Drawing Workshop in Salida, Colorado

I'm delighted to announce a 4-session Drawing Essentials class at the SteamPlant in Salida, Colorado. Class will meet Tuesday mornings in October, and all materials are included in the $125 class fee. Such a deal!

Register at the SteamPlant in person or by phone: 719-530-0933.

Field Sketching 101 with the Central Colorado Conservancy

Pretty much anything can happen with the weather in a Rocky Mountain spring. Twice last week I found myself making long drives in bad weather: wet, sloppy snow that thankfully didn't pile up much on the roads but which compromised visibility and gave me splitting headaches.

But I remain convinced that sparkling days are just around the corner, and what better way to celebrate outdoor adventures than with a field sketching workshop?

I've teamed up with the Central Colorado Conservancy to offer a half-day Field Sketching 101 class at the Boxcar Ranch in Chaffee County on Saturday, May 13. If you're in the area and interested in learning new skills or dusting off some old ones, I encourage you to grab a sketchbook and join us.

Registration can be made through the Conservancy, more information is available at the Central Colorado Conservancy website.

Workshop Weekend Wonders

This past weekend an intrepid group joined me at Patti Vincent Studio here in Salida for two days of twisting their brains around linocuts and reduction printing. I had an ambitious schedule for them, but they rose to the challenge and, quite frankly, impressed the heck out of me. By Sunday afternoon I was joking that I felt a bit redundant because they were all hard at work doing great things and I was just hovering. 

Take a look!

Laurie even tackled rainbow rolls!

Gayle could have a future in surface design, don't you think? 

Fay explored a combination of reduction and masking to create wonderful
color studies. Patti's pooches-in-progress and Marjie's landscape share the wall.

No fear of color use here! Bold and beautiful!

Many thanks to Patti Vincent Studio for hosting us, and huge thanks to "my" students for their energy, enthusiasm, good humor, and inspiring work. You've all inspired me to get back in to my own studio and back to work as soon as possible!

2-Day Linocut Workshop in Salida, Colorado

Hey, Coloradans! By popular demand, I've scheduled a 2-day reduction linocut workshop here in the Heart of the Rockies. Space is limited to 8 participants and we're over half full already, so if you're interested let me know ASAP!

(Details will be easier to read if you click on the image to embiggen it!)

Click to embiggen

Roll(er) in the New Year!

The studio is tidy, the recycling has been taken to the recycling center. The Yay Jar has been emptied and it's ready for all the good things to come. It must be a new year!

As my first act of 2017... I took a walk.

The Arkansas River, between Sands and Frantz Lakes, looking to the
Sawatch Range and the Continental Divide.

I had extra motivation for getting out early. Since mid-December our little Sands Lake State Wildlife Area has been hosting an extremely rare bird for these parts: long-tailed duck.

Handsome visitor, a male long-tailed duck

The long-tail is a sea duck, typically spending its winters in protected bays of the Atlantic coast. That's a long way from Colorado, and while it's not unknown for one to turn up occasionally on the big reservoirs of the eastern plains, a mountain bird gets a lot of folks' knickers in a twist. Luckily he stuck around for our Christmas Bird Count (December 17), and for the last few days I've been crossing my fingers extra-hard that he'd stay here until the new year. Hoorah! He did!

I've been a bit obsessed with this guy... he's so darn beautiful. He's been hard to photograph, partly because he tends to stay beyond the reach of my camera lens and partly because he's just so busy all the time. He probably spends as much time below the surface of the water as he does above it.

But I've got a few ideas for linocuts that I'd like to pursue, and now I can't decide if the subject of my next print should be the merganser idea I've been itching to start or Mr. Handsome Long-tail. Art world problems.

Since I'm stymied by indecision, I took time in the last few days of 2016 to make a small lino of my friend Sue's pug, Pipsi. These days Pipsi is a mature dog of many talents, but this print takes us back to her puppy days.

I've also got a little cat image drawn up and ready to go, so I can waffle about a larger piece for a few more days.

"Pipsi," reduction linocut, 5" x 5"

Whatever I decide to do next will have to wait until the end of the week, however. Tomorrow I'm off to Denver for the opening of the Coors Western Art Show. It will be a whirlwind couple of days, since I have to get back right away to get ready to leave again next week, but I'm looking forward to catching up with colleagues and collectors at this amazing event.

