Treasury: Beautifully Abstract

It has been so long!

Life has really caught up to me. A year has already passed where I have struggled to be the best high school art teacher I could possibly be. I hope to do better this next year coming up.

I have also struggled to create. But the dark cloud of insecurity is slowing drifting away.

I am going to put more paintings up on Etsy for sale. Please feel free to look! :)

I also hope to add more nail polish rings to the listings, since I have found more materials to use. Keep an eye out for those!

New rings added to my shop!

I've added new rings to my Etsy shop; two new bases have been utilized, including a more appealing silver base and an antique-bronze colored filigree base. I also bumped the size up to 18mm for more POP! :)

Please check out my shop and let me know what you think: favorite, share, or even buy one if you like! They're so reasonably priced, y'all.

More will be added in a few moments. I promise, they're just as lovely! Let me know what you think. :)

(If you promote these on your blog and you have your own store, please contact me and I will do the same for you!)

Etsy store reopened!

I reopened my Etsy store and it's stocked with almost 20 items!

It includes original art and prints, such as ceramic pieces and prints of my artwork. But it also includes some pretty jewelry with nail polish! That's right, polish. :) Go see for yourself!!! Great artsy items at great prices!

Nail polish giveaway!

http://nailsforthesakeofsanity.blogspot.com/2012/12/300-follower-giveaway.html

Get your entries in before it closes soon! 3 winners will be chosen!

Two new artworks.

So these are new in the sense that they were created in the last 6 months. I'm very proud of this one:

Inviso, graphite on paper, 9x12"

And many people seem to like this one. It received many comments in the Nashville show.

Gemino, mixed media on paper, 12x16"

Nashville Internationals VI

Hey everyone! It's been a busy few weeks for me. Student teaching is not easy, but it is very rewarding. My kids are just wonderful. I had a great first observation from my supervisor. Now I'm enjoying a lovely fall break. :) Gotta love time off using the school calendar!

A few of my pieces will be featured in an upcoming group exhibit at Centennial Art Center. The opening reception is this Friday 5-7pm. It will also be open all of Saturday for the Celebrate Nashville festival going on in the park. Fun! If you're going to be in town for either days, please stop by and check out all the lovely work from previously-international artists who now call Nashville home.

Also, if you haven't seen yet, I'm currently in an art competition. Winners receive international recognition, cash grants, and exhibition in Miami; please vote for my work if you like it here!! :)

Please view and vote!

Laura Martin

This is an artist submission for grant prizes and international recognition! Please vote if you like. :)

Bernheim's CONNECT 2012 highlights

 Not even one minute before I finished setting up, a line formed with lots of kids wanting their faces painted.

I set out two tip jars with "__ vs. __" on them, as suggested by a website on how to encourage more tips. For adults, I put "Romney vs. Obama" on one side. A little girl threw a dollar into the 'Romney' jar, and her dad immediately says, "No honey, put it in the Obama jar. My daughter ain't a Republican."

After mentioning that story to another customer, she said, "When my brother finally came out, my mom exhaled and yelled, 'Thank god, I thought you were going to say you were a Republican!'"

This cute, curly-redheaded-n-freckled boy, probably around 11 or so, sat down and began to ask me about sci-fi movies he had seen. He asked if I had seen Terminator, and asked me questions about it. Then he told me, "Did you know that Neil Armstrong died today? That makes me really sad." His mom mentioned something about winking at the moon to remember Armstrong, and the boy replied he'd do that as soon as I finished his cheek.

Funny teenagers and their funny words.

Lotus flower

The last customers were so nice: a happy little family with a little girl and older boy. They were a cool bunch. The parents talked about their fun adventures, doing a Zombie Walk in the future where their little girl will be a three-eyed princess, and the older boy asking if I could just do a mustache and a soul patch. LOL! They were even kind enough to walk me to my car and help carry my stuff to it, since it was so dark.

Hearing the music from afar was neat, too. I wish I could've seen the other exhibits going on, but maybe next year I'll just be a spectator instead. I also made some decent tips. :)

Night time!

Hooray, I sold a painting!

I picked up some of my pieces I had shown at Earthsoul Gallery this summer, and found out this little guy sold!

How exciting! It wasn't $1,000 or anything, but any money is good these days. For me, and everyone I know around me, art seems to have taken a dip... the purchasing of fine art, at least. There's so much competition going on, it's hard to get really good sales all the time unless you do purely decorative art. (Nothing wrong with that, it's just not my style for being a future serious artist.)

I hope to sell off more works next weekend during the Miscategorized show, where 50% of my profits will go to the Lupus foundation; I'm always down for giving artistic donations to charities.

