Canvas to the Imagination

I’m always on the look out for inspiration to keep my creativity fueled and fired up. I collect things like postcards, art show flyers, clippings from magazines, cards people have given me, photos and other bits of ephemera. As shown in the above photo I keep some of the things on display pinned to the bulletin board facing my desk. I love having something interesting to look at while I work on the computer.

These days the internet has become my main source of inspiration. It’s the quickest and easiest way to do research for my work or randomly come across the work of other talented artists through Twitter, Flickr, or blogs. Thanks to Boris’ introduction to Posterous I’ve started gathering together all the bits and pieces I find on the internet that inspire me instead of leaving them forgotten in google reader or filed away in email. Take a look at my posterous page to see what I’ve collected so far.

Some of the artists featured on my bulletin board:
A print by Theo Ellesworth
Two invites for shows by Soizick Meister
A flyer for Cecilia Z. Miguez
Postcards by Anahata Katkin

Please leave me a comment if there is an artist or blog you find inspiring.

I was very excited when Opus Framing and Art recently announced their new digital canvas printing service. I’d been considering canvas printing for some of my recent photographic work so their timing couldn’t have been better. I selected two files from the portrait series and took them in to Opus to test out their print services. As you can see by the photos they did a fantastic job.

The colours and level of detail in the prints are really fantastic and the texture of the canvas plays nicely with the illustrative qualities of my work. Opus stretches the canvas in-house with a choice between 3/4″ or 1-1/2″ stretcher bars and four different styles of folding the corners. I went with the larger stretchers because it makes the finished print more substantial and I can hang it without a frame. I am really thrilled with these two prints and it’s only a matter of time before I have the rest of my portrait series printed on canvas as well.

I can’t say enough good things about the staff at the downtown location of Opus (which is the only location to offer this service) who are very knowledgeable and helpful. They were really great about answering my questions, and I was shown samples of digital files of varying quality printed on the canvas to give me an idea of how things would look. They also have their monitors calibrated to the printer for perfect colour accuracy. It took a week for my files to be printed and stretched, and they gave me a call when everything was ready. It’s a great service with even better results – especially when you start with high quality files.

As a side note, I had been planning to use Kickstarter to create a campaign to fund the cost of producing the canvas prints of my portrait series. I want to put together a show of this work but not beggar myself in the process. This morning as I started looking into it I discovered I need a US bank account and address because Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments Business accounts to receive funds and this is part of their policy. Now I’ll either have to figure out a way to make it work for me or come up with some other means to raise money to fund my art. Any suggestions?

This is one of those pieces where I began without a plan and just followed wherever the book wanted to go. I wanted to create another folded page book using the same fold pattern as I did in a previous work but I had no idea where I would go from there. I tend to select objects and materials to inspire the direction of the work, but this time I didn’t do that.

This is a book of four hundred and thirty pages which means I folded about two hundred pieces of paper. When I finished folding I played around with the paper further and eventually decided to roll the pages underneath one another. I added colour and pattern using a rubber stamp, first in yellow and then in green. I actually had the whole thing close to completion when I decided the yellow wasn’t strong enough colour over the text. I had to go back, unroll all the pages, rubber stamp them, and then roll them again. The butterflies were the final element and their bright colours are the perfect compliment to the crazy folded background.

Materials used: book, rubber stamp and ink, paper butterflies, and lots of glue.