Grandma Goes Chic

UPDATE:

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This chair has been ready for a while, but I was hoping to get a cushion ready for it before I put up a picture on the blog. Fortunately for you I am already impatient and want to share how great the chair looks. I painted it in the same glossy teal house paint as the table. The pictures didn't come out as well as I hoped, but you certainly get the idea.

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Early in the summer I went upstate with my Dad, to a little town outside of Utica where my grandma lives. We went there to begin the process of clearing out her house: while she is still alive (and in her nineties!) she will never be returning home. Having recently moved into my first post-college pad, I seized the opportunity to nab some vintage home furnishings from Grandma's cast-offs. I loved the tables and lamps I brought back, but once I saw them in my apartment, my grandma's furniture looked less vintage-cool and more, well, grandma. My solution was a few coats of glossy turquoise paint (3 to be exact). The shape of this little table was already so unique, and after a little uncertainty and some paint fume inhalation, I'm really excited with how great it looks! I'm working on a chair now, and I think with a bright yellow cushion it will be stunning.

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Caution! Wet Paint!

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"Open to the Sky" August 2009. 8"x10" collage on canvas.

This weekend I am in my favorite summer resort town, Newport RI, to participate in a charity fundraiser. The Newport Art Museum has an auction each year named Wet Paint, where artists from all over the region come together for one weekend each summer to make art and auction it off for the benefit of the museum. The artists are of all ages, ranging from t0w-headed, 5 year old, finger-painters to some recognizable and venerable established artists. I'm very excited to have two collages included in this years offering: "Open to the Sky" and "Pottery & Peaches" (see last post). Tonight I got to go see them at the preview silent auction and put in the first bid on my pieces, and tomorrow they are going to be presented to the public. I can't wait to see how they sell, and I'll post to let you know!

UPDATE:

So the good news is, both of my collages were bought at the Wet Paint auction, the bad news is, the only bid on each was from my mom. So in the end we ended up just buying the work back, but at least it was for a good cause and a lot of fun. Next year I think I'm going more traditional, a nice oil painting of the ocean or something, because this was definitely not the right venue for collage. Oh well, you live and you learn.

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"Open to the Sky" side detail view

Right off the edge

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"Pottery & Peaches" (August 2009). 8"x10", collage on canvas.

Recently, I made the switch from using posterboard as the support for my collages to using stretched canvas. I had liked the posterboard (yes like from your seventh grade science project) because it was so lightweight that it made transportation easy, but unfortunately with all that moving around I learned the downside to posterboards portability was its fragility. With the ravages of time and travel all of my collages bent and buckled and broke. Canvas is much more durable, and it offered me a new, unconquered, territory for collage: the sides.

While collaging on posterboard, I would not extend the images onto the rough, raw, edges of the poster board, but with a stretched canvas the sides are finished, and thus a fresh pasture to frolic in. Instead of stopping at the edges my images have slopped right over the sides, overflowing down the flanks of the canvas- a coordinated frame:

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Side detail of "Pottery & Peaches" (August 2009).

All of the pieces that are currently at Wave Gallery in Newport, RI also feature the "right off the edge" look.

On another note I've been thinking about selling editions of my collages (as well as the originals). So if you are interested in making a purchase please e-mail me at Ashleye23@gmail.com , put the name of the piece that you are interested in in the subject line and I will send you all the pricing information.

Thanks for reading!

A Tree Blows in the Bronx

I've been working on a wall painting for a woman who works at Barnard. She's from St. Lucia originally, and she wanted the leaves of palm trees painted on her bedroom wall behind her bed.

Here's how it turned out:

When I went to her house I was originally planning on tracing a large print-out of palms, but I found it was easier to free-hand. In the pictures of palms I'd looked at, the width of the individual leaves seemed fairly consistent, so I used a single brush for all of the leaves so they would look consistent. I varied the colors, often ending with yellow tips, to convey movement and make them a little sundappled.

Detail view

The owner was very pleased with the final results (she even bought sheets to match).

Another blowing in the wind close up

Riding the WAVE

One of my main goals for the summer was to make some "commercially" sized and priced collages and see if I can get them sold in my favorite summer resort town Newport, RI. With that in mind, I made three new collages (pictures below) which are currently for sale at The Wave Gallery in Newport (www.wavegallerygifts.com). I decided to use imagery from Martha Stewart Living magazine, because she personifies the bright, commercial, and cheerful mood I was trying to capture. These are all a lot smaller than I usually work so I should be able to produce more soon!

