An Impromptu Artist’s Date

Yesterday morning I had to go out to run some errands - it was a beautiful day - sunny, spring-time warm and, for the first time in what felt like forever, the thought of having a little walk about was appealing.

After finishing up what I had to get done, I parked the car on Murray Street in the Byward Market area and walked over to the National Art Gallery…

This is a shot of the Beaux-Arts lane that I took a few years ago…one of my first ‘drive by’ shots taken out of the car window while I was driving past…















Here is a shot of the same lane from yesterday…















I can’t remember the exact day last fall, but at some point, while driving across the Alexandra Bridge into Ottawa, I noticed this sharp silver finger reaching up into the sky…I asked Cariño if he knew when it had appeared and what it was, but he didn’t know either…and that was how it remained until yesterday.

I walked past Louise Bourgeois’ Maman…the giant spider, and although I really dislike spiders, this one kind of grows on you. She is quite lovely. I believe there are 8 of these huge spider sculptures around the world.

Maman is one of many things that I keep returning to to try to get just the perfect shot…I’m not the only one, either…on any given day you can see someone or sometimes groups of people walking up to, away from and all around Maman trying to get their perfect shot.

I am happy with this one I took yesterday, but I am sure that it won’t be the last one I take of her!










As I walked around to the river-side of the gallery, I started to get a feel of just how tall this new sculpture was…and such a nice shiny silver.















I walked right up to it and all around it…I decided that I like it! I especially liked being right bellied up to it…




















































There was no plaque or anything telling me what the name of the sculpture was, who the artist was…when it had been installed…so I looked it up when I got home and my artist date became complete then – I had got out, seen something up close that I hadn’t seen before, had fun figuring out how to take some photos of what I saw…and then was inspired to come home and research about what I had seen…and, finally, to blog about it! That whole package goes a long way to making me feel good!

The new sculpture’s name is “One Hundred Foot Line”, was created by the New York artist Roxy Paine and is one in a series of trees that he has done in stainless steel called “Dendroids”. There are 4 interesting videos about the artist and his work. The first one that comes up when you go to this page is a talk with the artist about his stainless steel trees and rock sculptures. I’ll let you go listen to it instead of my paraphrasing what he is trying to portray. The other 3 videos (click on the little arrow at the bottom right of the video to get to them) show the process he uses in his ‘paintings’ – really kind of neat – he has an elaborate computerized set-up that then allows the paint to do what it will do.

There are some more videos that show the installation of his mammoth Dendroids – the first in the list shows a time-lapse video of the installation of One Hundred Foot Line.

After getting to know the new sculpture, I continued walking around this area called Nepean Point. This article from the Ottawa Citizen talks about both the new sculpture and Nepean Point.

I continued taking some shots…it was a good a good artist's date!















































To top the day off I played with Lily - who was 6 months old a few days ago...I can't believe how fast the time flies!!!

I never meant to lie...

I really did not intend to tell a lie. I honestly thought that I was on the verge and just about to, and I have felt that way ever since I wrote that last blog post back in late June of last year, but it hasn’t happened yet. Many other things have happened, some of which have made it difficult, for the time being, to have space and time in my studio, in fact, most of my paints and materials are packed up for now.

I still have lots of creative ideas, but the actual painting and creating of them will have to wait. They will have to wait until we move to a bigger place. One major thing that has happened over this past year is that I became a grandmother! This is proving to be a thrilling journey, little Lily has brought such joy into our house. Joy and happiness…and a lot of ‘stuff’! My daughter, her beau and the baby have moved in with us, so now we all need to move to a bigger place! We had been planning on moving anyway, so this is no surprise.

I have still been keeping creative, even if I haven’t been painting. I have been focusing my creative energies on photographic ones…last January 1st, 2010, I began a Project 365, and on December 31st, 2010, I completed it. I had so much fun that I am doing another one!

A number of us who finished up our Project 365 at the end of December were sent some interview questions…you can find my answers here at the 365 Community Blog. At the end is a slide show of all of my photos for the year:



I do miss writing my blog though. Through the process of writing it, I would reflect on whatever it was I was working on, taking the time to examine my creative processes, to look closely at how I came up with my different ideas and how these ideas would grow and change into more ideas. Blogging made me sit back and look over things in a way that I simply don’t do at all if I’m not writing my blog and I believe that process helped my creative growth.

I do still spend most of my free time “filling the well”, getting in all the eye candy that I can, as well as reading about and learning new things. My Cariño told me about this new Google project that he heard about on the radio – Google Art Project. I have just started to wander about in it and it is wonderful! There is a great video that explains the project and an article about it from ‘The Economist’ and you can find the Google Art Project here. I think I am going to be spending some quality time wandering around these museums. I love that, with some of the paintings, you can zoom right in and almost feel the brush strokes – and no gallery security guard is going to yell at you for being too close to a piece of art!