Amnesty International Portraits Show

Well, it is time to get to work.

Two years ago I participated in our local Amnesty International group's Portrait Show, and this month they are hosting another show. I'm in. The show is about detainees at Guantanamo. My person is Adil Abdul Hakim, who is a Chinese Muslim now living in Albania after four years in Guantanamo. It is a long, fascinating story that Human Rights Watches all over the world have been taking care to note. The thing is the Chinese government is also apparently likely to put him in jail, and so he, and some other Muslim Chinese men with China/Guantanamo histories have moved to Albania.

The thing that strikes me is this man's move from homelessness to home - something that resonates a chord in me.

And so:

(For some reason I am painting this time...)

Here goes:

The piece will be 24" x 24". In this photo I had just painted the canvas. This computer isn't showing the color quite correctly... the blues are soft, the whites are warm. I am enjoying them immensely. I added all the colors at once in preparation for the next step.

In this photo I am in the process of pouncing the wet paint with a rolled and twisted pad of paper towel. The colors blends and mixed perfectly. I was delighted.

Here I am painting the repetitive shapes with primer. They will lay on top of the painting in a grid. You'll see that there is a bit of texture and wrinkle to the "house".

This is the ripped tissue paper squares that I am painting into the surface.Can you see it? All this white on white...I set it all out to dry and in my next post I will show you the houses with some color and collage.

photographs! ... ?

Here are the iris from the other morning, I hope:

Yay! It worked! All I needed was high speed.

O.K. then, Here are the pictures of my foam board projects:

This first one is of the carving itself. As I said the other day, I only had a rather old exacto knife with me that day and this carving was my result.

But then I took it home and spray painted it. Spraypaint melts foamboard. Eew, environmentally speaking, but kind-of interesting as an effect.

Well, that's about all the blog excitement that I can stand for one day: learning how to upload pictures. See ya.

carved heart

Well, I carved as best as I could, but what with one thing and another, today was not the day to quiz the hardware folk, so I used a rather dull exacto and was somewhat pleased. See here:

Iris Morning: Project Day

Oooh! And what a gorgeous day it is too! Midsummer days at their best... clear and sunny and full of ... full of ... everything for us. I have been stunned by the beauty of our iris this last week. This precise blue-purple against the early green of summer keeps catching my breath. And we have so many, many of them. Yay. O. Yay

So: today's project: I have seen foam insulation board carved and painted into shapes and plaques, and I have tried to mimic the look but so far have managed to make a miserable mess of airborne blue bits which take me ages to clean up. So we will make a pilgrimage to the hardware store and see what ideas that they might have. I have been pondering the question of "What are my symbols?", and got to thinking that this medium might be a good one to work on some answers.

Breakfast done we will go draw some iris and then query the gentle foam board proprietor folk and then come home to make a mess, uh, I mean art.

I worked this morning on my beaded ribbon for the book. This is the angels one. I had an idea yesterday for the book. Less words, more art. I think that that might work.