100 Abandoned Arts Project:
Update - November 13, 2019:
The project was a success! I unloaded all 100 arts and only came home with two that I found water-logged on the ground when I went back on Sunday. They dried out just fine and I gave one to a friend and kept one for myself. I spent more time on the Sunday walking around and keeping an eye on things. The cards disappeared quickly. A few people even used the hashtag (#100abandonedarts) on Instagram and told a little story about finding one or two.
Apart from the happy art drop, the executive director of the Fall Festival offered me a potential job teaching kids how to make art cards at an art discovery zone. I think it's just a one time, part of a day thing, but it's not like I get job offers everyday. She told me to contact her about it later on, December. I haven't decided if it's something I really want to do. I'm going to think on it and find out more information later. It's interesting that this Craft Adventure has led to another one.
September 18, 2019:
On September 28th, 2019, a Saturday, I'll take myself and 100 tiny arts and place them around Central Park in Corvallis, Oregon, spread around Fall Festival (Sat 10-6, Sun 10-5), while looking around at the booths and artwork and handcrafts, and other places downtown. If you attend the event, keep your eyes out for them, playing card-size mixed media art collages made by me featuring whimsical and motivational, inspirational messages, and some silly weirdness. They will be left out for you on benches, in trees, set up in obvious places to discover and bring home. If the weather is cruddy on Saturday, though, I'll give Sunday a try.
Working in batches of eight or ten playing cards (vintage, modern, and Jurassic Park) at a time, I used combinations of several media: acrylic paint, gel medium, tissue paper, other paper scraps, magazine imagery and words, stamped imagery and words, doodled images, watercolor paints, water-soluble crayons, gel pens, paint pens, ball point pens, pencils, glitter glue, pressed flower petals, birch bark peelings, ink, spray ink, all sorts of media. Each card is dated, numbered (1 to 100), signed on the back, and held in a protective sleeve that was once used for Magic the Gathering cards. I was trying to not go out and buy supplies, nothing new, unless I ran out of a crucial medium. I made a dent in some of my supplies that I'd been hoarding like the Japanese and German postage stamps and my stash of magazine phrases and stamped found words.
The project idea came about by talking to a friend while we were out playing PokemonGo. She said she'd like to do abandoned art with me. I said I didn't have any art to abandon. Already I'd started thinking about making tiny art cards made on the vintage playing cards. Putting the two concepts together I declared that I would make one hundred arts(!) and leave them around town one day. And then I thought of Fall Festival, it would be the perfect time to put the plan into action. Lots of people would be out looking at arts already. It's an art festival!
This is an experiment that I'm excited and scared to try. I've never done it before. You know, some may end up in the trash. Eek! But more will end up going home with people.
Donation Piece for Art for the Heart event:
Update - November 14, 2019:
While attending the artists' reception before the actual event, I talked with the woman in charge of the Artist Accelerator program at The Arts Center. They were going to start a series of lectures for artists who want to start up a creative business. I'd been considering trying out the first one. Now that it's November, I have attended all of them and also this month's artist meet-up. While doing all this, I've found encouragement and motivation and reassurance that I can start up my own business and make all of this more than just a hobby! I haven't felt this kind of excitement for my work in years.
September 18, 2019:
I responded to a Call to Artists for an event, Art for the Heart fundraising gala in early October 2019 for the Corvallis Arts Center. They requested an 8" x 8" art panel or three-dimensional piece, with no specific theme. This is the first of these I've ever done. All works will be on display at the Arts Center the week before the event for everyone to see them all together. Each piece will sell for $40 with money going towards the Arts Center. If my art doesn't sell at the event, it will be donated to the Arts Center gift shop and available for purchase there.
Lots of art supplies went into this: gesso, acrylic paints, alcohol inks, India inks, soft molding paste, gel medium, collage papers, absorbent ground, water-soluble crayons, wax crayons, Stabilo ALL pencils, Prisma colored pencils, ball point pen, paint pen, stencils, Glossy Accents, glitter glue, and coated in protective Krylon UV matte clear coat. All on a wooden panel purchased from the Arts Center.
My piece was inspired by an incident that happened to me the other week. It was actually a gruesome thing so if you're squeamish at all please skip ahead to the next paragraph. I was walking to lunch, and a block from my house, I noticed two turkey vultures standing over something in the road. Crows were agitated and cawing at them from all the nearby trees. As I approached, the vultures flew off a short ways, crows flying and swooping towards them. Noisy and weird. And then I crossed the street, looking towards where they had been but saw nothing except a small blood smear. I assumed a squirrel. Nothing unusual. But there was no squirrel. And then I looked down on the ground on the other side of me. A small brown rabbit. Just its head. With its insides spilling out. Last summer while my mom stayed with us, after my dad died and she had to leave her home for financial reasons, we would see little brown rabbits hopping around the neighborhood in the evenings. Sitting in lawns, nibbling at blueberry bushes, peering out of shrubs. Not many. It seemed like two. Kind of a nice, happy thing to see after all the crud that had gone down. I hadn't really seen any rabbits in the neighborhood before but they were around that summer. All this summer, 2019, went by and I never saw one. And then there was that one. That part of one, freshly killed, run over and then dragged apart. It was gone by the time I walked back from lunch. No sign but the red spot in the road.
Death signifies the end of something, the beginning of a new life, phase, chapter, whatever. A transition point. Change. I saw this rabbit at the end of summer, just as school was starting again for my son, and my husband had just started a new job that kept him away until later in the day. I was ready and free to do my work. An end of an old phase, free to move on with my creative work, uninterrupted. That is why the word "free" came to mind.
I needed more words, though. I like to put words in my art. Meditating on it for a few minutes, more came, "Effecting change--it takes time and energy. Relax and rest." I was tired of working. I was tired. But I wanted to finish the piece. I had a deadline and near the end. The message was for me, and I messily wrote it in cursive on the piece, in ball point pen. Maybe it would resonate with someone else too.
