mixed media

New studio and new paintings!

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I’m a little late announcing this, but in July I started renting a shared studio space! It’s been amazing to be no longer working from home and having the extra space to spread out all my materials and scraps of paper while I’m working on a project. I’ve been busy and productive since then which feels SO good. AND I have lots of new exciting collage paintings to show for it!

I’ve been doing more newspaper collage cityscapes as well as branching out and experimenting with more abstract pieces. For a (mostly) complete list of my new pieces, check out my portfolio here.

This weekend, November 23rd and 24th, I’ll be showing off my new paintings at Brickbottom Open Studios. The Brickbottom Artists’ Association is a very cool live/work space for artists in Somerville. I’m an affiliate member, meaning while I don’t have a studio there, I get to show my paintings there when they have events.

The event is from 12pm to 6pm both Saturday and Sunday at 1 Fitchburg St, Somerville. There will be dozens of artists showing their work all around the building, as well as musicians and dance performances happening in the lobby. I’ll be set up in the hallway on the second floor behind the elevators! I really hope you can stop by–it sounds like a very fun event and I’m excited to have an opportunity to show off work that I’m really proud of.

As a teaser, here’s a triptych of Somerville Ave that I just finished:

Somerville Ave Sunset, part one. Mixed media. 11 by 14
Somerville Ave Sunset, Part 2. Mixed media, 11 by 14 inches.
Somerville Ave Sunset, Part 3. Mixed media. 11 by 14 inches

Somerville Ave Sunset, mixed media on canvas. (11 by 14) x 3

 

Squares! Squares! Squares!

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For the past couple of months I’ve been trying something really fun and different: Instead of working on large scale paintings I’ve mostly been doing a whole bunch of small, 10 inch by 10 inch, square paintings. Some are newspaper collage, some are just regular paper collage, some are abstract, and some are just whimsical. It’s been an extraordinarily fun way to try new techniques and test out new ideas in a low stakes way. I don’t have to worry if it’s a masterpiece or not, it’s just an experiment! It’s like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. And if it’s a failure…it’s not that big a deal! Literally, because they are tiny. Ha.

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I’ve tried some things that I would normally consider silly, like my fire and ice painting with tissue paper–totally off topic for me, but I had an absurd amount of fun turning tissue paper and paint into flames and ice:

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Any the skyscrapers floating on the clouds–that’s just a visual pun and Star Wars reference that I wanted to do, so I did it. No larger point about anything intended.

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And I would never have tried to do a Boston skyline–too overdone! But the colors and reflections caught my eye in a photo I saw and I just decided to give it a try.

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I’ve had a couple of super ugly failures that I finally gave up on and turned into something else and they’re still not there yet–but I think they’ll get there!

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I’ve learned a lot and tackled some things I definitely wouldn’t have if they’d been full size paintings. One of my main goals for my art this year is to push myself in new directions. And these little paintings allowed me to challenge myself by not taking myself too seriously, which has been amazing–and hopefully something I can bring to my regular-sized paintings!

Newspaper collage cityscapes

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For a long time I’ve had this image in my head, of a city–Mass Ave in North Cambridge, to be exact–where all the buildings were made up of words in different languages: Somali, Bengali, Haitian, Spanish, Portuguese, Amharic, Chinese. And I wanted to create that image. To somehow, imperfectly and clumsily, show my love for the diverse and messy and exciting community where I used to work in North Cambridge. And more generally to show my support for immigrant communities in cities everywhere who work so hard to literally and figuratively build cities and communities. I had this sense of longing, a need to make it happen. But I left it alone because I just couldn’t figure out how to make something that felt right, that felt like it had any integrity, that wasn’t forcing something to happen.

I started collaging, with paper and acrylic paint, and I could feel myself getting closer to satisfying the quiet buzzing in the back of my head. Finally, one day, I went out and collected newspapers from immigrant grocery stores all around Somerville and Cambridge. I didn’t get all the languages I wanted, but I found Bengali, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese. And I went to the public library to get Chinese and Spanish. And I started to collage with them and it feels so right and so exciting.

My first attempt felt hard and messy and all awkward and rough edges and painful and I kind of hated it but also…it came out better than I had imagined or planned it!

We Built This City
We Built This City, mixed media with newspaper and acrylic. 18 by 24 inches. SOLD but prints available.

My next one was a long time in coming since some life stuff happened (new baby!) but I love it too, in such a different way:

painting

Now I have two more newspaper collage works in progress and I can’t wait to see where this goes!

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Work in progress
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Work in progress

Photos from reception at the YWCA

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This month, August 2018, my paintings are on display at the YWCA Cambridge, where I’m Artist of the Month. I’m calling this collection “We Built This City”. I had an opening reception for the show on Sunday, August 5th, and it was so much fun!

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The reception was a wonderful opportunity to connect with people through my art.
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My favorite wall of paintings.
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The digger wall!
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My wonderful husband Tay was in charge of snacks!
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My kids came too!
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Thank you to the YWCA for hosting this show!

 

 

New mixed media projects

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20180405_160026I’ve been trying something totally new lately–I’ve been collaging with paper and acrylics to create some mixed media pieces that I’m really excited about. I started working on this painting in the beginning of February and I had a specific goal in mind…but the painting had other plans, and I’ve learned if I want to create anything successful, I have to let it do what it wants, not what I want.

It turns out changing directions multiple times, and teaching myself a whole new technique, is very time consuming so this one took me a lot longer than usual to decide this one was done.  I had so much fun with it though, and I felt like I was learning so much that now I’m starting another mixed media piece to see where it goes!20180315_114230.jpg