My studio has been a flurry of tiny paper scraps lately. I've created a dozen 5"x7" collages of birds for my May exhibit at The Delaware Contemporary (more about that next.) I started on the collage binge while I was travel art-ing in Costa Rica in January. Our wonderful teacher, Jean Cauthen, suggested painting papers to "audition" different color combinations. Another talented artist on the trip, Jane Harrison, shared her beautiful handmade papers and some tips on different glues and tapes to try. She also got me hooked on water-soluble Caran D'Ache Neocolor crayons; they are super pigmented and come in a zillion colors.

When I got back to Delaware, I missed our loud, colorful tropical birds (not to mention that tropical sunshine!) Digging through my collected papers, I found lots of good gelli prints to use; the leafy ones looked especially jungle-y. Then I hit the collage jackpot! A friend had given me her old artwork-a-day calendar from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every page pictures something wonderful and the paper was just the right weight for collage!

Every time I flip through the calendar pages, I feel like I'm on a special treasure hunt, looking for just the right color to fit into my bird collage. And I LOVE knowing that a few little feathers are thanks to my pal Van Gogh!

So now you are in on the secret. Most of the time I was humming away in my studio and forgot to take photos. Here are a few that made it into the camera. The rest will be an art history mystery!!

Pop over to the Portfolio/Collage page to see all of my feathered friends. And mark your calendar to visit The Delaware Contemporary to see my exhibit Blue Sky Thinking May 3 - 26. I'll have details coming soon!

What a joy it was to return to General Theological Seminary in New York City last weekend. Our family lived there for three years while Kevin completed his Masters of Divinity. From 2004 - 2007 Emily and Margaret attended Public School #11 in our neighborhood, learned to read a map in Central Park and rode the subway with ease. I frequented the Met and MoMA, painted and collaged with old prayerbooks and figured out how to get groceries without a car. We ALL learned a lot - about ourselves, about the Episcopal Church, about living in small oasis in the midst of a big city. 

Last fall at a GTS alumni gathering, I showed my visual journals to a friend who now works there. I told her how meaningful and cathartic the process has been for me and we thought it might be a good fit for the GTS Center for Christian Spirituality. I visited and talked to the Deans and TaDa! I became an adjunct professor!!

Visual Journaling as a Spiritual Practice is a one credit course with three required books (Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon, Journal Fodder 365 by Eric M. Scott and David R. Modler, and Spirit Taking Form: Making a Spiritual Practice of Making Art by Nancy Azara.) It centers around a 3-day weekend intensive session that involves discussion and mixed media work inspired by specific prompts. ​Students wrote an essay before our weekend together that responded to this quote by John Updike: What art offers is space, a certain breathing room for the Spirit. They also have new prompts and have to complete a new journal page each week until May.

We discussed the value of using the arts in personal spiritual practice, in conjunction with liturgy, for spiritual direction, or as a congregational activity.

I'm happy to say that I think I converted my first class of  Art Evangelists!

I've just reordered notecards of my favorite paintings!

The notecards are blank on the inside and printed on a linen finish paper that's easy to write on.  I sell these in packs of 8 cards, 2 of each image, for $18.  You can order directly HERE.

From now until Mother's Day I can send them to you with free shipping!

Click HERE to order your Lamb of God notecards. 

Hot coffee in one hand, binoculars in the other, we sat on our veranda and tried to name them all. It was magical. And it's all I can think about in my studio these days. ​

Be sure to check out the beautiful work that my friends create. Not only are they talented, they share their creativity generously and are quick to encourage, laugh, and break out into spontaneous dance (at the dinner table or in the pool!) Take a class, follow their blogs, find a new travel buddy or best of all, BUY some ART! You'll be glad you did.

Jean Cauthen, oil paintings (in yellow)
Laura McRae Hitchcock, oil paintings (in blue)
Pam Pardue Goode, mosaics (in hot pink)

Happy New Year, Friends!

​I had an amazing holiday with my family this year - we went to Valparaiso, Chile to pickup my daughter Margaret after a semester studying abroad. After 3 days there, we all flew South - REALLY South - to Patagonia. We took a 4 day cruise through the glaciers and around Cape Horn to land in Argentina. Then we flew back to the cosmopolitan city life of Buenos Aires.

Oh, how I LOVE to travel!!!

As always, I took a sketch kit. You can see it is small and lightweight and fits easily in my shoulder bag. This time I worked with pens and watercolor pencils - no paint tin! The Caran D'Ache Supracolor-Soft pencils are rich in pigment and great dry or used with a water brush. I found them at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, on a recent trip when my handy, dandy paint tin became a globby mess and had to be abandoned in the hotel. I sketch in pen, usually with a continuous line drawing, then add color with the pencils if time allows. The colors can stay dry (in the penguin sketch above) or I can go over it with my water brush to make it look more like a watercolor (in the Graffiti Dog sketch below.) 

