Artists at Work

I love watching ‘artists at work’ – whether they are sculpting, painting, potting – anything! I just love to watch their processes and how they do what they do. Actually seeing the magic of creation!

My elder daughter has sat for Karen Bailey a couple of times now and once it was for a demonstration at the Blink Gallery – so I got to watch! It was for two hours and it felt like five minutes, I was so enthralled!

This love of watching can be a dangerous thing though…there are so many videos out on the Internet that I could get lost for hours – days! And I spend such a lot of time on the computer as it is!

So, as a rule, I don’t go cruising YouTube, but I do watch the videos that I come across while cruising people’s blogs (another dangerous escape of mine – one blog leads to another, leads to another…and hours disappear!). I am also delighted when I look up some artist I have heard about or seen a piece from and they have a video posted on their site.

Both of these things happened this week…

Cariño and I had some time to kill in the Byward Market earlier this week so we walked over to the Lafreniere & Pai Gallery. The artist, whose sculpture I had seen in the window a few days before and had put on my mental list of things I wanted to see, was Susan Valyi and her work is fantastic! On her web site she has photos of her sculptures and also a video showing her working on some of her pieces. I absolutely fell in love with her piece “What I did Last Summer”, which was in the show – you can see it if you go to the Lafreniere & Pai Gallery’s web site, click on the Artists page and then click on Susan Valyi. This piece isn’t up on Susan’s web site yet. I love her morphed figures and this one, so small against the wonder of summer (it reminds me of the magic of summers when I was young) on the huge horse in a boat…a summer full of wonder and adventure is the feeling I get from this.

I am still trying to figure out the ‘etiquette’ of blogging…so I hope it is ok to post a picture of this sculpture here…





















This morning, during my morning coffee and blog wandering, I came across Cath Sheard’s blog and she had posted a video of Jonas Gerard painting. He dances while he paints! It looks like he is really enjoying himself…it would be wonderful to see him in real life!



The morning has almost slipped away on me again...but that's ok!