Friday 8 January 2010

Art Heaven

It's been a most wonderful 24 hours.  Sometimes you need to get out and experience other artists work to help inspire your own.  You can see what sells and what people are interested in.  You can watch the reaction of the patrons to see how the pieces effect them and the techniques the artist used to capture their audiences attention.

Last evening "Adventurer" and I attended an opening at the Patrick John Mills Gallery in Hintonburg.  I don't know the title of the art show, but it featured a number of contemporary artists.  It was quite incredible!  There was a number or mixed media pieces, sculptures, and of course paintings.  They had a darker theme and there were a lot of paintings of skeletons, body parts, etc....  Love it!  It never ceases to amaze me how oil paintings can "glow" and have such depth over other medium.  I definately need to take up this medium next September when the new school year starts at the art school!



Today "Hot Chocolate" and I visited the National Gallery of Canada.  If you ever get a chance to see an exhibit by David Hoffos, GO!  He builds miniature sets then uses video to project images of people into the small scenes.  It's quite friggin' freaky actually! 

In one in particular piece/model (I'm not quite sure how to describe the works) "Hot Chocolate" told me there was a man peering out of the living room window of the model.  When I looked through the opening I saw a woman with a pony tail peeking through.  It was then we figured the artist had a live feed attached to this piece that projected our own miniature images into the dwelling.  Incredible!




SERENA; Hey Serena, not a dumb question you asked in the comments section.  The ones bottom up are either not yet sharpened or are Derwent and/or possibly Faber-Castell pencils.  They have a finished end that makes it easier to locate the colour when standing bottoms up. 

The ones I have in jars and on my desk are the colours in the current painting only.  Once I'm done I put them all away in the cases, tidy up my desk and start from scratch.  The above pictured multi-level cases are all of the various colours I'm not using this time around.  The case that is more empty houses my greys and browns which are a big part of this picture.  I don't remember having this much trouble locating a specific colour when I worked with paints;-)

And if  I could make my acrylics work like you do yours I'd spend more time doing that!  If you were  to work in pencils you'd kick butt!

Well, finally I feel re-energized and getting away from the newly renovated house has cleared my allergies.  I expect things will continue to improve once the dust finishes settling.  It was nice to be headache and sneezing  free for a day.

Finally, I'm considering turning over some control of my blog to Hot Chocolate so he can post some pictures.  If he gets carried away I may have to post a few of my own of him;-)

6 comments:

Maureen said...

What a great idea to have the viewer IN the artwork! Cool!

I love seeing your art area; it gives me the itch to draw....

sandy said...

That art sounds great! The viewer in the art. Anyway, enjoying my catching up.

Jennifer Rose said...

that is such a cool exhibit! interaction like that can really help people that don't normally appreciate art, enjoy it.

I'm jealous, would love a few of those cases to carry pencils around

Kurt said...

The American city in which I live has a number of prominent art museums that have numerous exhibits of note.

Perpetual Chocoholic said...

Ya, that's what they all say;-)

I've been to the zoo in your famous american city and seen the street entertainers at work. You know, stripping a car in 60 seconds. Most fascinating, but never been to one of the galleries.

Serena Lewis said...

The David Hoffos exhibit sounds like a must-see! What a cool idea!

Thanks so much for answering my pencil question. I really like the way you work! I can definitely see where using the jars to keep only the pencils you are currently using in a given project would be a great help. I kinda do that with my acrylics....I keep the paints I use in a current project out on my desk where I can access them easily.

My asthma and dust don't like each other. Glad to hear you're feeling much better ~