First Thursday Opening Night at ANKA

The exhibit will continue for the month of October - so if you missed the opening you can still visit the show! I wanted to share a few pictures from First Thursday. Opening night was intense and bopping and great!

Sweet Video about the IHeartArt Event

Mixer Match: Round One from I Heart Art: Portland on Vimeo.

This video sums up the event quite well! My little mobile display makes a quick 2second cameo :) If you want to read more about this event, check out my previous posts:

• My Article on IHeartArt Portland Blog
• IHeartArt: Mixer Recap
• I Heart Art
• I Heart Art Party

Art Show Opening

The ANKA GALLERY of contemporary fine art

presents

Kalos Eidos

Color | Beauty | Form
Curated by: Anna Solcaniova King

I was downtown this evening setting up my work for a show - it opens tomorrow for First Thursday. 325 NW 6th (right on the Green Line)

I will be there from 5-10pm or so :)
I am exhausted, its late and this has been a long day of working at the studio, class scheduling snafu, hours of sorting and consuming scrap, and then setting up at the gallery. Playing at the Anka Gallery and hanging my work was really a pleasure! I made this long mobile to fit this spot in the hallway, see the opening that is about 2 feet wide and 10 feet long, I could not resist the urge to fill this spot with a mobile. I love how it turned out. Looks great in the spot.

I like taking pictures of the set-up process! Anna and Grayland and Chad were all so nice and graciously did not mind me clicking away with my obnoxious camera. There is something delicious about a gallery setting up. It feels nostalgic for me, as I have worked in Galleries before.

I like the set up process. Its fun to watch art get installed into a space.

This picture (above) is the reflection I saw as I was setting up the front window display. I now have 3 mobiles hung in the front window display for this show! I will take more pictures in the daylight tomorrow.
This mobile just looked so gentle and lovely in the evening light - although I don't know if the awesome lamps will be in the show (they were part of the previous show) - I liked how the picture looks
Come join me for the opening, or visit the Gallery another time. The show runs for a month. Check out the website for information on the exhibit and all the artists involved.

http://www.ankagallery.com/

Pictures of Glass Blowing

Right before I left to go out of town I had the opportunity to get into the hotshop and blow some glass with a friend. I am hoping to do more now that I am back! Maybe today, maybe Thursday... either way I am exciting and pumped!
I ended up hanging out at Elements for a few hours waiting for the kiln to cool down (so we could see the pieces before we left!) and I took a bunch of pictures while lolly-gagging around the studio. I love the imagery of a hotshop. The glow of heat, the sweaty men, the furnaces and kilns and other equipment. I also love the smell of beeswax and burntness that permeates a hotshop. Its exquisite.
Elements is a public access hotshop that many different gaffers use - that day there was a group of men working on pulling cane - in the picture above you can see them all working on the hot gather together - I loved how the lighting created a look of silhouettes.
These two pictures are of a beautiful piece that Aaron was working on, it was a rebellious piece of glass and kept leaping off the pipe and bouncing across the concrete floor. What you are looking at here is a new puntil attached to the piece and the flame keeping the glass hot as the puntil cools down (the puntil must be rigid enough to hold the weight of the piece before they can really pick it up and get it into a glory hole to re-heat). The wood underneath the glass burned a bit, but Brandyn simply stepped on it and put out the flames once the glass was safely in the glory hole. This was fantastic to watch and take pictures of - I am guessing it was a bit less fun for the artists chasing the hot glass around the studio!!

Beautiful Pictures

These images are in the slideshow on the previous post - but I had to take a moment to re-highlight them! They are so beautiful! The colors of these petals amaze me!
Part of the Conservatory at the Longwood Gardens is a beautiful water lily display. Beautifully set up with multiple shallow pools where the water lilies can thrive in the dark waters. The big leaves grow up to foot a day! The flowers were varying sizes, some big like dinner plates and some smaller like dalias.

Longwood Gardens

This week I went to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania while visiting Tim's family. I had been to this garden about 10 years ago when I was in college. For a few semesters I was in an amazing Ayuvedic medicine course and my instructor Dr. Patel took us out there to the botanical gardens. Its an amazing property bought and cultivated by Pierre du Pont back in the early 1900's. Its hard to describe if you've never been, you could walk around for hours and not see it all. Its like gardens of Versailles in Pennsylvania!

There was a particularly wonderful exhibit going on called: "Making Scents - the art and passion of fragrance". Throughout the garden scented plants were specially indicated and there were these neat sniffer devices on some displays. There were also some displays about scent extraction and a room full of perfume bottles and fragrance oils. And I could take pictures of it all! (I asked to be sure) Glass Perfume bottles are so gorgeous, with their precious contents...

When I was a little girl I was fascinated by my mother's perfume collection. So one time I took all the bottles down and poured a bit of each one into one bottle. I was creating my own custom scent! A little of this and a little of that... her expensive collection being wasted ridiculously! Until she smelled the horror wafting down the stairs and came up to see what I was doing. I was reminded of this experience as I wandered the beautiful room filled with perfume bottles. I recognized the no. 4711 - that was one of the perfumes in my mom's collection. She took me to Paris as a pre-teen and one of my most treasured memories is going into an old perfume shops. Shelves and shelves of au du toilettes. It was incredible, something I will never forget. I wanted to take them all home.

Rogue Celebrates the Portland Saturday Market

Tim and I got back in town just in time to go to the vendor party at Rogue Brewery last night. Great timing eh?! I swear it wasn't on purpose.

A few years ago Rogue Brewery created a beer in honor of the Portland Saturday Market and started selling a selection of their locally handcrafted beers in a booth with us. There was a party to celebrate this new relationship, they invited the vendors to come eat and drink in the bar on NW 14th. This year they had another party with us to again celebrate this great relationship! Honestly its really touching how highly they think of the Portland Saturday Market and it has truly been beneficial for both Rogue and the PSM to have their beer selection available on the weekends down on the waterfront.

I still had a bottle of the first beer they created for the market (pictured above on the left) and the current PSM brew (above on the right)
We all pledged to the Rogue Nation and toasted the Portland Saturday Market.
And our beloved Ryan, the nice man who serves the beer in the booth every weekend was officially inducted into the market as an honorary vendor. Basically he got a bumper sticker, a teeshirt and a gift certificate. You see, even though he has been setting up and selling with us for years, he has never actually been a vendor. Technically he is a Rogue bartender who works the PSM booth. Anyhow, he fits into the PSM family very well and treats everyone with respect and generosity. So we made him an honorary vendor.