“Instructors Show” at the North Hills Art Center

Wow! Another event in the North Hills! Since I only added the Norbth Hills Art Center (NHAC) to my set of teaching venues at the start of 2017, this month provides me with my first opportunity to participate in their annual “Instructor’s Show.”

This post will let you know about the opening of the show, which is, umm, today, Saturday, July 15, from 7 to 9 pm! That just happens to be a few days before I’ll manage to sort out a few specifics of my fall schedule but, as usual, I’ll add them to the bar down the right side of this blog in just a few weeks.

Now, if you’ve already taken a class with me, you probably know that most of them are single-session events: you complete the making of a piece during the class, I fire and tumble-polish it afterwards, and it is returned to the class site about a week later (I am specific about timing in each individual class, depending on my schedule, how much firing time is involved, expected road construction delays, etc.).

And I’ll be offering my two button classes (silver or bronze) exactly that way. In the silver-buttons class, we will make ones that you attach via holes in the surface of the buttons. In the bronze one, you will have the option of using holes or of adding a shank on the back!

Then, the other classes I have on NHAC’s fall schedule are a pair of multi-session, multi-project events: one each in silvers (both fine and sterling silver) and base metals (several bronze formulas and copper). We’ll start out with the basics and add new techniques as we go along. I will fire pieces between classes and bring them to the next session. About half the projects will be similar in the two versions although, with the different metals, the results will be very different. So if you choose to take both, you’ll be able to reinforce your skills in slightly different ways. The other half will be entirely different, chosen to take advantage of the differences among the metals. The base-metals course will have one additional session so we will have enough time to cover a few extra finishing techniques appropriate for those.

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Note:

I’d’ve sworn I’d queued up a post about this show, but it hasn’t appeared and I don’t see it now, so I must have dreamt that post!

Thus this last-minute re-do is short notice for the opening, but the show itself runs through July 28. I’m posting it from a train as I head off for some family-time this weekend. I hope to update it with photos for these classes, not the one from a different class I taught last year at the Artsmiths of Pittsburgh (just so there’d be something pretty with this post), once I get back and onto my main computer.

So if you are interested in any of those class ideas, feel free to check back for updates, and let me know if you have any questions or other requests. What’s in this instructors show is what I’ll be teaching at NHAC this fall, but I’m still working on my schedule for south and east of the city. I’ll be announcing the rest of my fall schedule in just a few weeks.

Two More Urban Flowers Burst Into Public View!

I seem to be talking about a lot of events in Pittsburgh’s North Hills lately. And now that summer is really here, it seems well past any reasonable point to continue procrastinating about another event up that way which started in mid-spring.

The delay: I can find photos of only two (of the four) relevant pieces. I remember taking photos of the other two, but for some reason now can’t find them, haven’t found the time to really look everywhere both possible and impossible, so let’s just go with what we have!

Four of my pieces are (and have been since mid-spring, thus the selections & their titles) in a “traveling show” that is on display at the Northland Public Library through the end of August!

Two (shown here) are pendants from my Urban Flowers collection. Neither one turned out the way I’d originally intended. Both pieces ended up, instead, telling me what they wanted to be!

Early Spring Bud (aka Rainbow Bud with Pollen)	She Loved Seeing the Flower Spring from the Pavement

I’d imagined the the larger, pastel-rainbow piece of glass going into a large flower. What with one technical issue after another, minor ones individually but still one after another of them, it ended up insisting it didn’t want to be overwhelmed by a lot a silver but, instead, to clearly be the focal point on a bud, just beginning to open, with a little bit of pollen just starting to appear. I’m OK with that.

The bezel around the red glass is exactly as I’d planned, and I was thinking I might use it on one of my other pieces inspired by Hepatica flowers. But I guess I hadn’t paid close-enough attention, because the flower-base I’d planned to use shrank just a tiny bit more than what would work with that piece of glass. It would have been relatively easy to “adjust” things to force all the pieces to fit. But I set the glass and bezel down for a moment to think about the best way to approach that fix and, when I looked up, I saw this flower next to them! Though I’d had other plans for it, I set the center-piece down and it fit in its space so perfectly that I said, “OK, if that’s where you want to go, that’s where you’ll go!”

The other two entry pieces on display (the ones with their pics missing) are movement-earrings: not the ones with layered elements that I call spinners that rotate around a horizontal axis, but the ones I sometimes also call spinners but also refer to as having movement that will rotate around a vertical axis.n Those links don’t go to photos of the pieces in the Northland show but, instead, the second one links to a different pair from several years ago with a comparable mechanism.

It’s been so much fun making all of those (and more in those series) that the seasons have seemed to be speeding by! What about you this year? Please let me know in the comments! Should any of my (local) readers find themselves in that area, please do check out the show and let me know that too!

2017 Martinis with Monet

For the second year in a row, the Cranberry Township Community Chest (CTCC) and the Cranberry Artists Network (CAN) are partnering on a show in the Cranberry Municipal Building in conjunction with the Cranberry Township Community Days.

Now the Community Days outdoor festivities will be on July 13, 14, and 15.

But that all kicks off with a special evening on Wednesday, July 12, with the opening reception for the art show, Martinis with Monet. From July 13 through August 10, admission to the show will be free. But the opening reception serves as a fund-raiser for CCTC, and a limited number of tickets are available in advance for $10 through their web site or at the Municipal Building Service Center (with just under a week now left), or for $15 at the door that evening.

And I’m thrilled to have had two pieces accepted for this year’s show!

One of them is another piece from my latest round of Three Rivers pendants. I didn’t make this one specifically for this show but I had been thinking what I might enter during a discussion of the movement and light in Monet’s art. My original design for this piece did include the movement of rivers with the sparkly light of the faceted ruby. But it was the surprising gift from my kiln, of the dappled surface-coloring hinting at sunshine and passing clouds on the ruby-side, that made this piece seem an obvious choice for this show! Because of this side, I’ve titled it, When the Sun Breaks Through the Clouds.

More colors from that kiln-gift are shown in the small, plain photo of the “other” side of that piece. Bronze firings can yield a wide range of surprises: sometimes the results cry out to be polished to a gorgeous, high shine everywhere, while other times they yield a stunning range of colors in random patterns (like this, with an upside-down rainbow in the midst of a crimson field). Though some people report that they find that unpredictability to be off-putting, for me it is part of what makes bronzes so addictive to work with!

The colors in the other piece I had accepted for this show come not so much from the firing, but from the underlying colors of various metals, stones, and glass of the piece.

I made the focal bead, the one that generated The Artist’s Impression of Warm Blankets as the title of this necklace (Monet –> impressionism: get it?!), several years ago. It’s a large, hollow bead, with layers of copper wrapped around rose bronze wrapped around yellow bronze, all with various woven textures. It was originally made as part of a series of exercises exploring the various shrinkage rates of different metal formulas in the construction of hollow structures. As I built it, I was thinking far more about those issues that about its actual design but, as soon as I pulled it out of the kiln, I saw myself pulling a (tiny…) bundle of freshly-washed blankets out of the dryer!

Most of the focal beads I made remain just that, the focus of attention, with little to nothing else to distract the viewer’s eye from them. I strung this one on some beading wire, added a clasp, and wore it myself a few times, thinking it needed something else and waiting for it to tell me what it wanted. At a recent bead show, I saw both the stones and the chain, and they immediately reminded me of the features at a cabin I shared years ago with friends on a series of late-autumn trips, where warm blankets were much appreciated as the temperatures dropped at night, and that was it: I’d found what I needed to complete this piece.

I sure hope that one or both of these pieces will find someone else’s heart to warm now too!