Hopefully, my readers know I write about both my art and mental health resources. If you are a new reader, well, there you have it – here at the “…Studios” you will get a little of both of my Gemini sides! With today’s post about my new online art gallery.
“Wooden Cardinal” watercolor
Helping Readers Navigate
I’ve tried to clarify about doing both art and mental health in my blogs over the past year. Still, I figured, subscribers and guests need an easier way to view my art.
New Online Art Gallery
“Postcards from the Beach” collage
As a result, I am unveiling my new online art gallery. The gallery is divided into six curated collections:
Coastal Collection: abstract collage landscapes and other coastline art.
House and Home: interiors and exteriors in a variety of media.
Fall and Farm: scenes from the Upstate New York countryside.
Patterns: showcasing my vintage Apple Trees and Cores pattern and
The Whimsicals: vintage pen and ink with watercolor characters.
While I currently work with recycled fabric and paper collage, each collection contains art I created using other media too. These include watercolor, acrylic, and mixed media.
Art and Mental Health
Viewing art is good for our mental health. Recently, I did this while visiting my sister in Boston. She treated my other sister and me to a day at the Museum of Fine Arts. Studies show that looking at art can can improve our mental health. This includes stress relief, improving mood, enhancing creativity, give a sense of relief, and improve social connections. Our “sisters trip” to the museum definitely improved our connections. We hadn’t done anything together with just “the sisters” since we were kids! Not only were we treated to the art, but we learned more about each other in the process.
Sue, Alis, and Carol
Which is Your Favorite?
I hope you enjoy a look around my gallery. In “Comments,” I’d love to hear which is your favorite collection or art work. Or tell about your experience with art and mental health.
Parents, homeschoolers, and preschool teachers often struggle to find picture books about rural agricultural areas where their students live. Because of this, educators must change what is available or go without. This causes extra work and leaves children missing out on important information about their home.
Parents and teachers want books for kids living in non-urban areas. They seek books related to local happenings. These educators want resources that speak specifically to the farming happening around their community. For example, kids living in rural areas see apple farming happening all around them. Their parents and teachers want picture books that cover life about orchards.
A New Picture Book with an Ag Theme
picture books about rural agricultural areas
To tackle this issue, my picture book, Apples for Cider, is an agricultural resource for parents and teachers. It helps them bring their rural agriculture community into their homes. They can also integrate it into their classrooms. Apples… is one of many needed picture books about rural agricultural areas. Plus, the book is now part of the National Agriculture in the Classroom Curriculum Matrix. The Apples for Cider picture book is now a Companion Resource attached to three Matrix apple lessons:
The Apples for Cider Parent/Teacher Reading Guide will also be available for download. The Guide is another way to help educators when using a picture book to extend learning. The Reading Guide includes various prompts for discussion and activities including a:
This new tagline I created from a Wendy MacNaughton quote should help readers (and Google!) better understand aws Studios. In her “Pencil Skills Part 1” post about drawing with healthcare professionals, MacNaughton declares, “Art and health. No. Brainer.” (Which I understand to mean how ones’ involvement in art or the arts strengthens an individual’s health.) Writer Austin Kleon’s recommendation from Steal Like an Artist, I was inspired to adapt her quote. It best communicates my aws Studios mission – “art and mental health.”
Click on Mr, Onion to get one of your own!
Yes, art is beneficial for social and emotional health. These include helping to manage stress and relieve anxiety, strengthen social skills, promote positive behaviors, increase cognitive abilities, practice mindfulness, etc.
Click pic to view aws Studios mental health resources
I spent the entire summer working on my newest book Apples for Cider. Apples… is a pastiche of one of my favorite picture books, Blueberries for Salby Robert McCloskey and a fast way to create a picture book. A pastiche is a type of intertextuality in literature. Intertextuality is either deliberate or latent. Deliberate intertextuality purposely borrows from the text. Some are exact lines while others are vaguely referenced. Latent intertextuality is incidental – “when references occur incidentally—the connection or influence isn’t deliberate” (masterclass.com). Forms of intertextuality include parody, pastiche, retellings and allegory. Some examples include the main plotline of Disney’s The Lion King as a take on Shakespeare’s Hamletand the structure of James Joyce’s Ulyssesmodeled after Homer’s Odyssey.
