Twitter Art Exhibit: Orlando

The Twitter Art Exhibit comes to Orlando and the Grand Opening tonight, Thursday, March 20th, at 6:00pm at CityArts Factory. This international event was founded in 2010 by David Sandum in Norway and the proceeds from every year are given to a selected charity. This year the Twitter Art Exhibit is benefiting the Special Needs Classes at the Center for Contemporary Dance.

My entry will be hanging up there along with over 600 other postcard sized works of original art from around the world. All the artwork will be for sale at $35 a piece and that money is going straight into the hands of the charity because everyone who is making this event happen is volunteering- like me! Not only do I have art in the show, but I am also working like mad to create an exhibition catalog that will be available on blurb containing everyone's art. EVERYONE'S ART! That's over 600 images I'm plugging into InDesign! Another great philosophy behind this exhibit is that everyone is equal; no one is getting special treatment because they are famous, everyone's art is the same price, and brand new artists have a change to exhibit next to seasoned professionals.

I've been working with the fantastic Robin Maria Pedrero who is curating the exhibit, and I can't wait to see how she has handled the presentation of such a massive amount of art.

Grady Kimsey at the Crealdé School of Art

Last week I wrapped up the catalog design for the next installment at the Crealdé School of Art titled Grady Kimsey: The Mind's Eye. The catalog is now in hands of Lawton printers, who always do an excellent job.

The opening reception is Jan 17th, 7pm-9pm and I encourage everyone who can to go. Grady's work is truly a joy to look at and I can't wait to experience his pieces in person. In this series, he incorporates sculpture and painting together in a way that makes them inseparable. The paintings sitting behind the sculptures are more than just a backdrop; they are an integral part of the design. Neither sculpture nor painting is complete without the other.

Grady's whimsical art plus the fantastic photographs by Randall Smith made this catalog a dream to work on. Not to mention the laid back pow-wows at Grady's house with curator Henry Sinn and art dealer Kim Sumner where it all came together. This has definitely been the most enjoyable design job I've worked on to date. 

Off to the Printers!

For the past month I've been working on designing the exhibition catalog for the Crealdé School of Art's next show, Keeping Haiti In Our Hearts: Interpreting Heritage in the Diaspora. I am relieved to say that after thirty-nine and a half hours of work, the PDF files were sent to the printers yesterday evening. I can now breath a huge sigh of relief and start focusing on my excitement about seeing the finished product.

The exhibit features both contemporary and traditional haitian art, and from what I can tell from the images I worked with for the catalog it is full of painting, photography, sculpture, and tapestry. Eight of the traditional paintings are from the Bryant West Indies Collection held at the UCF Libraries Special Collections Department. In fact, that's how I became the catalog designer. The two curators, Henry Sinn and Natália Marques da Silva, have been in contact with Special Collections for over a year while they've put this show together. Natália came by in July to take some photographs of the paintings and mentioned to the head of our department that they were trying to find a new designer for the catalog and voilà! I had a job.

The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 14th at 7:00pm in the Alice & William Jenkins Gallery on the Crealdé campus located at 600 St. Andrews Blvd., Winter Park. From 8:30pm - 10:00pm the festivities move to the Hannibal Square Heritage Center 642 West New England Ave., Winter Park and will feature a live Haitian musical performance. Lots of people have put a ton of work into this event, and I know they would all be grateful to everyone who can come to the opening reception. 

Guinea Pig Zone

I recently finished a commission for GuineaPigZone.com's logo. Teresa, who also runs CavySpirit.com, contacted me through my website a while ago and I have been slowly fighting with Adobe Illustrator since. I think I'm pretty competent at using Photoshop, but there is a reason I am a traditional artist and not a computer artist. That reason being that trying to make original art (not just doctoring up some images) on the computer for me is like trying to type with boxing gloves on my hands. I wanted to make the logo in Illustrator so that it would be a vector file and could be easily resized- oh how much I had forgotten about Illustrator! I spent most of my time reading through the manual trying to remember all the tricks of the pen tool that I used to know. I owe a lot of thanks to Tim Chism who helped me slay the foul Adobe beast.

I was super excited to do this logo because I am a huge fan of CavySpirit.com. I used to own guinea pigs, in fact most of my friends refer to it as having a guinea pig farm because I had so many, and I've always admired the work CavySpirit.com does with informing guinea pig owners. Her new website has a strong social emphasis with petfinder listings, product and pet reviews, and shopping.  The heart is designed to change based on the color scheme of the website or to be used in several different colors to designate different website sections.

I believe Teresa found me through my deviantArt page, which was a terrifying revelation. I hadn't updated that thing since 2007 and the thought of people looking through my gallery and only seeing bad ceramics and really old art gave me the heebie jeebies. Therefore, this commission also inspired me to update my page, which is going slow and I'm still only up to 2008 as of now. I deduced how Teresa found me because she provided two of my guinea pig images as reference photos, both of which are only available on DA. One was an old sharpie drawing of my lethal white guinea pig Winkle (he was blind and deaf and had one gangly tooth), and the other was a screen print of Ginger (who loved oranges).