Tag Archives: watercolor art

02/18/12

2012 Exhibits

New exhibit information for 2012. There will be more!  But for now:

(this one is over) Current group show until February 29, 2012:  St. Cloud Hospital, “Rio On Pools”

This painting is a watercolor for the Central Minnesota Watercolor group and is titled “Rio On Pools”.  It is a painting of a natural rock and pool area in Belize, where I was lucky enough to spend the day in 2007. The pools are called Rio On Pools and are part of a long river system.  The day I was there they were also being used by the British Military for jungle training exercises!  Note the top of many of the trees are bare sticks. The area was undergoing a beetle infestation when I photographed the area and it was killing many of the trees. I don’t know if the infestation has been stopped but it is one environmental effect of climate change.

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WARM Show: Kinetic Connections

This is part of the WARM exhibition series. Kinetic Connections is the title. I originally called my portion of the show reclamation. It’s a word used for what coal companies do to mountains after blowing them up for coal. Essentially, they destroy the mountains and the natural ecosystem and when they are done they plant some grass and trees, making it an elevated golf course, essentially. It’s a word I like for other reasons though. The word reclamation is an empowering word of renewal when faced with, in this case, a lot of environmental devastation. Most of my paintings have to do with the effects of global warming and industrial effects on the environment. I will be exhibiting with another artist, who does mainly abstract watercolor paintings. The WARM exhibition is scheduled for April 30 through June 8th, 2012, in St. Paul at the WARM building. The address is: Women’s Art Resources of Minnesota @ the Women’s Building, 550 Rice St., St. Paul, MN 55103

 

11/30/11

Planet Earth Art Exhibit

The local arts organization sponsored several themed juried art exhibits this year, and the last on the list is the Planet Earth exhibit. My painting “Erosion” (which you can see here) was juried into this show, which you can read more about in that previous post too.

Below are more photos from the exhibit.

I hope everyone in the central Minnesota area can make it to see this show. Studio C is in the lower level of the Paramount building, which is directly downtown near the Falcon Bank. You can’t miss it. It’s an unusually strong show, in my opinion, and not because of my painting but because of the other artwork in it. There are some very unique pieces and I’m very happy to see St. Cloud art shows branching out into accepting more mixed media and collage and unusual things in general.

11/20/11

Art Crawl St. Cloud

I didn’t take a lot of photos Friday night during the art crawl, but I did get a few. We had a much larger crowd of people after these were taken so I didn’t have time to take more. It was a good art crawl, though I was expecting more people. But there was a time period of about an hour when the building was very crowded with people looking at our work. The cookies and food were a big hit too, of course.

Inside Shelly's studio, Suite 206

Art Crawl November 18th -- before the bigger crowds came

The next art crawl isn’t until March 2012. If you saw something you liked and wanted to come by to purchase it later, just contact us using the contact forms above.

Next time I should have the ability to accept credit cards so that should make it easier for everyone to get the paintings they like and not worry about paying on the spot. We did sell a few things, but not as much as we had hoped. I talked to someone afterwards and suggested it might be because we don’t accept credit cards so finding a way to accept credit cards will be a priority for me for the next art crawl.

I also have a painting in the Planet Earth exhibit in Studio C at the Paramount. It’s titled “Erosion” and there is a photo on my website here. Please visit the Paramount to see the whole exhibit.

More of our artwork can also be seen in Little Falls at the GRAA art center downtown during their Wrap Up art show.

 

11/17/11

Art Crawl on Friday November 18!

Be sure you check out the last art crawl in central Minnesota before the holidays… the November 18th Art Crawl. This is the first time that Artists at 701 (Dona Koshowany and myself) are officially participating in an advertised capacity. As a result, we have a new website for Artists at 701.

You can meet us and see our art (and more) this Friday, November 18th, at the next downtown St. Cloud art crawl. Come and see us at 701 West St. Germain, from 4:00-9:00 pm. on the 2nd floor.

There will also be a guest artist for the November art crawl — watercolor artist Deb Vander Eyk. All of the artists you can meet this Friday at 701 work in water media, which means acrylic and watercolor, but our work is very different and varied.

We will also have things besides paintings at the art crawl to look at and to purchase, such as cards and other hand-made things, and a few good things to eat too. Yes, that means cookies. Stop by!

10/17/11

Feminism and Women Artists

This painting is new, starting out as one thing and ending up as something entirely different. That’s not unusual for how I work and can lead to some strange surprises. Now that it’s done, I’ve named it “Sacrifice”. It’s not meant to be literal. The wolf represents American culture, and the woman represents being a woman in America. If you want to be considered a “normal” American woman, you have to give up certain elements of who you are, and pretend to be a certain way, and act a certain way, and accept things (like lower wages and being taken less seriously than a man) and live according to society’s requirements. As an American woman who is a feminist, this makes sense to me, but I admit many people won’t get it, which is fine. (I don’t really care if people understand my paintings, which is why I usually tell people to just get out of them whatever meaning they want.)

I’ve written about gender and art here in the past, and now I’ve just joined WARM, a group of Minnesota female artists based in St. Paul. I found the following article linked to on their website: Why Have There Been No Great Woman Artists? The obvious answer is: There have been a lot of great female artists, what are you talking about? But maybe that answer is from my own personal perspective, as a female artist. I equate all artists as equally worthy and judge their work, if I judge it at all, without regard for their gender. But I’m not sure the general public does that, and according to this article, they don’t. Here is a small excerpt:

“Why have there been no great women artists?” The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist “controversy,” it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: “There are no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness.” . . . .

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