Posts Tagged ‘art projects’
Silk Scarves
During December, I’ve been enjoying the privilege of a front-row seat for an art project by one of Santa’s loveliest elves. I didn’t even know that painting silk scarves was a thing. Cyndie manufactured a rig to suspend the scarves so she could draw on designs before filling them with wonderful brushed colors.
Each one is unique and custom-designed for the person she was thinking about. I wish I had taken more pictures when she was doing the painting but I was hesitant due to the hush-hush nature of the project.
Wednesday night she and her friends celebrated with a holiday dinner and an exchange of gifts so I have now been granted permission to share some clips of the finished scarves.
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It brings me so much joy to see how Cyndie has been experimenting with different techniques to bring about beautiful artistic images with a variety of media. These silk scarves look really great. I love how she managed to mix a whimsical energy with an almost business-like calmness worthy of silk.
I’m very familiar with Cyndie’s artistry in the kitchen but her increasing proficiency in producing creative art from many different methods is showing me a whole new side of her. It thrills me to no end.
It shouldn’t surprise me that Cyndie continues to master new accomplishments, but her artistic creativity of late has. Her art projects since retiring stand out in contrast with her previous lifetime of more academic pursuits. Instead of cramming a world of ideas into reports and professional articles, she is now letting them flow freely into shapes and colors.
I am truly honored to have the pleasure of watching her work and then being able to gaze upon the finished pieces. I’m so happy when she allows me to share samples with the rest of you here.
I wonder what she will find to tackle next. You can bet I will strive to take more pictures during the messy phases.
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Wood Speaks
Sometimes, wood speaks to me, but I don’t always know what it says. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard words from a piece of wood. It’s more of a mysterious attraction to the visual. This piece has me wondering what it would look like smoothed.
I have envisioned it both completely flat or smoothed with contours. I think contours is going to win, because there’s already too much material missing to sand it flat and still have much of the branch left. The branch is really the key element that makes this special.
Imagine how complicated it can be to stack firewood when every other piece seems to grab my attention for its potential to be beautiful in some form other than burning flames.
Luckily, I receive great pleasure from the visual presentation of stacked firewood, too, so it makes it a little easier for me to leave the split logs on the pile where they belong. That just leaves a chosen few that occasionally get pulled for more permanent duty.
I decided to take a picture of this one for reference, and now having posted here, I guess as incentive. I make no secret of my difficulty with finishing art projects that I start. It’s rather curious that my inspiration to become engaged with this new piece would occur so soon after discovering a handful of others in a box that had sat unopened since we moved here 3 years ago.
Why haven’t I become fixated on finishing the others, instead?
I don’t know. It’s something ripe for analysis, I suppose. I wouldn’t have to dig too deep to discover an issue with perfectionism and a fear of failure, I’m sure. Being unfinished, their imperfections are judged differently. Being unfinished, they still hold the potential to become even more beautiful than they already are.
Or it could simply be that I am wanting to improve my techniques and tooling, and hone my finishing skills to a point I will feel more prepared to take those unfinished pieces the rest of the way to completion, in both aesthetics and function.
Yeah. That’s why I’m starting another new project. It’s for practice. That’s it.
I’ll chronicle the progress for you here, so I have added incentive to actually make progress.
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Relative Something 