Wooden Urns? Really?

Many of you know that before I discovered painting, I was a woodworker. There is something special about wood...the feel, the smell, the beautiful grain, just holding the three dimensional object. For several years I designed furniture, bookshelves, toys, games and puzzles. 

You may also know that recently a friend and I have been offering workshops focusing on end-of-life issues. We call them "Let's Talk About the Hard Stuff". 

So where am I going with all of this?

After receiving his terminal diagnosis, my husband and I talked a lot about end-of-life issues: the conversations that needed to be had, plans that needed to be made - all the things to 'get ready' for death. He even wrote a series of essays about his year-long 'journey into dying'. In our workshops we stress that whatever can be done ahead of time is a gift to family and friends.

For quite a while I have been thinking/planning about a final woodworking project. In my workshop, I have a lot of wood from a cherry tree that we had to have cut down over 30 years ago. We had it milled and over the years I have used it for several projects. My 'gift' would be to create two wooden urns for George's and my cremains!

Over the years, I have sketched out many different plans and done research about urn sizes and shapes. Realistically and sadly, I do not have the strength or skills to do what I used to do. No more frame and panels, dovetail joinery, running wood through the planner, or even use the router to create decorative edges. I threw out the sketches I had drawn and began to work on something simple.

New plans...I looked at the old cherry wood in my shop. I found beautiful clear boards and others with worm holes and live edges. It occurred to me that it's like life! Beauty complementing the atypical and imperfections highlighting character. 

 I began. Some of the wood was thick and very heavy. I was able to use the chop saw and cut manageable size pieces to run through the table saw. I created clouds of sawdust!

No fancy joinery or intricate anything...I dry fit the boards several times. 

And then glued them.

I found some interesting wood for the tops! I love the similar rectangle 'boxes' and the different tops.

 After all the glue was dry, I got out the tung oil. The oil brings out the beautiful grain and color of the wood. Here they are in my shop with a coupe of coats of tung oil.

I took them outside...Five coats of finish, the urns are glowing!

and a close up of the tops!

I know that (for some of you) this is a very strange project, 

but it seemed to me to just fit my moments right now. 

NO ONE wants to 'look' at death, but having discussions and preparations made BEFORE we need to helps/enables decisions that have to be made during a stressful time.

For any information on our 'Let's Talk About the Hard Stuff" workshops and/or other resources, click https://www.connectingtodot.com/ 

My 2026 Banner!

 It's that time again... SMAL (St. Michaels Art League) Banners. At the beginning of each year, SMAL artists begin planning artwork that will be scanned and printed on banners which are hung along Talbot Street (our 'Main' Street) from mid-April until mid-November. The banners are decorative and also speak to who we are and what our town represents. The banner theme has always been 'Celebrate St. Michaels'.

For years I have been painting "Mikey," a bright colored crab, showcasing the many aspects of our town. Mikey has gone fishing, eaten an ice cream cone, piloted a boat, gone shopping, held an anchor and a life preserver. You get the idea...

So, what's left to highlight?... the many beautiful gardens and the idea that so many of us like to play in the dirt. This year Mickey will be planting a garden!

I began sketching... Mikey needed a garden hat and garden gloves, of course. It was fun thinking about how his claws would look with green gloves on. I usually begin my banner sketch on plain drawing paper, so this first sketch is very wrinkled with watercolor paint.

I tried adding some seed packets and a background - which really wrinkled it!

At this point, I showed it to my art group and they didn't like the pot by Mikey's 'elbow'. So I moved things around a little with another sketch.

The pots are moved around. I still liked the seed packets, but as much as I liked them, I knew that things were getting a little cluttered and I was feeling a little overwhelmed.

 "Overwhelmed" really was the word! I had been trying to escape the 'world', throwing myself into my art, but I was becoming more distressed with what was going on in our country and the world. Even though I was only reading 'headlines,' I decided that I wanted to somehow put all this in my banner and make some kind of subtle statement. 

I experimented a little with the seed packets... 

And then, I had another idea...I transferred the initial sketches to watercolor paper and left out the cluttered seed packets. I put my 'statement' in the plant markers in the pots!

I got out my watercolors and finished the painting. Knowing that I don't print that well, I went to my computer and made easily readable plant markers which I just glued onto the painting!