Parody vs pastiche
I was familiar with parody – a humorous take on a classic piece of literature such as in the picture books Goodnight iPad (a parody of Goodnight Moon) and The Taking Tree (a parody of The Giving Tree). And I wondered if there was a way to take a classic and not make fun of it, as in a parody, but use the classic text as a foundation to pay tribute to it. That’s when I came across pastiche. The following is a description from literarydevices.net:
Illustration pastiche, a fast way to create a picture book!
Pastiche is a literary piece that imitates a famous literary work by another writer. Unlike parody, its purpose is not to mock, but to honor the literary piece it imitates. In pastiche, the writers imitate the style and content of a literary piece to highlight their work, as the original piece is accepted by the vast majority of readers as landmarks of their age. So, imitation in such works celebrates the works of the great writers of the past.
Fia finds Papa Deer
A pastiche of Blueberries for Sal, a fast way to create a book
I was thrilled to find this was “a thing.” I wanted to do a book about how my granddaughter helps her grandfather (my husband) make cider from the apples in our neighbor’s farm. I think the title Apples for Cider came to me first which immediately made me think of Blueberries for Sal. Blueberries… was the perfect foundation to tell the story of gathering apples to make cider. As an early-career illustrator, creating the pastiche gave me the opportunity to make a picture book fast, getting an entire book done in five months – over the summer and into the fall (by November so I can give it to my granddaughter for her birthday). It allowed me to get right to my book making – I didn’t have to wait to have a new manuscript written, edited and ready to go.
Self-publishing opportunity
Unless a publisher desires the rights to Apples…, my plan is to learn about self-publishing and use this book as my first attempt into that realm. I’ll keep you posted on my foray into self-publishing and when it’s ready for sale, I’ll let you know. Then you can tell me if you think my book Apples for Cider honors McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal! Wish me luck! And let me know in the Comments if you have ever written or read a pastiche!
My 2020 and 2021 collages, “Sunrise in the Preserve” and “Sunrise near Bellacina” are currently showing in the Venice (Florida) Art Center’s new “Near and Far” show (running now through February 11, 2022). The two works together in a series of three (including “Sunrise on the Bay”) tell the story about how creating art during the confines of the covid19 pandemic helped me maintain and, possibly, strengthened my mental – social and emotional – health.
Isolated in the first many months of the pandemic in 2020, I found solace in my small studio. The unassuming, demure space provides me with plenty – the secure comfort I desire for my creating. Ever since I was a little kid, I have always enjoyed the confines of small, big-enough-for-only-me spaces. The enclosed spandrel (the space underneath the stairs leading up to the second floor of our house) was my indoor playhouse. Every morning after breakfast, I couldn’t wait to play under the stairs with my dolls, in my own private, cozy representation of my family’s kitchen, complete with a 1950’s toddler sized white metal kitchen sink, stove and refrigerator. It was the safe sanctuary that my natural introversion craved.
Like the enclosed spandrel, my two, small, big-enough-for-only-me studio spaces (one in upstate NY and the other in Venice, Florida) provide me with the safe and secure calm I desire for my creative focus. In this soothing space, I relax and, along with my collage practice, destress. It was in my Venice studio where I “got through” the early pandemic months (and the later ones too) with peace and relaxation.
sunrise near Bellacina
Creating collage – the cutting and securing paper or fabric to a ridged surface – helps me manage my mental wellbeing. Scissors and X-Acto knives (slim, small knives with similarly slim razor blades for cutting my materials) are, for me, therapeutic. The concentration and attention required to accurately slice fabric or paper flows through my body. It calms my arms, hands and fingers down into a focused peacefulness. Again, the concentrated practice allows me to exhale my stress and tension.
sunrise on the bay
Collage also satisfies my desire for a challenge. It provides me another way to take care of my mental health. Stimulating our brain with challenges and problem solving helps to improve our mindset. This helps to make us feel more positive about the future. It helps to build confidence and gives us something to focus on. Problem solving takes our minds off the things that cause anxiety. Creating a picture that represents a story with Impressionistic-like simplicity is my challenge and goal. But the pandemic in early 2020, created an additional challenge. The challenge of trying to find materials needed for my collaging (remember, at first, stores closed completely)!
my work desk in my demure studio!