My work will be in the Club portion of the show, which means that after the opening it will be moved to the gallery at the National Western Club. Although the Club is "members only," you can still get in to see the work if you're visiting the National Western Stock Show January 7-22. Just ask at the Coors Show gallery and they'll let you visit as a guest.

My 2017 is roll(er)ing off to a fast start! Thank you for being part of the adventure, I hope the new year is a great one for all of us.

Linocut in Progress: Blue, blue, blue

And then more blue.

The image I'm working on is inspired by a photo I took several winters ago on the Phantom Canyon road below Cripple Creek. I like the pattern of light and dark in the photo, but the camera recorded the shadows as a single, flat blue. Okay in a photo, boring in a linocut.

So my goal is to print some variety, but I'm scratching my head over which bits to take out when.

Step 2, easy enough:

Looking okay, but the blue feels a little bright. For the next pass I took the scraps of this color and added some burnt sienna (color turned greenish) and purple (back towards a grayed-down blue).

As you can see, the ink is very transparent. Just in case you haven't noticed yet: I love transparent color.

Step 3 printed:

I definitely like the color and value of this pass, but I'm still not ready to chop out huge sections of shadow. So I carved out a few more small areas, added a wee bit more violet to the existing ink, and printed again. Step 4:

This particular pass was done in front of a live studio audience... sort of. I needed some new process shots for a presentation I'm doing next month, so a friend came over to take some photos while I worked. I rather liked this "reveal" image with a little Instagram filter effect. (Which... surprise! Is now in my Instagram feed.)

Reduction linocut color pass #4 reveal

So what's next? More blue, I'm afraid. But first I have to frame up some wee Bitty Birds for this weekend's Salida Art Walk. Yes, I DID do some before now... but the gallery just sent a message that they sold a couple today, so I need to replenish before tomorrow night. A good problem to have!

If it's Friday it must be.....

Yep. I've stooped to cliché titles. My brain is too full of other things to be even remotely clever just now.

There IS lino-cutting happening, albeit slowly and with many disruptions.

I was on the road for five days last week, for the Animalia exhibition at the Loveland Museum (show runs through August 21) and to give a short workshop for the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies in Allenspark. While I was out I visited some galleries and spent many hours parked in a WIFI-enabled coffee shop writing materials for other upcoming workshops and programs.

Since I returned I've been up to my eyeballs in framing, packing, and shipping work to collectors and galleries and exhibitions. Today I tried to print out the materials for one of my workshops and instead spent entirely too much time troubleshooting a cranky printer and then running out of ink. (And the one place in town that carries it was OUT, of course.) Plenty of other things to do instead, but it would have been nice to tick this particular task off my to-do list.

Oh, yes. The glamorous life of the artist, who spends her days sipping cognac, discussing Proust, and creating only as the muse strikes.

NOT.

Don't get me wrong. I'm quite aware of how fortunate I am to be involved in all of these activities! But, ooph... it sure would be nice to push some real ink for a bit. Of course I'm headed out of town again for a few days, but perhaps I can sneak in some press time before I go. If I do, you'll be the first to know!

In the meantime... Denver-area peeps can check out the Landscape show at Abend Gallery, and Salida-area peeps can get ready for Salida ArtWalk. 'Cause there's a reason for all this running around, after all!

Birds, Prints, Snow (??).... must be Spring!

Yesterday was the first Global Big Day, a birding event sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Birders all over the world submitted their day's sightings to the eBird online database which, if you're not familiar with it, is a great way to keep track of your birding checklists and contribute to the scientific record at the same time. I just checked the status page, and as of this morning 8,886 people from 108 countries had submitted 25,254 checklists, featuring 4,751 species. Cool.

You might have noticed that I do a lot of linocuts featuring birds, so I'm sure it's no surprise that I've got birder tendencies. Since I've been using eBird for a long time participating in the Global Big Day was kind of a no-brainer. But rather than just record data from my usual patch I teamed up with an old friend to check out some additional locations.

The day started out lovely enough....

7:00 am. Blue skies and a few clouds.

 8:00 am. Oh, look! A pelican in perfect light! Maybe another lino?

By mid-day we were about an hour up the valley from home and the sky had turned gray and thick with clouds.

 Early afternoon. Loggerhead shrike. Definitely some lino potential here.

By 3:00pm there was no denying that some serious weather was on the way, so we piled back in the truck and headed south.

Some rain, but mostly SNOW. Not sticking yet, but will be soon.

