Art & History Museums Maitland - Artist in Action

I am very excited to announce that I've been selected as one of the Artists-in-Action for the 2012-2013 season for Art & History Museums - Maitland. We had our first meeting to go over paper work and get to know each other last Friday (and get a very professional and fancy name badge). It was also the first time I was able to meet A&H's new Director of Art Exhibitions & Education, Rebecca Sexton Larson.

I had a blast getting to know everyone. Trent Tomengo is in Studio 1, Dawn Rosendahl is in Studio 5, and I'll be sharing Studio 8 with Camilo Velasquez. Studio 8 is under going some repairs right now, so Camillo and I haven't been able to move in yet. Dawn is also waiting for Studio 8 to be repaired because she can't move in to Studio 5 until Camilo can move out. Is your brain in a knot yet? In other words, don't expect to catch Dawn or myself on campus until this is all sorted out. I can't wait to move in and get to work!


TheDailyCity.com: Maitland Art and History Museum Shacks Up Four Art...: The Maitland Art & History Museum has announced its 2012-2013 "Artist-in-Action" recipients for 2012/13: Whitney Broadaway, Dawn Rosenda...

The Mad Hatter Tea Party

Yesterday was the Mad Hatter Tea Party at the UCF Library. Amanda Richards was on the committee that organized this fundraiser and she asked me to help out with creating Tenniel inspired linocuts for a print-your-own-print station. I, of course, said yes. Amanda and I each carved two of the four linocuts we had available, which was more painstaking than normal since the cross hatching from Tenniel's drawings is not a very intuitive technique for carving in relief. However, we struggled through and I was pleasantly surprised with how well they translated into linoleum. Especially Amanda's work- this was her first time EVER carving and printing and they look as good as I could have done them. She is a testament to anyone who is on the fence about getting into relief printmaking. We decided to depict the four characters (Alice, The White Rabbit, The Mad Hatter, and The Red Queen) in a frame reminiscent of playing cards and gave them each their own suit.

We had a good crowd at the print station - as in Amanda and I never got to sit down - and it seemed like everyone that came over had a good time. There were also several people intersted in possibly doing the linocut process from start to finish, and I'm hoping that will translate into students for the next Not Your Mama's Print Workshop on December 2nd.




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. 

Black Lantern Publishing

One of my older etchings, The Swing, has been published in the magazine Black Lantern Publishing Vol. III No. 8. It is a small print on demand publication that focuses on macabre short stories and poetry. The editor, Rebecca A. Huggins, approached me on deviantArt about using the print in her next issue and, of course, I said that would be wonderful. This is the first time my work has actually been published, so I was very excited- even if it is a very small magazine. You can purchase the magazine in both print or PDF form here: http://www.blacklanternpublishing.com/apps/webstore/

AffectArt Artists' Party at Taste

One of the patrons at my table was a drunk bee- the swinging bunny did not approve.

I had a table at AffectArt.org's Artitsts' Party at Taste in Winter Park on June 15th. I had a fantastic time and met a slew of wonderful artists and people. One of those people was Boone Fowler who set the whole thing up and did a great job of keeping all the artists happy and helping us set up.

Parker Sketch set up his booth beside mine, which meant I wouldn't have to be worried about boredom for the rest of the evening. That was a big relief. Thomas Thorspecken set up to sketch across the sidewalk from Parker and me, so I'm very excited to see that pop up on his blog since I didn't get a chance to peek at it the day of.

Richeson Baby Etching Press was there for print your own prints trying to drum up some interest in my next printmaking workshop. I had several people run prints and I'm hoping some of them caught the printmaking bug! Parker snapped a photo of some of the printing:

Boone is hoping to make this an every other month event, so keep your ear to the ground for the next one because I highly recommend going - whether as a patron or an artist with a table!

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).

A Photo History of the UCF Library

Exhibit mock-up on graph paper - one square to every six inches.

I've recently co-curated the Special Collections and University Archives exhibit A Photo History of the UCF Library which I installed this past Friday. As with all the exhibits I've done with SC&UA, it was immensely interesting and consuming. The library is the first academic building on campus and one of the only buildings ready for classes in 1968, which meant the library housed many random university needs including weightlifting as well as books. This exhibit is in preparation of UCF's 50th anniversary and is installed on the 72 ft. art wall at the main entrance. It's a step up, in size and exposure, from the exhibit area we have right outside of the department. I don't usually make such an extensive plan for an exhibit (pictured above) but since we only had one day to set it up I wanted to make sure we had all our ducks in a row beforehand. I've grown quite fond of my graph paper mock-up. The only significant difference from the plan and the actual is the absence of the groundbreaking shovel and Nierman's maquette of the Flame of Hope. The exhibit would have been approximately 10% cooler with their inclusion, but we also didn't want anyone walking out with them since it is so close to the entrance.

I haven't been lurking around the wall since I've put it up, honestly I haven't, but already I've seen a group men looking at photos from the 1981-1984 expansion and pointing out all their old buddies. I hope this exhibit is causing that kind of reminiscing even when I'm not creeping around the corner.

Exhibit will be up June 1 - July 31