November 8, 2012

Valentine's Holiday Gifts for MV Artisans Thanksgiving Festival

I'm in full swing researching, designing and painting new items for my booth at the upcoming Martha's Vineyard Artisans Thanksgiving Festival to be held at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury.

Below are a few photos of the current craziness in my studio.  I'll be sure to post new photos of completed works soon...hopefully very soon.


 I'm producing two very old traditional toys:  Jacob's Ladder and Dominoes.  For each project I'm painting my holiday designs of snowmen, Santa, Christmas trees, more snowmen, ornaments, mittens and scarves on to small wooden tiles that Rick cut out of a huge piece of white clear pine.


Jacob's Ladder is a challenge.  I made a prototype to learn how to make the ladder magically move and to identify the consistent sequencing of each side of the six ladder tiles.



These are newly painted tiles I'm preparing for six domino sets of 18 tiles each.  The sets were inspired by a 1980's Joan Miro exhibition in NYC  where my son, Kent, and I fell in love with a set of dominoes in the Miro gift shop.  Instead of dots representing specific numbers, the tiles were decorated with representations of various Miro abstract painting elements.  We have the set still and I used it as a guide to creating my own set of holiday dominoes.

As in the past, I'll be selling my painted Christmas ornaments which, thank goodness, are done...except for just a few new ones I've been thinking about.

This year at the Artisans Festival I will be showing my abstract paintings of water in movement and a composite work of movable painted skyscapes .  More on those works in my next blog.