One of the reasons I made pictures of a sunrise was because the only ridged surface I had at the time to build my collages on was a piece of florescent orange cardboard leftover from another project (I totally can’t remember what that was)! The bright orange became the perfect background to represent the dramatic streaks and peaks of the morning’s rising sunlight. Another challenge was obtaining colored paper to cut and collage the sky and foreground. Again, the only thing I had on hand were magazines. Even though magazines are not the best choice when considering a picture’s longevity and its archivalness, the “Venice Magazine” about Gulf Coast living, provided me with a broad selection of colors; the heavier cover paper becoming my favorite choice to weave into my sunrise representations.
Many artists relate their practice to helping them with strengthen their mental health. During the scariest early days and months of the pandemic, my “art saved me” (as it often does). It provided me a way to escape from the worries of what the virus. My secure and safe studio gave me focus. It illuminated a silver lining to my isolation – that of creating three related collages. Even the show’s opening night helped me grow my social health. My husband and I met another artist and his wife who also live in Venice. The four of us closed the reception down. We were the last to leave. We enjoyed a conversation of getting to know each other, exchanging numbers and promises to get together again.
How about you? Did/do you find solace during the pandemic creating art and or crafts? How does art or craft making affect your mental health? Have you noticed ways art helps to strengthen your social and emotional health? I would love to hear from you in the “Leave a Reply” below.
In a recent meeting of the Florida SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), I heard writers expressing their desire (and frustration?) for ways to illustrate their picture books. Two years ago, I came up with an idea to make my granddaughter a picture book about my mother (her great grandmother) for Christmas. Since the idea sprang up late in the year, I didn’t have time to do full color illustrations. The method I finally chose is one writers (who are not illustrators) could use for their picture books.
While spending a weekend at my sister’s and thinking of ways to illustrate my book, I spied a small, black paper silhouette cutout of my mother in her twenties that she had made of herself while visiting the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Silhouette is one of the oldest forms of expression that advertising and other print media have used for decades.
In “Printers’ Ink”, an old journal for advertisers, a commercial art manager said of the art of silhouette that, “History refers to it, and the French have always been fond of [the] simplified art”; adding, “[t]he silhouette is more than apt to print under any and all circumstances… generally speaking, it is accident proof”. Along with black and white “clipart,” the profile portrait of my mother became the perfect foundation for my story’s illustrations.
Fia’s silhouette
As a collage artist, I enjoy the hands-on cutting, manipulating and laying out of paper on paper and did not use a computer. Finding boarders and frames to use with the black and white pictures and laying out the pages was, for me, a lot of fun. Some frames I found I collaged or printed in the text I needed to illustrate from the story. To mirror the boardwalk silhouette of my mother, I made one of my granddaughter for the book. While babysitting her one weekend, my husband and I took her to a local beach where while playing in the sand, I was able to snap a picture of her in profile which I then turned into a silhouette.
I printed the clipart and the frames and boarders out on my studio printer and laid out each page of the picture book on 8”x 8” card stock. Along with some modifications, it still took me the four months working part-time to complete the book getting the text and layout just right. Once all the pages were complete with the printed text, I took all the pages to be copied and bound to Staples. There, I chose to have the book and it’s copy spiral bound. The Staples print technicians* at the store in Clay, NY did a great job with the printing/copying and the binding.
I was pleased with how my black and white picture book came out. It’s rare for a picture book to be produced in black and white instead of color but it works for this book. I think some of the reasons are that it’s a small book, the text moves right along with quick page turns and many of the black and white illustrations show movement i.e., the banner on the beauty school, the “sailor” on the Playbill, the shopper, the dancers and the ribbon waving behind the seamstress.
