It was more than a year ago that I began my butterfly series, Patterns in Flight. It’s now ready to break out of it’s cocoon (so to speak).  RVSP today at the Facebook event: Patterns in Flight at Wug Laku’s

The entire butterfly series, Patterns in Flight, will be on display at Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage. The series opening will be August 6, 2010 at 6pm-10pm during the IDADA’s August First Friday and the series will show through September 25. Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage is located at 1125 Brookside Ave #C7 Indianapolis, Indiana.

If you cannot make it to the opening, Wug’s gallery hours are 12-4pm Friday and Saturday or by appointment. To make an appointment, call Wug Laku at 317-270-8258.

The painting series is about journeys: the journey of each butterfly, but also my journey. I have transformed from being called the “bone lady” to the “butterfly girl” over last last year. Three paintings of this series were selected by the Arts Council of Indianapolis. Working with the Arts Council led to a few small commissioned works for the ARTI awards. My macro paintings have been compared to Georgia O’Keefe –whether that comparison is true or not. I have learned much about myself wondering around butterfly wing veins and cells for hours on end. And now I am excited to finally place these paintings in public view at Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage which is at the Circle City Complex.

Patterns in Flight is currently a 12 painting series. The series provokes thoughts on time, refined beauty, and overcoming struggles. It contains a variety of butterfly species: painted ladies, a blue morpho, malachites, a citris swallowtail, postmans, a variable cracker and a zebra longwing.

While you are at it, why not make it a special date? Past students have made my art classes part of a night for them and their significant other. You could make it an art themed date. After taking a class, visit a museum, photograph downtown, or paint “plein air” at a nature park.

Custom gift certificates designed by my husband are available for every occasion.

For more information, visit the Art Classes section of my website.

Sight/ Insight will be at the Stutz Art Space from November 6-25, 2009.  The show incorporates a variety of styles ranging from abstract slashes of paint, abstract quilted fabric, exaggerated recognizable forms, jewelry, and paintings and photographs that display clearly recognizable subjects.  The artwork is juxtaposed leading the viewer to flow back and forth between the styles creating a dialogue amongst this diverse set of visual ideas.  It is a conversation between eleven different artists, with different modes of visually communication, and different perspectives on the same subject.

The curator, Carol L Myers, chose artists whose work fit the theme of ‘inspired places’.  Carol herself has lately focused on drawings. She states that her “vocabulary is natural form, but inspired place happens between pencil and paper.”  She finds that drawing is a form of praying.  I was attracted to one of her quilted painting pieces entitled, Boardwalk.  The painting in the work gives the piece a sense of space and light.  On top of the painting, sewn rectangular shapes overlap and break up the space, while the process of sewing the material draws the fabric and adds slight texture.

Below I’ve chosen a few of the types of work represented at the show:

Photography: Ginny Taylor Rosner speaks through her abandoned building photos in South Stairwell.  The stairway leads upward from the bottom right side of the page.  Light is entering from the landing at the top of the stairs in the upper left corner.  The image beckons the viewer to enter, walk up the stairs and into the light.

Abstract: Kate Oberreich’s collage, Map of New York, (on right above) is about repetition.  There is a small section of a city map in the piece.  The map contains repeated rectangular city blocks.  There are repeated circles in the upper left part of the work.  Simple vines with repeated leaves flow around the map.  Even a few drips in the piece seem to repeat themselves in color and shape.

Surreal: Home, by Lydia Burris, is a collage that juxtaposes a home and a tree in a forest with the light shining through the trees paralleling the warm light shining out of the windows of the home.

Landscape: The gallery also holds a collection of landscapes that are produced with varying levels of abstraction.  These invite the viewer to walk into nature in a place of trees, water, and immense skies.  At least one of the landscapes is a piece of jewelry by artist Leigh Dunnington-Jones entitled Sunrise on Central Avenue.  Look at both the front and the back of this piece.

Other artists who are not previously mentioned:
Susan Brewer
Karen Land
Colleen Lauter
Susan Mauck
Jerry Points
Martha Vaught
Julia Zollman Wickes

Join the conversation about inspired places starting this coming First Friday November 6, 2009.

Butterfly Clover

Three Daisy Jazz

During the month of November, stop by Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage to see, Nerve, a collection of some of the gallery owner’s personal work.  His drawings and paintings are worth an extra trip downtown when his gallery is not crowded with people and conversations, but if one only has time to view them during a First Friday, stop by the opening on November 6th.

The drawings and paintings deserve more than a cursory glance.  Do not pass them by as minimalist renderings of form, but envision the works as simplified mirrors reflecting both physical and metaphysical thoughts. Open and honest communication is at their core. Parallel to his work, his artist statement is a simple poem that opens Laku up to the viewer and leaves room for abstract ideas to breathe.

In the gallery’s main area, he has work from 1993, inspired by a county road north of Zionsville, IN (and a Burger King cup).  Within this group, he juxtaposes negative/positive space, layered paint, planes of solid color, and value transitions.  One can see a simplification of nature–very direct, concrete but beautiful in Butterfly Clover.  This piece has three sections.  1) The background is a completely smooth green color. 2) The butterfly is a simple triangle that contains a slight amount of brush strokes.  3) The purple clover is the focal point.  Here alone, the color changes in value and the strokes are free and visible.  This group is connected to his later work (mostly from 2001) that is found in the red room through the conscious simplifying of nature.

The later work refines the simplification. The work’s referent is less obvious, but not less important. The color palette and texture of the images are limited, yet they are not minimal–only simplified. Three Daisy Jazz (located in the red room) represents the continuity, journey, and conversational quality of the entire show.  This medium-sized painting shows process with its un-erased graphite lines, leftover tape, straight and jagged edges, and additive pieces.

