Yesterday I participated in a show at Dixon Place called The Secret City (a little theater on the lower east side in Manhattan). Its a variety, cabaret, service celebrating the arts. One of my lovely followers, Maritza is involved in the production and sent along an email to see if I'd like to be involved. It sounded a little different, weird, odd but fun. It was one of those times where it felt right to just say yes and see what would happen. And the theme was COLOR!! I decided to do 9 22x30" monochromatic paintings in a rainbow show of color, I chose mainly a table top theme so I would know what to do each time I went to work.
I painted these in acrylic and gouache, It was fabulously fun, I've been wanting to paint larger for some time but just never seem to get to it. But in reality 3 weeks wasn't enough time to paint so many, I got 5 done. Here are 4 plus a purple one...
But the wall behind the stage where I was going to hang my work was huge and I wanted impact. So I chose 13 pieces of art from my sketchbooks and blew them up to 30x43" and had them printed. I scan all my art at 400dpi, for this I used an app called alien skin blowup that converts the art to vector for a sec, blows it up to whatever size and then returns it to pixels, It WORKS!!
At home on Saturday my husband and I put command strips on the back of each piece so when we got there we could just hang it up. It still took over an hour, there were singers, and musicians and dancers all practicing at the same time. But it happened. Everyone was so welcoming and fun. When the show started, the MC, Chris Wells came out, who had been in jeans and a very plain button down shirt like this:
What a hoot! He was funny and interesting. There was great music, poetry, stories and meditation. A dancer from American Ballet theater danced a gorgeous blues piece, we laughed and and really enjoyed ourselves. Everyone involved was so professionaland creative. They brought me up to ask questions, which I have a video of but cant seem to upload, If I can figure it out I will add it later. Thanks for looking! - Jennifer
Please see my whole sketchbook project here