Jean Stephany and Bill Hicklin

Jean and Bill create the most beautiful stained glass and mixed media work. Their work is in many public and private installations. Paul and I had the pleasure of being their "neighbors" at an art fair of few years ago. They are a very fun pair.

Crystal Brooke McCann

http://www.artbohemian.com/ Handmade paper is wonderful in that you can create textures and imbed bits of nature, wax it and it becomes transluscent. It's earth-friendly because you can recycle it. It's a wonderful medium to work with. Crystal has done some very cool art with handmade paper. I saw her work at Art Fair on the Square in Madison.

Sculpted Stone

Mary and Spencer Watson make the coolest art. Check out these stones. Aren't they fun!?

Well Behaved Women

Well Behaved Women
Originally uploaded by louisdemise

I did this piece a couple of years ago, it's one of my favorites. The original hangs in the Aurora Women's Cancer Center in Milwaukee. I love what it says, it reminds me that you need to go against the grain to make a difference in this world.

Published!

So this is pretty darn exciting, 2 of my pieces are published in this issue of Somerset Studio.

This is what I came home to....

100_0785
Originally uploaded by louisdemise

This is what I came home to.....what a mess! I live in a cape cod style house, the 1/2 story is where my studio is. Happily I can close the door and not deal with ......this until after an art fair.

Art Fair on the Square

Art Fair on the Square is where Jae and I were this past weekend. Marcia, Marj, Jae and I exhibit as the Wisconsin Calligrapher's Guild. The Guild has participated in this art fair for 23 years. We get 2 booth spaces and if I had presence of mind, I would've taken photos of the booth and posted them....next time. There are hundreds of artists...the booths go all the way around the capital on both sides of the street....lots of food and entertainment....it's a most excellent art fair.

Edith Piaf

The other day Paul and I went to see "La Vie en Rose" the story of Edith Piaf. She had a very difficult life....abandoned by her mother, father in the service, raised in a brothel, then on to the circus .....all the while singing like a "sparrow". Gérard Depardieu is in it as well (love him). It's an excellent movie. Take a hanky.

Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro currently has an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Musuem. Pissarro is the father of impressionism. The exhibit included 40 of his paintings, among the oils were 2 watercolors. He painted with Monet, Cézanne and developed with loose style of painting. Wonderful.

Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel was a talented artist, who abandoned her own art to work with Rodin. She was his muse, his lover......while he had another lover for 20+ years. Claudel became pregnant, Rodin would not leave the other lover, Claudel slipped into madness. She poured herself into her work. I saw her work at the Rodin Museum; this sculpture "The Age of Maturity" is terribly moving. There is a movie about her life that I would like to see, starting Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu.

Say Chris (this is Jae now), the Wikipedia links also to an extensive French website on her work which has lots of good photos, even if your French is not quite enough to read it all. I find the story (as presented in Wikipedia) about how her family treated her, incarcerating her in an asylum for forty years even against medical advice, more shocking than her relationship with Rodin.

Darlene Coltrain

Say, I ran into Darlene Coltrain at a local Fourth of July picnic yesterday. It was in its way a fairly star-studded event as she joined my conversation with Joan Vinge about whether the internet is a good place for selling your art. Joan has found her Hobby of Dollmaking (you can follow the links on her homepage to see her earlier work, showing characters from her books) is some help with her recent complex health troubles. Joan's interest in putting art on the internet is just in putting up photos of her artwork, as her main thing is writing, but her daughter has recently embarked on the world of art fairs, which I am just now getting out of after twenty years, thank you very much.

And Darlene has done art fairs and SF conventions for a long time now. That link above if it loaded properly for you shows some of her painted silk scarves and jewelry, that she takes to conventions. She doesn't seem to have this kind of work on her home page, which is devoted to prints of her paintings. But she says the internet has not been all that good to her for sales. Nothing like face to face contact and seeing, touching the actual work. This can be either because of the physical nature of the work, or because of the styles of perception of the persons taking it in.

Anyway, Darlene is having an opening tomorrow at the Bindley Collection gallery at Hilldale, for her wearable art, and she was very pleased with the publicity graphics Colleen Bindley has done for her there. The gallery is the latest version of the Twenty Hands Gallery that Colleen started up as an artists' collective during the last few holiday seasons. Lots of local artists from the art fairs and weekend house sales represented there.

Auguste Rodin

One of the most amazing museums is the Rodin Museum in Paris. His work is housed in the place he lived and worked. Sculpture is an incredible labour of love. There is a large glassed in cabinet that shows step by step how a bronze sculpture is created. Here is how lost wax casting is done. Rodin's marble sculptures are fascinating, the figures look as though they are struggling to emerge from the marble. The Burghers of Calais is an emotional piece. It it larger that life-size. These leaders of the Calais were ready to sacrifice their lives for their city. The emotion caught on their faces can bring you to tears. The Gates of Hell is an enormous piece of work. I didn't know that The Thinker is part of this piece. After seeing the amount of work that goes into a bronze and how much detail there is in The Gates of Hell, it is most certainly is a passionate work.

Spiders on Drugs--You Tube

Okay, I again need you to humour me on this one, someone from work sent this to me....it made me laugh out loud.

Donna Balma

I just found this site while reading a post from a yahoo group. Donna's art is very innovative. I read that she attended an egg painting party and decided to make hers with more of a graphic design quality. I love what she did with the bald heads (Retral Portraiture). She also combines knitting and painting (Modahls). Very cool and thought provoking art.