Adria Arch

Experimenting with lighter, spillier paint - the companion piece to the earlier image posted today. One of my favorite scribbles - the upper right hand saw-like shape. A lighter hand on the gold metallic ink, circular shape, lower left hand corner. I've recently updated my website with the most recent professional photos of my work from the Vermont Studio Center residency.

The lighting on this changes the look of the metallic ink a bit - but you get the general idea. Sprayed and spilled acrylic with overlays of the scribbles and more opaque shapes.

Lots of pours and spills, transparent paint vs. metallic ink...

Love that metallic ink - gold and silver... whew! Spills of acrylic first, then additions of the scribbles. Experimenting with painting some of the shapes in solidly. On top, collaged elements of black - pushing the space even further back.

Another Glyphic piece. Spills of color first, overlays of the doodle shapes in acrylic and metallic inks. I like this one because of the deeper space I create between the layers. Also, I love throwing in the humorous scribbles (the light blue one at the top). It seems so decorative and silly.

Still more collages from intuition. The horizontal photos derived from the "ladder" drawing which came from direct observation of an object. I will be teaching "Painting from Intuition" this winter at the Arlington Center for the Arts , Monday evenings from 7 to 9:30 pm.

More collages done with "rules". Most of the students chose 4 or 5 rules to guide their choices. You can see snippets of text from books or magazines, small childen's toys, and inkblots here.

These collages were completed by my students in "Drawing from Intuition", a class I taught this fall at the Arlington Center for the Arts. The goal was to create 20 collages on paper using a set of rules to determine the content. For example, "all 11"x 15", all using found images from a particular book, all using images created from a single drawing session". These rules help to narrow down the choices and take the pressure off the feeling that one has to make "Art" with a capital A.

In case you are new to my blog, all my work since 2007 has been inspired by doodles from my son's high school notebooks. I was thumbing through them and found pages of these kind of dumb quasi-geometric drawings. They were not meant to be seen by anyone, but I thought that the marks, when enlarged, might prove very interesting. I photocopied them onto transparencies and projected them onto paper, designing the page as I go along. I have been calling this series "Glyphs".

I am experimenting with different kinds of backgrounds including spills and looser paint applications. Not done yet.

Last night, Back/Talk - Teens Talk Back to the Media, opened at the Gibbs Gallery, Arlington Center for the Arts (where I work as the Education Director.) You have got to see this show! I was thrilled with the exciting work we got from teens from all over Boston. Thanks to all the art teachers who helped me pull this exhibition together! Connie Thiebaut at Another Course To College, Boston; Christina Chang at Burlington High; Colleen Breur at Germaine Lawrence School; David Moore at Arlington High; Cara Bean at Lexington High; Rose Austin at Arlington Enrichment Collaborative; May Chau at Somerville High; and special thanks to Diana Coluntino at the Revolving Museum . Teens have a lot to say about the influence of media in our lives, and its not all good!! Check out the photos from the show here .

www.smallartshowcase.com will take you to...

"Glyph Scroll", 12" x 27", acrylic, metallic ink and collage, will be exhibited in the Icons and Altars show at the New Art Center in Newton, MA beginning Nov. 14. This is a fundraiser for the center, and all artwork will be for sale for $250. This will be my 10th year exhibiting work in the show. The work is free hanging, away from the wall about 1" due to two pieces of 1"x 2" attached to the back of the work.

Last weekend, I participated in Arlington Open Studios at the Arlington Center for the Arts - where I work as the Education Director. Although we call it Open Studios, it is really more of an Art Event because 80 artists and craftspeople bring their work to the Center rather than have people come to their actual studios. It works better this way because artists here often have studios in their homes, and there aren't the artist buildings that exist in other parts of the city. I especially enjoyed the opportunity talk with people who came around to my tables, and watch their reactions to this work I had displayed. Plus, a lot of people who know me as the Ed. Director didn't realize that I am also an artist. It felt good to display this very important side of who I am to my community.

We're on the brink, everyone. It really could happen. We could finally redeem ourselves in the eyes of the rest of the world. I am so nervous about this, I don't want to jinx it by believing the good news in the polls! This weekend I'll be showing my work at Arlington Open Studios. I will be selling some of my older works on paper VERY inexpensively, so come on over. So what if the economy is tanking? Buy an original work of art and you'll feel better. Really.

Spurred on by my friend Jeanne Williamson , I have put together a page of small works on paper, priced to sell! This is work from a series I produced in 2004. I gave myself the goal of making 100 small collages within a set of restrictions - same size, all collage, all using photo elements, etc. Sometimes goals help you to get motivated and working if you hit a wall in your studio practice.

My final piece completed at Vermont Studio Center this September, it is acrylic, metallic ink and collage on paper, approximately 5' x 9'.

Also produced at Vermont Studio Center in September, this work is approximately 10' x 6' and will hang from dowels similar to scrolls. Acrylic, metallic ink and collage on paper.

Two versions of "Speckled Constellation", also produced at VSC. Approx. 8' x 8', variable, paper and acrylic.

