2024: A Year of Experiments

Previously through our travels, I had collected photos of interesting doors and painted small canvases to document. Not sure what I thought I was going to do with all of those canvases at the time, but after finding a rectangle door shaped canvas in the art store, I thought, “I am going to make a door of doors and attach all these small canvases to a large canvas of a door. I added a bit of graffiti effect to the whole design including the attached doors. 

After cleaning out boxes of CD’s/DVD’s, I was mourning over the waste. I thought, “I can make a mosaic! Easier said than done. The disks were very difficult to cut into pieces. I looked for advice on Google and Youtube that recommended boiling them…failed. I tried kitchen shears and garden shears and they shattered, not in a good way, or separated. I finally found a pair of shears that would cut them but it was very difficult and not all the CDs were the same, some cut and some still shattered. I completed my piece but never again. 

Some of the furniture pieces from our old house I was unable to sell or give away, I decided to repurpose. On Pinterest I saw many examples of painted couches and tables. I read all the articles and gathered all the materials, studied graffiti styles and gathered my favorite phrases. This was the result. I love them but I am still selling them to make space in my studio. If you have the space, it is a cool way to reuse perfectly good pieces. My husband thinks I am crazy with all my harebrained ideas. 

While I was in the graffiti mood, I completed this next piece. This was not experimental, but was inspired by a photo taken in Lisbon during our travels.  This was followed by the next two paintings, one was an experiment in modeling past and another was actually a simplification of a photo of a bird.

Many of you know that I have been collaborating with a group of artists on a community project. It initially involved 24 large aluminum hearts painted by local artists. This idea has been developed into an installation involving a center sculpture, which is being fabricated by a very talented sculptor, Michael Baggerly. Pictured here is the progress on this project and an example of a few of the aluminum hearts.  These hearts will be imbedded into a fence surrounding the center sculpture.