I could go on and on about our trip - but for now, let me share a few journal pages. Like most of my travel journals, these pages are created some on location and some at home, when I have more time and supplies at hand.

So CHEERS to you for an excellent 2019! I hope you will find spaces to create and places to explore. You can sketch at the other end of the world, or right in your own window. The most important thing is to look deeply and slowly and notice the beauty in your life. That, and to have fun making art!
Muchas gracias to you all for following me along the art and travel journey. Where to next???

Many of you have heard me talk about how much I love all the different ways of printmaking. Monoprints with plexiglass plates, carved linoleum for relief prints and etching with solar plates - each technique has a unique look and process that I enjoy - which sometimes leaves me feeling a little schizophrenic as I go between all of them. It's like too many choices of delicious ice cream flavors!!

I came across a better term for working with multiple techniques that speaks to where I'm trying to go with my work - hybrid printmaking. I am experimenting with different forms and trying combinations of plates and patterns to create my new "hybrid" prints.

Part of my experimentation has been working with my new lightbox and exposing solar plates. A short exposure can create delicate lines and images for etching, but a longer exposure with a high contrast material can create a high relief plate. 

I found these decorative metal screens at the hardware store and used them to make relief plates. Instant texture and pattern!

My family teases me about my odd collection of "found nature" - things like feathers, rocks, snakeskin, butterfly and cicada wings, and most recently a deer antler. Maybe not everyone likes to study dead bumblebees, but who can resist picking up seashells at the beach? 

This summer I took home a collection of shells as usual. But I chose fragmented shells that had interesting textures and holes, shells that might look like something other than a shell when examined closely.

I made some more solarplate etchings and began to play with composition and layering. Here you can see my three different versions of this seashell image. The light-sensitive plates are exposed with a photo transparency and when the emulsion is washed out, you are left with a plate etched with the photographic image.

Here's a first run of what I've done with them. I'm starting to feel like the images are not really about seashells, but about something deeper - a reflection of time, age and memory, perhaps. I'm sure this was influenced by the he said/she said news of the last weeks. I was thinking that my memories are stitched together fragments, a blur of what I have done and might have done, with great holes of forgetting as years pass.

The best part about all of this is my renewed creative energy. Working in a big, bright studio has done wonders for me!  As John Updike wrote, "What art offers is space, a certain breathing room for the spirit."
​Amen to that! 

I am thrilled to have been accepted as a studio artist at the ​Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts! On September 1, I moved into studio 2Q, joining a talented community of 20 other artists.  Our studios are open to the public during the First Friday Art Loops each month and we exhibit monthly in one of the museum galleries. I am scheduled for May next year!

The Contemporary is a non-collecting museum which presents unique exhibits from regional, national and international artists, along with  wonderfully diverse programming events for families, artists, teachers and all kinds of art lovers. It's a vibrant community that I am excited to be a part of.

My studio has big walls, lots of space and a nice skylight. Plenty of room for Elvis, my printing press, and me to get the creative juices cranking again!

25 years married to this great guy! We celebrated with a trip to New York and of course, I took my sketchbook with me. One of the highlights of our weekend was the big exhibit at the Met, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. According to the catalogue, it is "a dialogue between fashion and medieval art from The Met collection to examine fashion's ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism." Curators have placed runway style models and piped in moody church music throughout the Medieval art collections at the main museum and in the Cloisters. ​

What fun to join the Urban Sketchers of Delaware last Sunday afternoon! They meet once a month to gather and sketch in an interesting location. This was the first time my Sunday church schedule aligned with the designated location - a lovely hidden garden called Gibraltar, right in my own neighborhood.

My first sketch was from the side of the gorgeous waterlily pond. I drew first with a new ink pen that I THOUGHT was full of waterproof ink...not so! As I added my watercolors, the dark ink bled and I ended up doing lots of blotting with a paper towel. No worries, this is "go with the flow" art!

Next I strolled the garden and found this wonderful fountain, peeking through an ornate gate. I decided not to get caught up in the true details of the gate, but to quickly draw suggestive swirls. This time I used the only other pen I could find, a blue fine point sharpie, so no bleeding. I actually like the way the blue lines don't stand out as much as a black pen would, and allow the ink color to take a back seat to the watercolors. We would have worked a little longer, but the rain caught up with us.
​

my transparencies ready to be exposed on Solarplates - stay tuned for the next step!

