Enticing and Entertaining
August 23, 2017
Inspirational Art, Polymer community news
The art jewelry at these events is also a big draw. There is nothing quite like seeing masterful polymer work in person.
Here is a gorgeous piece by Bonnie Bishoff. She wore it to the final gala event and I just could not stop looking at the delicate forms and sunset-like colors. The picture (and the poor lighting in these places) doesn’t quite do it justice.
Another bonus to coming to these events is the local color. In this case, Sherman Oberson, a board member of the IPCA and a local Pennsylvania resident, treated a small handful of us to a tour of his insanely packed and ever-entertaining collection of flea market and thrift store finds. We did this, in part, to honor Nan Roche whose birthday it was. A huge collector of the curious and visually enticing herself, it was a perfect birthday outing for her and an immensely entertaining evening for those of us who got to tag along.
Poke around on Instagram and Facebook for more on Sherman’s place and other Synergy events.
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A Choir of Angels
June 22, 2017
Inspirational Art
Exploring technique and design doesn’t ever end, or at least I don’t think it should. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working with a material, there is always more to learn. Barbara McGuire is a true and long standing polymer pioneer who may often return to signature techniques but she keeps expanding on what she has done, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in big leaps.
This collection of beads is one of her subtler explorations. Barbara has been making face canes for ages but she keeps changing up what she does with them. The angelic looking collection here gets its ethereal feel from the use of translucent wings and background cane slices. Past variations were commonly surrounded by opaque slices and balanced or radial backgrounds. The more freeform application here adds to the otherworldly feel of these little angels.
Barbara posts most of her recent work on her Facebook page while her products and news can usually be found on her website.
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Body of Work
June 20, 2017
Inspirational Art
Looking over a collection of work can tell you quite a bit about an artist and what intrigues them. The posts this week will give us a chance to consider, in a more complete and varied way, what an artist might be doing or be after in particular types of work.
Carole Monahan-Kampfe recently posted some rather intriguing pieces in what she refers to as her Steampunk collection but instead of jewelry, it looks like we are seeing a lot of ornaments. We are looking at Swellegant treatments (click the ad link below for more on this fascinating stuff) which make for some very yummy textures but the various shapes and variation on an ornament is what is most captivating about this work.
Although she is calling it steampunk and the influence of that aesthetic is there, many of the common motifs are, gratefully, missing and we can enjoy the exploration of the surface treatment and the manipulation of the ornament forms. I love the negative space in the ones with the floating centers and then those forms that are folding in on themselves which she calls Infinity Orbs. No standard ornament forms here either. Carole actually looks to be taking not the motifs and objects from the Steampunk arena but rather the inventive nature it is supposed to be representative of. Regardless, the choice of shapes and decorative touches are beautiful and more so in a collection like this where the various take on the elements and forms can be compared and contrasted.
The orbs at least, she lists as being made with Makin’s clay which is an air dry clay, rather than polymer but this could all be done with polymer as well of course. Carole just likes to try all kinds of things out as you can see on her Flickr photostream–another method of looking at an artist’s collection of work and over time at that. In this collection though, she seems to have really hit her stride and I hope she keeps playing with these ideas.
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Working on the Inside
June 17, 2017
Inspirational Art
Another way to push the disk element in strung jewelry design is to create designs on those inside surfaces. This might push you to design the disks in such a way as to open up space between them so that the work on the inside could be seen. That might present a bit of a challenge but it will likely present some interesting options for added accents and forms.
Margit Bohmer did just that. Her solution to show off the intricate and highly colorful faces of her disks was to slightly dome them and have them stacked in pairs with the concave sides in, allowing an angled view to all the beautiful color and textures she worked into them. It looks like quite a bit of work too. I just love seeing this kind of dedication and commitment to a piece. Each bead face is different and could stand on its own but all together, they create an engrossing piece that will probably take the owner years to become familiar with all its varied surfaces.
A riot of color and texture is a signature of Margit’s and she never leaves us wanting for more of either. See her latest work on her Flickr photostream.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose a basic or commonly used design and push it. By sketching, planning, or just playing with your materials, change the form or the way this basic design is constructed as far as you can until you come up with something that intrigues and excites you then create your own original work from the ideas you came up with.
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The Disk Cubed
June 15, 2017
Inspirational Art
Let’s move on from the ‘ordinary’ disk necklace and really push what these could be. First of all, who says they need to be round? Or strung on their center sitting neatly one on top of the other? Well, no one, that’s who.
