Upcoming events in November and December 2012

Above is some of the new work I will be displaying November 17 and 18 as I exhibit for the first time at the Piedmont Craftsmen Fair at the Benton Convention Center in downtown Winston –Salem NC. Please come and join me in booth E-1 and view new work hot off the press and take in the sights of a wonderfully put together show, for more information on the Piedmont Craftsmen Fair click the link to go to their website.

I will also be on the Chatham County Open Studio Tour for the first time this year as well. The tour will be the first two weekends in December, the 1’st and 2’nd and the 7’th and 8’th each day from 10am to 5pm. I will be exhibiting some of my new work but will also be selling older pieces at significant discounts as well as serving light refreshments and hot drinks. So come in out of the cold visit for a little bit and partake in one of the best and oldest open studio tours in the state. For more information for more information on the tour and tour maps visit the Chatham Artist Guild

Featured in New Online Arts Magazine

            Creating Linus Art is a new online arts magazine that has just come out, and I was honored to be among the artists chosen to be showcased in its inaugural issue. Subscriptions to this online magazine are free until January of 2013, so please follow the link to Creating Linus and sign up, you will then have access to the magazine and also to its sister publication Creating Linus Jewellery. For the first issue, 16 artists in different media were interviewed. For my part, I felt that the questions challenged me to describe what this whole mysterious process of making art and being an artist is about. I also enjoyed reading what made other artists tick, so in my humble opinion the magazine is well worth taking a look at, so please sign up and check it out if you get a chance.

New Works on a Smaller Scale

I have been working on small figure sculptures on and off for the past few years, often as studies for larger functional pieces like my torso cabinet series. Last summer I began to think of them as little studies unto themselves, a way of sketching in wood and not getting caught up in the details of a larger piece that allows me to more quickly get ideas out. I set a rough parameter of not spending more than an hour on each piece, which removes that slow ponderous quality that can be my work style. With a relatively small investment in time and materials, each figure ends up being a short fun adventure. My work with these smaller figures is showcased in a short documentary film. See my blog article for more details on the film.

A New Documentary Short Film about Me and My Work

I am a film junky and have been since an early age. As a teenager I would watch age inappropriate films with my friends at the Carnegie Mellon University Friday night student screenings. You only had to pay your dollar with no questions asked and a whole new world opened up to you. I remember vividly watching A Clockwork Orange, Pink Flamingos and other art films far different from the fare being served up in the local movie theatre and probably forever warping my young mind. Once in college one of my housemates, a film maker and fellow celluloid junky, would drag me to every film screening offered at the university: the Tuesday and Wednesday night foreign films, the Thursday and Friday second run films, and the once a month movie at the Film Alternative. I came down with mono while watching Ingmar Bergman’s the Cries and Whispers and walked out of the only film I have ever left prematurely, the French new wave film Last Year in Marienbad. (Rachel reminds me that I have also walked out on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and on some other film whose title we have both forgotten.)

My addiction knows no end and since moving to Chapel Hill I have discovered and now volunteer at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Every April when the festival rolls around I feast on enough films to truly OD. Watching 12-16 films in the course of a long weekend can be hazardous to your health, and by the time Sunday rolls around the films are just bouncing off my eyeballs.

All of this is basically a long preamble to introducing the fact that I have finally worked on a film, though not as a maker but as the subject. While at the last Full Frame I sat next to local filmmaker Nic Beery as we watched an excellent short doc about the lost art of letter press printing called Kiss the Paper. It was then that we hatched a plan to shoot a short about me. Many thanks to Nic and to his intern Matthew Krieg for giving me my first taste of actually being involved in a film and please check out Nic’s other excellent films by visiting his website www.beerymedia.com and his vimeo page