Treasury

Clare from tastesorangey has curated me into a treasury on Etsy called 'hopelessly romantic'. Treasuries are curated by Etsy members and are little themed shopping galleries. There are some lovely items in Clare's treasury - I am flattered to be in such good company! I think treasuries are only online for a short time, so here's a screengrab just in case. Thanks Clare!

Clare also makes beautiful paintings, like this one with my favourite animal!

Second Home

I'm working from a different desk today - I'm at my girlfriend's house while she's at the office. The biggest advantage to working from here is the light. I have all the windows open and it's fresh and bright in here. Perfect. I'm halfway through a new mountain scene.

Continuing my theme of thinking about houses in the past few posts, I thought I would put up a few lovely home themed prints I have seen and loved on Etsy lately. 

 

From Laura George 

From britthermann 

From Lizzy Stewart

 

From Carambatack 

From Jenaardell  

From michelleramin

 

From leah giberson

tumbling houses

Three cheers for Tumblr. I have been building up a little pool of things I find on the internet at my Tumblr page. It's particularly handy if I see something I like on an artist's blog or design blog and don't want to bookmark the whole site for whatever reason.

Here are a few images I have tumbled (is that a word?) lately:



From One Hundred Abandoned Houses




From Julie Morstad




From Wood and Paint

the crystal lake

Today I finished a new artwork for my Tiny Pieces series.

I've called it The Crystal Lake because I have been rediscovering my love of the band Grandaddy lately. The Sophtware Slump is still one of my favourite albums more than ten years after its release. I like how the entire album is themed around a concept without it being a 'concept album'. I feel like the album is set in the not too distant future in a post apocalypse where everything is pretty much the same in terms of geography and politics but all the computers and machines have broken down and the divide between human and animal habitat has ended. Squirrels make homes in refrigerators in kitchens and plants are growing out of cathode ray tube monitors in empty office blocks.

This artwork isn't about any of that. If anything this is pre-technology, not post-technology.

I've made a print of The Crystal Lake available in my shop.

new tattoo

I've been meaning to post for a month or two now about my new tattoo! Only thing holding me back was waiting til I was in Brisbane to show my Mum before I put it online for the rest of the world. Heh. She took it pretty well - good on you Mum!

This was my first tattoo, after wanting one for about four years and even chickening out in 2006 after having the picture drawn and an appointment booked. Being a pretty normal girl, I am afraid of pain and commitment, ok?

The drawing which I eventually went with was almost decided upon on a whim - I booked the appointment for the tattoo three months in advance and had an artist drawing a bear for me - however she became very busy in the lead up to my appointment and we couldn't resolve the drawing in time. So I had about three weeks to go and no drawing!

And then - brainwave. I was in Brisbane visiting my Mum and looked through some old albums of photos I took in 1999. There were so many photographs of houses. Not houses I knew, but other peoples houses I saw in the street. Then I thought about artwork I made in 2004. I put architectural drawings of houses into collages I was making for my school work at uni. Flash forward to 2009 and I was still obsessed with other peoples houses. I walked around the streets I lived in Melbourne and took pinhole photographs of houses I saw. And I realised what I really want a tattoo of is my lasting obsession of the last ten years. A house.

So, of course, when I started thinking about who would have drawn the 'right' house, I thought of Melbourne artist Catherine Campbell. A very talented artist whose work I have been admiring since I first saw it in Melbourne a few years ago. I remembered seeing an exhibition about a year ago that contained a beautiful old house adrift in a woman's hair. I found the artwork on her portfolio site, emailed her, and got her blessing to go ahead with the tattoo all in the same day.

And so a few weeks later I went in and had the house inked.

It wasn't til afterwards that I thought about how badly the tattoo could have gone if my tattooist wasn't able to render all those straight lines perfectly. Luckily, Jai is an incredible tattooist! He made a few changes to the original artwork, as you will see in the images below. The delicate shading is probably the finest alteration he made to the image, but he also added a wintery gust of snow which he wanted to reference the blue waves in the original picture.

I love my house. I have had it for about three months now but it still sometimes surprises me that I went through with it! What also surprises me is how much attention it receives. This is no exaggeration - almost every person I meet either socially or just buying milk at the local shop compliments me on it! I had three client meetings this week and every single client asked me about it. Luckily I work in an industry where it's not career limiting to have an arm tattoo!

So here it is!

And here is Catherine Campbell's original artwork:

The Mountain Waits

I have decided 2010 is the year for getting organised.

Organised with my art practice that is.

I'm working on a new series called Tiny Pieces, and I hope to exhibit it in 2010 in Melbourne.

Here's one of the works which I have finished lately:

The Mountain Waits in my Etsy shop.