The weather continued through the night, and this morning my neighborhood looked like this:

Snow in May is not unusual here, and during the time it has taken to type this post most of it has already disappeared. It's lovely, in a "seriously-can-we-just-get-back-to-green-please" sort of way.

But cold, wet, and gray days are good for painting little bird linos with cheery and colorful palettes, so that's what I'm up to now. As for birds, we ticked 71 species yesterday... including a few that I don't manage to see every year. Birds, prints, snow. No denying that it's springtime in the Rockies!

Linocut exhibition at Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center

On Monday, with the help of the ever-capable photographer and hospital liaison Dan Downing (go look at his work), I installed my first exhibition of the year at the Heart of the Rockies Regional Medical Center (HRRMC).

The blank wall awaits, and the puzzle commences. What goes where?

When this facility opened in 2008, board members had the fantastic insight to approach local artists first when they established their art collection. I was, of course, delighted when six of my linocuts were included in that initial purchase. One of those pieces hangs in the emergency room, and it's always amusing when someone approaches me with "Hey, I was in the emergency room with a broken leg, but it was nice to see your work," or better yet, "I was really pleased to see your work while waiting for my colonoscopy."

Still shuffling, but getting close.

This exhibition hangs in the main hallway between reception and the cafeteria, so I anticipate less traumatically-inspired commentary. At least I hope so! The work will be up for the entire first quarter of 2015, show ends March 31.

Finished! Two views, since it's hard to get a good shot down a hallway.

Interlude

The Sawatch Range from Frantz Lake, Salida

Why, yes. Yes, it has been very quiet here at Brush and Baren. There is plenty of work going on in the studio, but I'm not quite ready to share it. Perhaps by the end of this week.

In addition to burnishing my shoulders and wrists into oblivion I'm also wrapping up work on a project for the Collegiate Peaks Scenic Byway, and getting two new contract projects underway. There are FOUR (count 'em) major exhibition jury deadlines coming up in April. AND I'm trying to wrap my brain around a week of linocut workshops and a steamroller printing event at the Woodson Art Museum at the beginning of May.

Maybe it's a (still-entirely-too-far-away) spring vibe. I'm spending an awful lot of energy putting an enormous number of things in motion– the benefits of which won't be reaped until the end of the summer.

This morning, however, I'd had quite enough of all of that and took myself out for a walk in "my patch." I've spent the last ten years cruising this same 3.5-mile loop, keeping erratic tabs on the comings and goings of plants and animals and fencelines. All the bird linocuts I've been making lately? Most have been inspired by adventures in my patch.

It's been a week since I stopped by Frantz Lake, during which time almost all the ice vanished. The surface of the lake has hosted ice skaters and fishermen and no birds for months, but this morning there was a feathered party going on! Ducks, geese, mergansers... a grebe. I spied this lone snow goose consorting with its Canada goose cousins... and immediately wondered if it might not be the same solitary snow goose that spent several weeks hanging out with its cousins last year at this time. No way to know.

The beavers did a number on the massive willow tree "on the corner" of the lake earlier this winter. When they cleaned out the damaged tree limbs property managers did a number on other vegetation there, too. It all looks pretty ratty at the moment, but I'm hopeful it will recover this summer. There's a western scrub jay loitering on this corner now– my first at this location. Red-winged blackbirds singing. Goldfinches. Last week there was even one of those pesky common redpolls that have been popping up all over the country and making birders twitchy.

The last ice on Frantz Lake. Methinks I smell a linocut here.

I don't have any sketches to show for today's adventure, but it was more than wonderful to  spend some time with my favorite subject outside the studio instead of in.

Back to work now.

20th Salida ArtWalk

Art, music, theater, dance... and horse carriage rides (why not?)! It's ArtWalk weekend in Salida, June 22-24.

Miniature Masterpiece fundraiser, "Buy It Now" sale Friday from 5-9 at the Steamplant, silent auction Saturday morning from 9-noon.

As always, I'll have linocuts on display at the Maverick Potter Gallery, 119 F Street.

"Familiars" at the Paquette Gallery

With David's help I ticked one more thing off my pre-travel to-do list today: We hung the show! This afternoon we installed Familiars at the Paquette Gallery at the SteamPlant here in Salida. Because I'll be out of town the reception won't be until Friday, June 1, but that doesn't mean you can't stop by and take a look before then.

Another inch to the right, please.

 About the show....

Familiar, n. In European folklore, familiar spirits (“familiars”) are supernatural entities believed to assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic.

