WELCOME AND INTRODUCTIONS!
We think you may need a respite from the various political and microbiological plagues we are now facing. This is a boutique Expo exhibiting the works of some of the Artists at daily kos. We endeavor to provide a new one each Sunday until we all get back to normal. Instead of our usual virtual museum, we will publish these smaller “Salons” with more commentary from the Artists and Poets.
We want you to feel comfy. Please enjoy!
֎ ֎ ֎
Paintings and Commentary by Cmae
I selected this photo to paint because I liked the big, floppy red bow. It is hard for me to describe any 'painting process,' because I am self taught. I am not really a 'planner.' I select a subject that I find interesting, and then I decide what medium. I do always start with a drawing, other than that, I don't have a plan. I just work on the painting until it feels like it is finished. I have thought about this, I can't really describe any feelings I have during the process, because I seem to be in some sort of meditative state. Kind of like when you are reading a book, time flies, and you don't know where it went. Suddenly, it is hours later. I do stand back a ways from the painting, when I am taking a break, I find that it is helpful to look at the painting from afar, I can see areas I need to continue to work on, easier that way. Questions are welcome. Contact me through KOS mail, at cmae.
This is an acrylic painting I did recently, this is a made up, fantastical person. I wanted to see what would happen if I just started painting, without choosing a specific subject. Sometimes I try to choose colors beforehand, too. While painting this one, i tried not to think too much about what I was doing, kind of free flow, maybe? I just thought it would be a fun experiment. Questions are welcome. Contact me through KOS mail, at cmae.
Here I am at fifteen, i wanted to use colors I remember from 1981. I had no intention to do a realistic type of portrait, it just came out that way. I just go with whatever happens, organic, I guess. I don't know if this is because I never went to art school or not. I started drawing at 10, I think. I kept practicing until I could draw pretty realistically. I had a very cool art teacher, in high school, he was very supportive, and said I was naturally talented. He is the reason I continued doing art. I couldn't afford to go to art school, I also didn't go to college. I started working in food service at 18. I continued off and on, painting and drawing through the years. I did stop doing art for a few years, after my dad died, in 2015. I always thought about doing it, though, and here I am. Questions are welcome, contact me thorough KOS mail, at cmae.
Drawings and Commentary by duccio46
Isaac Levitan was a Russian artist known for his very influential, moody landscapes. I came across his work and one of the paintings was just like a photograph I took several years ago on a trip to Central California. I saw the same empty starkness in the painting as I saw when I took the photo, so I decided to try to draw the bleak feeling I was seeing.
I drew the horizon line and darkened the landscape trying to show the undulating ground and how the cart track tried to show the irregularities of the landscape, and I laid a diagonal hatching to show a leftward movement on the ground plane that kind of evened the surface of the ground. I tried for a left and right direction on the ground. I noticed how the bright sky seemed to come forward and by drawing in the trees, and some small marks along the horizon I could make the sky recede. Lights usually come forward but I was able to reverse that.
This one, the sky had to be drawn in kind of heavily and then worked back into with an eraser to get the puffiness of the clouds. I had to darken the sky and erase several times to get the certain quality of light in the sky I was looking for. I used a diagonal hatching and a horizontal hatching that created a sort of plane of sky, and a suggestion of rightward direction in which the clouds seem to be moving which kind of balanced the hatching on the ground.
It’s no big deal of a drawing, but it has the sensation I was after and I was happy with it.
thriving vallejo series: yeah!// some vignettes from my town, here in CA.
This one on the upper left, is a rather nice, small, old wooden house standing alone on a busy main thoroughfare near my house. It has a very strong wooden fence separating it from a large vacant lot and then the parking lot of a donut and coffee shop. I kind of liked the really strong fence that was dividing the house from the large and threatening vacant lot (full of rapists and criminals trying to get in illegally).
They have a nice mini grove of trees on their property which I am always attracted to try and draw. I think trees are difficult to draw. They are full of detail, but at the same time are usually a mass of darkness surrounded by light: two conditions that are challenging to unify into something that expresses both characteristics, especially on this small scale. It kinda turned out OK.
I go around this town of Vallejo where I have lived for the past 15 years and see things that get my curiosity going, like, “what kind of place is this? do I belong here?” I started a sort of random series called, “thriving vallejo series: yeah!//“ It’s been going on for a long time; I probably will do/show more of them.
