Ripple, Art Affecting Oceans -Friday June 22nd, 8pm-Midnight

An art gala fundraiser for the DC Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation!

WHEN & WHERE?

Friday, June 22 (8 pm to midnight):
A gala for members and friends of Surfrider and other environmental organizations. Surf-related art from a host of professional ocean-loving artists. Wine and hors d’oeuvres, silent auction, music. Exhibit of member-created art inspired by the oceans.

Gallery: The Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital
Location: 921 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, Washington, DC 20003 (Metro: Eastern Market)

www.rippledc.org
www.surfrider.org

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series June 30, 2012–September 23, 2012

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series

June 30, 2012–September 23, 2012

@ the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

http://www.corcoran.org/node/8478

A pivotal figure in the history of modern painting, Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was an innovator whose work inspired legions of artists and greatly advanced the lexicon of abstraction. The Corcoran is the only East Coast venue for Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series, the first major museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s most celebrated body of work. The exhibition features more than 80 works, including large-scale paintings, smaller paintings made on cigar box lids, mixed-media drawings on paper, monotypes, and prints.

Named after the Southern California beachfront community where Diebenkorn worked between 1967 and 1988, the Ocean Park series grew out of a fertile period in the artist’s career when he abandoned the figurative style that had previously characterized his work. He went on to produce monumental, geometric abstractions formed of panes of luminous color. These powerful abstract investigations of space, light, and color evoke landscape and architectural forms as well as the sense of place that defined the California coast during this time.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series is co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition is curated by OCMA curator Sarah C. Bancroft.

Kandinsky @ the Phillips Collection - opens June 11, 2011

Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border June 11–September 4, 2011

After a visit to his native Moscow in 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) sought to find a way to record the “extremely powerful impressions” that lingered in his memory. Working tirelessly through numerous drawings, watercolors, and oil studies over a five-month period, Kandinsky eventually arrived at his 1913 masterpiece, Painting with White Border. The exhibition will reunite this painting with over 12 preparatory studies from international collections, including the Phillips’s oil sketch, and compare it with other closely related works. Complemented by an in-depth conservation study of Painting with White Border, the exhibition will provide viewers with a rare glimpse into Kandinsky’s creative process.

This exhibition is co-organized by The Phillips Collection and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The Phillips Collection's presentation and the exhibition catalogue are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Orinuno Bag - Handfolded and Sewn Flowers

This bag makes me happy and inspired :) It captures the joy and energy of spring and summer flowers!

"With our thoughts, we make our world." - Buddha ♥

"With our thoughts, we make our world." - Buddha ♥

The Peacock Room Comes to America

The Peacock Room Comes to America
April 9, 2011–Spring 2013
Freer Gallery of Art
Washington, DC

For the first time, the Freer Gallery's renowned Peacock Room has been restored to its appearance in 1908, when museum founder Charles Lang Freer used it to organize and display more than 250 ceramics he had collected from throughout Asia. As the first special exhibition held in the room since it underwent conservation in 1993, The Peacock Room Comes to America highlights Freer's belief in "points of contact" between American and Asian art and the aesthetic relationships to be found among the museum's diverse collections.

The Peacock Room was originally designed by architect Thomas Jeckyll for British shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who wanted a place to showcase his blue-and-white Chinese porcelain collection in his London home. When American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler redecorated the room in 1876 and 1877 as a "harmony in blue and gold," he was inspired by the delicate patterns and vivid colors of the Chinese porcelains. Their slick surfaces, however, did not appeal to Freer, who favored complex surface textures and subtly toned glazes. After he purchased the Peacock Room and moved it from London to his mansion in Detroit in 1904, Freer filled the shelves with pots he had acquired from Egypt, Iran, Japan, China, and Korea. The current presentation of works is based on photographs taken in Freer's Detroit residence in 1908.

Much like the room's arrangement in Detroit more than a century ago, this exhibition underscores Freer's belief that "all works of art go together, whatever their period." That faith in cross-cultural aesthetic harmonies achieved its ultimate expression in the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened to the public in 1923. Whistler's imaginative interior, now fittingly located between galleries of Chinese and American art, embodies the meeting of East and West. Enjoy the Peacock Room as Charles Lang Freer did by making unexpected aesthetic connections between art and decoration, paintings and ceramics, and America and Asia.

