blog.edmarion.com . Ithaca artist & painter, Ed Marion blogs

Interview/Slideshow re: CSMA Arts for All Marathon

This was a fun interview in the context of my participation in the CSMA Arts for All Marathon this year.

Interview/Slideshow

Article

Hey Ed, so what's up with the Ithaca Art Factory?

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.

QR Codes Get New Life

Just as people were questioning the impact of scannable QR codes, Starbucks has a new campaign. The company has introduced a series of codes that, for example, offer music from a particular coffee region or portray experts talking about a type of coffee. Look for the ads in stores and in popular magazines, such as People.

via www.bizcominthenews.com

I love it when my paintings and my wife's interest in business stories meet.

Red Pineapple Prints: the perfect feng shui housewarming gift

I've updated my "Pop Art" online print gallery at imagekind to include my series of "Welcome" paintings of pinepapples from 2009.

The red pinepapple painting particularly makes a great housewarming gift to accentuate the feng shui to the entrance of any home.  The pineapple is a universal symbol of welcome and hospitality and red is a wonderful welcoming power color to highlight the entrance to any home.

These prints can be ordered as stand alone prints, framed prints, or as prints on stretched canvas with deep gallery wrap borders (in black or white) as featured at left.  Prints (7" x 11") alone start at $23.72 with gallery wrapped stretched canvas maxing out at $222.50 (+ applicable tax and shipping).  All items usually ship within 5 business days.

All prints are shipped to your door through my wonderful partners at imagekind.  And if red is not your color, check out all the pineapples, ice cream cones and coffee cups in the gallery, in an assortment of colors.

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 5^th floor of 150 East 58^th 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.

Acrylic Painting Classes at Michaels Arts & Crafts Stores

 Here are two examples of recent landscape paintings I've taught for Grumbacher's Educational Program at Michaels Arts & Crafts stores in Vestal and Camillus, NY as part of the acrylic painting courses I am teaching for them.  It's a great pleasure to work with both Grumbacher and Michaels.  The students are great, the Academy Acrylic paints work beautifully, and the classrooms at Michaels are a great place to stop in for a painting class on your own schedule.


  I keep a link to my upcoming acrylic painting classes at Michaels on my website at edmarion.com.  The next class is scheduled in Vestal, NY for Tuesday evening, December 21, 2010 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.  We'll be painting a beautiful floral arrangement and I'm feeling inspired by poinsettias this holiday season.  Sign-up is at the respective Michaels stores.  Store contact info can be found at this link.

Painting from today's podcast

Today's podcast was a self-portrait demonstration.

You can watch how this was painted at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11227068.

Sketch from today's podcast

 

and, today's podcast . . . . http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11097468

Doodles from today's podcast

 

and today's podcast . . . . http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/10954029

Art Collecting

All you wonderful art collectors looking for pineapple paintings,
 

ice cream cone paintings,
 

and guitar paintings,
 

come check out what's available.

I need your help

So, Ithacans and those who just want to be Ithacans, I need your help.

Ithaca’s Community School of Music & Arts is hosting the CSMA Post-It® Art Show as part of the Arts for All Marathon from September 28^th to October 24th.

Here’s the idea. All of Ithaca is invited to make art on sticky notes (or more familiarly, Post-Its®). Folks bring (or mail) in the Post-It® art, CSMA displays the art on their gallery walls. Big opening/closing/purchasing night at CSMA on 10/23 when we sell these great miniature works of art for $5 per Post-It. Undercurrent: everyone (ages 1 to 92) is an artist and everyone can collect art, especially at $5 a throw.

On 10/23, crowds of people will jockey before thousands of works of art to be the first buyer of the next big (ok, small) thing. Basically, organized mayhem. Prior viewing hours & days will get people into the CSMA gallery to stake their claims, and, at the appointed hour, we need tight organization on sales.

So, locally, who wants to help me organize this baby? There are so many ways to say "yes."

We’re envisioning thousands of submissions and hopefully hundreds of sales on the night of 10/23. Immediately, we need help in:
– getting the word out starting August 18^th (blogs, e-mail distribution lists, twitter, facebook, Flickr; and
– commitments to staff the purchasing party on the night of 10/23.

Additionally, I (and more importantly, CSMA) needs all your ideas and help as this great Marathon raises scholarship dollars for students who could not otherwise afford the great arts programming that CSMA offers. Please e-mail me with your thoughts, ideas, and offers to proselytize/staff the event at ed@edmarion.com.

Thanks.

CSMA Portrait Drawing & Painting class cancelled

Oh well.  Bad news from CSMA.  The Portrait Drawing & Painting class I was scheduled to teach this summer has been cancelled due to low enrollment.

June 2009

Whoa.  So June finds me awash in exhibits up to my ears.  My show of NYC cityscapes will be up at the Starbucks on the Ithaca Commons until June 30th.  Then, it's 2 shows in July -- some older works in Binghamton at the Cube and some new works at the gimme! Espresso Shop in Trumansburg.  Finally, I'll be hanging a show of new larger paintings at Ithaca's Moosewood Restaurant in August.

Despite the shows, a few items have rocked my own little art world recently.

I am just jazzed to be painting a portrait of a mother and son over the Internet using Skype.  It helps that my 2 particular sitters are very captivating and interesting people, but the experience of working with portrait sitters in another part of the world is downright exciting.

I was also privileged to be included as a legal consultant to the New York Foundation for the Arts' MARK Artist weekend in early June.  Lucky to be part of the 2008 inaugural year as an artist, I had the benefit of seeing the work of some great and talented New York State artists from the 2009 class.  Follow this link to check them all out and then just google the heck out of them to find their work.

 I know this may seem trivial, but someone in the UK bought a necktie of mine from my zazzle page (and/or the "swag" link on the navigation bar at www.edmarion.com).  How cool is that?  Answer: tres.

 
And, oh yeah, I went a little self-portrait crazy in the last week in preparation for teaching a class on Portrait Drawing & Painting at the Community School of Music and Arts in Ithaca.  Seriously, it's not narcissism, it's just practice with a free model.  The 4 portraits done in June were each from life and took under an hour to complete.

Art as a Business, and Skype as a way there

Having spent 15 years of my life as a practicing lawyer, I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of treating law as a business or as a profession.

Art is no different.

Quite often we think of artists as starving artisans who do what they do for the love of it.  My recent take, however, is that any artist working full-time is essentially running their own business so that any time I try to tweak my practice of painting, I like to think of myself as a business owner first, and artist second.  If nothing else, it helps me define my market and further helps me assess the viability of my art going forward.

Which leads me to tell you about Skype and theportraitpaintingproject.com.

I've decided to start painting oil portraits via webcam and a Skype video feed.  Why, you may ask?  Well, using webcams and free Skype video software, I get to paint people all over the world from the comfort of their home while they get to visit with me in my rural art studio in Ithaca, NY. On the one hand, while painting by webcam is limited by lighting conditions and the quality of an Internet connection, it also opens my art studio to the world and avails me opportunities to meet and paint people I would never have known otherwise.  It's also rather cool that, using Skype, the portrait sitter gets to see themselves on their monitor so they actually collaborate on portrait composition.

Also, if you're a collector of emerging artists, looking to get to know artists and their work, what better way to spend time with someone whose art you admire?  As long as you have a webcam, a Skype account, and a reasonably good Internet connection, I can paint you from Barcelona, Macedonia, or even nearby Cazenovia.

So the next time someone asks you for a recommendation of a local portrait artist, if they live on planet Earth, please remember me and theportraitpaintingproject.com.