Art in Action

                                
How cool is it to see the art you have done hanging so beautifully in a patrons' home. I did these six pieces as a commission two years ago and was lucky enough to be able to see and photograph them all famed and hung. I especially enjoyed the reflection that showed up in the lower image from the window. I love all the juxtaposition of religious imagery.

What does an orange tree taste like?

I have recently become intrigued by the art of cooking. NPR a few weeks ago did a story on the new cook book by Rene Redzepi called, "Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. The recipes in this book use ingredients from grass and bark to dry ice and any other thing that might even be considered to be edible. The idea is that if you are in an evergreen forest that has blue berry bushes and a stream running through it that the recipe will reflect that and taste like it's environment. So, I am not by any means a learned chef, but I wanted to try my hand at such a cool endeavor. I live in Arizona where it is hot and dry and there are orange trees everywhere. I therefor decided to make a little orange cake using orange pulp in the mix, and orange meringue topped with a dashing of ground bark from an orange tree with a little leaf to garnish. In short, it was pretty good but not by any means amazing. I would have to say though a worthy  and fun first attempt.

Kids, don't try this at home!

 The first day I worked on this painting I did not wear gloves and ended up with paint up to my elbows.

It's so much fun to get in there and paint with your hands as the paint brush. Takes me back to the days of finger painting as a child.

This isn't your water soluble, basically edible paint though.

Update

I made it into the final round of judging! My painting has been sent off to Salt Lake, with the help of some friends of my mother-in -law, and has officially arrived at the LDS Church Art Museum. I so grateful that they could take it and I didn't have to mail it. I'm sure it would have cost upwards of $100 to mail it. And a side note about getting things framed. Don't try to do it over the holidays as all the framers are on vacation and leave yourself a solid three weeks to have one made if you are going that route. As you can guess I fell into these two traps and almost didn't have a frame for my painting. With a lot of luck and searching seven stores I found a pre-made one that worked pretty darn good. Whew! Now I have to wait to hear if I got judged in to have my painting displayed at the museum....and then I wait to hear it I won anything. I think I will know the end results by April or March. I'm so excited! =)

Student Art Show

            In November we had our first Student Art Show at the Learning Foundation and Performing Arts Charter School, where I work as their art teacher/ bus driver. I teach an elective class of Junior High and High School Students and I do special projects with the 4th - 6th graders. It's a relatively small school being K-12 and only about 300 students. So, as a result, we decided to include the whole school in the art show. Any student who wanted to enter a piece could. We had just over 200 entries. Not bad! We also had a viewers choice award contest so the students could have the chance to win prizes and, we had a silent auction. The silent auction was designed as a fundraiser for the art department as we get very little from the school for the art classes. We were a little nervous at how well the show would go since it was the first one we had ever had but, it was quite well received. We had a lot of people come and awesome support when it came to the silent auction. All the pieces that were up for auction were sold! Yay! We are looking forward to doing another Art Show this spring as well and making it even better than the last one!