Also, the silhouette is a unique communication tool that has been used by print media for their concise and immediate recognition. Their simplicity engages readers by leaving something to the imagination, which, I think, especially works with children. My book must “work” because my four-year-old granddaughter says she loves it and it has often been her number one choice when choosing a book to read!
If you are not an artist or illustrator and if you are looking for a way to add illustrations to your picture book, clipart could work for you too.
How about you? Have you ever seen clipart used for a picture book? Have you ever tried using clipart to make illustrations? Let me know. I’d love to hear from you. Use the “Comments” section below.
*I found out with my next picture book that all Staples print services are not the same. You are not guaranteed the same services even from your preferred store as it can depend on the specific technician. If you are pleased with the results from a certain technician, I recommend that you get their name so you can request their services in the future.
Like my old friend and colleague, illustrator, Jerry Russell, who chooses to work in different illustration styles dismissing the adage that illustrators should settle into one or two styles, I too have worked in a variety of media and, overtime, have shown different styles. (Though, I admit that, currently, I have settled comfortably into collage as my style du jour.)
My Sewing Machine
“My Sewing Machine” is an example of my foray into computer generated art and design. For a while, I liked using the computer to make art. At the time, I was just beginning my venture into fabric and paper collage, and making pictures using the computer was, to me, a lot like making collages (or maybe that’s just how I approached the media). But, alas, it didn’t last and back to the tactile I went, liking the handling, cutting and gluing of fabric and paper over the point and click of a computer mouse (styluses and tablets were just coming on the market). As one of only a few of my computer illustrated works, “My Sewing Machine” was a representation of another important media I worked in – sewing. I did all sorts of sewing including costume construction (for the Syracuse Stage Costume Department), dressmaking, appliqué and machine embroidery. (For a while, I had a dressmaking business designing and making one-of-a-kind gowns ultimately providing a niche fashion market designing and constructing wedding gowns for the “Pregnant Bride”! [More on that maybe in another post!])
The applique and machine embroidery lend well to illustration, though, they are much more time consuming. Instead of quickly (somewhat) gluing paper or fabric down on a surface, applique and machine embroidery rely on sewing, either thick “lines” of thread to secure pieces of fabric to another base fabric “canvas” for applique, and “lines” of thread to “draw,” “sketch” or “paint” pictures on a fabric “canvas” for machine embroidery. These sewing methods require more time than the typical collage method. (Knowing the work and time required for these illustration techniques provides me with ample respect and appreciation for fabric artists like Bisa Butler and her detailed and colorful applique portraits. Amazing and beautiful!)
Boot Shot applique
Friends machine embroidery
Both of my sewing machine-made art pictured here were “squares” for a “Bon Voyage” quilt I coordinated and made for friends who were leaving to sail their sailboat around the world. I coordinated the making of the quilt by asking other friends of the sailors to each pitch in a square. The “Friends” square is a machine embroidery portrait collage of the friends who “spared a square” for the BV quilt. “Boot Shot” is an applique I created representing a favorite shared activity between many of the quilt making friends – our love of hiking in the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York. (Later, I made a print of this square and entered it into a t-shirt contest sponsored by The Adirondack Mountain Club. Like my entry in the Dali Museum contest, again, my design wasn’t selected! But as usual, it didn’t stop me from more creating and entering!)
I don’t think I will go back to these media and methods. Though, you never know! What do you think? Should I do more of the computer-generated art, the applique or the machine embroidery? Illustrators, do you have just one or two styles or, like Jerry and me, do you, too, buck the norm? I’d love to hear about it in the Comments section below.