Vallejo is the largest city in Solano County. It’s a beautiful spot. It dates back to the period before the Civil War when General Mariano Vallejo was the holder of an immense land grant from the Mexican Government. Today, the town has nothing but troubles. The Mare Island Naval Shipyard closed in the 90’s leaving an old boy network in charge of the wreckage that remained. We have a shoot-em-up police force, rampant drug use, a sea of homelessness, joblessness, rising gentrification, and growing income inequality. We are surrounded by rich communities: Napa, Sonoma, Petaluma, Benicia, Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Fairfield, Vacaville, on and on, down to Vallejo. We gots lots of religious folks though. Lots and lots of religious folks.
That brings me to the other drawing of the pair on the top of the sketchbook page:
I like to walk the alleys around where I live because I think they reveal the true nature of the decay plaguing this town. And here, right at another main thoroughfare, Sonoma Blvd, is this Billboard Epistle to the Vallejans. I liked how the decrepit PG&E power grid features in prominently, even powering the sign. Somebody’s gotta do it! The higher ups want Vallejo to believe in (knuckle under) the “one true way” I guess. This dictum is on the property of the cheap gas station I usually go to. I am not sure what kind of station it is. There used to be small green brontosaurus logos above the pumps, but they went away some time ago. Now we have the “your only way” sign. All things shall pass.
I do a lot of these small drawings, pictures of aspects of Vallejo that strike my fancy. Sometimes they are a little angry, other times they are engaging takes on the town. I often draw rectangles around separate small drawings on single pages. It focuses the attention on one at a time, but I have realized that they sort of look like bricks, in a pavement. Like they are stepping stones; shortcuts to somewhere else for a moment.
Art, Cartoons and Commentary by Matt Z
Porcelain Tiles and Commentary by MEL in PGH
This selection of tiles represents my “signature style” of white raised designs on a black matte background. I have produced many of these tiles in all kinds of designs but mostly focus on nature-related themes. They have been featured in local galleries, a museum art exposition, an international installation project in Wales and seasonal crafts fairs.
The most common sizes for single tiles are 6 x 6 inches and 4 x 4 inches (because I have cutters for these sizes) but any size up to 13 x 13 inches (the limit of the slab roller) can be produced. Larger designs can be made across a series of tiles. The tiles start with raw clay rolled to a thickness that is compatible with commercial tile, cut to size and allowed to air dry between sheets of drywall. The design is painted on with shellac and, once dry, the surrounding clay is eroded with a wet sponge leaving a raised design underneath the shellac. They are then glazed with a matte black glaze (this one works best — believe me when I say I have tried many other colors with less success) and once the glaze dries it is dry brushed off of the shellac surfaces. The tiles are then fired once in a cone 6 glaze firing. A surprising level of detail can be achieved with this technique but stencil-like designs tend to work best. Plain background/filler tiles can also be produced to accompany the sculpted tiles.
At the present time, I cannot devote my full time to my art works as I am a clinical molecular biologist by day. In the fairly-near future I will be able to retire and devote a lot more time to simply being artistically creative (my “day job” does involve creativity as well, it’s just a different kind). I do sell pieces and accept custom orders but it does take some time to build up inventory.
Paintings and Commentary by Nolana
This is a small watercolor I did of a cluster of apple blossoms, after a photo I took a few years earlier. My Dad passed away in May 2017, and i felt a need to do this painting in the weeks after that. While I’m not a religious person, I think that if there were to be a heaven, part of it would be an apple orchard full of trees forever decked in blossoms. I could picture my Mom, who went there before Dad, meeting him with open arms, and the two of them having a picnic under the blossoming trees.
A painting of a sprightly little bird, given as a birthday gift to a friend.
I’m working on a painting from a photo I took of the Big Branch river in Mt. Tabor, VT, where the water has cut a steep gorge between mountains, and the water, stained golden-brown with tannin, rushes down toward Otter Creek. This is a study I have done of a small portion of the larger painting, which is coming together on a 24”x 36” canvas. I hope to capture the rush and roar of the water and the serenity of the deep wooded valley through which it runs.
Paintings and Commentary by Marko the Werelynx
I’ve been a creative person my entire life. Not necessarily a productive person, but a creative one. I have a bit of formal education and a scrawny little degree in graphic art. My first job was as the inhouse graphic artist for a small silk-screen printing company. My last full time job was as a ceramics teacher.
