Recent Work

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Even the Bugs have Bugs: Our Surveillance State

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My interest is in creating images of freedom. But are we free? Or are we being violated? Rather than depicting people quietly going about their business, having peaceful family time with no one bothering them, I find it much bolder and more interesting to show the opposite: oppression, tyranny, violence. To achieve this, I use monoprint to give

fresh color to the background of my work. I use relief prints to give the darkness and the details.

Art is not meant to be merely decorative. It can be a question or an argument or a proposal or a challenge. Poking fun is an effective way to deal with horrific events like the growth of the police state under our very noses, which is the focus of this series of prints. So six oversized red-light cameras at one peaceful intersection preen and peer down like tall, odd birds.

I also pay homage to artists who celebrate the birthday of George Orwell, who so deviously depicted a total surveillance state, by placing birthday hats on cameras all over town.

In another print, cameras perch against
a reddening fiery sky. Cameras watch us watching them, and in the lens we stare back and thumb our noses. Cameras can be found in many unusual places.

But they aren’t all bad: a camera is dressed like a hawk to capture and show us what it feels like to fly like a buzzard.

Moving forward, I will expand on using ridicule

as a means to depict the folly of our

modern police state and our complacency with it.

I want my art to debate the question, how much worse will it get?

My dream studio will be in my art truck. I plan to downsize and strip everything from my life and my responsibilities that I possibly can so I can be more focused on making art.

Currently I live in a small house with an acre of land. I love my little house and my property but it takes so much work and so much of my time. I have little interest in using the kitchen to prepare meals, using the dining room to eat in, or mowing a lawn. I don’t need much of a kitchen beyond a hot plate or microwave. My dining room table is a place for paintings and prints to dry. My living room is the place I prop up the paintings I am currently working on or planning to take to a show. I eat on my couch. Often I sleep on the couch. So already I know I can do with little. I plan to get rid of extraneous stuff and move into a Minnie Winnebago. I know this will be a big change, and I can’t quite figure out where all my art supplies will go. But I know this is what I was meant to do.

I imagine living in the same space where I work and produce my art and jewelry. I will have a work space for painting, one for rubbing my prints, and one for soldering/hammering my metal jewelry. There will be a shelf for books and cabinets for art supplies.

I picture having the freedom to drive to my daughter’s house and hang out for a day or so. Then on to my son’s house to visit him and his kids for a while. I will have a piece of property somewhere so that I can focus on making art in between these trips.

Then I will have the freedom to drive somewhere – just as the food trucks do – open up the truck and sell my art. If people are interested to see how I have set up my workshop, they are free to check it out.

I will have small workshops and classes in my art truck. It will be tight. But when the weather is nice and it spills out into the nearby property, that will work out fine.

I will pull up in front of shops on main streets whereby we both hope to increase one another’s business. I will take part in pop-up art shows and jewelry festivals.

For now I am reading whatever I can find about artists who live in their camper or tiny house on wheels or gypsy vardo and how they manage it.

Alyson Stanfield is in the art business and she blogs about it at ArtBizBlog.

Here she encourages artists to become professionals, to write effective artist statements, to display their art, and to sell their work.

Her website displays the work of other artists. Each entry features an artwork and she might use that piece as an example of how to become a successful artist.

For example, her entry on April 21 shows a bright -colored abstract oil painting by Christine Sullivan. It gets the reader’s attention.

She goes on to discuss an invitation that Robert Mapplethorpe used to attract visitors to his first solo exhibition in 1973.

His show was of Polaroids, and his invitation was a hand-printed image from one of his Polaroid originals. It is a piece of art itself.

Stanfield explains how this invitation was effective in wowing people and attracting them to Mapplethorpe’s show.

She goes on to explain how individual artists can take advantage of his example.

I admire Stanfield’s efforts at encouraging artists to stay productive and to make steps toward selling their work. She helps them stay focused on their goals. If their goal is to simply learn the professional side of the art business, she is there. Many of her blog posts feature free workshops on managing your time, writing a bio vs. artist statement, approaching galleries, filing tax forms, pricing artwork.