Red Constellation (working title) is comprised of four columns of paper, collage, and acrylic paint, measuring approx. 8' x 10 '. This is the first piece I completed during my residency. The piece is designed to hang unframed.

I am in my second week of a residency at the Vermont Studio Center . This is my second residency here, and it is heaven. I have been in the studio 8 hours a day since Sept. 1 and have gotten a great deal of work accomplished. It's amazing how much you can get done when you have no responsibilities. I know, it's not the real world, but how nice to live in this space for a month. We have had two wonderful woman visiting artists - Judith Raphael, and Rosemarie Fiore. I highly recommend a google search to see their work. I will posting my new work from the residency if I can upload my photos to the VSC computers. If not, look for images at the end of the month.

Today's efforts in the studio - screen printing is the way I've decided to go for my collaboration with "Design Story", Gerry Menz's label she will be selling at Artwear. This is for a jacket for me, our first prototype, printed on black linen using Deka ink and Speedball fabric screen printing inks.

3 panels in progress- a continuation of the Constellation series - cut out shapes adhered to a deep red background. Each panel is 72"x 30".

Down in Boston's South End, where the Bromfield Gallery lives, there is a very high, long, green wall (like the famed Green Monster) hiding a building under construction, that just begs to have guerilla art. Yesterday, I saw the recent addition of huge portraits of Abraham Obama as part of the A Political Show at Gallery XIV. Ron English is the artist. He goes around America hanging politically satirical billboard-sized artwork to make America think.

I was very pleased with the reaction to my pieces at the Bromfield opening for "Rara Avis" last night - btw, Rara Avis is Latin for "rare bird" or one-of-a -kind. All the artists' in this five person show are exhibiting pieces that are a little off the beaten track of their usual work. It gave me the opportunity to show pieces from my inkblot series that I really loved but don't quite have enough of for a solo show. This piece, Necklace, is featured in the exhibit. The size is approximately 8 feet by 10 feet, so it is quite large. The images in the bottom necklace strand are covered in black glitter, the top three strands are ink on rice paper. I was happy to note that viewers "got" my references to Rorshach, to the beauty of the images, to the serendipitous nature of an ink spill, and to the way in which the human mind wants to find recognizable images in abstraction.

Yep- my day job is getting in the way! During the summer, I am the director of a 10 week vacation art program (otherwise known as "artcamp") for kids and teens, so I find it hard to get into the studio on a regular basis. I am looking forward to going back to the Vermont Studio Center for a full month in September when I will resume production. Meanwhile, I kind of think of art camp as a huge, week-long performance piece - each week we have a new theme, and the art, drama, and music teachers guide the kids in art activities that relate to the theme. For example, last week was "Small, Smaller, Smallest". Next week will be "Young Architects". Check out the ACA website for the schedule of themes this summer.

This past week, before the heat wave, a friend from VSC came to visit from SF. I offered to give her a quickie tour of some of Boston's art destinations. We started at the Institute of Contemporary Art where a new exhibit of sculpture by Anish Kapoor just opened. These works are amazing - they are extremely interactive, they play with the viewer's perceptions of space and depth. Many are large scale, highly polished organic and slippery forms that act like fun house mirrors to distort and flip reflections. Others appear to have holes that are far deeper than you imagine. You just wish the overprotective guards would let you get closer and stick your hands into the holes to defy or prove the illusion! We then drove down to the South End, also known as SOWA , where the Bromfield Gallery and many other more edgy (for Boston!) galleries and artist studios are to be found. Karen Mennino is currently showing her Indian sari-inspired sculptural installation at the Kingston Gallery .

After my printing session on Friday at Artspace in Maynard MA, I was walking through the building on the way to my car and was struck by this telescopic view of a hallway. The lime green matches the fabric I had been laboring over the whole day (see today's earlier post). And I love the red exit signs and the reward of seeing the chair at the very end of the hallway.

Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.

Another printing day this past Friday. I am working on the fabric that will be turned into swing jackets by my friend Gerry Menz at Artwear. To the left, you can see what the plexi plate with stencils looks like on the press. The white shapes are paper stencils. The bottom image is of the finished prints on lime green fabric. That was sepia ink - and as you see, the color is changed by the fabric beneath. I just love pattern. In my next life, I will be a fabric designer. I wonder if inkjet printing on linen is possible? This process is so labor-intensive and physically demanding - took me 6 hours to print 14 pieces of fabric!

The image to the left is a view of what my stencils look like on my studio table. The process of monoprinting involves inking a large plexi plate with a thin layer of ink and laying stencils on it where you don't want ink to be transferred. Most people print on paper, but you can also print onto fabric . This is a close up of the fabric I printed. The orginal color was the dark gold. I printed white, but as you can see, the white turned into a cream color on this fabric.

I spent all day yesterday monoprinting fabric for my collaboration with a local designer. I printed 7 pieces of fabric, 27" x 48", which will be cut and sewn into beautiful swing jackets. These will be one of a kind pieces - very labor intensive, but fun to do!