News from Shannanigan's Art House

PayPal has FINALLY arrived...

2011-02-12T23:59:00.000-08:00

After virtually months of dithering and fussing and whining that it's just too harddddd, I finally set myself the task of getting PayPal onto my artcard website by the end of this week, and I'm proud to say that I'm only a day past my deadline in achieving 'The Goal'. My buddy David and I worked through the cybergeek-speak of the PayPal account thingy and eventually managed to decipher the instructions, admittedly with a little assistance from the help line. (Okay, I have learned the hard way that the phrase 'it's simple and fast and will only take 20 minutes of your time!' really means pour yourself a G & T and settle in for a slog...) Nonetheless, the waiting and whinging is finally a thing of the past, and 'The Goal' has been achieved. Click here to visit my website and try out the neato keen PayPal thingy because you know you want to, you really want to!

The other piece of news from Shannon-land is that I've decided to throw my application in to become a day vendor down at Granville Island - the timing was fortuitous as they only jury new applicants once every two years, and this month happens to be the month. If accepted, I'm on the roster for the next two years, and will have the opportunity to spend 2 weeks out of every 4 selling my wares in the market area itself. As Granville Island happens to be one of my favorite things about Vancouver, I'm thinking that wouldn't be such a bad thing to do with my life at this point! For the application process I had to create some new images as they want the process to be documented, so here are two new images I'm using for my application - not yet part of any series on my website, but perhaps eventually?...

'Night Vision'

'If Wishes were Fishes'

Yet once again already even!

2011-02-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

As promised (to myself more than anyone else) I'm posting two more new images that have recently been added to my artcard collection.

The first is an image based a picture taken on one of the long walks taken out at Boundary Bay Regional Park during the time when my Mom was ill - kind of reflects my dream at the time that her spirit would just drift gently away into the sunrise, when the moment came. Which, as it turns out, was a bit of pipe-dream. Those who knew her well, remember that she was bloody stubborn and had an incredible will-power which kept her fighting to the bitter end. As true in death as she was in life.

The second image is more of a kaleidescope, and reminds me of one of the beautiful quilts that my Grandma Reimer used to make. I still have a somewhat 'well-used', but much beloved quilt she made for me for my birthday from scraps of material of old skirts of mine (don't axe me which one, there've been waaaay too many o' those).

Oh yeah, the website! Click here

"Flutter Byes"

"Rose Quilt"

Red Rocks rock

2011-01-27T21:39:00.000-08:00

Three years ago I went to Arizona for a week with a couple of friends just before Christmas, and we spent a blissful week hiking in the Sedona area. Having never been to the desert before, I was completely seduced by the rich colours - vibrant reds and ochres of the soil cut cleanly by the astonishing blues and stormy greys of the sky. I took about a gazillion pictures. I've had great fun ever since messing about with them in photoshop, and a few of them formed the beginning of my Red Rock card series. A couple of the ones previously posted on my website just didn't cut it for me though, so I've now replaced them with the images below. Hope you like them!

Silly me forgot to put my website link into my last posting, so here it is - all the cards are on the 'Collection' page...

Click here to go to Shannanigan's Art House website.

'Listen'

'Marg's Wash'

Reclaiming my mojo...

2011-01-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

Those who know me (which at this stage of the game includes pretty well anyone who's reading this blog) are aware that my life has undergone a massive shift in the past couple of months. Significant considerations necessitated wrenching myself from my beloved mountain home in Nelson, and to say goodbye for the time being to all my dear friends and my rich and wonderful life in the West Kootenays. So at the end of December - after a move which included getting the flu on moving day, a minor car accident which required traveling over mountain passes in -20 Celsius weather with nothing but plastic on my rear window, and a dog who completely lost the plot as we drove away - I finally arrived in Vancouver. The psychic trauma of the entire affair reduced me to a quivering puddle for the first couple of weeks, from which I'm only now starting to emerge.

