Featuring Colette Crutcher, Mosaic artist

Among the many inspiring murals throughout San Francisco, Tonantzin Renace is not to be missed.  This sensational mosaic relief mural of  the fiery red Lady , unparalleled anywhere in the city, can be seen at 3495 16th St. and Sanchez.  Colette Crutcher lives and works in San Francisco, creating several mosaic masterpieces around the city including this incredible Mayan Quetzalcoatl ( seen above) sculpture located in the Mission district at 24th St. and York. One of her latest feats is the astounding community steps project located at 16th Avenue and Moraga in the Sunset district.  Aileen Barr, also a local artist who creates her own tiles, shared her skills with Colette to help create the hand made tiles and worked with Colette to design the steps.  With Aileen's ceramic knowledge and Colette's mosaic experience, the two artists work were wed.  Jessie Audette and Alice Yee Xavier are responsible for proposing the idea and helped organize the project. Together, everyone raised enough money, $120,000, to create and complete the 163 steps mosaic design.  (left image just below)

WOW!!!

I previously had the privilege of living in the same neighborhood as Colette and could visit her Lion, Wise and Furry, at whim.  We can see more of Colette's incredible work on her website at www.colettecrutcher.com.  You can also purchase a book about the 163 steps recently completed in the city to support their work and cover the cost of the publishing.   Also noted and not to be missed here is the detailed relief sculpture created by her artist husband, Mark Roller ( circular relief seen below). The two have worked on several projects together, most easily seen on the Quetzalcoatl sculpture mentioned earlier.

          

Finally, to learn more about the murals of San Francisco, visit www.cityhikes.com.  OR   www.precitaeyes.org.

Nature

Among the amazing, magical formations that nature reveals to us every day, there are always some exceptions that defy any sort of explanation.  Like this tree growth I encountered while hiking the Dipsea trail in Marin, CA.... 

I never cease to be amazed at the endless creativity around me.  Please post your most amazing experience in nature and remember... keep your eyes peeled.

recent drawings and paintings

Please post your thoughts...

Spirals

You will see spirals everywhere if you look very closely.  I see spirals in every day life all the time.  Raining, dreaming, walking, sunshine, they are everywhere.

Nature creates the most amazing examples every day if we take the time to look.

The Fibonacci sequence ( spiral created by a specific, mathematical growth pattern found in nature) and the Golden mean have been 

studied by artists, mathematicians, and scientists alike who have been fascinated with it's nature for thousands of years.

Renaissance artists applied the Golden mean when creating the perfect composition.  The images here are examples of architecture, pottery, jewelry, photography as well as some of my paintings, and drawings inspired by nature's spiral.

Where do you see spirals?

color shifting

While back East visiting my family, we all decided to go for a walk and find a new place to eat.  Stonington borough is a beautiful, quaint town in Connecticut, close to the border of Rhode Island with old cape houses with gardens that line narrow, meandering streets.  Taken by this beautiful cornflower blue house as we walked by, I remembered I hadn't been practicing my color shifting lately.

  One skill an artist should always work on is their inherent feel and understanding of color.  When mixing pigment on your palette, one should try and become the color, absorb yourself into it, feel the richness of it or its quiet shade so that you know where it wants to be on the canvas.  This will help your process flow naturally.

 I'll walk you through the steps of color shifting and I hope you find this will remarkably improve your color sensitivity as you create.

1. Stand in as close proximity to the color you would like to shift into. You may find articles of your clothing start shifting right away.  This is normal.

2. Close your eyes and envision the color, how it feels (cool, warm, intense, weak, kinetic, still...).  It is important not to overthink it.

3. Envision yourself as that color.  Your skin, hair, toenails, everything must shift to this new color.  When you are ready, slowly walk away from the color you have been standing next to, holding the vision of yourself as this color in your mind.

note: It is best to walk away from the color at first in order to strengthen your independent color nature.  Eventually this will not be necessary and you may be able to eliminate step 3.  ALso, it is helpful to have a buddy* so they can critique how accurate your shifting is.  You may find that you shift a few shades too light at first.  This is natural.

4. Shift!

*I was lucky enough to have Corby there to get a picture of me.  This was my first time color AND shape shifting.  When I realized the color shifting was happening quite easily ,  I decided to try and take it one step further and became a hose.  Sometimes you never know what you might become so it's a little risky.  You can see me in the last picture there.  But that's a very advanced state of shifting.

To unshift just simply think of another color radically different and you will pop right back to normal.  The more you practice the stronger your color sense becomes.

Have fun!

