Ronni Hunter Studios

"flowers"

Award of Excellence!!

"40 West Arts", "Experiments", "art exhibits", "art", "awards", "collage", "flowers", "graffiti", "paint"Ronni HunterComment

Graffiti Lilies

I entered this piece in the 2013 Inspire show being put on by 40W Arts here in Lakewood, CO.  This year the shows theme is recycled art or vivid color.  Happily for me I had this piece in the works.  This is made on recycled inter office envelopes, with newspaper, paint, tissue paper, various pens and grease pencils.  I mounted the collage onto a black fabric background that I pieced out of fragments of cloth leftover from some other project.  The background is quilted and trimmed with black satin ribbon.  I think it fits both of the shows themes!  Much to my delight I was asked if they could use my artwork for some of their outreach efforts and I won an Award of Excellence at the show.  My very first award!

Here is the thing about this piece..... it came together rather intuitively.  This never happens to me and finding that inner voice has been such a struggle.  I just wanted to play around with techniques one day so I started layering paint and newspaper on these envelopes and then tearing the paper back off to reveal layers.  When I decided I was done I had a background that I really liked.  But as usual I had no idea what to do with it.  It hung around on my design wall for several weeks while this teeny tiny little voice in my head kept whispering " add lilies made of more inter office envelopes".  I resisted.  Resistance is my specialty.  But I kept getting the same message and eventually I caved in and went for it.  This is the first pieces I've made that my husband genuinely likes.  The first piece that won an award.  Hmmmm.  I'm guessing that that intuitive voice in my head knows what its doing.  Now I just need to learn to hear it better.

Sketchbook

"art journal", "art", "drawing", "flowers", "sketchbook"Ronni Hunter1 Comment

Here are my completed flower drawings from my earlier post.  As you can see I drew a few more flowers and then colored them.  You can't tell from the pictures but I used my Twinkling H2Os for the top page and in real life they have a lovely sparkle!  For the bottom picture I mostly used my new Intense blocks.  I got both the H2Os and the blocks for Christmas and I'm having fun playing with them.  I decided to draw flowers after seeing Alisa Burke demonstrate her fabric flower doodles on the video that came with her book Sew Wild.  Now I'll have to try doing that myself.  Stay tuned!  I was also really inspired by Jane LaFazio's sketchbook pages.  She makes simple things look so appealing! Drawing intimidates the heck out of me but I have to say that working on these pages was intensely pleasant.  I really got into the zen state while drawing and painting and for once I don't hate the results.  While looking through an older art journal for some image transfer experiments I did a while back I came across the following page:

These silly creatures were created after reading Carla Sonheim's book Drawing Lab.  After doodling around with paint I found these two creatures but they are going in somewhat different directions.  Nonetheless I decided to decorate them and add shadows.  The blue one has iridescent paint and ink on it which is kind of over exposed in the photo.  The wings are white and the spots are pink.

I drew something!!!

"drawing", "flowers", "sketchbook"Ronni HunterComment

I never draw.  It's one of those things I have immense resistance too, which is a good indication its something I should be doing!  Years of never being happy with with my drawing have left me with a huge fear of drawing at all.  Couple that with damage to my cervical vertebrae and fibromyalgia, both of which make drawing physically painful, and its a recipe for intense avoidance.  Lately I seem to be going through quite an artistic slump.  Its not that I lack ideas, its just that all my ideas seem to bog down somewhere in the process and turn into messy disappointments.  All my of projects  for over a year have fallen flat.  At them moment I'm looking at art books for exercises that are not intimidating and might yield something I'm happy with.  Last weekend I spent some time looking through Alisa Burke's book Sew Wild and was inspired to try drawing flowers.  I've been saving this old calendar with lovely photos of flowers for this very purpose so today I dug it out and tried to draw some.  I was not aiming for really lifelike renderings, so much as looking at the flowers with a doodler's eye.  I like that - Doodler's Eye - sounds like a disease or a strange desert island!  I think next time I sit down I will color these in and try to make more cohesive pages out of them.  But I feel oddly light and carefree about just having sat down to draw.  And I don't hate these pages!  Yea!