December 2024

January 04, 2025

December 2024

Happy New Year! We just got back from a week in London and I had a little time on the flight home to think about all that happened this past year. 2024 was definitely one for the record books.

I sold more art than ever before. We traveled a lot: New York twice, London twice, Italy, Montreal, San Diego and more. Scored a studio space, taught drawing all year, gave a lot of docent tours at the High, played with clay, built my very first piece of sculpture, was an artist in residence, participated in Georgia Color, drew for 334 days straight, attended the Plein Air Convention, and earned Member of Excellence status with the Southeastern Pastel Society. I worked my tail off and a lot of things clicked. I’m grateful for every single bit of it.

December was filled with docent tours because I had a little extra free time in my schedule and needed to rack ‘em up before things get very busy in the spring. We have a quota we have to fulfill each year and now I’m in a great position to hit that mark.

Completing a 3-day sculpture workshop with Kevin Chambers at The Booth was one of the most exciting, rewarding things I did this year. It’s always scary to try new things, and I was a nervous wreck. I became aware of Kevin’s work while taking an 8 week figure painting course with Marc Chatov 5-6 years ago. Those classes were held at Kevin’s studio and Kevin was always around, in and out of the studio. Since then his career has skyrocketed. He’s so nice, very patient and low key.

The other people in the class had all studied with him before, so they knew the tools and lingo. I was lost, but as soon as I told Kevin that, he instantly came over and walked me through the terminology, tools and process.

It helped that I knew the model, Michael, from drawing sessions around town. He’s so nice, very experienced and did not mind us measuring his features with those giant tongs. He’s worked with Kevin a lot, so they have a great rapport.

It was wild to see things come together, but it’s a very slow, gradual, time consuming process due to so much measuring. It took every bit of 3 days to complete, but boy was I happy with how it turned out. If you look at the photo on the right you’ll see a glob of clay on the top of his head. That’s an eye model that Kevin built for me in about 60 seconds flat.

Here’s the final piece. I still can’t believe I did it.

He’s been drying on our dining room table for the last 3+ weeks. Soon I’ll take him over to Kevin’s studio for firing. I’d love to do more of this, but I’m not sure how to make that happen. Kevin’s not teaching on a regular basis and my schedule is packed through May. But I definitely would like to do more sculpting.

PAINTING & DRAWING

I worked on paintings for Trinity School’s Spotlight on Art, the Virginia Highland Bookstore, the Big Little Project, and Wekiva. Oh … yeah … I’ve been invited to paint at Wekiva! The ones below are going to Spotlight on Art.

I’ve been drawing every day for the last 300+ days. Hopefully I can hit that one year mark. Maybe even longer. Who knows. It’s been so good for discipline, for line work, for accuracy. My drawings have definitely improved, but there is still much to do. I want to be more creative in compositions, for sure.

Been posting these to a separate Instagram account. Not trying to grow that account, it’s more of a record of progress and ideas.

TEACHING

We had a short 3-week drawing session to close out the year. My 94 year old student is on a mission to paint a horse eating grass. I have no idea why this particular subject is the holy grail, but I’m doing everything I can to help. Here’s where she started and then where we left off. Progress, for sure.

I tell students all the time that it doesn’t matter what you draw, the process and approach is always the same. Find the shapes and line them up. Period. Forget about what you *think* a horse looks like because that’s almost never accurate. Focus on shapes.

I’ll be teaching at Acworth again all year. It has been incredibly rewarding, lots of fun and honestly, a challenge for me. It forces me to learn how to simplify and convey complicated information in an easily digestible way. When they request certain subject matter that I’m not familiar with, I have to go home and figure it out, find quality references. I put an enormous amount of thought into each week’s lesson and reference images. The thing is, it takes time to see improvements in drawing. There are no hacks, no shortcuts. You just have to draw and draw and draw. Nobody wants to hear that, but it’s true.

TRAVEL

As I mentioned earlier, we just got back from a week in London. It was a phenomenal trip. We kicked things off with dinner at the oldest Indian restaurant in the city, Veeraswamy. One of my artist friends recommended the restaurant and lemme tell ya, I will be forever grateful to her for that recommendation.

