Open Studio 2008

Everyone is invited to come to my Open Studio for 2008! Organized by ArtSpan

San Francisco Open Studios occur throughout October, with different neighborhoods open each weekend. my studio is in The Sunset and we are open Oct 11th and 12th 11 am to 6 pm.

daydreaming arts studio is located at 2169 20th Avenue Just off of Route 1.

I have so much new work this year it's very exciting getting ready. I will have 13 brand new oversized abstract photos framed and hung for presentation and a mountain of new prints that have not yet been framed.
You can see these at my new website, daydreamingarts.net

I also have mixed media work including several new silk works such as hand printed scarves, wall hangings and a new "found art" window with a silk montage and beach elements.

for my photographic prints i always use the original capture, but for the mixed media and silk i enjoy creating montages with those images so this work has a surreal impression. The picture on the right is one such montage that i used one my latest window.

water water everywhere

the winter beach is so fascinating, the delicate colors reflected in the surface of the water contrast with the reality dangerous high surf from winter storms. my photo shows the light playing on the thin film of water over the sand as the wave washes out. the link is to the annual maverick surf competition where they sometimes confront 100 foot faces on the waves!
the detailed story of the most harrowing year yet is told by SF Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/31/MNGQCNS3NM1.DTL
in making this final image i had to return to the beach repeatedly to study the colors i saw. the camera, set on automatic white balance, had interpreted the colors differently than i. and when i first attempted to print the blues shifted darker and even more saturated than i intended. by the time the print came out my memory had faded. so i returned several days in a row at the same time of day so that i would not be influenced by the camera or the printer I i finally got the colors i wanted.

the winter beach

this is the first winter i've been this close to the pacific. I can go every morning just to watch the waves. It so exciting the way that the sea rises and reduces the beach. there's really no place left to walk, even at low tide you can get cut off. I went down from the bluff at fort funston through the beach access and followed a young fellow as he scampered over some rocks to the next section of beach. by the time i'd picked my way over the rocks, he was long gone to the next section. then the waves were coming fast and high and the rocks i'd just climbed over were under water! now i'm not so agile any more and i got kinda scared as i climbed over a higher section of rock and slid down the other side on my tush. with the seat of my jeans wet and sandy i saw that a cement protrusion was about to become a major roadblock if i didn't hustle! the tide was coming in fast so i jogged down the beach past the cement ruin to the safety of the bluffs! fewie! so this dizzy shot is fitting cut that's how i felt as i worked my way back up the bluff.

fort funston

at the south end of Ocean Beach in San Francisco is some beautiful dunes that rise suddenly out of the beach. at the top a fort was once built and garrisons were dug in and we were safe all during WWII. of course the army sort of tore the place up, but it's been turned into a park and many areas are being restore - with native plants and protecting nesting birds. I love to walk up from the beach, winding through the dunes and turn around and go back before it get crowed with dog walkers and deserted army structures. This is where i've been taking pictures on my morning walks.

dizzy on the beach!

black and white

really grayscale. i think maybe my latest beach photo, a lensbaby interpretation of a broken shell, is better as a grayscale cuz when i converted it, out popped this face!
so the color was a distraction from the form. it was the color of the grains of sand.
but to add interest i reduced the opacity of the layer that i used for the channel mixer and let a little color thru. this actually made it eery - like a skeleton!

beach again and color

This morning i went down to the cold foggy, windy beach with my camera, lensbaby attached, and took sand pictures. Fun to revisit the subject from the warped perspective of the lensbaby. But i had the strongest macro lens on and that meant being inches from the subject. So i'm down on my knees in the wet sand, keeping one eye and both ears on the surf so i can jump up when the occasional larger wave sends more wet bubbles my way. I got out of the way every-time but i was wet and very cold at the end. The pics are interesting. see it you can see it with the profile - maybe open in photoshop too see the warm colors - the foam i was shooting was yellower than the foam that disappeared quickly.



I've been so wrapped up in working on my widows. following my teaching advise to test your application. I thought i had a great solution to the challenges of transferring photos to the glass when i decided i did not like the look at all and now i've switched to other materials. So i'm back to experimenting before i print out and transfer. the interesting part is trying to get the color i want. When i first thought of transferring images it was because i wanted to move a picture with perfect color from a paper with controllable attributes like a paper profile and consistent professional level paper production to a surface that was more artistic but without the controllability - watercolor paper, canvas etc.
The method for doing that is hard because it involved rubbing off the paper from the back of the acrylic gel emulsion. this killed my hands. So i started working with overhead transparencies and lazertran. they don't have profiles but they seem well made. But with the overhead transparencies i had problems getting clean transfers when i worked big, so i switched to lazertran for my big project. I'm currently in the middle of doing color tests. changing one thing at a time, printing out swaths of color waiting for things to dry, then transfer it and wait for that to dry and then compare with the image on the screen. painfully slow. But the color is important to me. when i worked with the overhead transparencies the first time i was so excited about getting the image to stay on the window that i did not work to correct color problems. but then it slowly got to me, how it was off. Also that it was too distressed ( places of lift where the ink does not transfer). I feel like maybe i'm crazy cuz no one else i know tests this much.
maybe i like testing! i'm the daughter os a scientist afterall ya know!
I have also been working on generating a handout that was supposed to be given for my last workshop. Oh boy, the dangers of cut and paste! the material is mostly a compilation of information at the Golden and Lazertran websites, with some quoted material from the yahoo group, with my running commentary throughout. Boy is it long! It was so unwieldy that i had to actually make an outline to determine the organization i'd given it and rewrite the outline to get things is a more comprehensible order. I can't remember the last time i outlined something!!! I guess i'll ost it here when i'm done.