"Planting the seeds of HOPE, RESPECT and KINDNESS"

All the banners can be viewed on the SMAL website https://smartleague.org/banner-program/  and will soon be hanging along the street. Posters of all the banners are for sale at Creative Xpressions in St. Michaels from now through the end of the year!

Mix It Up!

 One of the very creative artists in the St. Michaels Art League (SMAL) loves 'mixed media' and has chaired a show during the month of January called 'Mix it Up!'  January is a tough time to do a show because everyone is just 'recovering' from the holidays...and it takes a while to create something new.

Somehow she manages to get enough people to jump on board with this and we turn out amazing, creative pieces. Nancy works hard to make this all work and I wanted to support her efforts so I rummaged through a pile of old art pieces to see if I could mix something up.

I found an old small canvas that I had worked on in a class a few years ago. I don't remember the class assignment, but I do remember that I had had fun working on it. The finished piece had been sitting on an easel in my shop one day when I was doing some woodworking and, as I remember, something slipped and a piece of wood went flying toward the canvas and tore a hole in it. 

It was still hanging around, so picked it up and thought I would work on it for the show. Originally, I had begun by painting the canvas... thinking of an underwater scene. 

A few weeks before I had been on a 'field trip' with my art group. We had gone with cameras in hand to a harbor. I was more fascinated with the 'stuff' lying around than with the boats.  Here are just a few of the photos I took that day.

I cut and pasted... and ended up with this scene! 

I love it that I could find a fish and fish eye in all that tangle!

But, now I had a gash in the canvas. I needed to repair and update...  I found the old photographs on my computer (how I love the search button!), and tried a few things. I was able to cover the ripped canvas with some chains. And then, just for fun, I cut out some bubbles and glued them on, too.

"Environmental Concerns"

More catching up...

 Looking back at last year for artwork that never got posted... one of the things I found was the 'house drawing' for Christmas in St. Michaels, an annual event in our small town. It is a fundraiser for local non profits, held the second weekend in December. There is a parade, breakfast with Santa, a concert and more. A special part of the event is a house tour. All the events are published in a booklet that is given out when tickets are purchased, 

In the 30+ years of this weekend event, members of the St. Michaels Art League (SMAL) have done drawings of the houses on the tour. The drawings are printed in the event booklet and the originals are framed and given to the homeowner as a thank you for opening their home.  

I was given an address and drove into town to take a look. The house had been recently renovated. It seemed that the most used entrance was no longer the 'front door'. I walked down the driveway to find the backyard which had a lovely view of the harbor! There was a large back porch which invited a visitor to just 'be there'.  I took lots of photos and went back home to draw. I debated about adding all the trees. In the end I thought that the house needed to be 'embraced' by foliage.  

It's a fun project but always tests my discipline/need to add color. It's a black and white booklet - I have to restrain myself!

So, on to the other December project - the annual Christmas card. I have a friend who doesn't send Christmas cards, she sends Solstice cards. We had worked on a card for her and her theme of the 'return of the light.' I had also been thinking about the 'light' with another group as we planned a community vigil. I began to explore ideas about that light... and began to paint candles.

I ended up with three images, one on the cover and two inside. 

Front cover

I usually only put a painting on the front of the card. These extra images needed to be painted this year.  I hope your 2025 Christmas was filled with light.

More to come as I continue to catch up...

 

Where have I been???

It's like I just woke up and said, "Where have I been?"  For whatever reason, maybe because I have been looking and snow and ice and single degree wind chill temperatures!) I 'came to' this afternoon. I have been off-line with this blog for a year.  It hasn't been bad weather all that time, but it's just been a year of dropping out of 'stuff'. 

Hopefully, I can rejoin 'life' and catch up with 2025...2026.

I looked back at artwork I did last year - nothing very exciting. I did enter a couple of exhibits. So I'll start there:

For the past few years the St. Michaels Art League has had a show in October themed "Capturing Autumn".  One year I was feeling sort of 'sassy' and had worked on this one. I finished it this year and entered it.  I called it "Autumn Captured"...subtle and sassy...  It started out with a jail cell bars, added a large key hole ...

If you look closely, you can see the key hole next to the double bars 

where the jail door would be...