About halfway through our dinner, a table of 3 was seated next to us. We were the only ones in this little nook of the restaurant. One of the men was talking fairly loudly and I quickly realized that this man was somebody big in the art world, but I had no idea who he was. I was next to the man and Scott was facing him, so I got Scott to take a “cheers” picture of me but told him to get the man next to me in the photo so that we could figure it out.

I hate my picture, but that was not the mission! We got his picture and I texted a friend of mine who has a high level position at an art museum. He didn’t recognize him, but his area of expertise is not modern/contemporary art. Meanwhile, I am still listening to this man talk about his exhibitions at the Royal Academy (!!!!), doing a deal with a major hotelier as a color consultant, and how he handles negative reviews of his work. It was fascinating, and I was about to bust to figure out who this man was.

We got back to the hotel and of course, I couldn’t sleep. Finally I opened my phone and decided to scour the RA’s Instagram account for intel. And there he was …

Michael Craig-Martin, the godfather of the Young British Artists (YBAs), author of On Being an Artist, knighted in 2016 by Prince William. Sir Michael Craig-Martin. When I think about how many random things happened to get me at that table at Veeraswamy on that particular night at that particular time, I can hardly process it.

I read almost all of his book on the flight home. We discovered a signed copy at Hatchards Bookshop, the oldest bookshop in London. I don’t particularly love conceptual art, but I love Sir Michael’s paintings of every day objects in a large scale, graphic manner. This series reminds me of Wayne Thiebaud and his paintings of every day subjects.

His book is fantastic. It reminded me a little of Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act. But the difference is that Sir Michael’s book is focused on artists who primarily paint, draw and sculpt. He has seen A LOT of stuff in his 83 years, lived through several different generations of art styles. From abstract expressionism to the current social justice, expressive messaging art we see a lot of today. He is so smart and such a great writer. The book gave me a lot to think about.

I’m going through a phase where I want to throw rules out of the window, and he talks about that in his book. Now, there’s no going back. Don’t get me wrong, I still love traditional art, but experimentation and rule breaking will be the focus for 2025. Sir Michael has given me permission.

The other huge highlight from the trip was a visit to the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace. Ol’ Charlie has a massive collection of drawings from Leonardo, Michelangelo and the gang. He was kind enough to let us have a look.

I learned the hard way that sometimes photos of paintings/drawings are not available on line, in the public domain, especially ones that are from private collections, so I took pictures of EVERYTHING. These were two of my favorites from the King’s collection. But there were lots more.

The one on the left is attributed to Pietro Faccini and dates back to 1590. Isn’t that an amazing drawing??? It’s such a modern spin on composition considering it was drawn nearly 500 years ago. The one on the right is by Leonardo, “Muscles of the Leg,” and it was drawn circa 1510-1511.

If you haven’t read Walter Isaacson’s book on Leonardo or seen the Ken Burns documentary series on him, you should check both of them out. This was the first time I’d actually seen the backwards writing that Leonardo was known for. Goosebumps!!!!

We visited the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, the Royal Academy and the Churchill War Rooms. We had a proper tea service, ice cold martinis, a Francis Bacon Negroni and walked until we couldn’t walk any longer.

It’s hard to put into words how much I love my man. I know I’m lucky. We celebrated our 12th anniversary, 17 years together in all.

Here are a few more photos from London:

Look at the scale of these Francis Bacon paintings at Tate Britain … wow

Francis Bacon at National Portrait Gallery

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, an absolute stunner

Martinis at The Connaught Bar and my new favorite VVG painting, from a private collection in Greece

Jan Van Eyck’s self portrait was not on view, but this’ll do … love a man in a headscarf

Amen!

JANUARY

Will be extremely busy. Mondays are for docent training and studio work. Tuesdays it’s back to pottery. Wednesdays are at Acworth. Thursdays are a pastel class. Fridays for docent work and studio work. And on Saturdays I’ll be teaching. So busy. But that’s how I like it :)

And last but not least … O-doggie and JuJu photos!