Silvia Ortiz de la Torre goes completely off the disk reservation by squaring off the standard disk necklace element and taking full control of their positioning. This necklace is getting so far from a disk that I bet some of you are thinking it’s not a disk necklace at all. And maybe not but the stacking and repetition of form is the same and this is a good example of where an idea might start with some common or basic design and really veer off in very exciting directions, ending in a place barely recognizable from where it started. I don’t know that Silvia started with the idea of disks but she could have. And so can you start from a well used (or over-used) form or basic design and end up somewhere quite different. The thing is, it would have been hard to get to that cool and very original design without that common or basic starting point.
This piece is several years old but Silvia still loves disks and stacking but she is taking things in a very different direction these days. See how she has journeyed from pieces like this to her big intricate disks display in her Flickr photostream and her Etsy shop.
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Disk Arrangements
June 13, 2017
Inspirational Art
Disc beads are fantastic for the complexity they can create just by sheer numbers. They also pull the design away from any one bead and put the focus on how they work together. Employing Skinner blends to create the series of well-arranged colors on this necklace, Spain’s Carmen Morente del Monte, develops a rather striking look with the common stacked disk necklace design as the basis for her composition.
It is not that we haven’t seen quite a few Skinner disc arrangements but this one is rather intriguing with its wide array of colors that still somehow conveys a sense of quiet coherence. I believe that is primarily due to the muted, natural tone of the colors. Their thick spacers subtly echo the surrounding color while their variations trail off to long stacks of warm grays. I think the choice of gray rather than black or white or simply more of the colorful blends for the back half of the bead string is actually what makes this piece work so well. The gray creates a kind of neutral background for the colors to contrast with but the contrast is a gentle one which is also echoed at points in the front beads where the blends go to gray.
I was just having a conversation this weekend about how people steer away from anything well used believing their work won’t be appreciated unless it’s wholly original but how far from the truth that is. Doing something really, really well, even when it has elements seen many times before, is a far bigger and more difficult accomplishment than striving for something purely original. I think this necklace is just such an example.
You can find more of Carmen’s well thought out pieces in her Etsy shop and her Pinterest boards.
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The Many Faces of Glass Beads
June 10, 2017
Inspirational Art
To round out this week’s quick focus on beads, I thought I’d share focal beads in another medium that is very well-known for them–glass.
Glass artists have some very particular and, literally, inflexible limitations and yet they create these extremely intricate and amazing beads. They do get to work with super clear transparency–a characteristic of their medium that they use to great advantage–which is something that is difficult to achieve in polymer, but their forms and patterns are something that, I think, could be a gold mine of inspiration and a jumping off point for ideas in polymer that go beyond the basic and common beads seen in polymer.
Here are just four examples of the intricacy and beauty in glass bead making today. Starting from top left is a bead created by Leah Nietz, top right is Lisa Fletcher, bottom left is Andrea Guarino, and bottom right is Ikuyo Yamanaka. You can click on each artist’s name to reach their shop or website to look further into what they create. You can also immerse yourself in glass focal beads by putting that very phrase into a Pinterest, Google Images, Etsy, Flickr, or even Instagram.
Weekly Inspiration Challenge: Choose your favorite image posting service, such as those just listed above, and enjoy the art and inspiration that comes up when you search for “focal beads”. Choose a couple of images and try to determine what you like best about the bead or beads and then figure out how to recreate those characteristics in polymer. Hopefully that leads you to some original and very fulfilling polymer bead explorations.
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A Bead Cubed
June 8, 2017
Inspirational Art
How about just a little bead beauty from the consistently wonderful Sarah Shriver today while I amble down the road?
Six canes constructed into a cube that is both turned on its side and has had its corner’s tweaked makes for a beautiful simple bead design. Just those two changes to the upright and steady cube has created movement due to its relative instability, facing the world with but one point down, and direction since the slight sweep of the sides slides our eye out to the point of the cube corners and beyond. And let’s not forget the lovely lines of the canes themselves that add to both the movement and directing of the viewers eyes beyond the constrains of the cube.
Apparently, Sarah will be teaching this Celtic cane on the Alaska Polymer Clay Cruise, the “Clayditarod” coming up next month. I was not able to discern if spaces are left for what is certain to be an amazing polymer adventure but you can check out the details and query as needed on the cruise website here. And for more splendid Sarah Shriver work, jump over to her website here.
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Bead Break
June 6, 2017
Inspirational Art
This will be a simple, and hopefully simply delightful, week as I am traveling or in the midst of preparing to travel and will have to be brief. But I have had the idea of the ‘bead’ on my mind. That sounds pretty basic, I know, but for art jewelry, the bead–be it a simple, plain spacer or an extravagant focal piece–is the most common single element created and thus, has a pretty highly esteemed place in the world of adornment. So let’s take a closer look at some very well-considered and lovingly created beads.
