Nature Morph

The process of illustration

I've done a bunch of commercial illustration projects over the years.  My most recent gig was with the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which gathers, sells, and promotes heirloom and open-pollinated seeds.  They have an amazing and unique program where they commission artists to create a work of art based on a particular heirloom plant... which will then become the design for that plant's seed pack.  "Plant the seeds, frame the art" is their motto.  Needless to say, I was thrilled to be chosen to design a seed pack.

First I sent them a few jpegs of my work and the link to my website.  Then I was asked to submit sketches for two different plants, piracicaba broccoli and lovage.  After gathering images online to figure out exactly what these plants were, I used their template to make sketches of how the seed packs would look.  Once I did the broccoli sketch and moved on to lovage, I could literally feel the gears turning in my head, the creative juices flowing, the idea coming fast and furious.  It was an amazing rush!  So I ended up submitting 1 sketch for the broccoli and 3 different ones for lovage:

After those trial sketches were given the thumbs up, I was assigned my seed pack plant: Isis Candy Shop Cherry Tomato. 

Yum!  Look at the amazing diversity of shapes and colors.  And of course the mythological component of Isis, the Egyptian winged goddess, was right up my alley.  

I made three sketch proposals.  These two were not chosen:

And this was the winning one (with the caveat that the chickadee would become a scarlet tanager, both to echo the colors in the tomatoes and to call attention to the fact that it is endangered in the Hudson Valley):

Then I turned that sketch into a watercolor: 

Which is now this seed pack:

Which you can find and purchase at this link.

Whew!

Needless to say, it's a huge mental shift to go from making work for a gallery show, which is entirely of my own creation and direction, to making work in collaboration with an art director, who guides the creative process and makes a series of suggestions and changes along the way.  There were definitely moments in this process that were challenging, simply because, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I do not like being told what to do.  Ha!  But this turned out to be a true growing experience (pun intended), since my work got pushed in new directions by virtue of the art director's input.  It also brought me right back to art school, where I had an assignment to complete, and I had to do it within someone else's constraints.  New ideas, new directions, a fresh set of eyes: I'll take all those good things any day.

Hello, Tiny Showcase!

Yesterday, these two paintings were released as "tiny" prints (10x8") on Tiny Showcase.  I've had a great partnership with the Showcase folks since 2005 (!!), and I'm thrilled to be working with them again.  There are still some Snake Charmer prints available there, too, if collage is more your thing.

Winter goodbye, April hello... almost.

I'm back! I'll say more about where I've been another time soon. First and foremost, I just overhauled my website, which was long overdue. Check it out! www.amyross.com.

April Hello (detail), watercolor on paper, 22x16", 2013

 Currently, I am in a show at Drive-By Projects in Watertown, MA, along with painter Gail Boyajian and video artist Danielle Mourning. It's called The Romantics, full of birds and flowers and romance, and it is the perfect antidote to these last cold days of March.

The new painting above is in the show. Its title, April Hello, is taken from an E.E. Cummings poem:

first robin the;
you say something
(for only me)
and gone is who.

since becomes why:
old turns to young
(winter goodbye)
april hello,

********

Here are some more pieces in the show:

Lovebirds #1 and 2, collage on paper, 8.25x5" each, 2012

 

Anemone, watercolor on paper, 11.5x8.5", 2012

 

Pixies (detail), collage on paper, 30x22", 2013

 I'll be posting regularly, knock wood.  It's great to be back!

Tiny Showcase!

My print, Snake Charmers, is available for purchase on Tiny Showcase!  Here is the link: http://www.tinyshowcase.com/, and here is the image:

The folks at Tiny Showcase also offer framing:

The original piece is a collage made from 19th century lithographs that I found on ebay, which is my favorite place to look for source material when I have exhausted my local antique market/bookstore treasure troves.  Just for kicks, here is another piece in this vein:

I love the way these snake/shroom creatures take on such personality.  As I've mentioned before, it's always a welcome change to switch over to working on collage after spending a good chunk of time doing watercolor.  The tightness, for lack of a better word, of working in watercolor can be really exhausting.  The inability to erase or go back a step, the constant tightrope-walk of keeping enough of the white of the paper and not letting the painting get muddy-- it's as if I'm holding my breath for much of the time that I'm painting.  In comparison, collage is pure fun and play: cutting and pasting and putting pieces together like a puzzle.  It's really nice to be able to jump back and forth between the two types of work.