Tomorrow night I'll be doing face painting at the Bernheim CONNECT event; so excited!! Kids love it. Hopefully the tips will be generous as well. If you're near the Louisville, KY area, please come! Just $5 to get in; all the events within are free, including WHISKEY TASTING at Jim Beam nearby. "Alcohol, you say?" Sign me up!

Upcoming events!

I'm trying really hard to get more involved with artistic things, to inspire my art muse and to hopefully make some income from selling some work.

If you live in the Nashville area, please consider coming to any of these events:

Silent auction for artists, including some of my works (paintings and some pottery). All profits go to the Lupus foundation; 50% of my commission from sold works is included in that. Live music and photobooth also!

(Stay tuned for updates on one or two other shows in Nashville, e.g. with RAW Artists.)

If you're in the Kentucky area -- in Clermont, or near Louisville -- please consider coming to CONNECT @ Bernheim this Saturday night! Even if you're further away, this is sure to be a blast! It combines nature, science, and art. Tons of events will be going on; I'll have a face/body painting station myself!

Please spread the word, if you can! The more, the better. :)

Artist of the Day

Katie MacDowell, ceramic artist.

Her work is just so beautifully crafted. The medium used -- porcelain -- definitely adds to the content of the work: beauty, fragility, and phantasmality. My favorite pieces have to be where light is involved, hidden inside the works to give it a certain glow, which adds to the ghostly imagery of our collision with nature.

From her statement: "In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment.  These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops.  They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones.  In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.  In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats.  In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices."

Simply wonderful. I encourage you to visit her website and view her work.

Work Completed

Gemino

Mixed media (watercolor, felt pen, graphite, coffee) on watercolor paper.
9" x 12"

WIP..

Watercolors, micro pens, graphite on paper.

9"x12"

Another year zooms by..

My, oh my! Time sure does fly.

It's been too long, and I have barely painted. Let us hope that this is a good start to reviving my artistic inspiration.

The Artist's Way

I managed to find a copy of this book, untouched, for just $1.99 at my local Goodwill. It's an interesting read, and some of the exercises are quite informative of one's own subconscious. But it also seems a little lofty, what with the talk of God/the Creator, even though the author states a person who is not of that faith/faithless can use different terms that apply. The morning pages don't really seem to be doing anything for me, because I'm not a writer, but a painter.

I don't know why my creativity fluctuates so much... one day I want to paint, draw, whatever, the next day I want nothing to do with it. I got a nice easel for my birthday, and I bought myself some new oil paints, but I resist my newest painting for some reason. Am I afraid that it will turn out bad? I'm seeing all of these shows and possibilities, but hate the idea of rejection and failure so much... perhaps I am hindering myself on purpose to avoid these things.

I wish Patrick's trip to NYC to try comedy was inspiring me to get over these fears.. but alas, I don't think this is so. At least not today.

How to rid of this creative block? I must do it soon.

Summer 2011

I'm so thrilled to be back in America! My home.

This summer will consist of anything I can do artistically before my final school year begins:

• Working on unfinished/older pieces
• Creating one to two new pieces
• Drawing more/work with photography
• Applying to exhibits/galleries/publications
• Getting an A in my online Art History course
• Updating my website and store
• Updating blogs!!! And writing more
• Odd jobs

Suomi in Springtime

Finland is such a different country when the snow is all gone. The greenery is wonderful. Flowers are rearing their pretty little heads.

The plainest of birds are actually not that plain-looking.

The bumblebees I've seen are black and orange, not yellow.

I enjoyed walking outside without a jacket, or big boots. No gloves or scarves. Girls in tank tops. Kids with ice creams.

I've had an incredible, stressless time here. I'm quite happy with the work I've made, my interim paintings that were mostly for fun and experimentation. It's definitely going to be the big thing I'll miss (besides my friends, of course) when I go back. I've been so happy at school. I will miss that happiness. :P

Hopefully I will kick it up a notch this summer. Start making prints; marketable works.

Ooh, Finland. Now that your weather is gorgeous, I almost wish to stay. ...almost. ;)

I know I've been very distant.

But I promise I've not gone away.

Life just gets so busy, and sweeps you away, and you forget things. Like blogs. But I am still here, not truly "forgotten" I hope. I am still doing art, but in Finland, hence more absence. I will be back in full swing once I'm in America and get my stuff together. :)

Hang in there!

Tumblr

Yes yes, I've gotten a tumblr. Anyone else here have one? We can follow each other. :)

http://spektorish.tumblr.com