Funny you should ask!
I have the privilege of opening a new painting studio at 210 Elmira Road in Ithaca and I'm calling it the Ithaca Art Factory. In addition to being my painting studio, there will be a new gallery, initially open Friday through Sunday, and a painting classroom with acrylic painting classes scheduled on Friday & Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons.
The whole idea of the class paintings is to share my passion for making art and for making paintings. I think most people are fascinated by just the idea of an artist's studio, so to invite people into my studio, not only to view it and poke around, but actually to make paintings with me, this is what the Factory will be about. Art will get made here, not only by me, but by you.
So to make the painting classroom inviting and accessible, I've created a new web site -- http://ithacaartfactory.com, which you can also like on facebook (http://facebook.com/IthacaArtFactory.com) and follow on (http://twitter.com/IthacArtFactory). Just click on the "class calendar" link on the Ithaca Art Factory web site's navigation bar, and you will be taken to our calendar of acrylic painting classes.
My vision of the classes is almost that of a party or a date night. You don't have to have any prior art experience and you don't have to buy any expensive art materials, just sign up online for a class prior to the class date, and then just bring yourself and a sense of fun and adventure. When you come to the studio, you will be provided with canvas (16" x 20"), paints, brushes, easels, aprons, and art instruction. I'll guide the class, step-by-step, how to make the particular painting we'll be working on. Obviously, each person can add their own flourishes, and at the end of the class, each person will take home a work of art that they made with their own hands.
I'm absolutely thrilled about it!
To keep posted, follow what's happening in the Factory at http://www.ithacaartfactory.com/blog_index.html.
- Contents © 2004 - 2012
Edward R. Marion
Live Painting
A Night in the Kitchen . . .
. . . preparation, perspiration and inspiration.
This past Tuesday night I painted live before a audience of 130 interior design bloggers from across the U.S. in the Manhattan showroom of Sub-Zero and Wolf as part of BlogFest2011. The WineDown ArtLive evening was hosted by the formidable Liquid Assets Consulting team of Michael Green and Andrew Levine. Supporting us all throughout the night was the wonderful Tessa Gallo.
I first painted live with WineDown ArtLive at last year’s Food Network Atlantic City Food & Wine Festival. This night I would be painting for interior design bloggers and hoped that just a few of them would interrupt me to introduce themselves. Many of them thankfully did.
Appropriately enough, the setting was a kitchen, and what a kitchen. The first thing I needed to do was get my mise en place in order. I brought along a box of oil sticks and a bag of lemons. Accompanying my preparation was much perspiration as the ovens and burners were fired up and I could smell extra virgin olive oil wafting throughout the showroom.
I gave myself the goal of painting three canvases in only 90 minutes. My inspiration: a bag of lemons brought down on the bus from Ithaca and purchased at reliable old Wegmans. I had only the idea of painting the lemons in a bowl and hoped I’d find one in the Sub-Zero showroom. Chef Coleman was incredibly helpful and provided me not only with a colander but with 3 extra lemons to give some height to my assembled still life.
As the bloggers arrived, most gravitated to the food and various corners of the room to tweet and watch those tweets on various HDTV screens throughout the kitchen. These were writers after all. I should have predicted that most would be shy and not interrupt and engage me like I prefer during these events. Nonetheless, as the painting began and sparkly was being poured, several bloggers did come up to greet me while I worked. For that, I was most grateful.
After all, the point of the conference was sharing great design ideas and I can wax prolific about design, art and the confidence that all of us should have in decorating our lives with the things we love.
Lemons in Colander was the first painting of the evening. As the paintings were being gifted to tweeting bloggers in attendance, I did not have the opportunity to photograph the completed works in ideal lighting conditions, so I’m chalking up the lighting of these paintings to memory and PhotoShop. Happy with this painting after about 25 minutes, I went to work on the next canvas.
Lemon: Four Ways was not a painting I had planned at all. Somewhere between set-up and half-way through the first painting, I thought I might slice a lemon in half and just paint it’s large mid-section on the 24" x 24" canvas. But as we all know, I love Warhol too much to let an opportunity to do a quadrant painting pass me by, so I simply held a lemon in my hand and painted four variations of it, finally slicing it in half to complete the last quadrant on the lower left side.
Three Lemons on a High-Wire can only be chalked up to end-of-evening exhaustion and my attempt to channel Basquiat in the last half-hour of live painting. I had this idea to paint 2 or 3 lemons in isolation and invent a table and slim board on which they were balanced. As it was, as I was painting, I was looking right into the Bloomberg building and Le Cirque from the 5th floor of 150 East 58th Street across the street. So, I decided, once I painted the 3 lemons, to put them on a high-wire over the facing Bloomberg building. The lemons could easily have represented my paintings and the high-wire could easily have been the experience of painting in oils, in a hot kitchen, with very little lighting.
So there you have it. Thanks to Michael, Andrew and Tessa; my compatriot in painting – Sangita Phadke – who painted the most beautiful pear imaginable; Paul and the great team at Sub-Zero and Wolf; Chef Coleman; Ben; designer Andie Day; blogger Mae Hacking, and the waiter at the end of the evening who kindly complemented my work. A great night was had by all.
