Paris metro art nouveau project: Glue Collograph

Starting in 1900 in Paris, entrances to subway stations were designed in art nouveau style by Hector Guimardas part of the Fulgence Bienvenüe project. Eighty-six of his entrances are still in existence and I think they're beautiful.

I made this collograph using matboard and glue, constructing all of the lines from glue, and after they dried, rolling and daubbing ink on the plate and printing it on an etching press.

I've posted process photos, showing the steps I took to make this, on my Flickr page.


Below are two photographs showing other subway entrances that were part of the project. For more information, see Wikipedia.



















Photo attributions:
Left: Tom Fletcher
Right: Michael Reeve

Drawing of 1937 Fishing Bridge beach at Yellowstone Park

Drawing of 1937 Fishing Bridge beach at Yellowstone Park
Originally uploaded by flickring

For "Drawing Day 2008," I chose to draw from an old photograph taken in 1937. It shows three children sitting on the beach at Yellowstone Park's Fishing Bridge area, at the north end of Yellowstone Lake. This area is of the park is sentimental to me, partly because it has family history going back more than 70 years! The child on the far right is my father-in-law, once a Yellowstone Park ranger, and the other two are his sisters. His father, in turn, was a ranger naturalist for 15 summers, at this very spot, Fishing Bridge.

Drawing Day is an annual effort to post one million drawings on their web site, DrawingDay.org.

Mod - Digital Art

Fighting a cold, I took to the couch and laptop, and had 1950's fun with digital art. Usually I take photographs and artistically alter them in Photoshop Elements. But this one involved no photographs, just Photoshop. I just made shapes and filled them in, here and there, with subtle colors of pale yellow, gold and dark gray.

Mod, 6 x 8, digital image

Gale's Restaurant Art Benefit

Last night I had the privilege of being a featured artist at a benefit for the AIDS Service Center.

Gale's Restaurant in Pasadena held the event which was also sponsored by Walt Disney Engineering, Grey Goose, and other well-known eleomosynary organizations (great word, eleomosynary!!!). I had never been to Gale's but must say the food (Italian) was fantastic! The place was packed with people.

At one point, a volunteer docent handed me printed information on one of the artists: me! Maybe I should have worn a name tag...

I haven't heard about sales volumes yet, but I hope they did well. Many, many people gave their personal time, their energy, imagination, money, art, decorations, and more to make this benefit a success. And I had a great time! Here's a copy of one of the pieces of art I donated.

"Testing the Water," graphite, 8x6"