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!