These beauties are cane constructed by the ever clever Ivy Niles of iKandi Clay. Canes takes their place on center stage as well as energetically running around the circumference for an intricate and rather mesmerizing look.
If you are partial to either a well-done cane or intricate, take a break to look through Ivy’s her Etsy shop and her website.
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Last month was a very long month. So much was going on only now can I see the light at the end of the tunnel, a glimmer of hope, a spark of optimism that all of our special projects will be wrapping up. So in honor of those glimmers and lights, how about a few slightly blingy things this week?
We’ll start with some new Donna Greenberg earrings. Seeing a new piece of hers always brightens my day. And I do love those cool jewel tone shimmers. These are not overly complicated but I am very much for simplicity right now. The shiny side kind of hangs out there like a beacon of some kind.
But I also wanted to share this because look … she made her own stand, or jewelry show furniture, as she calls it. How fun and fabulous is that?
See what else Donna has been up to on her Facebook page, where I found these, and her website.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Create your own style of displays for your work, something completely different from what Donna made. Displays can be artistic, but be careful with heavy patterns and colors brighter than your work. You want your work to stand out, not your stands. Search online for DIY display ideas to help you out. These kinds of projects are prefect for dipping into your scrap bin. You can paint or powder mud colored clay displays to bring them back to life.
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Some days, I just can’t believe how insanely lucky I am to be doing what I do. A few days ago I was blessed with these gifts from Germany. These are not just any gifts. If you read the Muse’s Corner article by Anke Humpert in the Winter 2015 issue of The Polymer Arts, or read the blog post about Sigrid Smolka last November, then you know some of this story.
Anke brought to our attention what must be the very first book of polymer techniques, written in 1974, and I was ever so thrilled that we were able to share Sigrid’s story. But now, I get to actually hold the book in my hands. I am so thrilled and have been just bursting with the implications of what I have so I just had to share.
Sigrid contacted me a couple of months ago and said she wanted to send me her book and a few other things. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I thanked her profusely and patiently waited. Poor Sigrid has been having intermittent health issues so she was not able to get them off right away and eventually employed her friend Theresa to pack the intended items up for me.
Well, not only did she send the polymer book but also her book on air dry clay techniques and three of her polymer pieces from her years creating in the medium. And … she also sent prints and cards with her more recent computer paintings. Note the print on the left has a March 2016 date. Even with her ups and downs these days, she is still creating and sharing her art. I am amazed by this woman.
Since it seems too selfish to keep these to myself, I will be bringing the book and her polymer pieces with me to Eurosynergy in Bordeaux to share. I assume many people in the community are like me and would be thrilled to see pieces of our past in person. That is also why I sent Ellen Prophater and Sue Sutherland at Creative Journeys Sigrid’s contact information, so hopefully her work can be included in their amazing retrospective collection. It just wouldn’t seem complete without this earliest pioneer included.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Can you recall a piece or an artist from when you started in your present medium that greatly influenced your work? Can you recall what it was about their work that inspired you so greatly? Take that inspiring element or your sense of the artist’s work and design or create a piece that pays homage or utilizes what you got from them without copying anything they did.
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Read MoreA quick note on the Polymer Journey 2016 book … we’ve been able to extend the introductory sale through Friday, so if you haven’t reserved your copy or were waiting for payday, this is your chance! Go to the website today before the price goes up this weekend.
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here are timeless techniques as well as timeless art. This easy but impressive looking technique, painting with mica powders on molded clay, was posted by Lilin in 2008. This particular construction harkens back to the art deco style with the enameled look of the butterfly wings against the stylized faces. It gives them an antique air. Lilin credits Donna Kato as her inspiration although she doesn’t say if that was from a book or class. But she gives her own brief instructions and tips, enough for you to get some ideas and run with a new design of your own.
The instructions for these are on this blog post. Lilin hasn’t posted since 2009 and I couldn’t find any reference to her moving her work to somewhere else. I am always curious how an artist progresses. It’s both encouraging and fascinating to see people improve their skills and to see what directions they chose. So I am curious. If anyone knows what Lilin is up to now, let me know and I’ll post an update here.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Find a new way to apply an old technique. Look through your older project books, back issues of magazines, or your favorite tutorial sites and find something you haven’t done in a while or never tried and use it with your present forms and color palettes. What do you do differently today that you didn’t when the tutorial was published or when you first used it? It’s interesting to see how your approach has shifted.
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Read MoreOkay … a couple little notes first …
Thank you to all of you who jumped in and pre-ordered a Polymer Journeys book. It was very heartening to see how many people are interested in this kind of book and I so hope you all enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. If you wanted to get in on the discounted pricing that we have through the 30th, just head over to the Polymer Journeys website.