Most of my art in the last few years has been in collage – “painting” with pieces of fabric or paper and gluing to a hard surface to create a picture. In addition to collage, I have also been doing assemblage often described as three-dimensional collage. Assemblage “assembles” objects onto a canvas or board or as free-standing sculpture. Picasso is attributed with creating one of the first assemblages in his 1912 “painting”, “Still life with Chair Caning”, where he used rope and oil cloth in addition to oil paints. Collage and assemblage at that time was considered by many to be avant-guard and a “sharp break with previous modes of aesthetic coherence”. In other words, like the Impressionist style of art before them, these new artistic methods shook the long-standing convention of oil painting, long thought of as the only way to make true art – imitations of “life” done as realistically as possible. “Collage”, stated MOMA Exhibit Director Margaret Miller in 1948, “has been a means through which an artist incorporates reality in a picture without imitating it”. Now, that’smy style – a little avant-guard and representing reality without exact imitation, allowing for a bit of the artist themselves in the art!
“Still Life with Chair Caning”, Pablo Picasso, 1912
Often assemblage is described as assembling “disparate” “every-day objects” but my assemblages are different. I do not use “disparate” objects. My assemblages are of collections – objects that are intended to go together. My assemblage art making grew from my desire to organize my home which grew out of my obsession watching home organization shows on HGTV back when the network first aired in the mid-90s! To clean out my home and organize, I immediately latched onto the widely promoted organizational mantra to create piles of “stuff” to either keep, donate, decide about later, or throw in the trash. I began with my studio closet.
The studio closet was my “junk drawer” closet, a lot of filled shoe boxes crammed in haphazardly because I didn’t know what else to do with it. (Sound familiar?) Disorganized closets like these, though, can be sources of hidden treasure and with this one, I struck gold. One of the boxes held my forgotten plastic doll house furniture I played with as a child and the “Little People” (what I called the Disney figurines I used as my dollhouse dolls). I didn’t want to “trash” or “donate” this collection. I wanted to keep it but was unsure how. One of the organizing directives from the shows was that if you have collections, you either need to display or get rid of them. They do no good sitting in a closet or attic, never to be seen. (One way around this is to stash extras and rotate them in and out of display areas, kind of like what we do with Christmas and Halloween decorations. It’s also what most museums do; they don’t show everything they own but bring art out now and then to display from their “collections”).
Doll house
I decided I would definitely “keep” my dollhouse collection and find a way to display them. Looking through my stash of frames, I came across two that sparked ideas for how I could display my collection. I would use one for the furniture and one for the Little People. I had the most fun with the display I made for the furniture. I loved how the recycled “collage” style frame seemed to naturally create “rooms” of a house – kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room and den. I also enjoyed researching and finding wallpaper to use in each of the rooms and I like how the paper fits the era of the furniture too.
I look forward to doing more “collection” assemblage. In 1961, art critic Lawrence Alloway defined assemblage as a result of what he called “junk culture” or “city art”. Said Alloway of the method, “its source [is] obsolescence, the throwaway material of cities… as it collects in drawers, cupboards, [and] attics… Objects have a history, first they are brand new; then they are possessions, accessible to a few, subjected often to intimate and repeated use; then as waste, they are scarred by use but available again… Assemblage of such material come at the spectator as bits of life, bits of the environment.” And Lynne Perrella in, “Art Making: Collections and obsessions”, says that making art with “objects [of our collections] find a new life and chance to shine…the objects speak and provide a spark”. After they become “scarred” with use, a framed assemblage is a great way to give our collection obsessions a new life, a chance to shine and speak again.
Do you have a collection you think would present well as a framed assemblage? Contact me and tell me a little bit about your collection. I’d love to hear about it and create a one-of-a-kind assemblage for you!
In the winter, my husband and I leave our cherished cottage on “The Great Sodus Bay” (as it’s termed in Google Maps) off Lake Ontario for the warmer climes of the Gulf of Mexico. My favorite bike ride there is to leave my home in Venice, Florida, hop on the wonderful “Legacy Trail” and make my way over to Casey Key. Casey Key is one of the many unique Keys running along the intercostal waterway on Florida’s “Gulf” side. Casey Key in Nokomis, Florida is known for its narrow motorway with gorgeous views of the Gulf and its spectacular and lovely oceanside (and intercostal side) mansions (it’s also a winter home to Steven King). On one of my biweekly rides, I finally took the time to snap some shots along the way. The picture of the iron gate inspired me to make a “See and Say” booklet for my toddler granddaughter.
