Art Blog Gallery

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art, collage, gallery, Mixed Media, painting, paintings, patterns, Zendala, zentangle, Zentangle Inspired Art, Zentangles

I have created an updated gallery on my Jeanette Clawson Art blog. I hope you stop by and see what I’ve been up to.

Year in Review

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art, art journal, art therapy, blogging, endometriosis, graphic text, inspiration, Journal, Mixed Media, pain management, text

See the rest of my 2018 art journal on my other blog.

Flower of the Day: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Monet Sunflowers

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art, Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Monet, Sunflower painting, sunflowers

For more inspiring flower photographs check out Cee’s Flower of the Day posts.

Guess Where I Was Yesterday!

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art, art glass, Chihuly, Flower of the Day, glass, New York, New York Botanical Garden, NYBG

New York Botanical Gardens

Sorry for my absence of late from my blog and from all of yours. I’m continuing to have health challenges that limit my activity. I have to choose where to spend my energy and one of my best friends was in town this past weekend. Getting ready and having adventures with her took all that I had. I will be back later this week. I hope you have a beautiful day.

Back to Gratitude and Paint

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acrylic paint, art, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, grateful, gratitude, gratitude journal, Zentangles

I have been working on layers in my art journal and have been so busy with Zentangle® classes and art, but here is the page layout of the buildup to the CZT27 and planning our trip to Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I included my first Zentangle® tile from the seminar and my dinner coupon for the first evening. The meals at the Providence Biltmore were fabulous. They were awesome in their skill in accommodating gluten free and special dietary needs. There were quite a few of us at the seminar and I got some good tips on that too! They made some gluten free brownies that everyone loved!

You can also see some random flowers I drew/painted on scraps of paper. They turned out pretty well. I’m still playing with cutting painted paper and using layers in my art. I feel like things are coming together, so to speak.

The background of all of these pages were from my Lenten painting marathon. They have been great fun to work on. I should probably get back to them so I can continue to have art journaling backgrounds ready! I played with more layers and tried out new pens and tangle patterns during and after the seminar on these pages. I’m also working on a mandala that I’m going to submit to a show out here and I’m a little nervous. This is a different market from Wisconsin! I’m learning about combining inks and acrylic paints and pens and gel pens with interesting, and sometimes smeary, results. The daffodils are from a napkin from a pot luck dinner I participated in at MUF (Morristown Unitarian Fellowship).

There is also a quote from The Buddha Walks Into a Bar by Lodro Rinzler.

“One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it’s hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That’s just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.”

The thing about living with daily migraines is it has helped me see the threads in myself, not just the ball of yarn. Don’t know if that will mean anything to you, but it gets me through a lot of my days.

Oh! And I have Zentangle® classes scheduled to teach! And my professional art website is getting going! Check it all out here!

I hope you have a beautiful day.

 

Mom Turns 80: So Much Gratitude

Tags

acrylic paint, art, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, gel pens, mandalas, Naomi Novik, quote

We made the trip to Wisconsin and back to New Jersey this last week and there was so much to be grateful for! I’m really pleased with the impact my daily painting has had on the backgrounds of my art journal. I didn’t paint on the trip or yesterday, but I’m getting back to it today.

My Mom turned 80 and my oldest sister did a great job organizing a party. It was great to see family and friends. Our boys hadn’t seen each other in more than a year and the night before Mom’s party the four of us went out for dinner and a movie. Beauty and the Beast was beautiful and the boys loved the music. We also got to see quite a few friends we hadn’t seen in so long. The “happy birthday” on the journal page is from one of the napkins at the party. I drew little mandalas on the page while my mom and I talked and caught up in the days before the party.

The quote is from the Naomi Novik book “Uprooted” that Mike and I listened to on our drive out to WI.

“I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.”

I hope you have a beautiful day on this rainy, Spring day.

Simple Paintings 8 & 9

Tags

abstract, acrylic paint, acrylic paintings, art, dictionary page, dictionary page art, painted dictionary page, Simple Paintings, trees

This painting was to work with increasingly opaque layers of paint. I struggled with it and am not thrilled with how it turned out. Maybe a mandala on top will help. In any case I will use it for mandala experimentation.

This painting uses more or less the reverse color order of my first abstract and I used modeling paste through a mandala stencil. It was a good learning experience. Again, I may use it for experimenting with layering a mandala on top.

It is seriously snowing here! I hope you have a safe and beautiful day.

Celebrating 23 Years

Tags

acrylic paints, art, art journal, collage, paper collage

Last Sunday was our 23rd anniversary! We went out to a play on Saturday and to dinner with friends on Sunday. Also on Sunday people started bringing their pieces of the community mandala back. We got less than half of them back and I’m hoping we get a lot more this week. They used my Celestial Mandala as the cover for the order of worship. That cover is covering up a mandala that I started that was not coming together. I have too much going on this week to wrestle with it, so I added a more relevant layer.

I used some modeling paste on the left hand page and played around with different ways of coloring it. I used part of this Vogue pattern in the background of the community mandala and added it here. It interacted interestingly with the modeling paste. I think in the future I would layer tissue first and then modeling paste, but I do like them together. You may also notice I got a new White Sharpie! I’m working on using black and white for contrast in my pages.

I hope you have a beautiful day.

Eggstraordinary

Tags

art, Cee's Photo Challenge, egg, photography

Here is my contribution to Cee’s Oddball Challenge.

“Oddball:  noun   a person or thing that is atypical, bizarre, eccentric, or nonconforming
                 adjective  whimsically free-spirited; eccentric; atypical”

Cee has had an influence on how I see the world. Now when I seriously overly hard boil an egg I see a potential photograph, rather than a mess. Thanks Cee.

It is such a surprising shape. I hope you have a beautiful day.

Still We Rise

Tags

100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, art, art journal, flowers, gratitude, gratitude journal, I Rise, mandalas, Maya Angelou, Poems, quotes

My new gratitude art journal is my first mixed media sketchbook!

I can journal for quite a few days and really play with things with this book. This page layout was from the past week and culminated in the Women’s March. I didn’t make it to Washington, DC, but I did go to Trenton NJ. It was a really uplifting day. Yesterday I taught part 1 of a mandala drawing class at my Unitarian Universalist Church. I donated the class for their annual service auction. The people who made it were really happy with part 1 and I’m looking forward to part 2 next Sunday. You will see some of my samples in this journal.

Here is my sample free-hand mandala and some very free for all art journal play. I’m going backwards chronologically so here is the beginning of the gratitude journal.

I got some new art supplies that are used in these pages and am playing with lots of flower images. I’m kind of doing a 100 flowers challenge as well as the 100 mandala challenge. I have really enjoyed doing a lot of mandalas as samples for the class. It gets me working in different ways. Another focus for the new year is to get a new blog for just my art and beef up my Etsy site.

The right hand page of the top image has much of the Maya Angelou poem, “Still I Rise” written out. It really captures the spirit of the march and was part of our minister’s sermon yesterday. I’m so grateful for the legacy of Maya Angelou. Here is the poem in its entireity.

Still I rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou

I hope you encountered beauty today.