New Loves Day!!

While I am waist deep in creative process in the art room, I thought I would introduce a new idea I had for a weekly blog post.  I get a lot of my inspiration and ideas from other artists, fellow creatives, and things I discover while exploring on the internet.  I thought it would be fun to share a few of the things I have recently discovered that are inspiring me right now.  I'll put a new list up each Monday and maybe you will find something new to inspire you in each new week.  We'll call it New Loves Day! Here goes...

1. Gritty Jane: 

Jane DesRosier is just lovely.  I adore her blog, her work, her style and her spirit.  She does mixed media artwork, with a religious theme, and is currently opening up a brick and morter store front in her home town in NC.  Her art expertly holds the balance between dark edginess and soft beauty.   Her mixed media angels lift my heart every time I see a new one.  Her work is currently inspiring me to push myself into new techniques for painting faces and bodies in my work (she was hugely influential in my choices while painting Dream Flight.  Check out her work, follow her blog and I know you will find something there to push you to a new idea.

2. Charity Elise Designs: 

 She does pottery mainly, but has an impeccable eye and feel for incredible color and texture combining.  I want to turn her plates into a background for one of my paintings.  I love the idea of using more texture and patterns in backgrounds or within a figure that I am painting.  Every time I run across her stuff on Etsy I swoon again and kick myself for not using some of her palette choices in my own work.  (I have also been dying to buy a set of her clay stamps to use in artwork.  I need to just go ahead and do it.) She also blogs, just not very often.

3. Knitalatte's Etsy Shop

I want to fill an inspiration wall with her prints.  They intrigue me, confuse me, and make me smile.  I adore it all.  The way she plays with her arrangements, colors or lack of colors, and the texture and patterning of the crocheted bits, speaks to me somehow.  I always feel connected to nature and the natural world.  The Earth element is definitely where my heart and soul lies, and this artist seems to share that sensibility in her as well. She inspires me to take ordinary things that I find everywhere in my life and make them spectacular!

4. Florence + the Machine: 

 I've been listening to her "lungs" CD for weeks now, primarily when I paint.  I adore every song on it and find that it puts me in a perfect creative zone everytime. The last time I found a whole album that did this for me was Radiohead's KidA.  Oh Man,  I love this girl's music so!

From her website: “I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe,” says Florence Welch. “It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear.” - that is often how I feel about making art.  Perhaps that is why the music connects me to the art process so well. 

5. Karen Michel 

 Karen is always an inspiration.  I think her book was one of the very first I bought and tried the techniques when I got into Mixed Media artwork, and I am dying to take one of her workshops sometime.  The link to her blog is on my sidebar, but she recently listed these incredible assemblages of tiny mixed media squares on her etsy site, and I absolutely adore them.  I love when I am confronted with the realization that simple and rustic can be very beautiful and my inclination to over complicate and over perfect is totally unnecessary.  I am going to try a few of these types of assemblage pieces for one of my fall shows.

So there you are.  Some inspiration for your monday. Hope something in there gives you a bit of a spark this week!