Salida, Colorado printmaker Sherrie York finds her best relationships develop on foot. Inspired by almost a decade of wandering trails throughout Chaffee County, the woodcuts and linocuts included in “Familiars” represent places and creatures York knows well– and that she likes to believe know her, too.

The natural world is replete with wonders and relief printmaking, whilst not precisely magic, certainly has its moments of mystery and inexplicable surprise. From iconic waterfowl to intricate tangles of fallen leaves, the familiars haunting the Arkansas River valley inspire York to carve a place for herself in the landscape.

Pushing a different kind of paper

I'm a printmaker, so I like paper, but this week I'm shuffling pages of a different sort.

It's time for another round of wayside panels for the Collegiate Peaks Scenic Byway and Chaffee County Heritage Area, and I've been tapped to do the research and writing. It's keeping me away from the print bench just now, but it's still fun to work on. I've decimated our library's local history section and I've been rooting through historic photo archives. At this point I'm mostly gathering notes and looking for interesting stories that address the project's themes.

Before work began this morning I took a short hike up the "Frontside," a trail that zigzags up the face of Tenderfoot Hill overlooking town. I'm still getting to know my new phone/camera, so I snapped a couple of images, including this one.

Salida in the morning. If you knew where to look, you could find our house.

I had a good chuckle when I got home and settled down to my research... and came across this image of our town sometime in the first 10 years of its existence. (Between 1880-1890, from the Salida Centennial Collection at the Salida Regional Library.) It's not from exactly the same spot, but if you find the diagonal of the old Monarch Spur line (center above and far right below) you can probably line things up in your head.

Salida before 1890. Salida Centennial Collection photo, Salida Regional Library archives.

Salida was, quite literally, born of the railroad. The town was platted by the Denver & Rio Grande when it laid rails to service gold and silver mines. The empty, scraped-looking section you see in the foreground of the contemporary photo once held a depot, roundhouse, and many, many rails... some of which are visible in the historic image.

The work I do as an artist is rooted in my place, but I tend to focus more on the natural history than the cultural history of my home. Projects like this one help me to remember that people are part of my landscape as much as the river and peaks. Does this mean I'm going to start doing work about trains? Probably not. The trains stopped running a few years before I moved here. But the rails are still here, slowly disappearing under dust and shrubs.

Dust and shrubs, you say? Hmmm... I wonder....

Time Out

We had great plans to get lots of chores done around the house this weekend, but you know how it goes. This morning our brains shouted "DAY OFF!" and who are we to argue with gray matter?

We were out the door at 8:00 and on the North Backbone trail by 8:10. I love this trail, and probably said so a couple of dozen times during our hike. (Just ask the DM. He will roll his eyes and confirm it. At LEAST a couple of dozen times.)

My favorite tree. It's two-dimensional!
All those lovely arms are in a single plane.
When you get around the side of this tree,
there are no branches sticking out!

We park a car at the north end of the trail and hike the... what? Four-and-a-half? Five? miles back to the house. It takes us a couple of hours, and on a picture-perfect morning like this one there isn't anything I'd rather be doing. Seriously. Not even drawing or printing.

Sherrie (for the 14th time): "I love this trail."
David: "You don't say."

 The trail winds through piñon-juniper woodland... juniper titmouse and pinyon jay territory. (Of course.) Mountain chickadees, bushtits, nuthatches, solitaires... ravens on a nest. A stout cottontail. And a fabulous view of our town, stretched out on the valley floor.

Our town from the North Backbone trail

It's nose to the grindstone tomorrow, but I won't mind so much now. Thank you, brain, for being good for "nothing more" than this today.

Woodcut experiments

Tiny woodcut experiments

Okay.... raise your hand if you're the sort of person who decides to try a brand new recipe on the night you will have dinner guests.

Or perhaps you can remember any number of times when you agreed to perform a task ("Sure. I can do that.") and then immediately set about learning how to do it. Usually under deadline.

Yup. That's me, too. Which is naturally why I decided to participate in my first-ever [Baren]forum print exchange now. It's Barenforum's 50th exchange, with 100 printmakers participating. (As opposed to the usual 30-something.) The format is tiny (2.5" x 3.5"), but 101 impressions are needed for the exchange. By October 1. Sorry, November 1. Wait. I think. I should check.