She also offers consulting services if you want one-on-one time with her.

Her blog is bright and easy to navigate. The variety of artworks from a different artist for each posting is eye-catching. She includes paintings everywhere.

She posts new information frequently. Her content is always fresh and very useful. I would like to mirror her professional look in my own website.

Nina Bagley makes jewelry: Ornamental.Typepad.com

As soon as you land on her website, you get a feeling for her work and her aesthetic. The soft colors, the natural elements, and all the photos tell you something important about the kind of work she produces.

A major element of Bagley’s work is the story behind the objects in her pendants. Her blog is her place to tell all her stories. Her readers look forward to the stories of her life in her blog posts.

When she moved into her new house in the woods and created her new studio, she told everyone about all the steps.

When she visits her hometown and stays with her mother, she tells all about it and includes many photos.

When she takes walks with her dog or along the beach and finds new objects, her readers know there will be a story about it and there will be new jewelry pieces.

As soon as she posts a new necklace on her site, it sells right away. And her pieces are not cheap!

Bagley travels frequently to teach jewelry-making classes. She tells all about her travels on her blog and includes many photos of her trip, her class, her friends, and the objects that are made. Her readers love all this attention to the details of her life.

And it’s smart that she includes all these details because she has no lack of interest in her classes; they sell out as soon as she posts them.

Her chummy, story-telling style has made her very popular and successful. I envy her success and would like to experience something similar. I can see that her blog is an important part of her efforts.

I have been working on the theme of surveillance and cameras using relief prints and monoprints.

The monoprints give a fresh application of color and I’ve been using this as the background. I’m trying to get better about controlling the look of the pigments. For example, if white is too liquidy, when I mix it with blue on my palette, on my paper it turns into an unrecognizable blob. If the blues dry on my palette, then the color isn’t imparted to the paper and the paper can stick to the palette. The colors work best when they don’t dry too quickly and aren’t too wet.

I’m experimenting with different kinds of paper and printing on fabric. I’m getting new mediums and thickeners to better modulate the pigments and get better results on my paper. My goal is to get recognizable forms such as clouds, buildings, figures, landscape. I may not get a lot of detail, but I can add that with other forms of media later. It was not unusual for artists who used monotype printing to include other printmaking processes as well. Maurice Prendergast and William Blake, for example, used this practice.

And I’ve been adding linoleum block prints onto the monoprint backgrounds. I like doing reduction prints so I get a variation in colors. I’ll try adding darker colors on top of lighter colors as well as lighter colors on top of darker ones. Some of the linoleum prints are not giving an equal application of the pigment, some need a little more pigment and some have too much. So I’m trying roughing up the surface of the linoleum block before carving so there is a better application of the ink. And the lines are not giving perfect detail so I want to work on improving this. Since I am hand-printing, I believe I need to spend a longer time with each print, rubbing and pressing, in order to get a better and clearer printed image.

Next I want to try woodcut. I also want to try using more mixed media applications. This will mean that each print is unique. Where relief printing often gives the artist the same image over and over, the use of mixed media will put each image in its own unique piece. Mostly, I want to try out new ideas and techniques.

Suzanne’s Art Truck is hosting an art show – “Life is Good.”

We are looking for your interpretation of “the good life.” Perhaps it’s spending time with family and/or grandkids, taking vacations, historic sites you admire, a job you love, good health, a clean and beautiful environment – a related theme of importance to you – and how you would represent this idea.

Because you produce and sell art in Carroll County, you are being asked to participate in the show.

We are looking for two-dimensional pieces less than 36” in width or height in any medium.

If you are interested in participating in this exhibit, please submit your proposal to my email at suzannearttruck@gmail.com.

Send a description of the size, medium, and subject matter for your works.

We are looking for two pieces from each artist. We charge 27% commission.

The work will be displayed in my Art Truck from May 15 to June 15 and it will be on display according to the itinerary available on my website. This Art Truck is my gallery on wheels that is dedicated to displaying and selling the work of local emerging representational (or abstract) artists.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Let me know if you have any questions.

-Suzanne

My latest linoleum prints of surveillance cameras. The way we live today.