Artistic Challenges, I've Got Questions!

The month of May, the garden is in and sprouting, trees are budding, flowers are pushing forward, and I guess I'm doing the same with my art!

A Inks on small tiles

Working on bringing some variety into my art shows for this summer, Door yard Art Festival, last weekend of July I believe, Golden Unicorn Art Festival August 16 and we will see what else before the season is done.

Through the winter I've worked on larger pieces, and have really been enjoying both working large and texturing with the palette knife and Diatomaceous Earth mixed into texture paste and paint.  In fact I'm so enthralled I'm finding it hard to shift gears and create some pieces that customers have come to enjoy and expect in my work.  All my work has my familiar stamp to it, deeply textured and saturated colour even when I'm working with black and white and all the shades of grey, but the techniques vary widely.

Detail of Palette Knife work

24x12" Palette Knife Painting

Still I find myself wondering what other artist do when they discover some new avenues in technique and find themselves challenged to move away from the new explorations to continue to create and develop previous stylings for lack of a better word.  And what about clients and people who follow an artist work, are they disappointed by or intrigued by the new things they are seeing?

It's a touchy balancing act I'm finding, the danger being that when I push too hard to continue with a certain type of work I loose the ability to do it well, I'm never happy with the end results and I can't accept offering up less than my best.  Sadly, I've had to drop doing a specific type of work for just that reason, I am hopeful that given some time away from it I might one day return to it and find my groove again. Which gets me to wondering, again, have other artists gone through the same thing?

Detail of Inked tile

Detail of 48x48" Palette Knife Painting "Primal" (photo by Kellie Graham)

Art Festival Prep

It's that time of year, the art festivals are soon approaching!  Though I've only been at this a few years, I find I learn as I go along, things I need to do better with, things I need to reconsider and what feels like the eternal search for a better set up!

There's lots of great ideas and helpful equipment out there, I've invested in a few and long for others.  Aside from purchasing an E-Z Up pop up tent, one of the best things I did was buy weight bags to anchor the legs of my tent.  With our New Brunswick weather, you can have a beautiful sunny day with winds that will have you permanently attached to the legs of you tent trying to keep it from lifting off even with cinder blocks as weights! I bought these E-Z Up Shelter Weight Bags last year and it made all the difference.

I'm blessed to have a husband who teams up with me to do the art festivals, along with my kids and their families.  So Jean and I are brainstorming these days on better ways of displaying my art, and I'm working away on creating new pieces for these summertime events!