Based on my visits to Laku’s gallery over the past year, he appears to enjoy displaying multiple stages of an artist’s work. This both contrasts and unites one body of work to another to showcase the development that defines an artist’s style. Laku continues this practice with two prior bodies of his own work.

While you are viewing Nerve, be sure to check out Nancy Lee’s beautifully designed metal jewelry.

A small disclaimer: Laku has represented my work at his gallery, so I am not a complete stranger to him.

My three latest butterfly works, After Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis will be on display this Saturday, October 19th from 8pm to 2am at Oranje, a contemporary art & music event. Wug Laku of Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage is representing my work at booth 17.

Wug will be displaying his drawings, digital art prints, light boxes, and furniture along with the jewelry of Nancy Lee (I’m sure she’ll be there, too!) and the mixed media of Cagney King –among others. They will be recreating the feel of his gallery in their 22′ x 24′ mega-booth for an intimate discussion with the artists. This past weekend, they were practically living there getting the space ready.

Tickets to the event are $20 and is only open to 21 and older.

Oranje
Wug Laku / Booth 17
2323 North Illinois
Indianapolis, IN 46208

I have three of my butterfly paintings in the 2009 IndyFringe Festival. Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis were mentioned in my prior post, Trio of Painted Lady Butterflies. You can see thumbnails in that post. These works can be seen at Henry’s on East, 627 East Street, Friday, August 7, 5 – 9 pm.  Cafes, theaters and spaces along Mass Ave. have been transformed into art galleries for the IndyFringe Festival. Add it to your usual IDADA First Friday Art Walk on August 7th. I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make that Friday, then the work will be on display until August 30th.

You can vote

Make sure to stop by the temporary galleries to vote for your favorite piece of art to become one of those “Be Indypendent” stickers you have seen on your neighbors’ cars. Complimentary Barefoot Bubbly champagne cocktails will be served at each Fringe gallery, too.

The 2009 VisualFringe galleries are: Mass Ave Wine Shoppe, Theatre on the Square, Franklin Barry Gallery, Henry’s on East, Hoaglin To Go Café, Herron School of Art and Design at The Earth House, and the Fringe Gallery. Visit IndyFringe for more info and full gallery addresses.

Opening Quick Facts

August 7, 5 – 9 pm
Henry’s on East
627 East Street

These three paintings are inspired by the painted lady butterfly.  I have entitled them temporarily (left to right): After Thistles, Fluttering Cosmopolitan, and Cynthesis.  These titles have their roots in scientific classification, common association, and/or metaphors.  Ideas and intellectual direction for the entire butterfly series are still taking shape.

What do you think? Please offer me feedback and take a look at the first three paintings in this series.  At present their potential titles are Flight of the Painted Lady, Vanessa Made Up, and Seeing Past by Present.

I have three works in the show, Cyclist in Maastricht, Connemara Cottage, and Black Forest Foliage. All were taken during travel to Europe. I hope you are able to make it to the opening.

The Dean Johnson Gallery is located at 646 Massachusetts Avenue Indianapolis, IN 46204 on the first floor of the Dean Johnson Design building.

Wug Laku is hosting his retrospective show Eye Music in his gallery, Wug Laku’s Studio and Garage.  This show will include artists that have been featured in the gallery during the last two years.  You can see one of my first butterfly paintings in my upcoming series at this show.  I have included Wug’s poster promoting the event.

The official hours for this event are 6 – 9 p.m. on May 1 during the IDADA First Friday Gallery Tour. The following artists’ works will be on display: Bernadette Ostrozovich – Patrick Flaherty – Eric Jones – Rachel Steely -Mark Pack – Jim Gerard – Pam Fraizer – Nancy Lee – William Ray Denton – James Ratliff – Wug Laku. This gallery is located just above Massachusetts Avenue at 1125 Brookside Avenue C7.

Also, I will be showing one of my studies of Asian Lilie’s, Three Stages, in the Athenaeum ArtSpace’s “Spring” exhibit.  The Athenaeum ArtSpace is located in downtown Indianapolis on 401 East Michigan St, 2nd floor.

The Yarn Burners are “bombing” the Harrison Center for the Arts with knit graffiti on May 1,2009.  I look at my piece as a type of art instillation that I made out of yarn for one of the stairwell railings.

I was introduced to the work of Caroline Mecklin two years ago when I visited the Stutz Artist Open House for the first time.  I have not forgotten  her work, and was looking forward to seeing her studio again this year.  Her dynamic figures are rich with the life she sees in her live models.

Derek Powell has a studio tucked away at the end of the third floor.  His work mostly consists of soft, misty landscapes painted with limited palates.  There were also three black and white ink drawings that were reminiscent of Rouault without the color.  Their titles, The Last Supper I, II, and III also added to their connection with Rouault.

This past spring I have been drawing on Friday mornings with a group of other artists.  One of the artists is Vicky Shaffer White.  Vicky presented a slue of nice flower pieces from the past few years; however, I preferred her calm, elegant, clothed figures that she had placed outside her studio.

Mark Pack is one of the artists in residence this year at the Stutz.  I have seen his work before and due to my love of the natural world, am fascinated by the intricate designs in his carved acrylic paintings.

Three diverse artists share studio B240.  Kate Oberreich had a series of small paintings entitled “A Happy Home”.  I met Kate last summer when she was a part of Elegant Funk.  Her work is a collage of words and images that provoke thought.  She uses realistic images in an abstract manner.  Ginny Taylor Rosner photographs empty interiors giving insight into what contemporary man abandons and leaves behind.  Carol L. Myers is a print maker who is newly exploring watercolor as a way to express her visual ideas.  Themes of snail shells and trees run through her present work.

It was a great night at the Stutz and that is just a taste of what I saw.