Last fall...

...I had an exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.  All of 2011 was a crazy time for me (see this post for more on that), and I never posted images from my show, Lone Wolf.  So here you go, better late than never.

Day Tripper, watercolor on paper, 11x15"

Totem, watercolor on paper, 11x15"

Bounty, watercolor on paper, 15x11"

Nature's Bride, watercolor on paper, 15x11"

Flotsam, watercolor on paper, 15x11"

Howl #1, watercolor on paper, 10x8"

Howl #2, watercolor on paper, 10x8"

 

Bones, watercolor on paper, 11x15"

 

July travels: Hudson Valley & Down East

What a fun opening at One Mile Gallery!  Here I am with curator Wendy Cohen and artist/writer Susan Minot, who makes beautiful watercolors on vintage book pages.  Thanks to everyone who came to the party!

In true summer getaway fashion, I've put a lot of miles on my car these past few weeks.  I just got back from a quick weekend trip up to Maine.  The cove water was a balmy 65 degrees, and I swam, sunned, walked the coast, and sketched a little.  Nothing fancy; I just wanted to capture the place and keep myself from getting rusty.

I'll be back tomorrow with some news about a print release.  Please stay tuned!

Hello, July!

First and foremost, a huge thank you to Apartment Therapy's Tess Wilson for featuring my veggie sketches a few weeks back!  You can read her post here. 

In other news, I am going to be in a group show at One Mile Gallery in Kingston, NY that opens this Saturday, July 7.  The fabulous Wendy Cohen has put together a great show called "Six Degrees" that I'm thrilled to be a part of.  The only constraint she set up was that the pieces had to be relatively small and under $500.  There is something about working small that is so freeing-- maybe because there's less at risk in terms of burning through materials (I can just hear that voice in my head saying "Don't mess up this enormous sheet of pristine paper!"), or maybe because the small paper size simulates a sketch book, which is synonymous with new ideas and experimentation. 

Anyway, I spent a chunk of time in Maine earlier in the month, and it was very much an artist's residency sort of situation.  My friend Peter and I set up a "work hard, play hard" agenda for the week: we cranked on our work from the crack of dawn until lunchtime, and then spent the afternoons hiking, swimming, kayaking, and so forth.  My favorite thing to do is walk the coast and the woods, and gather as I go.  I was out for hours collecting wildflowers, shells, stones, seaweed, sticks, mushrooms, urchins...

When I stepped back from these collections, I realized that there was a mixture of the living and the dead: daisies and dried seaweed, columbines and broken shells.  The combination of the two reminded me of the old vanitas or memento mori paintings, particularly those Flemish still lifes that featured glistening, voluptuous fruits and audaciously blooming flowers alongside skulls and freshly killed game.  The idea of the the dead objects as symbols of mortality, tempering the exhuberance of the living things, appealed to the cynical side of me, and I decided to set up some still lifes of my own.  My pieces ended up more like botanical illustrations than cluttered tables overflowing with symbolic objects, but the message is nonetheless largely the same.  Here are the three Memento Mori watercolors I did in Maine:

Maine Memento Mori #1, watercolor on paper, 10x8"

Maine Memento Mori #2, watercolor on paper, 14x11"

Maine Memento Mori #3, watercolor on paper, 14x11"

They will be on view at One Mile Gallery for the month of July.  I also have a couple of collages in the show:

Birdbranch, collage on paper, 11x14"

Spring Fairy Ring, collage on paper, 11x14"

Ladyshroom, collage on paper, 9x8"