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/peacockRoom.asp

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/online/peacock/default.htm

Calder’s Portraits: A New Language - at the National Portrait Gallery

Calder’s Portraits: A New Language

March 11 through August 14, 2011

Best known for his abstract mobiles and stabiles, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was also a prolific portraitist. Throughout his career Calder portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as colleagues Marion Greenwood, Fernand Léger, and Saul Steinberg, to name a few. Typically, Calder worked in the unorthodox medium of wire, a flexible linear material, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance. Suspended from the wall or ceiling, the portraits are free to move; because of this mobility, they seem—like their subjects—to have a life of their own. This unprecedented exhibition will feature Calder’s work alongside contemporary documents—photographs, drawings, and especially caricatures by such artist-illustrators as Paolo Garretto, Miguel Covarrubias, and Paul Colin—and will pose questions regarding the line between fine-art portraiture and caricature. The exhibition will also shed light on an often overlooked aspect of Alexander Calder’s career, as well as on broader narratives of American culture of the twentieth century. Barbara Zabel is the guest curator for this exhibition.

http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/calder/index.html

http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhcalder.html

This Summer @ The Corcoran Gallery of Art

Washington Color and Light

Reopens June 25–August 14, 2011

Washington Color and Light presents major works by the artists associated with the Washington Color School and their contemporaries. These works are united by an exploration of the language of abstraction, a desire to experiment with materials, and a love of color. The exhibition reveals the artistic innovations and individual approaches that shaped new directions in abstract painting and sculpture from the 1950s through the late 1970s. Living and working in Washington, D.C., Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Morris Louis, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed first displayed works together in an exhibition called Washington Color Painters in 1965. While these six artists never thought of themselves as a group, the Color School title became synonymous with local abstract painting of the time. Washington Color and Light includes galleries dedicated to the monumental stripe paintings of Gene Davis; meditations on color and space by Thomas Downing; and hard-edge abstract paintings by Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, and Paul Reed. In addition, the exhibition includes sculptures by Rockne Krebs, Ed McGowin, and Anne Truitt, as well as glorious color-saturated paintings by Willem de Looper, Sam Gilliam, and Alma Thomas.

http://www.corcoran.org/colorandlight/index.php

Paul Gauguin at the National Gallery of Art

Gauguin: Maker of Myth

February 27–June 5, 2011

Paul Gauguin's sumptuous, colorful images of Brittany and the islands of the South Seas are some of the most appealing paintings in modern art. They will be represented among nearly 120 works by Gauguin in the first major look at the artist's oeuvre in the United States since the blockbuster National Gallery of Art retrospective of 1988–1989, The Art of Paul Gauguin. Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the Gallery, Gauguin: Maker of Myth brings together self-portraits, genre pictures, still lifes, and landscapes from throughout the artist's career. It includes not only oil paintings but also pastels, prints, drawings, sculpture, and decorated functional objects. Organized thematically, the exhibition examines Gauguin's use of religious and mythological symbols to tell stories, reinventing or appropriating narratives and myths drawn both from his European cultural heritage and from Maori legend.

Gauguin (1848–1903) was the ultimate global traveler, sailing in the South Pacific and living in Peru, Paris, Martinique, and Tahiti, among other places. The exhibition features many of his iconic paintings, on loan from around the world—ranging from scenes of religious life near the artist's colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany to the colorful, exotic canvases depicting the people and the tropical flora and fauna of the islands of French Polynesia, where he moved to escape European civilization. In Tahiti, he immersed himself in its fast-disappearing Maori culture to invest his art with deeper meaning, ritual, and myth, a fusion that continues to mesmerize audiences worldwide.

Organization: Organized by Tate Modern, London, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/gauguininfo.shtm

Protective Sealer for Paper Collage Paintings

"Sealing Coats"

"The function of a sealing coat is to reduce the absorbency of the substrate and also to encapsulate the inks, making them less susceptible to reacting with subsequently applied materials. It also seals the substrate’s ink-receptive coating if one is present. Each substrate will have a unique degree of absorbency and reaction to the initial sealing coats applied to it. Sealing allows for uniform varnish coats and the ability to apply and manipulate subsequent products more readily. Once a uniform layer has been established, the artist is free to “re-mark” — the post manipulation of a print with color and texture — with paints, gel mediums, or varnishes.

In many cases it can be difficult to apply water-based coatings directly onto the print without some color bleed — even systems deemed “water resistant.” Spraying provides the most even application of these coatings. Light, fast-drying seal coats can minimize the occurrence of inks bleeding or distortion of the image.