For those of you who get this by email, you may have noticed a change in the look of your emails the last time or two. We moved to a new, more stable email service for you. You now have “like” buttons, so you can share it on 252 different social networks and online sharing services (Never knew there were so many!). Not all of them will transfer the image, if that is what you want to share, but you can click the post’s title in the email and it will take you to the post where you can share the URL address instead. If you have any questions or comments about the new format, just reply to the email and let us know!
This book has raised a number of discussions about looking at work retrospectively. I wanted to create Polymer Journeys as a series as a way to document what has been going on in polymer art as well as give us a more concrete way to understand where it’s going. The internet has endlessly muddled our sense of what is happening today because if something was posted anywhere at any point since the internet went public, it could pop up on someone’s screen for the first time, and it will seem like something new.
This mosaic is an example of something that came up while I was doing some research online that I had never seen before this past week. I thought it a beautiful example of how polymer can be used as a material for a traditional art form, giving the artist a bit more latitude and ease in creating the tiles for a traditional mosaic application. However, Geena Bregar, the creator of the mosaic, posted this some 13 years ago. I had never seen it and would have been at a loss as to guess its age if it weren’t for the dating of the blog post.
Of course, the question is, does it matter if we know when something was made? In many ways, no, it doesn’t. The strongest art continues to inspire, draw admiration, or causes someone to stop and ponder years, decades, or centuries after its creation. But I think the history of an art form, an artist, or even a piece of art itself has stories that we can learn quite a bit from or at least find wonder in them. I’ve been talking about how polymer has really reached out and touched so many other forms of art and is being used in conjunction with so many materials, but pieces like this are a good reminder that this influence and creative use of polymer is nothing new.
I think, really, polymer always been that kind of material. It’s just hard to get a good perspective on when and how this reach and influence occurred. If the Polymer Journeys books do well, perhaps we’ll be able to have a clear and educational perspective alongside a great collection of beautiful work to inspire us for years to come.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Look back at your oldest pieces in whatever medium you first created original works. Do you see new and inspiring elements even now? Take an element–a form, the way you used line, a technique, or color palette and combine it with your advanced knowledge and skill in a new design.
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We set aside our usual art discussions today to announce the first big book project for TPA and the associated book publishing arm, Tenth Muse Publications–Polymer Journeys 2016 is just about ready for you! The release is set for April 14th.
This retrospective and peek-behind-the-scenes book is in its last phase of preparation for printing! Now that we have a publication date, we are offering you very anxious and enthusiastic folks a steep discount and a bonus to thank you for your patience and to give you the opportunity to get your copy straight off the press and into the mail!
We have an exclusive pre-sale price for just this one week. If you purchase the book on our website by March 30th, you get 30% off the cover price of $22.95! That’s all of $15.95 plus shipping.
It is also available in a digital format, which will be $12.95, but this week you can reserve your copy for just $9.95.
But wait … there’s more! (I’ve always wanted to say that!) I also worked out a way to reward our most enthusiastic supporters … be one of the first 250 people to pre-order a print copy and get a companion digital copy for FREE! Just put both a print and digital copy into your cart, then use this code to discount the digital copy: 1st250. (You’ll know others beat you to it if you get a note saying the discount is no longer valid.)
Want more info on what this book is? Go to the website here. In the meantime, enjoy the gorgeous cover art by Kathleen Dustin (top) and Jon Stuart Anderson (bottom).
We’ll be here if you have any questions for us. Otherwise, have a beautiful Spring and Easter weekend!
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Onto more thoughts of Spring. We had a perfect Spring day yesterday but today we are in the middle of a blizzard, so I went off to find something cheerful and found some fun sculptures, wall art, and jewelry by Melissa Terlizzi. Her creatures are beautifully sculpted, but it’s the situations she puts them in that really made me smile. This here is not the most unusual place to find a tree frog but it would kind of startle you to find one on your indoor plants. She also has frog peeking out of terrariums, mice in the pantry, and beetles in books. There is a bright playfulness in the faces of her creatures and in the way she sets up the shots. Many of her compositions, like this one here, are predominantly constructed from polymer clay components, but many others use natural settings and common household items to bring out the story.
Take a break from your common or gray day and peruse her Flickr pages for some Spring cheer.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Create or adapt a piece of yours to live in an unusual place. Hang charms in the kitchen cupboards, replace blind pulls with beautiful focal beads, put a cute sculpted creature in the medicine cabinet (who doesn’t need a bit of cheer when opening the medicine cabinet?), glue tiles to the inside of the mailbox door, etc. Look for the most unusual and surprising place that will delight your family and visitors.
