carol j watson

Whew, what a school year it has been! Better than ever, busier than ever, with more talented students, more challenges in every way and every day. For months now we’ve been preparing for our big dance, V.A.S.E. (Visual Art Scholastic Event, see www.taea.org), on February 27th. I get to take 25 of my best, brightest, and -ahem- most academically eligible art students to this competition held again at San Marcos High School in San Marcos, Texas. This year, they’ve worked on self portraits, still life drawings, and gesture drawings, and now it is coming down to the wire. Less than two weeks away, we’re staying after school late and coming in to class early, putting the finishing touches on the work destined for judges’ hands.

The best part is by far the look of achievement on students’ faces when they hand me a finished work and we get to mat it for competition. Not normally driven by competition, this event moves me. I love the challenge my students face: conceiving a project idea, seeing it through to the end in whatever form it winds up taking, thinking deeply as they create, connecting their ideas to elements and principles of art, facing a judge, and lastly, coming away with feedback, experience, and a better understanding of themselves as artists.

I’ll post more about this experience as it unfolds. But for now, I am busy cutting mats, spraying fixative, and reassuring nervous students…and myself.

Asked what I’d like for Mother’s Day, I responded, “Let’s make garden gnomes!”

So that’s what we did. Down we sat, clay and tools in hand, in a sunny yellow kitchen overlooking our beloved garden. Armed with imagination, a few handy hand-building techniques, and a sense of humor, we all managed to create a gnome worthy of a garden.

It was a great day of art, indeed.

My husband, Arden, and I had an opportunity to attend a recent retreat for board members and volunteers of a wonderful and local non-profit organization called Georgetown Art Works. Our goals were simple: Clarify our vision as an organization, write (or at the very least agree upon the basics of) a mission statement, work on our 2009 calendar, and designate specific responsibilities and opportunities for each of us in attendance. We had an incredible facilitator, a dedicated board president, plenty of food, great ideas, and most importantly, a creative outlet. We made incredible progress.

The creative outlet, which was strictly optional, was to design a chair made from various materials: pipe cleaners, wire, beads, and imagination. As we listened, ate, talked, prioritized, laughed, and became better acquainted with one another, we also created a chair representative of us and our task at hand of “chairing” some event or task.

By the end of the retreat, several completed chairs were passed around for oohs and ahhhs…Oh, how I wished I had brought my camera! Each chair was indeed unique, representative of its creator, and just spilling over with artistic genius! The funniest, and certainly most endearing, moment was when my husband and I placed our chairs side by side. If you know us, you’ll love this picture (I snapped this picture at home):

While mine was, well, what you might expect from me, Arden’s was delightfully sturdy, stable, well-made…also what you would expect from him. I love the contrast the two chairs created, but it wasn’t until we showed the chairs to our son, Carter, when he commented on their scale. The way he put it was something like this, ” Whoever can fit into one chair can also fit into the other, isn’t that cool?” Pretty astute for a 13 year old, I think. What he hit upon is that our chairs shared the same scale. And in that moment I realized that our chairs were a perfect snapshot of our life together, me and Arden. Some similarities, some differences…well, maybe a lot of differences to those who only look at the outside, but we live our lives in scale with one another.

Perhaps that accounts for the harmony we so often experience in our household, even in these tumultuous times.

At any rate, this art activity ran deep and wide for me…I learned a lot that day of the retreat, but even more about myself, my love, and our life together later on.

Art is like that. It mirrors your reality, makes things clearer, gives voice to your life and times.

Art is worth doing.

I love working with blue/brown glass combinations. Doing so is the lampworking equivalent of jeans and a soft turtleneck sweater on a rainy day. There’s something so maternal and genuine in this combination, perhaps because they are the essence of earth and air, soil and sky. Visually, these beads are versatile in terms of fashion and jewelry design applications. This beadset features moretti glass of cobalt, blue, periwinkle, sky blue, blue aventurine, brown, topaz, taupe, and ivory. Transparent light blue and topaz lend three dimensionality to many of the beads, and a variety of shapes and designs are highlighted in this set.

This set features variations of brown, taupe, topaz, red, yellow, and ivory. I used both opaque and transparent glass, the latter of which creates the layered look in several of the beads. This was a new color combination for me, and I enjoyed working with it. Warm, organic, and honeyed, the end results are reminiscent of harvest time. Beyond that, the red glass brings out something primal and corporeal in the color combinations.

Blood and Honey.

I am working with jewelry designer/metalsmith extraordinaire, Jane Estes, on the International Society of Glass Beadmakers’ Convergence Project. The fundamentals of this competition are that two artists are paired, a lampworker (that’s me) and a jewelry designer (that’s Jane), to created a wearable object of art that is inspired by the four elements of water, air, earth, and/or fire.

We’ve been planning, brainstorming, sketching in our notebooks, and visiting each other’s studios in order to learn more about one another’s style, ideas, art form, and expectations. It has been exciting to collaborate with another artist on a project, and we have gotten off to an incredible start, despite one hip replacement surgery (me) and 4-year old twins (Jane)! I have found Jane to be a fountain of inspiration, with an incredible eye for style and design. My most memorable moment so far has been watching Jane play with and pick out colors from my glass inventory, creating a palette from which I would create glass beads. Pulling out the pretty rods of glass is sort of like opening a brand new box of crayons, but without the fabulous smell. It’s good.

So far, I’ve experimented with nails and screws in glass beads (see last month’s posts), and I’ve really enjoyed creating the most recent Earth and Water inspired bead set, which I will feature below. Next, I am going to focus on truly Earthen tones, and see what inspiration is derived therein.

Whew! I finished! These were fun little projects…I gave two away as Christmas gifts before I could take pics (hmmm, mental note to self: sneak them back for a picture). Four are left though, and they are going up on Etsy as soon as I am done with this post.

I say that these shrines are finished….for now, because they really are intended for completion by the owner. While I put a few embellishments inside, I was mindful to leave room for purposeful things to be added later. Each one definitely took on a personality of its own, but even that is destined to evolve in the hands its owner.

So, what did I do in these final stages? Well, first, I decided it was time for more hand-designed paper, so out came the rice paper, watercolors, and oil pastels. That is a therapeutic activity perfect for whiling away the time (even better if Ellen is on). I drew shapes and designs on rice paper with the oil pastels, then went over the entire paper with watercolor (Prang glitter watercolors are my favorite). Then I just tore various rectangles, squares and odd shapes with my trusty metal ruler.

I used more satin finish varnish to seal everything on the outside, and added more than just the decorative rice paper. I used stamps, fortune cards, and my favorite, precious die-cut gnomes from Tiny Things are Cute. I added some 3D features with various small embellishments and even some leftover multicolor shrinky dink rectangles left over from a previous project.

Last, I gave a light sprinkle of sugardust white glitter. I love it glitter. I love working with it. I love how when I finally quit for the night, I have glitter in random and accidental places. I love how the next morning, it is in my bed on and in my husband’s sideburns. Glitter migrates. No one is safe from the glitter.

Now all I have left to do is upload the shrines to Etsy. I’ll post more pictures there. For now, enjoy!

Here’s a project I did with my Art I students earlier this year, pre-surgery. We were studying gesture drawings, composition, foreground, background, and I was attempting to fully indoctrinate my students with a love, respect, and appreciation for prismacolor pencils. Yum. Or, as one of my students calls them, “Charismacolors.”

Yes. Indeed, that is exactly what they are.