Once it is established that a waterborne coating can be used, then determine what properties are desired with this coating and what application method works best. For example, GAC 500 blended with Airbrush Transparent Extender makes a good overall spray coating, while Soft Gel (Gloss) thinned with water is better for brushing. Thin coats are best to seal the surface. Absorbent papers may require several coats to properly seal the paper. Gloss products provide better clarity and depth of color than semi-gloss or matte products.

If the image is too easily blurred with a direct application of a water-based coating, the most practical solution is to apply the GOLDEN MSA Varnish (Gloss) or Aerosol Archival Varnish (Gloss) as the primary sealing coat. This solvent-based acrylic varnish should not react with water-soluble inks or ink-receptive coats."

http://www.goldenpaints.com/justpaint/jp14article3.php

happy heart day

happy heart day! making art is a wonderful way to express yourself! "Do something creative everyday!"

3-D Typography Book

love the idea of 3-Dimensional Images creating Typography! check out this new book and the blog connected with it! http://www.3dtypographybook.com/2010/07/i-can-not-believe-news-today.html

and below is a video... get inspired to make your own text! ;)

what is 350.org?

350.org is an international campaign that's building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis—the solutions that science and justice demand.

Our mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet.

Our focus is on the number 350—as in parts per million CO₂. If we can't get below that, scientists say, the damage we're already seeing from global warming will continue and accelerate. But 350 is more than a number—it's a symbol of where we need to head as a planet.

We work hard to organize in a new way—everywhere at once. In October of 2009 we coordinated 5200 simultaneous rallies and demonstrations in 181 countries, what CNN called the 'most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.' In October 2010 we organized a 'global work party' all over the world, with over 7000 events in 187 countries. People put up solar panels, dig community gardens—and sent a strong message to our leaders: 'If we can get to work on solutions to the climate crisis, so can you.'

Our theory of change is simple: if an international grassroots movement holds our leaders accountable to the latest climate science, we can start the global transformation we so desperately need.

http://www.350.org/

350 ART

THIS NOVEMBER 20-28, 350 EARTH IS CALLING ON PEOPLE TO USE THEIR MOST POWERFUL SKILL—THEIR CREATIVITY—TO CONVEY THE URGENCY OF CLIMATE CHANGE. WE NEED YOUR HELP TO COMMUNICATE, IN NEW AND EXCITING WAYS, WHAT THE NUMBER 350 MEANS FOR OUR PLANET.

Here is a list of some ideas for your own climate art projects. Change or combine these projects if you want, or develop your own! We’re accepting photo submissions of art from around the world at art@350.org

Land Art: Land Art is one of the oldest art forms. It is simply, creating something beautiful out of natural materials. This is an art form that can be done anywhere on earth, because any material can be used to make art. A pile of sticks can become a bird, or a sandy beach can become a sun. The possibilities are endless. more ideas

Aerial Art: One of the signatures of the 350 movement has been the incredible creativity shown through the creation of Aerial Art. This is a great art form because its very medium shows how many people are involved. Aerial art can be done in many different ways, small or as big as you can imagine. Think about using different colors in the image, or using other materials to create part of the image. You can even make your aerial art animated! more ideas

350 Concerts: Raise the volume, lower the CO2. Music moves people, physically and emotionally, and has been a crucial part of many social movements. Invite a few local groups to play a Zero Carbon Concert. Invite speakers working on local environmental issues to talk in between songs or invite theater groups. click here to see what songs have already been made about 350

350 Mural: There are walls all over the world, separating things. By painting the wall you can make it the wall tool to bring people together, to educate and inspire them, and to make spaces more colorful and enjoyable. This is a great project that everyone can get involved in, and can communicate to people for years to come. more ideas

350 Flash Mob: Organize a “flash mob” – where crowds of coordinated people suddenly assemble in public spaces. There are endless variations, from freezing in place for 350 seconds to wearing snorkels and swimming trunks to talk about sea level rise. This is a project it is bound to surprise.more ideas

Street Art: Street art supporting 350 has started showing up all over the world. From Belarus to Switzerland to the United States, people have been sending us images of walls where they have seen painted 350s. Street art is a modern way to bring the 350 message into public eye and the public conscience. more ideas

Note: Street art is illegal in some places.

For more ideas and a different take on how climate art can play a part, check out this great piece by Franke James.