The next show was the annual Martha Hudson Excellence in Watercolor. One of the paintings I entered a Christmas card from a prior year ...  It's a watercolor on Yupo painting. Yupo is a plastic paper that I have written about before. It doesn't absorb watercolor paint so you can paint on it and then lift the color off.  There are several layers of thick paint which added interesting depth. Such fun to use!

Then I found this painting that I had done a few years ago. It is also done on Yupo paper. I did a little tweaking on it and turned it upside down!  When I first did it, it looked like this.

I had just been playing with color. Dropping paint and probably spraying it with water. As I recall, I picked it up and kept turning it around. I thought it was fun but a little weird and decided to turn it over and paint something on the other side.  I laid it upside down on my board and played with the back of the paper. (My board is a piece of luan plywood that I polyurethaned several years ago.) The next day when I picked it up ...I found all these interesting marks from the board! 

I showed this to my art group (a small group of friends with whom I zoom each week. We support each other and critique our artwork) They suggested turning it upside down...

It's now a completely different painting! And someone suggested calling it "Creation". I like the light from above calling forth a life form beneath. 

Look for more in the next couple of weeks... will explore Christmas card and more... (yeah, I'm really behind!)

Ahoy!

 Each year (since 2010) the St Michaels Art League (SMAL) has had a banner program. Artists are invited to present artwork that will be scanned, then printed onto 'weather proof' material. The banners hang on the telephone poles along Talbot Street - which is our 'Main Street'.

I have blogged about my banners for many years. You may remember "Mikey" my St. Michaels crab who tries to "Celebrate St. Michaels", our annual theme, in all sorts of ways. 

I wasn't sure what I wanted Mikey to do this year so I went back to my file and began to look at all the banners from past years. I found the sketch below...It had been an idea that I never followed through on.  Maybe this year...

I began with a rough sketch...capturing some of what I had done before and adding a line to the life ring.

It progressed from there...to this. This was all done on drawing paper - not watercolor paper -so the watercolor paint just wrinkled up everything. I was trying to get an idea of color and balance.

I really like the simplicity of this. It should look great at 30 feet up on a pole. Not too detailed as you drive or walk by. 

So, I switched to my watercolor paper. Almost all my previous Mikeys have had some sort of hat and I wanted to fill the space between Mikey's 'head/shell' and the life preserver ring. 

Now I had this...

I showed it to my artist critic friends and we had a discussion about adding any kind of light wash background to make sure the hat and ring would stand out from the white paper. Several of us just like the crispness of the primary colors and the white. 

After putting it aside for several days and looking at it from across the room (no way could I get it 30 feet high!), I decided not to do a wash.  

Instead, I added more shading and a bit more ink drawing around the hat, ring, and line. Mikey is ready to be scanned!

"Ahoy!"

It's takes time for everything to be scanned, printed, sewn and readied to hang. Lots of behind-the-scene activity on this project! Look for the banners to appear in mid-April. 

All the original banner art will be on view in April at the St. Michaels Community Center. Stop by for a preview before they go 30 feet in the air!  They will also be on the art league website around that time smartleague.org

"Things that Warm the Heart"

Horrible fires in California, snow in some unusual places across the South, minus zero temperatures in the north,...14+ inches of snow here 10 days ago. It's hard to process all this and it's just the first month of the year!  At least when I am snowed in I can get a lot of things done inside! (and, yes, I did go out and build a snowman.)

Blue Heron Coffee, a small coffee shop in my village, offers gallery space to the St. Michaels Art League. The theme of the upcoming show in February is 'Things that Warm the Heart'. I wanted to participate so tried a couple of paintings. 

For many years I made valentines for my husband in sort of a 'zentangle' manner. As I thought about the February exhibit I wondered whether one of those valentines would work. I couldn't find the original one, but I did have an image in my photo file. I sort of copied it and made some upgrades...

As I understand zentangle, it's free form object with formulated 'designs' within. I think 'true' zentangle is also black and white. But, being more of a color person, I break the rules. This is what I reconstructed. I love the hearts connected.

While I love this image, I wanted to try another idea. My thought was warming hearts centered around a fire...and a chance to really get into color! I got out my pastels. I love the variety and depth of color. No 'hearts' shown here, just implied. 

If you are in town during the month of February, stop in to Blue Heron Coffee and take a look at this and all the other artists' ideas.

Coming soon...whatever it is I decide to do for the 2025 Banner program... ???