It's an uncomfortable thing at any age to deliberately cut loose all the strings that tie a person to a place, a community and all the activities by which you define yourself, and to do that in your fifties is quite a startling and anxiety-producing experience. While I know that the decision is the right one, it nonetheless feels a little like being dumped on an alien planet. No matter what my circumstances while living in Nelson, there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. And now, my days have suddenly become reduced to sitting in front of my computer firing off at least 2 job applications a day into the gaping maw of cyberspace, punctuated only by a forced march in the rain to walk the dogs, and waaaay too much TV in the evenings. In the face of that, it's a constant struggle to maintain a sense of being an independent and productive member of the human race. At a cerebral level, I'm fully aware that this is just a temporary pause in my life while the universe sorts me out, and I do have confidence that I will be able to look back on this someday and heave a sigh of relief that it's over and done with. At the emotional level... well, let's just say it's definitely gut-wrenching.

However, there is one place where I feel at home, and that's when I allow myself to shut everything else out and work into the small hours of the morning creating digital images for my art cards. My image bank is stuffed with exactly 3,172 photographic and hand-drawn images, each one of which holds some resonance of a place or a time or a season. The trick is to learn when to actually stop, as once I start it's all-consuming. It's as addictive as chocolate, and those who know me well will appreciate the enormity of that statement (she says without a shred of irony or exaggeration). As well, for some time I've wanted to update my website with some new cards to replace ones that didn't quite work for me, which I've now done. So for the next couple of weeks I'll be posting some of these new images - I'd love to hear your feedback! Here's the first couple images that are now part of the Black White Series.

Based on a hand-drawn image originally produced for my one-woman show at the Dancing Bear Inn in Nelson, Spring of 2009, entitled 'Puzzle Piece'.

Based on a photograph taken of a large rootball beached at the mouth of Kokanee Creek, entitled 'Drifting'.

Shannanigans website launched!

2010-10-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

After many months of work I am pleased to announce that my new website for SHANNANIGANS ART HOUSE is now up and running. It can be found here.

Please come visit my art house when you get a chance, and feel free to browse into the nooks and crannies. I look forward to your feedback, and am keen to tweak the site as time goes on to make it as welcoming as possible. To those who have asked, yes, Paypal IS on its way, hopefully sooner rather than later!

I recently found out that some people can taste colours, or experience smell as a certain colour - it's called synaesthesia. I find that fascinating, and am a little bit jealous of that ability! Anyways, here are a few images that give a taste of the season...

Monday morning and other banalities

2010-10-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

One of the things about social media that I find irritating sometimes is the whole status update thingy - you know, people who seem compelled to inform the world of whether their cheerios were soggy, their socks were mismatched or that their shampoo is making their scalp itchy. Seriously - who freaking cares about that stuff? On the other hand, I really enjoy being able to connect with long-lost friends, keeping up to date with the major stuff happening in their lives, or finding out about concerts, exhibits, or other noteworthy events that I might not have heard about otherwise. But my allergy to trivialities means that I often swing in the other direction. I clam up. I don't want to impose the tedious, everyday details on my potential audience, and so I say nothing at all. Which is probably not a good place to start if one is determined to enter wholeheartedly into this peculiar world of cybernetic journalling. So it's time to get over myself as it's too early to start getting writer's block!

I remind myself that this blog is meant primarily to share my creative process with my followers (what a weird term that is - makes blogging sound like a post-modern religion or something). People often ask me where / how I come up with stuff. In the meantime, I'm still coming to terms with the whole notion of being an artist. Self-identifying as an artist is a puzzling act; it's so incredibly subjective and means something different for every single person who considers themselves an artist. As a chartered accountant, a lawyer, a physician or for most other professions, you are expected to have a certain body of knowledge and expertise, and are regularly examined by your peers, your guilds, your associations or your colleges to ensure that a professional standard is maintained. But regardless of the opinions of artistic academic institutions, the reality is that every person in the world sees that world through slightly different eyeballs. Perception is as individual as a fingerprint, which makes it difficult - if not impossible - to put descriptive words to the act of creating art which would make sense to everybody, so why even bother to try?