I just can't seem to get away from those fairy rings!  But the memento mori series is my current obsession, and I hope to be able to post a few more drawings in the coming days.  In the meantime, happy 4th of July!

lessons from the field

I spent the long Memorial Day weekend up in Maine near Acadia.  In my mad scramble to get out of the house in time to beat the traffic, I grabbed art supplies haphazardly and managed to pack my travel watercolor set and my sketchbook but no watercolor paper.  Lesson learned!  That thin sketchbook paper barely held up to the watercolor and did quite a bit of buckling, but it was also liberating.  The preciousness of working on good paper was not there in the back of my mind, and it freed me up to play around and experiment with something new.  I always work from digital photographs on my computer and never directly from life, let alone out in the field.  I hate to sound cliche about it, but the immediacy and spontaneity was such a welcome change from the deliberateness of my usual way of working.

My first watercolor sketch was the most successful, I think because I wasn't trying to have it be anything "good." Know what I mean?

I did this quick pen-and-watercolor sketch perched on some rocks in Curtis Cove.  I also had my camera with me and took a picture of the same view.

Well, I was so pleased with my first sketch that I wanted to do more, and with cocktail in hand on the back deck of the house, I attempted two more.  Emphasis on the word attempt, because the next two were no great shakes.  Case in point:

From this:

And this:

From this:

Maybe it's just too hard to capture such beauty on paper!  But back to the lessons learned, if any.  I've always maintained that less is more with watercolor.  Don't lose the white of the paper.  Exercise restraint!  (Easier said than done, of course.)  Don't let it get muddy.  Relax.

 

fresh start

Wow, has it really been a YEAR since I've posted?!? So much for the resurfacing I had planned to do last March. I've gone through a huge life change (known in these parts as The Big D) that basically took up two years of my life. Finally, finally, finally the wrangling and negotiations and endless attorney meetings are in the rear view mirror, and a fresh start is really, truly upon me.

So, to jump ahead a bit (and also look back), last summer I got my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm share: a big bucket of locally grown vegetables that I picked up every Wednesday from June to November. There are a huge number of farms that supply CSA shares to the greater Boston area, and I chose Farmer Dave's, which has a pickup site ten minutes from my house. When I signed up for the farm share, it had been my intention to not only cook and eat the veggies, but draw and paint them as well. I thought it would be a fun challenge to come up with recipes for each week's bounty and also to turn that bounty into art. And so I came to discover how much I love to cook (and how much I love to draw radishes). Almost as exciting as the actual drawing/cooking/eating was the anticipation leading up to each week's share: the weekly email newsletter from the farm that hinted at what was being harvested, the thrill of opening the box lid to see what lay inside, the fresh smell of greens and dirt and ripeness. 

Here are some of the pages from my farm share sketchbook:

Radish roots.  Acrylic on paper.

 

Swiss chard.  Ink, watercolor, and collage on paper.

 

Kohlrabi.  Graphite, colored pencil, and collage on paper.

 

Pea tendril.  Colored pencil on paper.

 

Garlic scapes.  Graphite and watercolor on paper.

 

Pea pods.  Graphite and collage on paper.

 

Radishes.  Ink and watercolor on paper.

 

Leafy greens.  Ink, graphite, and collage on paper.

 

Radish.  Graphite on paper.

 As you can see, I became somewhat obsessed with radishes and their amazingly intricate little roots that seemed so creaturely to me. They usually made their way onto the dinner table by way of the tried-and-true potato salad and its myriad variations (mustard, shallots, and vinegar, or yogurt and dill, and so forth). This year I decided to find a new way to cook with radishes, and I found a recipe for oven roasted radishes that is to die for.  It's from Food & Wine, and you can find it here: Roasted Radishes with Radish Greens. I cooked up a bunch last week with the first radishes from this year's spring farm share (more on that in a bit), and they were wonderfully tender and sweet alongside the peppery bite from the greens.

Here's to a sustained return to the blogosphere!

 

 

 

mission accomplished

I finished my Moleskine sketch book.  What a satisfying feeling.  Now on to the next one!  Here are the final collages: