...Are the LUCKIEST People in Italy!
Day 5 (already?) began in Pienza, another lovely hilltop town about an hour from Cortona. On the way we passed beautiful vineyards and vines heavy with grapes, olive trees and cypress trees in stately rows, and fields of sunflowers that were dry and brown and ready for the oil press. Every time I passed a villa, I thought, hmmm, I could live here!

Our lesson was the dreaded "painting people." There are seven billion of them out there in the world, so you have to paint them eventually! Our spot in the sunshine was perfect and we attracted lots of cameras and smiles (even the attention of an artsy cat!) We made a new friend, Erica from Verona, who posed for us. And we told ourselves that, YES! We are Artists!

Just when we thought the food couldn't get any better, we met Chef Donatella and her daughter and translator Luccia. Mamma Mia! The food was amazing and all used simple, organic ingredients from their farm. We made Panzanella (a salad with stale bread - sounds weird, tasted delish!); Maiale all male verdi (pork with green apples that smelled SOOOO good while it was cooking); Pici all'aglione (hand-twirled, dumpling-like pasta with fresh tomato sauce); Rappini (simple boiled greens with olive oil); and the piece de resistance, Torta della Nona (Granny's cake, a divine concoction of 2 sugar cookie-like rounds of dough, rolled out and nested into a giant pan, with a layer of creamy egg custard between them.)

We are definitely in food heaven!!! Donatella, grazie mille!

Bongiorno from Cortona! I don't think there could be a more lovely place to live and paint for a week! I haven't been here a full 24 hours, but already I am smitten. The town is perched on the hillside and has only one flat street. Everything else is either up or down. 

Today I begin teaching eight wonderful women. We will work in our journals each day outside, en plein aire, to capture the essence of the moment and really really LOOK at what is around us. 

We began last night, meeting our guides Patrick and Angela of ToscanaAmericana, who hosted a wonderful dinner at a charming little restaurant. 

But now the bells in the Piazza are ringing and it is time for some of that amazing Italian coffee. I cannot wait to see the creative joys that come out of this week together. Stay tuned for more pictures - sketched, painted, and photographed!

You may have the universe if I may have Italy. Giuseppe Verdi

Only two more days until I take off for Italy! I have spent the last few days working on lesson plans, packing supplies and making handouts for my eight travel companions. We will be staying in the Tuscan hill town of Cortona, just south of Florence. Every day we will venture out for plein aire painting, journaling with watercolors, pens, pencils and anything we can find to collage with.

What a fabulous gift this is to me! I have to keep pinching myself, saying "I'm getting PAID to go teach in Italy!!"

I thought that a trip this grand deserved a new paint palette and a new journal. In England earlier this summer, I took my itty bitty Altoid box of paints, but now I'm going whole hog on the colors! Yes, I may have gotten a bit carried away on the Daniel Smith website, but why be limited when you are surrounded by Italian light!?
 
In case you were wondering, here's my list of colors, going around clockwise from the top yellow:
Winsor Yellow, New Gamboge, Quinacradone Gold, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Deep, Quinacridone Magenta, Opera Rose, Quinacridone Burnt Orange, Sepia, Burnt Umber, Carbon Black, Paynes Grey, Moonglow, Amethyst, Winsor Violet, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue, French Ultramarine Blue, Pthalo Blue, Cobalt Turquoise, Pthalo Yellow Green, Permanent Sap Green and Olive Green.

Yes, there are some wacky colors in there - Moonglow, Amethyst, Turquoise and all those Pthalos and Quinacridones - but they make super beautiful, intense shades when mixed with the old standbys. 

One more day to pack all those less important things, you know, my clothes.

So you may have noticed that while all my art buddies are posting their paint, sweat and tears every day, this chick has been suspiciously absent. Here's why: doing this everyday is hard!

I did work in the studio on Day 17. I tried printing some goldenrod from the mountains through the press, like I did with my hydrangeas. Let's just say, it looked like someone vomited on the paper. Bleeeeck. But, hey, what's a little ink puke to stand in the way of creativity? Suffice to say that I DID work all day to make something of the mess and MAYBE have something worth showing you. But not yet. Sorry. 

What happened next? Family life. College visit. Grocery shopping and cooking dinners. Church, Project Runway, cookouts with friends and wine on the porch. Good stuff. But not art. 

And I'm ok with that. I'm impressed that I made it 17 days straight, since I have never been very good at good habits. It's all fodder and fertilizer for the creative garden.

So here's the prototype...can't let the Queen out of the bag just yet. But hopefully the 8 recipients will be pleased and surprised! 

Shhh! Don't tell anyone but I'm working on a super top secret project in the studio. Think 007 meets Frida Kahlo crossed with Miss America and a dash of First Lady Michelle Obama. Or Jackie O.

Project Runway with the Charlotte skyline. 

Jackson Pollock on a MUCH smaller scale.

Pretty much me. Code name Bartsy. Shhh.

