The 24 Hour Theatre/Art Festival

My contribution to UW Rock County's 24 Hour Theatre/Art Festival

When Alicia Reid, owner of Janesville's Raven's Wish Gallery/Studio told me about an upcoming theater/art festival, I was intrigued.  So I emailed U-Rock associate professor Zac Curtis for the details about the art part of the event.

Artists were to show up at 7 P.M. Friday at the campus theater, where they would be given a theme and a challenge.  Then they would return to campus with the art by 4 P.M. so it could be displayed before the theater, dance, vocal and instrumental music and poetry part of the evening.  Attendees could browse the art, bid for it in a silent auction, then take home their purchase at the end of the evening.  From my standpoint, it was nice because there was no entry fee, and I could set a minimum bid for my art - or even not sell it at all if I chose.  Artists also were given complimentary tickets for the performance, which proved to be both interesting and entertaining. It helped to keep in mind that everyone was under an extreme time limit, and that the stated goal for the evening was to try out new ideas and take risks.

Here was the challenge given to artists:

Art my be any size and any medium.  You will use your own materials, and be asked to sell your piece through silent auction and the opening gala.  You will be allowed to set your own minimum bid if you would like.  You will be given the option to indicate that you would like to donate your sale back to the UW Student Theatre Association if you would like.

Theme - Truth and Lies

Challenge - As a primary element of your art, you must use a recycled or repurposed material.  This may be either an element of your art itself, the frame, or the "canvas" you create your art on.  You must use at least one material from the items provided.

The items provided were varied indeed - boxes of nuts and bolts, stacks of record albums, glass vases, plastic fruit, old photos, old books, containers of glass "jewels," an old house shutter, metal screening, a bird cage, and so on.  I was thrilled to find a couple of vintage textbooks to use for collage elements in my painting.

I decided to collage pages from an old practical math text on a 16x20 inch canvas I got for a song at my favorite local second hand store.  Then I wrote out as many little white lies as I could think of:

I'll call your tomorrow; your table will be ready soon; I love you too; you look just fine; I see what your mean; we took him to a nice family in the country; that fish was ten feet long; officer, I had no idea I was going that fast....  You get the idea.  Then I just painted ambiguous looking portrait of a person who may have uttered, or been hurt by, white lies.  Finally, I used the textbook pages and cut out letters which spelled out "white lies." 

So, the piece was started at about 9 A.M., finished by about 2:30, varnished, wired, and delivered by 4 P.M.  I was exhausted.

But the evening was fun, and the piece sold at a price a student might afford.  Can't ask for more than that.

Challenged Again - Virtual Paintout, Summit County, CO

6x6 inches, acrylic on watercolor paper

 Breckenridge, Colorado

It has been ages since I've participated in an online painting challenge.  One of my favorites is Bill Guffy's Virtual Paintout, which chooses a different location around the world each month and challenges people to use Google Street View to select a scene and then paint it.  He includes the paintings on his site and on Facebook.  I wanted to give this one a try for a couple reasons.  First, we finally are buried in snow after a balmy start to winter in southern Wisconsin, and I thought I should paint a snowy scene.  Next, we've actually vacationed in Breckenridge a couple times in the summer, have driven around the whole area, hiked the streets, everything except skied.

It takes a while to do these challenges, even in a small format.  I virtually drove all over Breckenridge, up in the mountains, over at Keystone and the whole area searching for a scene that grabbed me.  Then planning and actually painting took several hours.  Finally there are rules for submitting these challenges, including resizing the image to fit Guffy's requirements, something I never remember how to do from time to time.  I think I did it correctly, but I'll have to wait to see if it shows up with the other submissions. 

Now For Something Completely Different - A Sock Monkey

The National Weather Service has been warning us since yesterday that we are in for a big winter storm, so a trip with friends to Milwaukee today was canceled, and tomorrow's trip to the opening reception of Watercolor Wisconsin will be canceled too.  We went shopping for food, laid in a stock of books and prepared to hunker down.  As I type, cars are spinning their wheels on the hill outside the house, and I am in here wrapped in fleece, drawing sock monkeys.

Hey, who doesn't like a sock monkey?  My dad wore Rockford socks, the kind with the red heel, as long as I could remember, wore out the toes and heels inside his Redwing work boots.  So when I see a sock monkey, I think of my dad, in stocking feet.  His work boots, mucked up from being in the barn, were behind the kitchen door.

