$5 each: artbylauraelizabeth@gmail.com or pop into Gumball Collective in Nordeast, Minneapolis!
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Hey everybody! Hope you’re well, and enjoying the brisk winter weather.
Here in Minneapolis it’s cold af. Which is why we’re all so chill here. Sure, we like to hang outside, but more than that, we like to hang inside during the colder months of the year. Preferably by a fire with lotsa wine.
Considering all of the above, I’m going to be hosting/ teaching a series of intimate painting party/ classes, complete with wine, ambiance, and good company.
I have room enough to host a group no larger than seven.
The party starts in my kitchen:
Mini easels, primed, wooden panels to paint on, these events are fun! If you live in the cities and want to do this with me, shoot me an email and we’ll set it up!
This is an 8×10″ print of my piece “The Hunt” mounted onto a cradled wooden panel, painted and varnished, numbered and signed, ready to hang for $88. I also have prints that are not mounted for $22. Email me @ artbylauraelizabeth@gmail.com
Dia de los Muertos (for all you gringos out there, it’s “Day of the Dead”;)) is a Mexican holiday focused around remembering loved ones who have died. So I saw online that the gallery, Altered Esthetics in NE Minneapolis, was holding an open call for artists to participate in their Dia de los Muertos show on November 1, 2012.
I was told that as long as the piece fits in with the theme, it’s a shoe-in, so participating in the show wouldn’t necessarily be something that I could include on my resume, but I was interested in participating anyway because, like most artists, I’m a bit obsessed with themes that revolve around death, and I just so happened to have a piece that fit with the theme:
“Separation of Earth and State,” Muertos Show, Altered Esthetics
So there it is. I’m looking forward to the day when I can share some really exciting news about my work with you all, but for now, every little bit of exposure is much appreciated.
Birds are fascinating, aren’t they? Some are undeniably clever, like crows for example, who when tested have proven themselves astute enough to actually fashion tools out of random materials in order to reach obscurely placed morsels of food. Male Bowerbirds build attractive hut-like nests, complete with soft ferns cushioning the ground, adorned with bright flowers and other fancy, little objects, all in an attempt to attract a mate. And then there are birds, such as the Lyre, who can mimic approximately twenty other species with such extraordinary accuracy that even those she’s mimicking are fooled! Devastatingly, she’s also been captured on camera perfectly mimicking the sound of a chainsaw…..
Of course, every sentient being is worthy of respect, regardless of talent, intellect, or outstanding attributes, but the above examples serve to illustrate the point that humans, while certainly peculiar, are not the only meritorious species on the planet; it boils down to mere differences in the many ways of, just…. “being.”
Below is my new oil painting, a study I’m calling “Bird.” Hope you enjoy!
Gustav Klimt has long been my favorite artist and a major source of artistic inspiration. His work is intricately decorative, richly detailed with gold leaf, hues of orange, brown, green, speckles of blue, red, yellow, purple; it’s ingenuously erotic, and, more often than not revolves around one femme fatale or another.
Makes me swoon just thinking about it!
The painting below is my way of paying homage to an incredible artist. Like flowers, I plucked and rendered the three figures from Klimt’s painting “Goldfish” to create “Flowers for Klimt.” While mine does not at all resemble the brilliance of a Klimt painting, the central figure is unmistakably Klimt’s– with an L.E. Amatulli twist, or course. Hope you enjoy!
As some of you may know, I’ve been working on building a portfolio worthy of approaching a gallery with for some time now. The target date to begin marketing myself as an artist has been tentatively set for fall of 2012, but when a friend asked me to be the featured artist at Seven Elephants Coffee in St. Cloud for the upcoming Art Crawl (Friday, June 15), of course I jumped at the opportunity.
I’m considering it a preview of sorts, since my collection to this point is incomplete. My ultimate goal is to have a tightly cohesive body of work to showcase; but for now I’ll be showing a slew of very different styles of work, from realistic pencil drawings, to surreal paintings, to the ethereal. It might be a bit disjointed, but isn’t everything in life a bit of that? And shouldn’t art reflect the truth? (did my tongue in my cheek translate through the text??)
Here are a few fun little items that I’ve been working on:
Oodles of mini Giclee prints on canvas, packaged in black organza bags
A little business card box, painted black, varnished, and decorated with a paper flower
Sculpture is something that I’ve always been interested in, and as far back as I can remember, I would sit for hours upon hours just completely immersed in sculpting little human heads and busts out of Sculpey clay. So I decided to combine two art forms that I love: Painting and sculpture. The result is my new painting, “Separation of Earth and State;” the head and breast are little sculptures that I mounted onto the canvas and painted. It was such a fun and interesting process, something I’ll surely try again.
I recently watched the documentary, “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” and was creatively inspired, to say the least! Basquiat’s paintings are filled with bold color, child-like drawings, and meaning usually surrounding themes of oppression, sometimes pertaining to his personal life, but mostly depicting a profound distaste for politics and social class. Pretty astonishing to know he was able at such a young age to perceive the world through such capacious eyes!
His story, like that of many artists, is a tragic one; he died from a heroine overdose shortly after a precocious rise to fame. He went from a teenage runaway, sleeping on park benches and living under cardboard boxes in Washington Square Park, to a successful, highbrow artist in a matter of a few short years, which must have been fantastic in a lot of ways, but surely not without a great deal of baggage……
Watching this film and reacquainting myself with the amazing work of Basquiat has inspired me to explore a freer style of painting, not confined by the constraints of a beautiful face, or a form that requires every angle to be just so– but not before doing a realistic portrait first. Haha