The push is on. Shows happening this month mark my biggest and most productive time of the year. Realizing
that Calyx and Triwood shows are coming up, now is my time to get a volume of work done. Pairing that with my annual Retreat, the timing works out great.
River Rock is where I can spend an entire week without distraction painting. And I do! I am known for getting up early and staying up late to pound out more work. Surrounded by my group of incredible ladies who are my sisters in art, the setting is beautiful and peaceful, the food is most excellent, and then there is wine. Who could ask for more? When life comes at you from so many directions, it is good to take a breath and remove yourself from it once in a while.
Phil’s Restaurant Installation
It’s been a long journey through research, over 100 drawings, and multiple preliminary paintings that has brought me to the conclusion of the project for Phil’s Restaurant. The installation of seventeen paintings into their 14th Street location is complete. When Chris came to me with the project he indicated that he wanted me to urbanize my style of painting. My first thoughts on this were to incorporate some type of graffiti into my work (a style that I have been wanting to add into my portfolio for quite a while). But I didn’t stop there. I looked into examples of Urban Design as well as Urban Art. The difference between these two topics was huge. Urban Design deals more with architectural elements and the design concepts dealing with land, people, buildings, and the spaces that these elements share. Urban Art tended to be more like political statements through art. This work tended to be grittier than the kind of work I generally do.
I focused back on the graffiti again. There needed to be lots of colour and energy in these paintings. Designed for a younger more downtown feel. I added the element of buildings and structures to some of the paintings, and the graffiti and colours bind all the pieces together. The opportunity to meet with graffiti Artist Kidbelo to have a look at his process, and to understand some of the basic rules of graffiti gave me some direction. He was very clear “you are not a Graffiti Artist”. And he was right, I could not copy another artist’s work, nor could I really do true graffiti.
I took the elements of graffiti and created my own designs. Using inspiration from graffiti images I’ve collected, I came up with the shapes created through many sketches. I created my own stencils and spent the last few months with a perpetually spray painted hand.
This collection tips it’s hat to beautiful graffiti without being pretentious. I am so thankful that Phil’s was patient with my long artistic planning. But that is the way of creativity, sometimes it takes time.
Parting Thought
“It’s impossible to make life-changing decisions when you are submerged in the hectic activities of the day” Les Hewitt