The “Beyond the Gate on Casey Key See and Say” booklet’s front cover is the shot of the gate beckoning the reader to open the gate to “see” what’s beyond. Once open, I collaged a fantasy view of the Gulf with, well, like the rhyme says, the sun, the waves, the sand and shells, sailboats, dolphins and seagulls. I enjoyed making this fun booklet and made a few copies for friends’ children and grandchildren and a few of my adult friends received a copy as a greeting card. If you are interested in a copy of the “Beyond the Gate on Casey Key See and Say” booklet, contact me here.
Have you been to Casey Key? If so, have you ever spotted the gate there?
Beyond the gate on Casey Key, tell me now, what do you see?
Do you see a butterfly kite? And a big yellow sun shining bright?
On the shore some seashells gather while dancing waves make a lather.
Count the starfish if you can. They are hiding in the sand!
Out on the Gulf of Mexico, where the winds begin to blow,
Sailboats chase the dolphins gray all through the blue green ocean spray.
Feathery gulls fly up high as the clouds go drifting by.
It’s a beautiful day for you and me beyond the gate on Casey Key!
Welcome to the first installment of the aws Studios blog! Here are stories about the art I make. Enjoy!
A New Collage
alis’s like vincent’s
alis’s like vincent’s is one of my most recent works. It’s a mixed media paper collage that I did for the Salvador Dali Museum’s “Paint Your Bedroom Contest”, a promotional event for the “Van Gogh Alive” exhibit they had there earlier this year. I was thankful for the contest. It came at a time when I needed some motivation, an idea of what to work on next and, alas, the contest appeared! (We were going to the Van Gogh show and I was looking for information about it and the museum online and found the contest).
It’s Not the Destination, It’s the Journey
By the way, I didn’t win (boo hoo!) but, really, it didn’t matter. For me, making art is more, if not all, in the thrill and enjoyment of the process and not so much in the final destination. It’s the engaging and challenging journey of getting to completion – especially one that you like in the end (rather than judges) – that keeps me keepin’ on!
My Studio to Look Like Vincent’s Bedroom
The idea of the contest was to share a Van Gogh-inspired painting of your bedroom based on Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles painting. For me, I was inspired by the colors in his painting, the blue on the walls (which I learned was a result of the original painting’s walls fading from purple to blue), the green of the window, the yellow bed with a red blanket and the brown (also originally more pink) of the wooden plank floor.
I tried to incorporate these colors into my “painting” (actually a collage – maybe that’s why I didn’t win!). Instead of my actual bedroom in our home in Venice, Florida, I used my studio as the basis for my composition. The room is pretty much represented as it is except I took liberty to make the window green, turned my blue sofa into a yellow bed with a red blanket (like Vincent’s), the carpet into a wooden plank floor and made the French doors blue.
Overall Success
A lot of this collage, I felt was a success. I especially liked how the St. Petersburg sailboat poster came out and the brown plank floor (I even added green along the planks of the floors like Vincent did in his). With collage, it’s fun to add typical pictures or text found in a variety of papers. With this collage, I mainly used paper from magazines.
Since I was just starting a paper collection for my Venice studio and it was at the beginning of the Covid pandemic and shopping for paper was difficult, I started using magazines for my collage papers. I liked using text from the magazines to represent the keys of the piano, though it didn’t come out as perfectly as I wanted. The collage is built on a small base, a 9″x12″ board, and it was often difficult to cut shapes as small as I needed. I truly challenged myself with cutting out the pair of black eye glasses that sit on top of the cabinet in the background on the right and was pretty happy with the end result!
All in all, I was pleased with the overall outcome, a great feeling for an artist! And thank goodness for the many years of doing art that I have come to realize that this – pleasing yourself and not basing the value of your work on what other people think- is one of the most important and satisfying results in making art.