Traditional Art: Embrace local traditions to create a piece of art that reflects local traditions. Use traditional local materials, symbols, or artistic techniques and show the world what local solutions your community has. There are thousands of years of knowledge of how to live sustainably on this planet, lets hold onto and share those traditions as we move ahead. more ideas

350 Film Festival: There are so many wonderful and creative films online about climate change. Organize a mini film festival, and invite people to come watch. You can show numerous short movies from Youtube, or show a full length film. There may even be films made about the specific local issues of your region. Leave time for discussion at the end of the movie, so you can talk about how to turn your feelings into actions.

Street Theater: Create a Street Theater performance that educates people about climate change, and what they can do to help stop it. Get creative! Street Theater is a great way to entice a general audience into listening to what you want to say. Street art engages anyone who happens to walk by – which is great – we need everyone to combat the climate crisis. more ideas

Get Crafty: Crafts are a great way to show your support for 350 while simultaneously taking action. Everything we can make for ourselves is one step closer towards sustainability and local production. Use your talents, whatever they might be, to create a solution that will get us down to 350. Click here to see the beautiful results from the 350 Craftster Contest.

Bike Parade: Bicycles are one of the most joyous and simple solutions to get us down to 350. Organizing a bike parade is simple. Set a place and time, and ask people to come with their bicycles. Ask people to come in costume or to make flags or license plates for their bikes – and you’ll be sure to get noticed.more ideas

Food!: Cooking is an art, perhaps the most important one of all, and is one of the key solutions to sustainable living. Sitting together around a table is also one of the best ways to get to know new people. Have a pot-latch dinner with local food, or contact a local food co-op and organize a feast. Get creative: how can you incorporate the message of 350 into your favorite dish?

http://earth.350.org/get-involved/make-your-own-art/

Truth Beauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 @ the Phillips

TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845–1945
(October 9, 2010–January 9, 2011)

Photographic pictorialism, an international movement, a philosophy, and a style, developed toward the end of the 19th century. The introduction of the dry-plate process, in the late 1870s, and of the Kodak camera, in 1888, made taking photographs relatively easy, and photography became widely practiced. Pictorialist photographers set themselves apart from the ranks of new hobbyist photographers by demonstrating that photography was capable of far more than literal description of a subject. Through the efforts of pictorialist organizations, publications, and exhibitions, photography came to be recognized as an art form, and the idea of the print as a carefully hand-crafted, unique object equal to a painting gained acceptance.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/truth_beauty/index.aspx

350 EARTH will be the first art exhibit large enough to be seen from space -November 20-28th, 2010

http://earth.350.org/

This November 20-28, 350 EARTH will launch the world’s first ever global climate art project. In over a dozen places across the globe, citizens and artists will create massive public art installations to show how climate change is already impacting our world as well as offer visions of how we can solve the crisis. Each art installation will be large enough to be seen from space and documented by satellites generously provided by Digital Globe.

350 EARTH will be the first-ever global scale group show on the front line of climate change—our polluted cities, endangered forests, melting glaciers, and sinking coastlines. People around the world are invited to take part by attending signature events, submitting their own art, and spreading the word about the project.

350 EARTH will take place on the eve of the next United Nations climate meetings in Cancun, Mexico where delegates will work to create an international climate treaty. Our politicians have all the facts, figures, and graphs they need to solve the climate crisis. What they lack is the will. 350 EARTH will demonstrate the massive public support for bold climate action and the role that art can play in inspiring humanity to take on our greatest challenge: protecting the planet on which we live.

green mums

yesterday afternoon i was watercoloring some sketches from my garden using only green on white paper. this morning i came across this image at terrain at styers ... Styers is the most unbelievably inspiring place for home and garden! my fav place to stop for flowers, inspiration, and amazingly fresh food @ the cafe in Pennsylvania.

...

Terrain at Styer’s
914 Baltimore Pike, Glen Mills, PA 19342

610-459-2400

November 5-7th 2010

ABOUT - Pyramid Atlantic Art Center presents the 11th Biennial Book Arts Fair and Conference, the preeminent book arts event on the east coast. Now in its third decade, the fair will showcase a dynamic array of innovative book art, limited edition prints, fine papers, and specialty tools along with a rich program of notable speakers, demonstrations, and special exhibitions. This three day event will connect international artists, scholars, collectors, publishers, and art lovers. Serving to inform and inspire, the Book Arts Fair and Conference is a celebration of the printed form and the book as art.

http://www.pyramidatlanticbookartsfair.org/

Fall into Art ;)

Wow... where did summer go?! It is officially scarf and boots season in DC... Luckily there are some great art exhibitions around to keep us inspired now that the weather is turning chilly :)

Last night I went to 'Phillips After Five' for the month of October... the Phillips Museum of Art stays open late every thursday night... but the first Thursday of each month they host "Phillips After Five' where there is always a combination of art, culture, and socializing amidst music, art lectures, and special events. Mark your calendar for next month's which will take place on Thursday November 4, 2010. And in the mean time, check out the exhibit "Side by Side... Oberlin's Masterworks side by side with art from the Phillips Collection.

