First Exhibit!

Today I put up my first exhibit at Beans and Bagels, 1812 W. Montrose.  It was really awesome to see a selection of my paintings up on a wall together.  I think it looks great.  They are for sale, but mostly I'm just excited for people to see my work.  This is the first of three cafe exhibits I have lined up, and I just want to get my name out there and hopefully I'll sell a couple paintings in the process.  It's kind of weird to send my babies out into the world- (anything could happen to them, coffee spillage, psychopaths, earthquakes, etc)- but that's what they're made for!

I took a really terrible picture of them with my phone, I'm going to go back and take a better one with my camera.

I had to climb up really high on this ladder to hang the ones on top, it was kind of scary.  I also put labels next the paintings on the bottom, but I took this picture before I put them up.  This is eleven paintings, but several of them are meant to be viewed and sold as sets.

Go check 'em out!

I Haz Website Now

I decided I needed a professional looking website as I have a couple of exhibits coming up.  It was kind of a lot of work, and I probably paid way too much for the whole package (domain name, web hosting, design templates...) but I'm very pleased with the result.

www.sarahcurllarsonart.com

 I remember I had to make a website freshman year of college for a graphic design class and mine was pretty horrendous.  We built them from this really bad Adobe program that no one uses anymore and the color got skewed when they were published, so it made my already bad design look even worse.  I didn't understand design at all then. Not to say I do now, but I have an idea that a website should be clean, easy to navigate, and eye-catching.  It's not about cramming as many weird little images and superfluous design elements onto a page as possible.  That's one of my pet peeves, in fact: badly designed websites.  When I'm perusing yelp looking for a restaurant to go to that night, I won't go to one that has a bad website, even if it has good reviews and the menu looks delicious.  It just makes you have less respect for that business.  So I hope people like my website.

What else is new...I've been hard at work in the ceramics lab.  I've been pursuing the same theme of my paintings with my pottery.  Mostly I just make these little vases, then add stuff to them and carve them.  My friend told me that I'm not very adventurous, but all my vases turn out very unique.  I also bought a set of underglazes with a gift certificate my sister gave me for my birthday, so I'm super excited to use them! I like bright colors, if you hadn't noticed by now, and that's hard to achieve with the glaze selection available.

Here are some pictures of some of my pots:

I Think I Need to Slow Down

I've noticed that I churn out paintings at kind of an alarming rate.  Sometimes two a week.  I can't stop, I finish one and I start the other right away.  I'm not sure if this is the best way to go about making art, because the last couple paintings I've done I haven't been that pleased with.  I should probably take more time to think them through, work on them, re-work them, study them, make changes, etc.  But I don't. Instead I just keep spitting them out.

I feel some pressure to make more because I have four upcoming shows- Beans and Bagels in July, the Kitchen Sink in August, the Glenwood Arts Fest August 17th and 18th, then the Common Cup in October.  I'm also going to submit a few to a LGBT pride show at the Kitchen Sink in July.  So, in the event that I actually sell my paintings, I'll need to have more for the subsequent shows.  So, here I go, churning them out:

The Factory
Acrylic on Canvas
24" x 18"

This is the finished version of this painting.  I added a couple more jellyfish and touched up a few details.

The Plight of the Lovebird
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 18"

No Rain in the Desert
Acrylic on Canvas
14" x 11"

Betsy Johnson
Acrylic on Canvas
9" x 12"