IdeaJones

Category: Art

Art, Peace and Charity

Hi — we’ve been very active on our Facebook page, but it’s been a while since we checked in on our website.

There’s a lot going on! First, if you get a chance to go to Blue Line Gallery in Roseville, CA, we’ve got a sculpture on exhibit:

Second, our charity for the summer is Opening Doors, a charity helping refugees resettle. They provide everything from “welcome kits” with necessities (the refugees usually arrive with nothing) to volunteers helping drive people to appointments. A portion of each sale we make this summer will go to buy items for Opening Doors.

Among the items we have are silver necklaces from Zazzle featuring our digital paintings, including these peace signs:

Rainbow Ripple Peace Sign Necklace at Zazzle.com

We also have items in our Redbubble shop and will be posting items to our Etsy shop as well. We’re hoping to buy a lot of welcome kits in September!

We have a brand new sculpture, just finished — pics to come. We should find out soon if it’s about to go into its first show.

Hope your summer is productive, fun, or both.

July 27, 2016
Birth of a (Painted) Owl

Process is interesting to me — how someone makes a thing. I’m a sucker for factory tours (Jelly Belly in Fairfield, CA and the Budweiser plant nearby have fun tours), or watching someone create.

The latest animal painting, “The Night Watch,” is the first in a planned trio of paintings featuring owls. I’d painted an owl before, in a hurry, for a charity fundraiser, and on a 9-foot market umbrella at that (first time for that, too):
Detail from the beginning of a 9-foot painting of owls and their prey.

This is an early sketch for the finished painting, which featured owls and their prey catching sight of each other. At the time, I hadn’t planned to paint another owl, but then an idea started rolling around in my brain, an owl dancing.

A painting and poem from our Redbubble.com shop.

When i finished the painting, the poem came into my head while I was looking at it. I think most of us feel we have a secret self, and that self has the potential to do things very different from the things others expect.

So that led to an image of that same owl, about to take flight.

The moment just before takeoff. Ready to fly, but not yet in the air.

In the end, I liked the idea enough to create the full painting in color, that moment just before vaulting into the sky, one last look back before launching.

The first in a trio of planned paintings featuring owls, here an owl pauses before taking flight.

Each owl informed the next. Now The Night Watch is set to be in a show, and over the summer I’ll complete the series. It’ll be interesting to see where my owls are by the time I complete the last one.

May 26, 2016
Shades of Carmichael

Headed out to an event we’ve never been to before. Shades of Carmichael features about 80 hand-decorated market umbrellas, which will then be auctioned off as a fundraiser for the park and for the Sacramento Fine Arts Center. Joey has painted an umbrella for the event, and has also booked a table as a “vender” (sic), which means we’ll be at the mercy of the weather. We’ll take our portable pop-up shade, and the weather report says to expect warm but not hot temperatures, so we should be okay.

Here’s one of the focal points from the umbrella Joey painted:

Fingers crossed!

Event follow-up: Had a fine time. Weather was great, if a bit too breezy for our display materials. Lunch from the gyro truck on-site. Met some fun people, sold a painting (an owl based on the same Northern Saw-Whet owl seen above) and had some good arts talks. Only thing that would have made it better would have been more people in attendance.

May 16, 2015
The Value of a Smile

Getting started in the arts is hard. There’s the work involved, which, if you really feel a passion for it, takes time, energy, research, planning and a certain amount of faith. Will anyone get what you do? Will anyone like it?

You sit by yourself for hours at a time. An artist works in solitary confinement in the hopes that he will, some day, communicate with someone else. He may never even see that other person, or hear from him. He may never know that the communication happened.

It makes you realize how undervalued simple human things can be. The person who takes an extra minute on the phone to not just “process your call,” but help you. The person who reaches out to tell you your work touched him, or her. Meant something.

In the end, we are social animals, even introverted artists who work like hermits in their cells. We want to make contact, be seen, be valued, be heard. Or even just smiled at, over the phone. The little things count, and they always will. The world becomes more technical, but we are still human.

June 26, 2014
Now Appearing

There’s a neat fine arts center tucked away in a decommissioned school in Carmichael, CA. The Sacramento Fine Arts Center has lessons in various crafts that can be used as take-off points for artistic endeavor, and also has exhibits, shows and sales. Currently, there’s a juried show called Inner Visions, with works in several and mixed media done by local artists.

Joey’s sculpture is included in this exhibit. Previously shown at Capital Public Radio’s multi-artist show, but in a slightly different form, Where It All Starts interprets empathy with a visualization of personal communication that includes mirror neurons, the mechanism behind empathy, and the breathing in of shed cells from other people, with the result that each of us is actually made up of ideas and matter from others.

Shown this time with a different title and different working of the connection between the two figures, Where It All Starts: The Beginning of Empathy is shown as part of Inner Visions through July 12th.

June 24, 2014