Art Show at Anytime Fitness – Boulder

My first public art show is up! My art! On walls in a local venue! Go me!

 

I am excited to announce that my art will be hanging at Anytime Fitness for the next three months. Anytime Fitness is a local gym and I reached out after seeing their call for art. Apparently members of the gym had requested art for the space and the team at the store decided collaborating with local artists would be best. I am honored to be the first artist to exhibit in their space.

Anytime Fitness has a super chill vibe, friendly atmosphere, and you can check out my art by scheduling a tour of their facilities. Or if you are already a member, go get some exercise and soak in the colorful paintings. Thats what I plan to do! Paintings are available for purchase. Prices listed in the price sheet in the office.

 

 

 

Day 1: Lots of Watercolor

To make up for the fact that I joined the 30 Days of Painting Challenge late I thought I would do a bunch of small watercolor paintings. Although I only needed to do 13 paintings to catch up I ended doing 16, so now I’m ahead of the game!

30 Days of Painting Challenge

I just signed up for the 30 day painting challenge! Paint a painting a day in the month of September. I could use a new challenge and as I’m not traveling this month it feels like a fitting time to attempt such a task. I realize we are already twelve days into the month of September but its never too late to start, or at least thats what I keep telling myself. If I do 7 paintings tomorrow and 7 paintings on Sunday i’ll be all caught up.

The challenge is being organized by Leslie Saeta from the Artists Helping Artist blog talk radio and over 700 people from around the world are participating. I sometimes get stuck in this mindset of “why should I create art if I don’t have any audience… its just gonna pile up around my house anyway.” Quite the defeatist voice and this challenge feels like a good way to combat it. I also want to blog everyday, and get caught in a similar funk telling myself “nobody cares about your artistic endeavors” and I realize thats probably not true either. You gotta start somewhere. Check back daily to see my paintings!

Interested in joining in? Check out the challenge here: http://30paintingsin30days.weebly.com/

Horned God Diptych

 

A long time ago I found an image in National Geographic of a man holding an elk on his back. The image felt ancient and haunted to me, even though the article was about Canadian hunters and the lives they lived. I searched through magazine until I found other images of deer/human crosses and planned on creating a horned god triptych.

I knew I wanted the colors of the final paintings to compliment the wall colors of my home (which are currently lime green, purple, and teal) and that I wanted the original images to be the main focus. However, once I started playing with the images I realized my original inspiration no longer worked with the other images I found. I ended with a male and female diptych, which are currently in my front hallway. They are mixed media works with a acrylic, oil, watercolor, tissue paper, and the found images.

Horned deities have been present in religion for a long time. In Egypt there was Hathor, Goddess of joy, feminine love, and motherhood. In Greece there was Pan. The Celts created images of the nature god attributed to be Cernunnos. Even Christianity has images of horned beings. In more recent times Horned Deities have come to represent sexuality, fertility, and nature, often becoming the masculine counterpart to the great goddess. I liked the images of the horned male and female, and went with it even though its less conventional. For more images of horned people visit my deer people pinterest board.

Profound Gateway: Bold Doors Entry

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Doorways are inherently magical and you can see their power
mirrored in our language. We stand at the threshold whenever we
reach a right of passage, pass through the gates to all things new
and unknown, then close the door on the past. These metaphors
link together life, death, and creativity which are all held in the
transitional space of doorways. This piece became a place for me,
as an artist, to meditate the meaning of these sayings and the
power they hold.

For my door I wanted to play with the passage of time and in my original sketch I conceived of a maiden/ mother nature figure on one side, and a crone figure on the other. I was unsure of how to include the window, but when I found my heavy purple door at the resource yard I knew it was the one I wanted to work with.

I thought turning the glass into a cave was appropriate because it made me think of passageways, wombs, time travel, and other images that fell within the theme I was wan’t to explore. I ended up using wax to create the stalactite affect on the glass, and then I embellished with beads. The other materials used on my door were Basic Acrylics, found paper and fabric, ModPodge, and ducting tape.

Considering the amount of time I gave myself to complete my rather ambitious vision (a week) I’m pleased. However I knew about and had entered the competition weeks in advance so I should have had plenty of time to complete my concept. School and travel ate up my time instead. All things considered I’m pretty pleased with my first solo step into the professional art world of Boulder.

Art in Mexico: The Raven

Last semester the professor in my Art in Contemporary Society class help curate a couple shows. One of the shows was a Day of the Dead exhibition in Oaxaca, Mexico. The professor presented the opportunity for students in the class to create an 8 x 10 print in the medium of their choice for the show. The only other restrictions was that it had to cover the content of Edgar Allen Poe’s the Raven, and only have black, white, and red as the colors.

Not wanting to miss out on being exhibited in an international show I submitted the work above. I hadn’t read the Raven… ever, actually. It had been read to me in middle school, but I had never actually sat down and read the poem for myself. Quite frightening to day the least. The mediums I used are acrylic paint, india ink, and crayon. I was really happy with the final composition considering I knocked it out in half an hour after reading the poem before class. Sometimes not spending too much time thinking about it results in great work.

Today I’m not sure where the print it is. I know that it was well recieved in Mexico and the show was supposed to tour around the country to a couple of schools. I don’t know if my print is still touring or not, and with the upheavel present in Mexico at the moment I don’t know if I will ever get it back. I’m really glad I scanned a copy before I sent it away. I have tried to contact the professor to see what the status is to no avail so I suppose I’m just going to have to make time to catch him in his office. Wish me luck ^_^

Paint Me: ARTS 1020 Performance Project

This is the schedule for my Performance starting tomorrow, Monday April 18th. This schedule is subject to change so check back before heading out.

The project is to appear in these places dressed in white with paint and a sign that says “Paint Me.” I will stay for an hour and see what happens. Simple as that. ^_^

The Long Awaited Tea Project Video!

Tea Collection Project from Sam Lee on Vimeo.

There it is! For everyone who has seen my kitchen and wondered why it is sticky this video will reveal all. Here is the final presentation of my collections project in Foundation in Studio Arts II. For the project I collected tea for 30 days then turned it unto syrup to be mixed with milk paint. Later I shattered the cups in my kitchen, which had less to do with collections and more to do with my unexplainable desire to smash ceramics.

In the end a lot of things went wrong. The tea became moldy faster than expected. The syrup was either too runny or too hard or to sparse. The milk paint was lumpy and didn’t dry like normal paint. Despite all this I felt the final installation made quite an impression and looked a lot more polished than some of my classmates pieces. I received and A for the piece.

Out of The Box

Feeling stuck in a rut at the moment. I’ve been craving more lavish inspiration. I have lots of ideas in my head but a lot of them feel really cliche or way too conceptual. I want to create something really juicy and rich and deep. All my art at the moment seems very cerebral- the box is my brain and I’m ready to let my body do the talking. I want a more sensory connection with my art and the world around me.

I  think I will do some painting for a while becuase it is so kinetic. See if that moves me to a more tangible art form.