I know from previous experience with small prints that registration on tiny sheets of paper is far more challenging than it is on larger sheets, so a single-color image seems to be in order. But hmmm.... what to do and how to do it? Border print? Bleed print? Naturally I've also decided to carve wood instead of lino, which means I'm using less familiar tools on a less familiar surface. Experimentation required!

I'm not completely satisfied with any of these, but I think I'm headed in the right direction.

Meanwhile, we had a spectacular sunset this evening. Not just in the west, but in the entire sky. All of town glowed pink and orange. It would be challenging to try to interpret such images as relief prints. I don't think I'd have the slightest idea how to start. Which means.... Uh oh. Must. Resist. Idea. At least until 101 other little prints are done.

And they're off!

Yesterday was the grand re-opening of the Maverick Potter Gallery on F Street in Salida!
Bigger, brighter space! More work! (Spanky new floor installed by the Potter himself.)

Summer. It's insane.

I laughed mightily the other day over a message from a friend who has a business quite different from mine. In it she mentioned the natural tendency to play more than work in the summer, a tendency of the self-employed to go easier on themselves in the summer months.

I refrained from responding with a query about what chemical substance she might be ingesting.

I suppose a slow-down happens in some lines of work, but in this household we go into overdrive from May to October. My contract work ramps up for undetermined reasons. There are exhibitions and gallery events to supply and attend. The DM's gig calendar goes haywire. Last summer we had two (count 'em, TWO) weekends between mid-May and mid-September in which one or both of us did not have a show, a gig, a workshop.... something. It's a tad frustrating, actually, because I would rather be playing. Seventy (or eighty, depending on who you ask) percent of the county where I live is public land. People come from all over the country to play in the surrounding forests, climb the 14,000-foot peaks, and splash down the river that flows through town. But it's not for us. We get our slow time in February, when it's below zero.

But this week, at least, we get to run around like headless chickens near home. David's gigs are all local. My contract work has a little room to spread out, since I don't have to cram it in between the day after we get back from somewhere and the day before we leave again.

Thanks for talking me into a glass ceramic goblet of wine, Mark.
Even if it did mean I was half asleep by the time we got to David's gig.

Did I mention it's busy? The local farmers' market opens next weekend, and the FIBArk whitewater festival starts in three days. The following weekend is the Salida ArtWalk... I'll have work at the Maverick Potter and a few pieces at the Book Haven (both on F Street between 1st and 2nd) and the DM will play a couple of locations. The next weekend we have to go out of town again, but for now we're happy to be limiting our scurrying about to a 6-block radius of the house.

Especially since I've already emptied the walls of the house in order to supply all this summer bru ha ha. It's WAY past time to get started on a new print.

Must. Make. Prints.

Check one mini task off the list

Whoo-eee!  It's FINALLY nice enough to have the studio windows open today! The neighborhood is infested with evening grosbeaks and yellow warblers, their songs and chatter more entertaining without a glass filter. Why, I can even hear the serenade of crickets!

WHY am I indoors?

It's the sort of day that makes it painful to stay indoors, but stay in the studio I must. Most of the week has been given over to a big illustration project, but even when I set down my brush to take a break there are plenty of other tasks at hand. Surely Murphy recognized weeks like this and wrote some sort of pithy aphorism about inevitable simultaneous deadlines... but at the moment it eludes me.

I AM nearly a week ahead of the Salida ArtWalk "Mini Masterpiece" deadline, however. Surely that's good for a bonus point or two.

Each June local artists donate "mini" artworks for a fundraising auction during ArtWalk weekend. Through a series of unfortunate events that would make even Lemony Snicket cringe, I have never participated in previous Mini shows. This year, however, I had canvas and entry form in hand in plenty of time.

Wait. Did I say canvas?

Yeah. Canvas. The auction committee provides 4x4- or 4x6-inch stretched canvases for the work... a wee bit perplexing for a diehard works-on-paper gal like me. Thankfully some friends requested I mount a small linocut on canvas a few months ago and that successful experiment made me brave enough to try again.

Where's my baren? My brayer?

Like most printmakers, I've got a drawer full  of "failed" prints. Bad registration, bad color, uneven printing... whatever. They're no good as editions... but one never knows when they might come in handy as collages.

So here's my entry for the "Mini Masterpiece" auction. Bits of four different linos are here, representing four seasons. A little PVA, a little paint, a little varnish, and voila! One deadline checked off the list.

I now return me to my regularly scheduled drawing board.

"Seasonal," linocut collage on canvas, 4x4 inches