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First, my apologies, to those of you who get this by email or RSS feed, for the erratic delivery last week. We had some odd technical issues, which we did finally resolve. We’ll be moving the email and RSS to a more stable service this week, so if there are any other oddities please forgive us and know that it is all in order to get you your thrice-weekly dose of art and design chatter as promised.
So yes, a few new things are on the horizon and it would seem that three of those things will be showing their new faces this week. One will be the new blog delivery service, so you’ll see that here. I will wait until Wednesday to reveal more. Onto art now!
We are not the only ones with new stuff to share this first week of Spring. I was so thrilled to see these beauties from Daniela D’Uva, who I have long admired for her dynamic wire and polymer work. She took a break from it for a couple of years so I have missed seeing her bright and swirly pieces, then these popped up on Flickr this weekend. She’s built polymer swirls around beads of glass as a base to show off layers of the translucent canes she’s been creating. It’s a perfect homage to the new season up here in the northern hemisphere and a pretty sight for a Monday, don’t you think?
If you don’t recall Daniela’s prior pieces, a vast collection of her work, old and new, can be found on Flickr and on her Facebook page.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Let the season direct your muse! What is it about the change of season that you notice most or most enjoy? Keep in mind, this does not have to be nature inspired. It could be firing up the grill for the first time this year or the return of Peeps to market shelves. It could be that urge to clean out the studio or get that shorter hair cut. Focus on the feeling these thoughts give you and see if you can translate it into color and form for a simple homage of your own.
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Letting the material determine the outcome of a piece by allowing it to flow and mix as it wants is an approach that can be used in a variety of mediums including polymer, as we saw on Wednesday.
This beautiful image here, as I am sure you surmised, is not polymer. It’s not alcohol inks or watercolor or any of the traditional mediums. Although it may not be surprising to find out it is encaustic wax, the way the artist gets these ethereal forms and textures just might be surprising. So, instead of listening to me blather about the technique, I will suggest you slake your curiosity by watching this wonderful video the artist, Alicia Tormey, recently produced to show her technique. It’s a beautifully done video, but it is nothing next to the gorgeous texture of the pieces she creates.
Visit this link for the video on her home page, then stay and investigate her website and the wonderful colors and forms she creates for her wall art.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Starting with a single white, translucent, or light-colored sheet of clay, work the surface with spontaneous, uncontrolled additions. Crumple paper or foil and press the texture into it. Drop inks onto it, splatter paint or rub gilders paste onto it. Spritz with alcohol and water and let inks and paints run, then dab or rub off spots with a bit of towel. Sprinkle mica powder or oxide powder over it or randomly adhere metal leaf. Do as much or as little of this as you like until you see a surface that pleases you. If you go a little overboard, let any liquids dry then roll the sheet one step down on the pasta machine once or twice. Pick out parts you like to make polymer elements for jewelry or add to the sheet to develop a piece of wall art.
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The wide open canvas idea that the Fimo 50 project brought up on Monday got me looking around at polymer painting. It is not an easy thing to literally paint with polymer, and sometimes I think that there isn’t really any advantage to painting in polymer other than to see if it can be done. I mean, if you are familiar with the wide world of acrylics, you know so much of what we do as painting with polymer can be done in acrylics. Thick dimensionality, rich color, marbling, layering, and even sculpting is possible with acrylic paint mediums. And you don’t have to cure it. But then you see a piece like this and yes, the rippling effect would be harder to achieve in polymer. It does have its place. It just depends on the hands it is in.
The hands this was in were Gloria Nilsson’s. She works almost exclusively in paint now, along with creating some jewelry, so I don’t have too much information on what she did here. This is from an old web page site on the piece:
“I developed this rolling wave technique in several of my polymer clay jewelry pieces first exhibited in September 2010 at the Killingworth Library. The process of painting with clay requires an artist to be open to the clay itself. The design of the wave is established, but the detail and the movement is dictated by the spontaneous color mixing process. No two will ever be alike.”
She goes on to say that she planned on exploring this further, but I could not find any other polymer paintings. It was certainly a beautiful start to this kind of ‘painting’, although it might more accurately be called construction or layering. But let’s forget categories and labels. When texture and imagery blend so well that you get a little lost as you look at it, you know the piece has transcended begin defined by its medium and any associated labels. I think this is one of those pieces.
Inspirational Challenge of the Day: Work with very, very thin sheets of clay and layer them so the edges form the lines, shapes, and texture of the piece you are creating. It is okay if this process leads you in another direction. Just follow your muse.
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