In the process of all this hydrangea printing, I use newsprint to cover the plate and paper, to keep the blankets on the press from getting dirty. As I was printing all the small strips on my large acrylic plate, I noticed the beautiful patterns that were building up as I ran each piece through the printer, using the same piece of newsprint behind them all. 

If you've seen my mixed media paintings and journals, you know I am ALL about the layers! So this time, I used a piece of good paper, 100% cotton Stonehenge printing paper, as my backing, intentionally printing beyond the edges of the smaller plate. NOW we're talking layers!

I'm really tempted to go back into this one with some paint and pencils. I should take my own advice to students who struggle with when to keep pushing a piece...keep this one that you love and make another one that goes further. And before you know it, you have a series!

I plucked more blossoms off my hydrangea bushes today and printed them on green-inked paper. The shapes looked a lot like broccoli before - but now they REALLY do! I've ordered some brown and blue papers to try. I still really like the drama of the black ink, but I might have to do a round in another color. Maybe dark blue ink on the light blue paper? Too Mother's Day?

I'm surprised at how hard it is for me to embrace the "true" tenets of printmaking - white edges, clean marks, well defined carved or etched lines. Instead I find myself layering and turning and adding to my prints in a non-traditional way. I keep saving newsprint scraps with ink on them to use later for collage. I can't resist the urge to add mixed media everywhere!

I suppose I've worked with messy hands and goopy layers for too long. No worries, I'm on a roll here, looking for plants to squish and prints to pull and having fun in the studio!

If one hydrangea looks good on paper, why not a whole garden of them???

Here you can see the 3 prints I can make with just 1 plate inking. Please let me know which one is your favorite!

The top image happens first - a full inking of black on the plate, with fresh flowers laid on top, and paper on top of that goes through the press. The gorgeous sepia shadows are made with the plant's own juices. The heavy cotton paper is dampened first to allow it to give around the stems, leaving a nice embossed texture.

The middle image happens next. I carefully remove the flowers and place a new sheet of damp paper on the plate. I tighten the press so it will absorb the leftover ink and all the fine details of the leaves and petals.

Lastly, with most of the ink off of the plate, I lay the inked flowers back onto the plate, turning them over so that the ink side is up to face the 3rd piece of paper. I like that the "ghost" images of the earlier printing still show behind the dark black of the new arrangement.

I'm really enjoying this long horizontal composition too. Next I have 3 new papers that I background printed with green. Can't wait to see how those look in the new "garden." This 30 in 30 challenge is a great push forward into new territory! 

What a glorious gift to have two days JUST for ART! No cooking or shopping or laundry or carpooling. No meetings or emails. Just me, Lola and Pandora in the studio...bliss!

I continued to work on my mountain landscape monoprints. These are small 4" x 13" studies on leftover scraps of paper from another project. The plan is to find a few I really like and enlarge the composition on a new fabric-type paper called Evolon that I ordered. 

Evolon is a new micro-fiber material that is super strong, but soft. I read about it on another printmaker's blog and was dying to try it. Because it is much like fabric, I think I can sew pieces of it together, to create a print larger than my press's capacity. My press can print up to 17" x 36" but by combining and sewing more than one together (after printing), I can create something BIG!

I've got 10 more still unfinished in the studio for tomorrow - and a test on some Evolon! 

Please let me know if you have a favorite you would like to see as my BIG WOW piece in November!

Today I began to work on a series that I've had on my mind for some time. Back in June, when I was teaching a printmaking workshop at Ciel Gallery, I stumbled into some landscape imagery using cheesecloth as a printing texture. I was monoprinting - rolling ink onto a flat plexiglass plate and using torn paper stencils to mask areas of the plate, then printing layers of different colors onto each piece of paper. 

I love the way the cheesecloth suggests clouds and how the different shapes and colors mimic the Blue Ridge Mountains on the horizon. The prints remind me of the happy week my family spent in Spruce Pine, NC last summer. We stayed in a crazy, funky, round house, perched on the side of a steep mountain. The cabin was minimal but the view out of the curved 180 degree window was amazing. Mt. Mitchell was right there in our living room!

Tomorrow I will add more colors and more mountains. And I will remember the smiles on top of Mt. Mitchell.

So Day 7 was a business day at Ciel Gallery. Lots to do. Always. 

But what an awesome place to spend time?!? Especially with the new INHABIT exhibit with fabulous work by Jean Cauthen and Jonathan Grauel. I feel pretty darn lucky to be involved with all of these talented artists. 

Please come visit, in person or on the web. You are sure to love it as much as I do!
http://www.cielcharlotte.com

Old habits die hard. As much as I'm loving printmaking, I just can't help but throw in some mixed media sometimes. My fingers twitch towards crayons and stencils and glaze and paint pens. I glance at my big scrap box and find a wonderful old advertisement, torn from a vintage knitting magazine - a smiling little girl who might love to taste a summer tomato. 

I found a gessoed panel and worked away, eventually gluing the original tomato print into the composition. Printmaking requires careful neatness; mixed media is all in the paint smudged hands. I can't resist a layered surface, can you?

Farm fresh while they last...summer tomatoes!