My Art Show is Confirmed!

Whew, I thought it would never happen, but the planning for Founders Day weekend has finally been completed, with my art show on Fri. Aug. 13 at the Old Colorado City History Center scheduled to begin a weekend of activities:
Thanks to all the volunteers at the center, we all know it was like herding cats, but now my show is all ready to be put on display, helping to commemorate the 151st anniversary of Old Town. We're not done herding cats yet, but already it's fun.

My brochure is 2-pages:

My apologies for taking so long to get this posted, I'm not showing any new paintings for now in my blog, and I kept thinking this was all going to come together any time, but it took a lot longer than I'd hoped for, and now I'm rushing to print and distribute flyers and invitations. I'm excited about having this show. Once it's done, hopefully I will have accomplished one big objective of my blog: to sell all my accumulated artwork, so I'll have room to produce more!

My Diptych
I especially wanted to show another of my pairs of pictures, my only true diptych:
East and West St. Elmo, oils, each 20" x 30":

I now have a collection of 6 St. Elmo pictures. I want to show 4 drawings, which I've completed with my relatively new watercolor pencils and--voila!--better paper.
Here's the original view of St. Elmo I painted both halves of the diptych from:

You can see that St. Elmo actually is a long town, which I had to break in half to get all of. And I "scrinched" all the buildings together to make the compositions I wanted. My view of the steeple came from this scene, and I blatantly put it into the middle of the second half of the diptych, West St. Elmo:

The drawings of the 2 landscapes seem rather innocuous compared to the paintings themselves. The oils are very thick and rich, they're the most vibrant colors I've ever used; I let people touch them.
You may be able to see why I paint few landscapes, but instead primarily use buildings to give me forms, colors and shapes that I can "weave" together. Here's one scene I know would make a good painting, Judy in St. Elmo in the middle of the old town:

These two buildings survived the fire. Four buildings were burned, including the court house (that I depicted as a church). These buildings also remain:



Art in Denver
I also want to show you some great artwork that we've scene lately in Denver, notably the outdoor exhibit of at least 20 huge sculptures by Henry Moore. Most of them are at the main Botanic Gardens, where I forgot my camera. Don't you hate it when that haopens? At least I can show you a picture from their website:
However, two Henry Moore sculptures are also on display at the Chatfield Botanic Gardens, which we went to see with Rick and Chris:

Each is a reclining figure, as are nearly all of the Moore sculptures. This is a woman with a child, and is nearly the smallest of all the sculptures on display:
This past weekend we went to the Denver Biennial of the Americas with Chris and saw their art show in the newly remodeled McNichols Bldg., which now is a vast cement, steel and brick edifice, empty except for the artwork. Two pieces are shown here:
Cardboard box interior, by Lucia Koch, Porto Alegra, Brazil:
This uses the old visual trick of making you think you're walking into a room. Judy is just seeing the flat surface, you have to get close. Then you can read the lable which tells you you're looking at a 2"x3" cardboard box photographed with a super megapixel camera and enlarged to 15'x15'. Astonishing printing job.
350,000 pennies, by Sandra Nakamura, Lima, Peru:
Basically what she did was buy $35,000 of pennies, which she then paid installers to arrange altogether on the floor. Judy and Chris are talking with the guard, who was a volunteer, who said his job mainly was putting pennies back together after they get kicked out of place by kids. He wasn't amused by my joking around, pretending to trip. What the 350,000 pennies represent, of course, is what its all about, but I don't remember what that was.
Next blog, and will show you my years-old scheme to paint a large TRIPTYCH, one painting of which is completed. It's my largest painting. Can you guess which one it is? (You should be pretty familiar with all my paintings by now, since I'm currently just showing the same old pictures.)