The pinwheel

This is a true story that took place at one of the Saturday afternoon lectures, or dharma talks, at the San Francisco Zen center in San Francisco, CA.  I love the simplicity of it and I hope you like it too.  That's Corby and I in the pictures on our way home from NY.  He took very good care of his 4th of July pinwheel from Aunt Jane's and carried it in his pocket the entire way home.  He let me borrow it when I got bored.  Those are some of Aunt Jane's painted twigs in his pocket too.

The room was filled with about 50 people, slowly shifting, straightening out their legs as the gong sounded to end the meditation.  As we rearranged our bodies, preparing for the teaching, the head monk turned our attention to the children present before he began his lecture.  Each child had been given a pinwheel as they entered the meditation room that afternoon, a brilliant idea and a hugely successful one at providing the children a quiet way to relax and play.  There was a calmness in the room as we gathered ourselves, focused, intent to listen and learn from the monk about the buddha nature; compassion and the union of wisdom and emptiness.  There was a tangible intensity to the silence as we patiently waited to hear what he would say.

"What do think about the pinwheels?"  he asked.  The children each shouted out their discoveries enthusiastically..."They're fun!"   "They're beautiful"   " They go 'round and 'round".

One child shared less excited, "sometimes they break". 

The monk was nodding and smiling as he listened to each of them share their pinwheel wisdom.  We adults, dutifully still, waited patiently on our pillows, waiting for the lecture.

One child held his pinwheel up high and shouted "You know, if you don't blow on it, it doesn't go!"

Suddenly the silence in the room plunged a little deeper.  The monk smiled as he refocused his attention to all the adults in the room and paused, letting the child's statement sink in.

"I think we've heard our lecture for today..."he smiled and beamed proudly at how easily the children had grasped a simple yet profound concept.     "...if you don't blow on it...it doesn't go".  And he quietly, slowly stood up and left the room.

Finding your Rhythm

Creating a fun, interesting, quality composition in art requires only a few ingredients. One of these concepts is the proverbial element of finding the rhythm, or pattern that carries through your image.  Whether it's the focal point of your drawing, photograph, sculpture, dance, poem, Italian aria or whether it holds the composition together in a subtle, gentle, style like the sound of the earth rotating around the sun; rhythm is the dance.  

The photos above were taken in the gloriously romantic city of Rome, Italy.  One of these photographs is an unusual perspective of the famous Pantheon, taken by Corbett B. Leith. Can you tell which one ( Hint: the Pantheon's main structure is cylindrical and you maaaaayyyyy be able to make out the 125 AD stamps on the bricks)?   Any masterful surmising as to what those triangular slices of light and shadow are?  In each one of these photographs at least one or more shapes have been repeated throughout the image to create a sense of rhythm.  This repetition holds the photograph together the same way a beat holds you and moves you when listening to music. It draws you in. 

 Is there rhythm in the silhouette of the chandelier? You can decide for yourself, but the strong vertical and horizontal stripes of the window panes offset the graceful curves of the iron frame that curl and bend in its own rhythmical style.  Following suit, the columns in the far right image, taken in front of the Vatican, establish depth and rhythm, the bottom image ( the back wall of the Pantheon taken from a rear alley) reveals a beautiful brick pattern that zips horizontally across the curved wall while subtle arch like patterns offset it vertically. Finally, the descending, curvilinear stone steps in the center photograph, taken in front of a Bernini chapel, suggest rhythm and movement in its simplest form, changing a seemingly mundane subject into a curious, abstract composition.  

Ciao! Ciao!

Introducing Corbett Browning Leith

I would like to introduce to you Corbett Browning Leith, my studio partner, partner in crime an amazing artist and unquestionably, my favorite.  His artwork speaks as powerfully for itself as he does.  For now I will simply share with you some of his finished work.  Enjoy!

Finding the edge

Finding the edge is about finding and redefining the boundries of space, shape, and potential.

It's about finding the zone between what exists and what can exist, the threshold of creativity.  It can be applied to  different concepts like finding the edge between the tree limb I am drawing here, and the sky that appears behind it.  It can also be the edge of what you think you can do and what you actually can do, exploring new territory of  yourself and your imagination.

While on a trip to visit family in Stonington, Ct. I discovered this writhing, hand-like tree that seemed to be reaching straight out of the ground. In this painting I tried to capture  the wiggly, human, limb-like personality of the tree by defining its hard, winding edges and set it against a loose, aquatic background to further capture its magical quality.  The contrast between the dark background and white limbs clearly defines its shape and presence.  The stark line that builds and wanes as it carves around the edge of the tree also defines it in a very deliberate approach, leading the eye in and around the spaces that dip and turn while exposing its texture, contour and volume.

Another way to create an edge, ironicly, is to blurr parts of the edge.  Having soft areas of color that are less defined helps emphasize striking edges and ultimately appear more dynamic in contrast.  

So to re-cap, finding the edge helps to define space, shape and movement to create a more dynamic presence.