ART ON MY WALLS

Today I have decided to post some art that hangs on my walls. This year I treated myself to other people's art---people who I have found on these blogs. I think it is a good thing to support other artists and I also think that art should be affordable so that everyone can own it and purchase it. There are great buys on ETSY, where I have found most of these pieces.
This piece is by Gina who lives in Tasmania. Gina is a very talented artist and currently she has an incredible calendar that she is offering for 2010. This piece, above, is one that I especially like because it has a special number on it: 17. My husband and I got married on December 17 because it is a combination of my two lucky numbers: 6 and 8. The number 17 is both of those numbers depending on if you subtract or add. This isn't a very good photo of the piece but I can tell you that it is very special. It has many different layers of incredible paper and it is all white and framed in a deep, black frame.
This is a section of one of the walls in my living room. Because the walls are dark redwood, I try to pick out pieces that are bright and will stand out. I have a few plates here: one from New Mexico and one from Italy (both gifts to me from my sister and my mother). The yellow piece with the four circles at the bottom is from Mary Buek. I have just recently purchased another piece which now hangs below this piece. I will post it separately on another day for everyone to see. The piece above it is from Jimmy Adamson who was a teacher at Sierra College. He studied ceramics at UC Davis and has created some really great stuff. The small piece is an acrylic painting by an artist named Kary Stickney. Kary is a California artist who exhibits some of her work at Studio 41 in Benicia, California.
This section of the wall overlaps with the photo above and it also shows two more plates which are American-made redware pottery from Pam Ambrust. They can be found in stores and museums across the United States and abroad. To the right of these plates hangs a grouping of four encaustic pieces from Crystal Neubauer. These four pieces I fell in love with and purchased at different times. They started out as a group of sixteen, I believe, and then she sold them off separately. I wish I would have purchased the entire group, they're that wonderful!
This is a photo of a piece that I did titled "Crescent City" (Excuse the camera flash-I can't figure out how to alleviate that when there is glass in front of the art). When we were up in Crescent City, California visiting friends once, we walked the beach and I picked up all these stones like I always do. As I was bending down and picking them up, I noticed a similarity between all the shapes of the stones that I was collecting and then it all made sense to me. I did these tiny watercolor pieces that represent the sand, the ocean and the sky and mounted the stones on each piece with a tiny piece of string. This piece was done in 2002 when I was attaining my Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and was part of my final project. I have it mounted to the right of the photo above. I have close-ups of a few of the individual pieces below.
I stitched details on each piece with my treadle sewing machine. I do everything with that treadle! It has since become my signature to do stitching on most of my work if I can. I have since seen many pieces of art that have tied stones. Whenever I go someplace now I make it a point to collect rocks from the places that I visit and I also take a series of photos from each place too. Then, I come home and make a piece that has all the components of the place that I visited: the rocks and the landscape. It forms a complete memory (picture) unit for me of that place.