Blog Archives - Page 16 of 17

Bicycle paintings

September 30, 2010

I have put plenty of miles on my Specialized bike since getting it about 8 years ago and especially the last 4 years I have become a year round rider. In winter if there is snow and ice on the road I don’t go but most of winter the snow and ice is kept off the roads, so I’m out there. I dress more or less as I would for cross country skiing- layers and nothing too heavy. You definitely see things you don’t notice when driving. Cyclists have become a subject of my paintings and happily my bicycle paintings have found an audience.

Exactly how many art supplies are at arm’s reach when I am making a painting? And how much do those supplies cost?

September 22, 2010

Something artists do not like to think of when making art is how much is it costing me to make art? Granted I spent most all of my travel budget to London, Amsterdam and Paris on paint in the London Windsor and Newton store on a trip years ago and still have one or two of those tubes left. Other than that I am always buying new paint.

Paper: $200 worth of full watercolor sheets on hand. Many other sizes of pads and blocks of paper to paint on.

Paint: Watercolor professional grade Windsor and Newton
$1000 worth of watercolor tubes are always on hand. Much of watercolor painting involves putting pigment down and then removing some or nearly all of it while still wet- not very efficient but that’s how it is.

Color pencils
$250 worth in Prismacolor pencils.

Watercolor Brushes
$150. in watercolor brushes on hand (some are dead and just keep for the memories)

Other stuff I am using during painting process- paper towel, soft erasers, vine charcoal, pencil, digital camera, computer, prints of photographs.

House Portraits

September 10, 2010

Do real artists paint house portraits?
This artist does. See more and learn about pricing

I can either visit your home to sketch and photograph it,

or I can work from your photographs. Here are some examples of my house portraits:

I sometimes like to paint a house at dusk when the lights come on inside. This is the house my cousin and her family lived in for several happy years. They are planning to build a zero energy home and they wanted to have a portrait of the home they loved so much. The new owner also loved the house portrait and they purchased a high resolution digital print.

I met the owner and saw this house in the summer but felt it would work well as a winter portrait. The owners collect house portraits of all the places they have lived. They bid on the chance to have me paint a house portrait of their home at a fundraiser for Fox Chapel Crew Club.

This was a going away present from one family to another. I am guessing the parents and children had some great memories together in each other’s homes.

This was my most recent house portrait. The young children of the family were seated on kitchen stools waiting to see the painting of their home. Their mom opened the cardboard portfolio while I watched and it was such a pleasure to see their faces light up with pleasure when they saw it!?I work in many different ways and I am comfortable with the mix of work. I recently enjoyed this piece in the NY Times about Wayne Thiebaud who has worked in many areas of both applied and fine arts even if most people know him for only his paintings of pastries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/arts/design/03wayne.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=wayne_thiebaud

One part of the long article which gets at what I mean is this…”Mr. Thiebaud’s original aim was to be a commercial artist, a field he deeply respects. (“I still paint as if an art director is looking over my shoulder,” he said.) Over the years, he has worked a sign painter, a theatrical production designer, an art director, a poster designer, a fashion typographer and illustrator (his subjects included lipstick and shoes), a comic strip artist, a cartoonist for the Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles and, fleetingly, as a teenage “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios filling in the figures of Dopey, Pluto and Jiminy Cricket.”

Homage to famous Pittsburghers

July 12, 2010

Homage to Rachel Carson -purchase a 17″ square print here

Homage to August Wilson- purchase a 17″ square print here

The first layouts for a print series where I pay homage to famous Pittsburghers were completed in November 2009. My photographs and my electronic alterations to my photographs are the media. What I would consider an original version using 4 images per piece, was shown, “honorably mentioned” in Pittsburgh Society of Artists “Small Works” exhibit, written about and sold at Borelli Edwards Gallery in Pittsburgh in April 2010.

Here are the first two images as high quality digital prints, copyright 2010 by Carol Skinger
Kurt Shaw’s review of “Small Works” has an explanation for the images I choose to put together in each homage.

Fake Urban Plan for East Liberty, Pittsburgh, PA

June 9, 2010

My Fake Urban Plan for East Liberty is art and not a real urban plan. You can tell because I did not have one meeting, ask for anyone’s input, or work with any neighborhood groups. I just did it. If reality were to be inspired by the vision in my artwork- I believe Pittsburgh would become #2 nationally in green roofs.

