Adria Arch

Swept into NYC yesterday for an art fix, a one-day whirlwind of MOMA and the Whitney. Highlights at MOMA included the Daniel Ortega exhibit. Some pieces were hilarious and poetic: the room with three plastic yogurt containers tacked to three walls, and nothing more. Elegant: the hanging shapes of plastic insulation material that looked like a whale. The Bauhaus exhibition felt strangely familiar. So that's what my teachers at RISD were inculcating in us with their insistence on color swatches and texture studies. The designs are elegant and contemporary - that is how much we have completely incorporated the Bauhaus aesthetic into modern life. Unpleasant: the waterlilies room - too many tourists taking photos of each other standing in front of them! Sacrilegious. Whitney: Georgia O'Keefe was a very sexy lady. Even though she protested that her flower-inspired paintings were NOT about female sexuality. Those nude photos that Stieglitz took of her... hmmm. Roni Horn - two floors o...

Just to explain how the final piece came into being: I prepped the wall, then cut shapes from orange and white sticky vinyl (random colors!) to use as a mask for the yellow paint. (Behr "Disney" yellow!) When I finished painting yellow, I pulled off the orange vinyl to reveal really nice, clean edged shapes. After the yellow, I projected the glyph shapes onto the wall and painted them using acrylic. Then I silkscreened, and finally I cut out skinny lines of black sticky vinyl to finish off the piece.

I have the week off from work. The last several years, I have found myself doing some home improvement projects between Christmas and New Years. This year, I decided to create a wall installation in an under-used bedroom. Similar to my bathroom installation at the Bromfield Gallery, this piece is much larger. I used my projector to transfer the glyph imagery to the wall, and also my silkscreens, though that was challenging, especially since the walls angle in and there is the danger of sliding screen ink!

This semester, I have had the pleasure of teaching 3 young teen girls, 8th and 9 th graders, drawing and painting. Today was their last class of the semester, and I thought I would honor their hard work by putting some of their pieces on my blog. The work here is charcoal, pastel, and acrylic paint.

Today I went to a lunchtime talk hosted by the New England Foundation for the Arts , concerning the topic of presenting your work for potential public art commisions. The focus was on photographing your work. If you can find out who is on a certain panel that will be looking at your work, it can help you to tailor your presentation. Generally, it was everything we all should know about presenting artwork - professional photography and presentation are really important. It really does pay off to have a pro take your photos if you want to enter this venue. Since architects and landscape designers have entered the competition for public art, and are used to doing very clean and professional presentations to get clients, artists have to work especially hard to be competitive in this field. But my take away is if you really want to go this route, try hard to get a small beginning commission or do a temporary piece in a local building or neighborhood, get really good photos, and look for the...

I went back into some pieces that I had thought were complete that did not go into my recent exhibition - reworked them to simplify and strengthen color. Here is one half of a diptych that I have been thinking about for a while. I like the introduction of more solid shapes of color. Based on seeing my work all together at the Bromfield, I can see that I can hold back a bit. What does that mean exactly? Simplifying, I think. I want to look into presenting my work as public art, because I think that the wall constructions would be wonderfully whimsical in a public space. I am excited to create more site-specific installations, as I did in the bathroom at the Bromfield Gallery. That was so much fun! And shouldn't we all try to have more fun? Can I just say that it is important to have humility in this world? Thank you to all of my friends who make me laugh and show me that the art world is just a small small slice of the big picture.