Big Thanks and New Stuff!


Soooo....
Last weekend, I attended a weekend's worth of workshops hosted by the Northwest Art Alliance, the fine folks who bring us the Best of the Northwest art fairs several times a year. We talked about jurying (that thing where you send in pictures of what you hope the people who run shows really want to see and then you never know why they must hate you specifically), and thing like booth design, selling techniques, wholesaling, photoshop techniques and photography.

I want to thank everyone who volunteered their time and energy to make the weekend happen. Not just the organizers... while I know it was a huge amount of work to get it up and running, and watching Karen Seymour work the registration desk Saturday morning was a tutorial in multitasking and good humor, I want to thank all the other artists who showed up to learn but wound up accidentally teaching, either by speaking up when a presenter got stuck on a question or just by allowing an image of their work to be put up on screen and saying "Whaddaya think about this?". You never know what will happen when you just take the leap to put your work in front of strangers and hear their gut reactions to it. So thanks to everyone who showed up.

And big thanks to the Amazing John Luke for showing up with his camera and lights and  pretty much his whole photo studio to show us how to make our work look good. The man just gets the job done!

I was lucky enough to show up asking for help when there was no one else around and he wound up shooting a dozen of my pieces for me because we couldn't figure out how to get into the manual controls of my camera. Here are some of his shots (and links to them in my shop).


                   "This is my career"











               "Carmina Banana"

Comments

  1. JohnFebruary 12, 2011 at 6:11 PM

    What great works, Greg! Funny, creative, you! Thanks for sharing.

    John

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Staff Infection!

Image
A couple of weeks ago, my  friend Carol Davies called me up and asked me if I'd be willing to create a prop for the Edmonds School District musical. They're doing Disney's "Aladdin" (it seems like everyone is doing Disney's "Aladdin" this year... in fact, Edmonds is so fond of the idea, they're doing it in two different schools with two different casts! Meadowdale Middle School  This weekend! Edmonds Elementary Anyway, I needed to make the staff for Jafar, the bad guy... remember him? So I grabbed a broomstick, some wire, a gallon of Elmer's Glue, Reynolds Wrap, some paper towels and newsprint, and a little polymer clay and went to work!  But, of course it needed to be gold, so I had to make a trip to Lowe's for some spray paint...   Instant Evil! Good Luck, Everybody!
Read more

A week with the kids...

Image
This week, I had one of the best part time jobs in the world... teaching stage combat to a bunch of kids in a summer program. I had done it last summer and like last summer it was challenging and fun and over waaay too fast. Eleven kids, eight to twelve years old and five three hour sessions, to give them some knowledge of stage combat and physical comedy. They were total kids... silly, spastic, charming, needy, unbelievably creative, completely exhausting. Awkward, beautiful, fragile, clumsy, glorious kids. The first day of the session I asked them to write their names on pieces of paper, so that i could take mugshots of them and hopefully get some idea of their personalities and imaginations. Best idea I've had in a while... I had kids who knew each other, kids who hung out together, kids who'd never met before. It's amazing how fast they make friends with each other. I came in that first day and started tossing around some basketballs, hoping they might play. I shouldn...
Read more

Long Live the Queen!

Image
Have I told you I love mermaids? Maybe it's the idea of blending two different worlds, maybe it's fantasizing about being Aquaman when I was seven years old in the surf at Coney Island. But there's something wonderful about the idea of people living in a world beneath the sea. What do they used for furniture? Or telephones... well, there, at least, the answer's obvious... So the above piece came about when I found some atrocious wall deco at TJ MAXX (how often do I say that?). It was a pair of copper colored scallop shell wall hangings. I immediately saw Elizabeth the First-style frilly colors, but from another dimension.  I wanted to create that feel, but with a certain otherworldliness... if you look closely at the piece, you'll see pearls and green and brown glass gems in her hair... which isn't hair so much as flowing seaweed, with bits of gold and copper leaf pressed into the clay. I did her hair by taking leaf shapes I cut out with cookie cutters and str...
Read more