My piece received a Juror’s award from Kathleen Zimbicki at “Urban Dreams” at Fein Art Gallery June 2010 exhibit of the Pittsburgh Society of Artists. I painted on top of an archival print of a satellite photograph, (archival printing thanks to Heiko Spallek). My urban vision featured 80 green roofs, organic gardens, pools and a lazy river moat ride around ELPC- East Liberty Presbyterian Church (architect Ralph Adams Cram).

A large outdoor film screening theater and stage is right in the middle of things. I titled the film area “Chris Ivey Summer Film Festival”. He’s been doing interesting work making documentaries about the people who live there, or lived there- and who were in many cases relocated there because of historic urban renewal and are now having reactions to the latest changes (NY Times recently described East Liberty as coming out of a 40 year coma with Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Google as tenants) in East Liberty. He’s a professional filmmaker giving people a voice. I decided to give him a big stage and a screen. Who knows, he made need to host a film festival one of these days.

A poem titled Urban Renewal by Yusef Komunyakaa is written on the frame. I also wrote words about the really big real estate snowball that plopped into Thomas Mellon’s lap with his marriage to Sarah Jane Negley-not exactly a coincidence, and this too“cows will not graze again on the liberty (English usage: a liberty is free land for grazing) but birds, butterflies and insects would graze on 80 green roofs of East Liberty, while storm water run off, building insulation and outdoor air quality would be improved by living green rooftops. East Liberty becomes Liberty Green”

This is a bit like starting a rumor- maybe hearing about 80 green roofs will become 80 green roofs!
Makes me wonder what other fake stuff I could propose that could become a reality.

Chicago is considered the leader in the US for “green” roofs.
If you take even the quickest look at this site that fact is very apparent.
Then select “map” and you see a map of Chicago with all the green roofs! It would be hard to catch them.

My thinking about green as relates to my art piece:

East Liberty and contiguous lands were once green before all the subdivisions first created by first Jacob Negley (laid out East Liberty in 1810) and then Thomas Mellon his son-in-law.
Liberty itself used in the British usage meant free place to graze (not from the Revolution as I had always imagined) – so I’m thinking historically it housed a bucolic cattle grazing place (apparently there was also originally North Liberty, South Liberty and West Liberty). Since now there is only East Liberty- maybe now a name change can be considered to go with the “greening of East Liberty- hence “Liberty Green“
“Green = $”– When thinking of the financial engine that the land Thomas Mellon acquired (as a result of his marriage to Jacob Negley’s daughter Sarah Jane) became,’ it’s impressive how it fueled the many other business ventures he is more associated with.
Green the way we think now… sustainable, energy conservation, recycled and recyclable

Contact me to purchase original or a print of it. I have an excellent high resolution scan of it.

August Wilson and Rachel Carson Homage

April 15, 2010

One of the my fondest anecdotes came from my husband and my son who could not attend the art opening (in April 2010) so they went a few hours before just to see the exhibit at BE Gallery. They said they finally found my two pieces and five people were gathered around them looking closely at them and talking about them. That was a really great bit of feedback!

Arts writer Kurt Shaw writes about the exhibit, including my pieces in his write up of the show in the Tribune Review.

Well hooray! My piece titled “August Wilson Homage’ received “honorable mention” and both pieces sold at the opening of “Small Works” Pittsburgh Society of Artists Exhibit April 10th at Borelli Edwards Gallery. Artworks no larger than 14 inches in any dimension was the limitation for consideration to be accepted in the show.

Here is info about the Small Works Exhibit at Borelli Edwards gallery:

Borelli Edwards Gallery
3583 Butler Street
Lawrenceville (a Pittsburgh neighborhood), PA 15201

“Small Works” runs through April 24th, 2010.

In the August Wilson piece I included the building where he grew up as the primary image, and the Carnegie Library in Oakland as the secondary image. He went to that library to read and read after dropping out of high school when he was wrongly accused of plagiarizing a 20 page paper on Napoleon ( and many other complications and hostile educational settings). Eventually the Carnegie Library in Oakland gave him his high school diploma, and he is the only one to ever have received a HS diploma from the library. The image of Rachel Carson’s homestead in Springdale is mixed with my images of coal burning smoke stacks there- a current environmental battle involving new scrubbers proposed by owners RRI out of Houston TX that would reduce sulfur dioxide emissions but increase lead and mercury emissions. High school students (among others in the region) in Springdale have even gotten into the act and have mobilized to demand a better solution- so that is a current news story that I have to think Rachel Carson would have to be proud of.

Architect John Martine bought them! John is a lead design partner at Strada, an award-winning Pittsburgh architecture firm. Of course I’m thrilled about anyone buying my work but I am especially proud to be in John’s collection! I have enormous respect for his work in architecture, and he himself is a really fantastic artist.