BEE happy - exhibition up

Still Life with Bee - Collage

Its finally up.  :-)   I will tweak a little bit today but it is now open. 

Eucalyprus Blossom detail - Textile Work

Cuckoo Bee Embroidery

Honeycomb - Collage

My exhibition essay (or artists statement) is up on the wall: 
BEE Happy – A mixed media art exhibition

Bees make me smile. A warm day you can hear them in the garden. They can be so loud. And yet almost invisible. And there are so many of them – both honey bees and the native bees.

My play with ideas about bees came about when I discovered that there was a stingless bee that could be kept in a hive and its honey judiciously collected. I lived in Sydney then where the climate suits that sort of bee.

Since moving to Albury in 2015 I have continued to think about bees. And noticed different bees in my garden.

Did you know our region has three identified species of blue banded bees?
There are about 1,700 different types of bee in Australia. They can be super tiny to quite large (for a bee).

Photo courtesy of www.aussiebee.com

Most native bees are solitary. The female makes a nest in a small opening in a tree or fibrous plant stem or makes a burrow. The bees live only one season and their eggs are sealed in the nest and the next generation of bees emerge when the weather is warm enough.

I am more mindful in my garden now. I am aware that the blue banded be may be in a burrow in certain areas and that reed bees may be in canes of old plants. I understand that a messy area of foliage and ground cover can be a home to many insects including bees. I now don’t feel bad that I love daisies and I have learnt that most bees love daisies too.

I discovered that some bees are buzz pollinators and others collect pollen on their chest and legs. Bees are hairy. It’s a feature that distinguishes them from wasps.

A few native bees collect pollen by eating it. They then return to the nest and regurgitate it.
Aussie Bee has an online site with a huge number of photos and lots of information. I have them to thank for informing and fostering my interest.

Donna Caffrey

Foraging for Pollen - Collage

Up date on doll making

In November last year I posted that I had become interested in doll making.

Whilst I haven’t written about it since but I have been slowly progressing with my skills.     

I got two craft orientated presents from my better half this last Christmas a: doll pattern by Cindee Moyer and an online course  with art doll maker Deb Wood through A for Artistic (no affiliations).   Deb's course was polymer clay face making over four weeks  I haven’t quite made the soft female faces that Deb makes but my faces have improved leaps and bounds.

Meet Arnold -  not quite the beautiful smiley girl I set out to create.    But he is alive with humour and is patiently waiting for a body.

The next face I made was more like an old crone.  But Deb kindly said she reminded her of one of her fairy godmothers.  I have made a few more and there are more faces in the pipeline..

Cindee's pattern was called "the Gatherer" and involved simple needle sculpting and a a lot of mixed media :-).

In the past I have resisted courses because I didn’t want to duplicate other peoples’ work or replicate their projects.   Silly me!   Very rarely is anything ever exactly the same.   And now I realise that have missed opportunities to learn.   But most importantly I have missed making friendships and connections in the creative community.  

And of course like everything in life, if you want to get better one must practice, practice, practice.  Which is fun, fun, fun when it comes to creating.  

To this end I have been working on a small series of cloth dolls which I have called Garden Girls.   They are simple skittle shape and the  purpose is to practice painting faces  and designs on cloth.  This is Lily who is singing in the garden.

I have heaps of idea to work on  - recorded in my visual diary   The trick is to remember to look through it occasionally :-).

So where am I going next in this doll making adventure ?   I will keep at the faces and bring embroidery back into the bodies or the costumes that I put on them.    I have ideas tucked away in my visual diary for garden girl variations and will remember to look at them.

And I am finalising pieces for a group exhibition with Six Running Feet.   We are five textile artists who have each worked on pieces which reflect what "off the beaten track" means to us.   We have a date next year and I will tell more next week.

Cheers

play and inspriation - lino prints

Had a fun day yesterday and played with simple lino prints for half a day - its very addictive and had to stop or I would have run out of paper.  

I had been itching to play with lino printing for a some time.  A little while ago I bought some heavy rubber (sort of looks and feels like those white erasers by Stabilo) which is so easy to carve from Lyn Britten at Batik Eotoro and the tools to carve  it with.   You can carve on both sides of these blocks so I felt I got really good value  for my dollar.  And then I came home put them in a safe place and couldn't find them for a month!   I used student quality acrylic paint for coloured stamps and something called block printing colour for the black.  The latter was definitely a better quality to use but I like to effects that the acrylic gave.   Some of the paper I used was coloured with watercolour wash.

Quite some time ago Stitchers Plus had a design exercise where we made continuous patterns from a single drawing - the trick being to make sure that all the lines at the edge of the drawing would meet when you flipped the pattern around.   I used this technique and had such fun and came out with a couple of reasonable prints and a bit of inspiration for embroidery too :-

Looking for something else to stamp I then added the stamp to a collage I had been working on - I had painted, pasted and stamped onto a canvas tile which had remained unfinished and was waiting for that something else to bring it to completion.  I think the stamps do that.

Cheers all

tired of pears yet?

I'm not.  They have a lovely shape - very feminine in form I think.

After drawing yet another pear (not this one) an idea struck me for a challenge my group has set all members of the Embroiderers' Guild NSW.  Having been involved in the set up of the challenge. I was almost over the idea. The general theme is "Changing of the Seasons" and I really wanted to avoid doing something involving flowers - well I haven't but that's OK.  The piece is not due in until September so I have a little bit of time to change my mind.

sketch club

Our model Kit is a tall lanky guy - though the men in my family are tall I am not used to seeing such a thin body and I had great difficulty drawing him - all the poses from where I was sitting seemed impossible and the last one was the worst but turned out by far the best drawing.  I had a view which contained challenges of hair, foreshortened arms and there were fingers! Being too lazy to move I worked on drawing and was really chuffed with my result.  PS - I used a pastel pencil

Cheers

sketch club

Renata - a ten minute sketch

an apple a day

cornicopia

Designed by Diane Edwards (& my piece named by me) - with several colour palettes to chose from and instructions to go for it four of us stitched up distinctly different works by adding or altering the design and stitch guide provided. I got to play with different threads that I hadn't used before such as velour and a variety of silks as I tend to stick to perle and cotton.


Still working on an embroidered canvas piece inspired by an abstract painting I posted a while ago - it is taking me so long that the dimensions have been shrunk and I have decided to colour, paint or dye the canvas that will represent the night sky (so I don't have to stitch it!!)



In the interim I keep painting - my son has dibs on my painting inspired by a postcard of the Dali Lama as a child.

(yes, the wall needs a paint too- we have stripped the wall paper and need to clean it up before we get there - painting an art canvas is just so much more fun)

Cheers

more painting and stitching

I have been working on my canvas piece - it is slowly coming together. The colours don't quite zing in this photo. I plan to put gold foil in the empty squares in the blue block. I have started working to the right of the yellow block and will have to unpick as the co lours aren't right!




Painting has helped on the colour theory front. My apricots look a little unprepossessing at the moment but the beauty of acrylics is I don't have to unpick but can paint over!

I learn more about colour every day :-)