Actually I doodled this guy in response to an online challenge at Doodlers Anonymous.  Check it out.

Winter Bouquet - Studio Atalier Challenge

5x7 inches, acrylic with touches of oil pastel and tissue paper collage

Oh dear.  Skies are gray.  Snow keeps falling.  Icy patches are building up where we walk, and the house is too cold for my comfort.  I have a space heater in the studio, so when I go there to paint I can at least be a little warmer.

Yesterday I headed over to my local painting group, and tortured them with constant chatter, something I have to stop doing.  I think the need to blather on comes from a built up need to interact with other people, especially this time of year when I spend so much of the day inside in solitary pursuits - the talk inside just builds up and has to be released!

Anyway, when I got home I decided it was time to paint something in response to an online challenge, and this little painting was the result.  Not my favorite, perhaps.  I don't always feel compelled to paint florals, but I wanted to experiment with a brighter, simpler style than usual.  I was unhappy with the tabletop, so on a whim I added tissue paper stripes, just to echo the orange in the flowers.

Want to try your own version?  Head over to to Studio Atalier and take a look at the original, then see what you want to do with it (or another reference photo).

Virtual Sketch Date: Pears

Sometimes I like to try online challenges as a way to stop procrastinating and get back into the habit of going to work in my little upstairs studio. I stumbled across "Virtual Sketch Date" this week, and liked the reference photo very much. I saw some people's responses to this challenge on Flickr, and decided to give it a try. This response began as a sketch, which I put under a piece of clear acrylic which had been coated with a monotype base. Then I painted over that, and made a hand print. Then I went a step further and added color and detail with colored pencil.


Here's the sketch, original reference photo, and completed monotype. It works nicely for me to keep my eraser, shrpener and pencils together in a foam meat tray. I like to work on my cutting mat, because the surface is softer than the table alone, and because it's plastic it's easy to clean.


Here is another response to the same challenge. This one was done in my Moleskine journal, and was an experiment in mixing media. I copied out a Hilda Doolittle poem, Sheltered Garden, in my journal, then covered the writing in thinned down gesso. I used my pear sketch to guide me in painting the pears in acrylic paint, some of which I wiped away before it dried. I then used a black Micron pen to add dark lines, and added some highlights and background color in pastel. It was labor intensive, but interesting.

Sheltered Garden by Hilda Doolittle

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest --
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

I have had enough --
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

O for some sharp swish of a branch --
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent --
only border on border of scented pinks.

Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light --
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?

Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit --
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.

Or the melon --
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste --
it is better to taste of frost --
the exquisite frost --
than of wadding and of dead grass.

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves --
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince --
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.

O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.

Some Recent Sketches

For the past few months I have participated in an online sketching group called Everday Matters, and have made an effort to draw their weekly challenges. I'm never, ever caught up. Of course they started a couple years before I joined, and I face an apparently impossible self-assigned job of drawing every challenge. That isn't the point of the group, I know. The point is to draw as often as possible and to realize that ordinary objects in our everyday lives are worthy of being sketched.


I have a tendancy not to draw from life. Readers here already have seen my whining about being nervous when people watch me draw. Heavens, I admire other people's loose and breezy travel watercolors! Some day I'll be able to do them myself, but not yet. The first two pictures here are of the sketchbook work I did on our Thanksgiving week in Jamaica. It worked out well for me, because I was able to draw some things from the privacy of our room, with its balcony and comfortable chairs. At the beach I had to work fast, but so many people were reading or asleep that they were unaware of me with my sketchbook. My new Moleskine probably could have just as easily been a diary, I suppose. I gave up trying to do watercolor sketches on this trip for a couple reasons. First, it involves hauling the materials around, even though I have a very small case with a tiny set that works fairly well. But the kit itself draws attention, and the other reason is I don't really want a crinkly warped page in my sketch journal. So, I've been concentrating on pen and ink or pencil.


The drawing of the tree was rendered from a photo I took up in Door County. I photographed this tree with its wonderful horizontal branches and textured bark at The Ridges environmental sanctuary. Lately I have been combining colored pencil with my graphite work, and I'm liking the combination. In fact some of my favorite artwork has been done in this very small format. Part of me like a little book of detailed drawings like this, and part of me knows if I'm going to do detailed work I should probably do it bigger.