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"Newport Blooms" (2009), 8"x10" collage on canvas.

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"Spools" (2009), 8"x10" collage on canvas.

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"Late July" (2009), 8"x16" collage on canvas.

Romeo and Juliet

One of the pieces I've been working on this summer is a Romeo & Juliet themed large collage. The idea started from a photoshoot that I pulled out of Vogue a long time ago, its a shoot featuring ballerinas acting out the seminal moments of the Shakespearean drama while dressed in haute-off-the-runway couture. I'm pretty sure that renowned fashion photographer Annie Liebovitz shot it- the images are truly immaculate, the lighting, the colors, the rich textures. The images were very rich in color and romantic in detail, which lent a different mood, more mature and subdued than with other work. I looked for similar rich colors and textures in my additional source images to establish continuity. With the non-Vogue pictures I was drawn to some riffs on the traditional romantic motifs, like the images of Marilyn Monroe on the set of "Some Like It Hot", as well as some more traditional romantic imagery, like the Monarch butterfly wings and the gondola in Venice. During the making of this I indulged my Leonardo Dicaprio fascination by watching the equisite Baz Luhrman "Romeo and Juliet", and the excessive lushness of his visuals came through in my aesthetic. The tentative working title at this point is "Romeo & Juliet", but I'm open to something with a little more irony if anyone has suggestions.

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"Romeo & Juliet" (2009). 24"x36", collage on posterboard.

The image gives you pretty good detail expanded but I've added some additional detail shots so you can see some of the vignettes:

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Here are some of the romantic touches: monarch butterflies, lavender fields, peaches, and red hair.(Click to Enlarge)

Venetian gondola and the dead Juliet.

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Venetian balcony scene.(Click to Enlarge)(Click to Enlarge)

Butterflies at the ball.

Fashionable Sketches

My mom loves to rip things out of magazines and send them to me as "ideas" for art that she wants me to make for her. So this past May for Mother's Day she sent me a fashion illustration from the 1940's that had been featured in one of her favorite fashion magazines. I decided to copy the sketch, which was little more than the silhouette of a woman holding a handkerchief, using water color instead of ink. Having made my first attempt at capturing the silhouette I decided it needed a little more excitement near the top and added the swoop of a hat brim. I think it turned out quite nicely! Since then I've been playing with the motif, changing the colors, hairstyles, and jewelry of the model.

Mother's day present, my first attempt.

Trying out a different style of hat.

Now with blond curls!

A different silhouette.

Featuring the Fiesta necklace made by my friend Hiedi Brueggeman for her jewelry line called Sugar: http://www.shopsugar.com/

Addiction To Elegance is Virtue Not Vice

This piece was a major component of my Senior Visual Arts Thesis Exhibition. While many of my collages are exercises in simple, frivolous, visual pleasure, this piece addresses serious issues. Entitled "Addiction to Elegance is Virtue Not Vice", the collage attempts to intitate a dialogue about popular culture, drug culture, and consumer capitalism. By conflating imagery used to sell luxury goods with depictions of illicit drugs, "Addiction to Elegance is Virtue Not Vice" exposes the underlying similarities in the economies of luxury. The same media that glamourizes profligate spending on jewels and furs is harnessed to the cause of promoting profligate drug use.

"Addiction to Elegance is Virtue Not Vice", 2009. 36"x48", collage on posterboard.

Installation shot from Senior Thesis Exhibition

"Addiction to Elegance is Virtue Not Vice" (center) is shown with (from left to right): "The Eye of the World", "Down the Rabbit Hole", "Gastronomy" (under "Addiction..."), "Saidin/Saidar", and "Synesthesia".

Some oldies

I've realized that to get my blog up to speed I need to upload some of my earlier collage work. Here I've put up four old pieces (late 2007-2008 era):

Flying AirIndia (2008). 24"x36", collage on posterboard, fronted with Styrene.

"Down The Rabbit Hole", 2008 24"x 36" collage on posterboard fronted with acrylic.

"The Eye of The World", 2007, 36"x48" collage on posterboard.

"Synesthesia" 2008, 24"x36" collage on posterboard.