Art Diary. A weekly wrap-up of art activities. For earlier posts, search under the category Art Diary.

Art every day of the week, please!

Saturday, September 1 – Here are photos from yesterday’s take-down of the exhibit at the Gallery at the JCC, Allentown, PA, where my paintings had been for the last couple of months. It’s an anticlimax, really – it’s very quick to take a display apart! We took in our boxes and bags:

and started to take items off the walls and from the display cases.

Soon everything was neatly packed away.

Empty walls and cases…

We took the tags off the walls and then…the party was over!

The arts group here has invited me to participate in their holiday craft show, so…I’ll be back in December.

Saturday, September 1, nighttime – I did some paint brochure drawings – this is a gray-themed group. As you may remember, I often choose an activity like this one for when I am watching TV at night. These brochures are addicting.

Sunday, September 2 – I sat down with a friend to do a planning session.

I spent a couple of hours or so going through my projects (art and poetry)and working out plans and possibilities I’d like to explore in the next 6 months or so. I do this exercise about every..6 months…I guess, and it helps me to review what I have going on and where I want to go. I wrote it in a notebook and will type it up tomorrow and put it in my studio.

Then I went down into the basement and cleared out my head by working on a couple of clay cylinder people.

Monday, September 3 – I did some odds and ends around the studio. Not exciting, but necessary, these things were. I have a collection of 6″ x 6″ drop-in frames that I have used for clay tiles. Well, I admit that lately I’ve sent to the trash a lot of earlier work that was glued into these frames.

I am sure this may provoke gasps of horror at the idea of destruction but sometimes, there is no other answer for past work that I don’t feel is up to my standards today. And, these frames were perfectly good. I gessoed over the name and date of the previous works.

I tentatively intend to use them for the 6″ x 6″ paintings on board that I have been doing. I tried out the look with a few and I love it. I plan to velcro the paintings to the frame rather than gluing them, so I’ll have some TV-watching work ahead of me in putting all these together, I guess.

I also gessoed over a couple of paintings my husband sanded down for me. Ditto the clay tile situation – time passes and older work does not always please. I have learned that onceI feel this way about a painting, I will never change my mind. It is better for me to wipe it out and do something new.

Art is not always about creation, I guess!

I did a quick cover-up of the back inside cover of my current Large Artist Sketchbook. Once it dries I am ready to take it to Poetry Marathon sessions to get some text done for it.

Tuesday, September 4 – More secret project.

Then I went into the basement to work on cylinder people. Things continued to progress. One guy, though, I was not happy with how his outfit was turning out. It seems that in every group, there is one figure with whom I get off on the wrong foot and my attempts to salvage and re-make a design just get – uglier. When that happens, I wash off the old.

Then I give him a new undercoat. I will start over again next session.

Here are the others, in progress.

Wednesday, September 5 – I worked on finishing up the cylinder people today. The one in the remade outfit is a lot happier now, or at least I am, with his attire.

I took them, plus puff people and a few tiny tiles, and loaded the kiln.

In the past I would never have contemplated firing a load this small. No, absolutely not. But I think differently now about this subject, as well as about a lot of other things! In the past I would have had these figures wait until I had made enough new work to fire (because with low-fire clay, you can fire bisque and glaze loads together as they fire at the same temperature).

That would have been fine if I were in an ongoing claywork mode (which I usually was). Now, though, I do less work, and if I hold these until I get more to go with them, it could be months. I am planning to do some other things for a while and clay’s not on my schedule right now.

And I’m impatient – I want to take these cylinder and puff people to a show next week – plus I have several other clay shows lined up in the near future. I don’t want to rush making more work just to…fill up a kiln-load? The cost of one firing is just not enough to make me worry about it. I’ll probably get these guys fired this weekend when the weather is cooler.

Thursday, September 6 – Last night I decided to paint a little… just a little. By dinnertime I had this start:

Hint: it’s the former Beach Lady painting. Anyway, I almost never work after dinner, but for some reason I got engrossed in this painting (despite not knowing what I wanted to do with it).

Here is where it ended up.

Don’t know if it is finished. I don’t want to be doing this kind of work, really – I want to move on. (Destination: unknown.) I think this exercise might have been the equivalent of comfort food art – using a well-known recipe and getting predictable results. I’ll let it sit a while and see if anything else happens to it.

Friday, September 7 – This morning my husband and I drove to Allentown, PA, to pick up my painting from an exhibit at the Baum School:

Here’s a quick look at how it appeared hanging on the wall, before I took it away with me. I inserted an arrow to direct you to its location:

I thought I might do some artwork later this afternoon, but since I’m not sure, I figured I’d post this week’s Diary and clear the decks for another week.

OK, that’s it for this week! Thank you for coming along with me.