Sketching is something I enjoy doing. For me, the time spent on a drawing is captured in the drawing. I look at these pictures and can remember what was going on around me as I sketched.
I sat with my back to a small monument in Maltese Square and became an object of interest for a group of Japanese tourists who had just visited their embassy nearby.
I spent several days walking along the shore of the largest body of water in the Czech Republic, Lipno Reservoir. I’d packed a sandwich the day I sketched those boats and that shed. The day I set up and began sketching the lake through the trees along that curve of the road a lightly, but fully dressed man and a woman in a bikini stepped in front of me while the man took pictures of the woman posing awkwardly. They walked down to the edge of the water, just out of my sight, for a bit and then left.
In Rejviz I managed to find a little bench dedicated to the memory of a priest who had frequently sat there behind his church on the path to the little graveyard. I’d found an interesting view of the village from the field behind the houses. Not a single person passed me the entire time I was sketching, such a sleepy little village for a popular tourist destination.
Paintings and Commentary by GlastoSara
This was the day I could finally call myself an artist. It was my birthday (won't say which - it was nearly 12 years ago). I sat on a tiny beach, on the west coast of Wales, painting the same scene over & over, fairly competently (watercolour on a small pad). This was the fifth version. I knew I had crossed a creative threshold with this one, because it was loose, spontaneous, a painting this time, not just another little watercolour on holiday, recalling a scene as faithfully as a snapshot.
[Editor’s Note] Recently, a diarist at daily kos was trying to figure out what painting hung behind Nancy Pelosi as she spoke with Rachel Maddow on TV. Unknown to most of the commentators, the diarist picked a random beautiful painting from the kos image library and made it the title image of the diary.
He used GlastoSara's painting and even attributed it to our friend.
The misunderstanding that ensued was that many of the commentators thought this was the painting that was behind Nancy Pelosi as she spoke. Or, it was by the same artist. So, they went on a search for the Artist, and they found ... TA DA! ... our friend GlastoSara. To make everything just a little too hilarious for me to take (I laughed my arse off), GlastoSara, herself, replied in the comments!
ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY BY THE ARTIST: For me, it was the latest chapter in Becoming a Real Artist, the sequel: people were discussing my work, trying to decipher my signature (ignoring the attribution at the bottom!), looking for similar paintings, searching for me online — and finding me! (Thanks, everyone, who participated in that.)
Paintings and Commentary by LaPinturaBella
The vast majority of my art is decorative painting. For the past 18 ½ years I’ve made my living by transforming walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, cabinetry and even objects with paint. Since starting this career, I’ve also branched out into painting murals. Today I want to share a mural and an experience that is near and dear to my heart.
In February 2007 I was fortunate and honored to be one of 8 artists chosen by the Sarasota County Community Redevelopment Agency to paint a group mural for the town of Englewood, Florida. Englewood is a funky, arty little town on the Gulf Coast just below Venice. As one resident commented to me, Englewood is “a drinking town with a small fishing problem.” The eight of us were brought to Englewood, put up for a week (all meals provided) at The Hermitage Historical Retreat on Manasota Key and enjoyed ourselves immensely as we painted and partied together on the beach. Our only requirements were that each artist paint an 8 foot high by 4 foot wide panel that depicts our impression of the town’s history. The installed mural is just below.
I learned that during Prohibition, there was a “supper club” called The Royal Casino located at the end of a very long pier off the coast of Englewood. There was gambling, dining, entertainment, dancing and of course bootleg liquor. I researched popular art of the 1920’s and this was the inspiration for my panel.
This was a once in a lifetime experience. The eight of us and our “minders” bonded and are all still in touch with each other to this day. It was an incredible experience in every way, one that I will always treasure and never forget.
And to prove that artists are a different breed, we even learned how to breath fire that week ... literally. One of the artists in this group taught us how and she used to put on a show at Burning Man doing just that.
֎ ֎ ֎
THANK YOU for stopping by! If your thirst for Art and these wonderful Artists and Poets still needs slaking, let me suggest last week’s boutique Expo published by Angmar. Additionally, Gwennedd will host the next boutique KOS Art Expo on Sunday, May 3 at noon Eastern. Please stop by and say hello. Cheers!