All materials in this class are non-toxic.
Students should wear work clothes or bring an apron.
Beginners and creative explorers of all levels are encouraged and welcome!

Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29 (2 day workshop) | 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
$80 Members, $100 Non Members

Register at www.delart.org

​Questions? please email me at mail@CarolineCBrown.com

I just enjoyed a wonderful weekend with my "old" friends from college. What better reason to get together than to celebrate a year of 50th birthdays? They joined me from Virginia, New York, California and Tennessee. We laughed SO hard at all the old photos! It took us right back to those formals, beach trips, weddings and baby showers. What a gift to have friends like this, still strong after 30 years!!

Who says you can't teach an "old" gal new tricks?? Cheers to my sweet friends - the ones who came to Wilmington to see me and cheer me up in the snow - and the ones who couldn't be here but still make me smile. 

The Bishop makes a fine DJ and bartender, but I'm voting for a tropical island with a cabana boy next time we get together...
maybe to celebrate turning 51?

People keep telling us that Delaware is such a small state that unlike the six degrees of separation in the rest of the world, here it's only one or two. It must be true because within a few months of arriving, I received a call from the Delaware Art Museum asking me to get involved in a special project!

In conjunction with the new exhibit Eye on Nature: Andrew Wyeth and John Ruskin, the curator asked several leaders from the faith community to offer recorded responses to specific paintings to be used in the audio guide. I was honored to be asked as an Episcopalian artist. Among the others participating are some wonderful folks who are Jewish, Muslim, Quaker and non-denominational Christian.

The exhibition explores how Wyeth and Ruskin, though living 100 years apart, "shared a lifelong obsession with the close observation and finely rendered imagery of the world around them." The question for us was, "What relevance does the work of art, or Wyeth/Ruskin’s act of looking at nature, have for our own day and age?"

John Ruskin, I have since learned, was also a watercolorist and urban sketcher! He took his journal everywhere with him and sketched on all his travels, around home and abroad. My 19th century kindred spirit!

I look forward to seeing the complete exhibition and the works by these two masterful painters. If you are curious about my response to "Path at Brantwood" please read on...

This Visual Oratory was hung behind the altar for our Eucharist celebration, helping make the hotel meeting room a little brighter. I'm happy to report that these prayers will move to Friendship House, a homeless shelter and ministry at the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew in Wilmington. The staff and guests of Friendship House will keep adding their prayers to the sculpture, making it bigger,  brighter and more layered. Each piece reminds us that we are all connected in our prayers for each other. 

Special thanks to Danny Schweers for sharing his pics from the convention. He is also an Art Evangelist, combining his gorgeous photos with original prayers  on a blog called photoprayer.com. You can see all  his work at dannyschweers.com.

Wait, let's back up. At the end of June this year, Kevin and I traveled to Delaware (Dela-where??) for walkabouts and interviews, as some folks seemed to think that he would make a good Bishop. Amid a host of excellent candidates, my thoughts were mixed - the honor and the challenge would be wonderful, but why leave our friends and fabulous church in Charlotte? Then in July...he was elected! Good grief, this was really happening! August...we brought the kids to Wilmington to see our new house, "Bishopstead,"  (complete with koi pond and elevator!) September... we fixed up the house to sell and began to pack. October...moving time plus one last trip together to Montreal before Kevin started work in November. 

And in the midst of all this change, I was packing and moving and now unpacking and reorganizing my studio. It became an unplanned sabbatical from my artwork as I focused on making the transition easier on Kevin, Margaret and Emily. Not to mention Lola, sweet old schnauzer, who can't see or hear very well these days. I'm trying to be patient, and I truly am thankful for all the blessings of this new adventure. 

So here we are in December and I find myself married to the Bishop of Delaware and celebrating Christmas in a new home. Wow.

​ The consecration weekend was snowy, beautiful, dramatic, full of friends and family, sacred, humbling, musical, and oh so special. If you want to view a special consecration edition of the Diocese of Delaware's news magazine, please click HERE. If you'd like to view the whole ceremony on YouTube, please click HERE.

Between the turmoil and excitement of packing and moving from North Carolina to Delaware, I saw a call to artists from one of my favorite organizations, ECVA - Episcopal Church and Visual Arts. I've been involved with ECVA many times throughout the years, exhibiting my work in their shows online and in New York. Their membership represents a wide variety of artists and styles who share a commonality of expression in honor of God and in community with the Episcopal Church. 

I'm pleased to say that this mixed media piece, Valley of the Dry Bones, was accepted to the new ECVA online exhibit Telling God Stories in the 21st Century. 