Side by Side: Oberlin's Masterworks at the Phillips (September 11, 2010-January 16, 2011)

Side by Side: Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Phillips combines masterworks from the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum and The Phillips Collection. The 25 works on loan from Oberlin date from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and include stellar works by artists of the British, Dutch, Flemish, French, German, Italian, and Spanish schools. Highlights include Hendrick ter Bruggen’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (1625), one of the most important examples of northern baroque painting in the United States; Rubens’s The Finding of Erichthonius (1632–33); and The Fountain of Life, a superb 16th-century painting probably painted in Spain after a work by Jan van Eyck.

The exhibition showcases an unconventional hallmark of The Phillips Collection, the mixing of works of different periods and nationalities in changing installations to reveal new affinities between works of art. This approach reflects the views of museum founder, Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), who saw the history of art as a conversation through the ages among artists and works of art. In his collection of contemporary art, Phillips included several old masters, including Giorgione, El Greco, and Goya, and an early wish list included the names of others.

Going to the heart of Phillips’s claim, among Side by Side’s loosely themed groupings is one that brings together artists who copied paintings by their predecessors in the Louvre. The Allen’s Rubens appears with Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who is known to have copied works by Rubens. In the second half of his career, after abandoning impressionism, Renoir again looked to Rubens for inspiration. Related works in this section of the exhibition are from the Phillips, by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, and Ferdinand-Victor-Eugène Delacroix.

Several works from Oberlin show the world at night: Dovedale by Moonlight (c. 1784–85) by Joseph Wright of Derby, Pier Francesco Mola’s Mercury Putting Argus to Sleep (1645–55), and Giuseppe Cesari’s The Agony in the Garden (Christ on the Mount of Olives) (1597–98). The moon is the light source in the first two, while Christ’s angelic vision illuminates the third. Their silvery gleam is reflected in later paintings in the Phillips, including Arthur Dove’sMe and the Moon (1937) and George Inness’s Moonlight, Tarpon Springs (1892).

In another group of landscapes, Oberlin’s shimmering View of Venice: The Ducal Palace, Dogana and Part of San Giorgio (1841) by Joseph William Mallord Turner, joins one by his rival John Constable, represented in the Phillips by On the River Stour (1834–37). Both artists had a powerful effect on modern landscape painting. Their works hang with paintings by Claude Monet, an artist profoundly influenced by Turner. Oberlin’sGarden of the Princess, Louvre (1867) is one of Monet’s first views of Paris and represents a much earlier stage in his development than The Road to Vétheuil (1879) and Val-Saint-Nicholas, near Dieppe (Morning) (1897) owned by the Phillips. Other modern landscapes on view in Side by Side include Paul Cézanne’s Viaduct at L’ Estaque (1882) from Oberlin and add new dimensions to the rich imagery of the south of France, represented at the Phillips by paintings by Pierre Bonnard and Vincent van Gogh.

A display of self-portraits includes one of the most dramatic works on loan from Oberlin. Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner expresses the artist’s terror in the face of war. Kirchner wears the uniform of his artillery regiment, his vacant eyes are pupil-less, and his right hand has been amputated. Nearby are the Phillips’s rough-looking Cézanne (1878–80) and Oberlin’s Michiel Sweerts, in which the artist presents himself as a gentleman (1656).

Outside the Rothko Room hang a trio of historic New York Schoolworks from Oberlin, by Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Gottlieb’s The Rape of Persephone and Rothko’sThe Syrian Bull, exhibited in 1943 at the Third Annual Exhibition of Modern Painters and Sculptors, were seized on by critic Edward Alden Jewell in the New York Times as examples of incomprehensible recent art. A few days later, Newman helped Gottlieb and Rothko to draft a rebuttal that set the aesthetic and cultural themes for the New York School. In gratitude, Gottlieb and Rothko gave Newman the two paintings. Side by Side: Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Phillips is organized by The Phillips Collection and the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.

http://www.phillipscollection.org/exhibitions/side_by_side/index.aspx