Recently, after receiving generally positive feedback about my work, I've had the experience of someone describing my art as dismal, depressed, tangled, confusing, downward feeling and drab (and that was all in the space of a paragraph!). Knowing this person as I do, I know that the feedback came from a place of wanting to give an honest critique, and not necessarily as a reflection of that person's own feeling of inadequacy or general malaise. If this isn't a clear example of how imagery can be read in polar opposite terms, I don't know what is. The challenge for me is to remind myself that it's a matter of a different set of eyeballs and not necessarily reflective of how everyone responds to my work, nor should I let it have much influence on how I go about doing my work. But perhaps engaging in conversation about the creative process can trigger a different way of perceiving the world - both for myself as the artist and my audience. Or if not in a different way, then perhaps a more subtle, or more complex manner? Like learning to identify the different notes in a glass of fine wine? Can I separate the negative connotations of those words from their true intention, and bring that to bear when I step back from the creative process to see the work how that particular person might view it, and thereby discover a whole new avenue of expression? Well, perhaps that's the next step in becoming more emotionally intelligent, which I suspect is a whole nother blog...

Hmmm, so much for writer's block. Here's a couple of new images - I'll just shut up now!

Lantern procession

Abstract Series #4

Taking a deep breath...

2010-10-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

Today I became transfixed.

The weather forecast predicts a gloomy Thanksgiving weekend, so this afternoon I decided to take advantage of what may be the last of the golden days of autumn. After cajoling Mr. Binks into the car I pointed towards one of my favorite places in creation - the sandspit at Kokanee Provincial Park. As usual I was drawn to walk out to the furthest point on the sandbar - that place where you feel like you're literally standing in the middle of the lake (and which, incidentally, is where I want my ashes spread when my time is up). As I stood there, I glanced down to the spot where the water curled around the spit to form a shallow, clear pool, and saw that the glittery mineral which is part of the landscape around here, had formed ribbons of golden sparkles in the rivulets of sand below the surface of the water. Then Mr. Binks splashed through my reverie and stirred up clouds of the dark silt seeded with the millions of particles of glitter, and the effect was like watching an Imax movie about galaxies full of star clouds.

All very pretty, and enough to captivate most people for a moment or two. Except that it fixed me in place for long minutes, because it was happening again - trying to capture that elusive memory - from early childhood? Another life? Something about sparkles and sequins on a dark background which brings up not only visual associations, but also has emotional content for me, like the discovery of beauty for the first time. I can never quite grasp the actual memory, and it could be something as simple as the trim on a party dress I had as a small child, or the fabric a favorite doll was wrapped in, or an illustration in a story book. Whatever it was, and remains, the hidden memory has the ability to stop me in my tracks, to transfix me.

I'm quite aware that I'm not a particularly beautiful person - even as a young woman in my prime I knew that was an attribute that would never be used to describe me. Sure, for a short window of time between dumpy childhood and frumpy old-maidhood, I could create 'cute' when I made the effort to clean up. But I always had this fantasy that if I imprinted something beautiful to look at onto my eyeballs, I could carry that postage-stamp vision around with me and that somehow it would be reflected back onto the world, and that's what people would see instead - like the glittering silt in the water that looks like a star-field, but is really just a commonplace mineral. In the past few years, as I've struggled to come to terms with a profession as a commercial artist, I've become more deliberate about sharing the huge collection of postage-stamps that reside in my brainbox in a more tangible way, both as a means to a financial end and as a passion. So. I'm taking a deep breath and inviting you to follow me into the world of the blog, to check in once in a while as I attempt to share with you my somewhat convoluted creative process. And it's also meant as a forum to share with you my latest work (photos, drawings, composite images, etc.), and to plug my new website at www.shannanigans.ca - which will hopefully be launched within the next month! Until that time I will try and post every few days, and promise to always have a new image or two from my postage stamp library to share with you.

Sandspit at Kokanee

New card design for the Red Rock Series