Biblical themes often influence my artwork and challenge me to question how MY story aligns and overlaps with God's Holy Spirit. Mixed media paint, drawing and collage allows me to layer prayers and stories quite literally into the artwork. 

Valley of the Dry Bones was also juried into the 2015 exhibit The Body Beautiful at Ciel Gallery in Charlotte, NC. Here's my statement for the piece:

​
The body has the miraculous power to heal, whether it is tissue, muscle or bone that needs to mend. The text beneath the x-ray tells the story of the Valley of Dry Bones in the Biblical Book of Ezekiel; the breath of God restores life into the lifeless forms, a miracle that makes the dry bones dance. Pulsing with vibrant colors, our bodies experience both seasons of brokenness and ache alongside seasons of blossoming and healing.

I love when my art story connects with my viewers. To give this story a happy ending, I was thrilled when a friend purchased this piece and asked if she could use it on the cover of the book she is writing! 

So the Browns have arrived in Wilmington, Delaware! 
If you've done it before - packed up your life into a thousand cardboard boxes and plunged into the deep end of a new life in a new place - you know what an act of faith and holy patience it is. 

So much that is UNKNOWN ahead...where is the closest grocery store? will we make new friends? will Kevin like his new job? will I find a place to make and show my art? can I continue to teach? and where are the lamps that go with all these shades?

But one very known aspect of this move was our new home, Bishopstead. How very wonderful to have a job that comes with a fabulous old house! Built in 1912 by members of the Du Pont family, Bishopstead is in a lovely neighborhood near the Delaware Art Museum and between two big, gorgeous parks. And as you can guess from this photo, it is grand and quirky. 

I can't wait to share more details of this amazing place, but for now, let me share a poem written for me by my Charlotte friend Mary Cox. It's been on my mind a lot, as I wade through packing paper and this "in-between" time as we work on the house and get ready for the work of "real life" and office hours and disciplined routines to begin in November. Thank you to Mary and all our Charlotte friends who have encouraged us and prayed for us in this new life. We couldn't have done this without you.

You never planned to be a clergy spouse ----
you didn't think you'd fit the job description ----
but God called Kevin. What's a girl to do?
Dismay and panic, verging on conniption ----
and then a daffodil: God said, "You're in this too.
And oh, you've not been called to keep a house."
In fact, you've packed, unpacked ----but not to stay ----
for all too soon, another moving day.

So you've made homes that travel where you go,
crafted of scraps and love, and prayer and laughter,
love's joyous dance, a few unbidden tears.
It's the routine a hermit crab would know ----
no certain space for happy-ever-after,
a heart that's housed wherever home appears.

This time between the houses here and there,
routine suspended, life packed up in crates, 
remember that whatever house awaits,
we are each other's home, where hearts connect,
open to other hearts. You can expect
your home's already eager to begin
unpacking in the house you'll put it in.

Mary W. Cox, October 6, 2017.

The October moving date approaches quickly. Kevin and I are busy wrapping up church and gallery commitments, keeping the house nice and neat for the realtor, and saying so long (but not goodbye) to our dear Charlotte friends. 

On the other end in Delaware, folks are writing notes, painting walls in our new home, and making plans for our arrival and Kevin's December consecration ceremony. What a gift to be loved on both sides of this transition!

I was thrilled to talk to Jerry Hames, one of my new Delaware friends and a writer for the Episcopal Journal, about my artwork and my thoughts on the move. I loved that he calls me "A Modern Itinerant Artist" who is comfortable with "improvisation and experimentation." True, true. 

Please take a look at the whole article HERE...and stay tuned to see what creative inspiration will evolve from my new studio in Delaware!

​Other highlights of the weekend included songs with Grey Langley around the fire, on the porch and in the HoCo Late Show with a special new verse of "Sweet Caroline" and an homage to the new Bishop-Elect of Delaware to the tune of "Wagon Wheel" (He's the new Bishop of Delaware, hope that fancy mitre hat don't mess up his hair...)

Plus an amazing Bluegrass Eucharist with the West End String Band from Greenville, SC and a hike up the mountain with pals.

Holy Comforter Episcopal Church really is a place were love dwells in every size, shape, age and color. Kevin's last Sunday is tomorrow. Sigh. We are going to miss you all.

My adventure continues with a new plot twist - Kevin and I are moving to Wilmington, Delaware in October! We are incredibly honored that my sweet, smart husband Kevin, an Episcopal priest and rector of the Church of the Holy Comforter in Charlotte, has been elected to become the 11th Bishop of Delaware. Wow, just Wow.

We have known this was a possibility all spring, so this theme has been showing up in my journals for a few months. Funny how when something is on your mind, your hands seem to find just the right pieces!