Art Walk Part 2

 Hi everyone. Happy Friday. 

       Today I have some more photos from my art walk at Alnoba in Kensington, New Hampshire. I shared the info about it last week, so if you want to check out that post you can find it here: Art Walk Part 1.

        A couple of you asked about the artist led walk itself. It was just over 3 hours, but very leisurely. There was no rush to see everything at the center. The center is very large, and our artist guide liked to talk.  BUT, he also liked to learn, and I think everyone from our group had something to add. There were only 6 of us in the group, so everyone had a chance to be quite interactive. There was also a bathroom spot with a couple of the world's cleanest porta-potties. 😏

      The artist who led our tour was  Joseph Gray, and his media was stone. He has several pieces of art at Alnoba, but so do other artists. Since I have some faces I will be linking up to Nicole's Friday Face Off and I'm also linking up to Gillena's Friday Lunch Break.

      Let me start with a little more art by Joseph Gray, and then I'll share some other art.

This is one side of the statue up close.

And here is more of the statue including the face on the opposite side.

Gray said he made this piece because he had a Native American grandmother.

       Here is another piece by the artist. This is his circle of life, and it was right at the beginning of the tour next to the entrance to the woodland trail. 

This next series of photos are of  an interesting set of statues by Juame Plenza, an artist from Barcelona.

This was another piece of art by the same artist that we saw. It was a bit far off, but when I zoomed my camera lens I could see it better.

Here they are zoomed in.

And here is one more face by the same artist. The man in the photo is the artist Joseph Gray who led our art tour.

You might notice that this statue is actually quite thin.

I'll finish my post with a few more statues that I saw on the tour.

These white flame like  piece is made out of marble by Pablo Atchugarry, 

and next photo is this rock with a carved quote by Nelson Mandela. I know you can't really read the quote, but my eye caught the leaf shadows on  the stone, so this is my own art-grin.

     And finally this beautiful table outside of the main building on the grounds.  It is called Ice Ring and Gradient Table, and it was wonderfully warm to the touch. It is not only a table but also art made by Michele Oka Doner.

       I have more to share from this walk, so you'll have to wait for another post which won't be for a couple of weeks.

      The hubby is taking some time off next week, so he and I as well as the dogs are taking off for the week. I won't be around for Friday Face Off, Friday Lunch Break or Sunday Smiles (after this week). See you for those link ups when I'm back in 2 weeks.

Have a great weekend ahead.

Yellow

      Hi everyone. Happy Thursday.  It's been a lovely week (again) so far weather-wise at my house; these are all bonus days with cool nights for nice sleeping and warm days. I love it!❤

     Today I have a couple of journal spreads to share from my Garden/Harvest journal.  Today's theme is yellow.

     I'm linking up to Aimeslee's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey and also to Creative Artiste Mixed Media challenge blog  #108. The theme there is always Anything Goes.

    This first page is all about bees and honey. My bees are doing very well, and they made a lot of honey. However they didn't make any for me to take.  😒  Oh well, I would rather they have food, especially since we have long winters here in NH.

      The background is made with a bit of paper layering as well as some ink coloring. On the left I used 2 die cut sets.I used black paper and a honeycomb die. I also used a Hero Arts set to make the honey pot, the honey dripped and also the word honey.

      On the right side I used some die cut bees. I used a glitter pen on their wings and added some little art gemstones to their bodies. I also added some yellow ric-rac trim and a felt sunflower from my stash.

      My other spread today is all about  Corn. On the right side I used a sheet of cardboard colored paper. There are 2 holes punched in the top where I added some green twine. I stamped some corn stalks along the bottom, and I also stamped the large corn image which is from Impression Obsession. I used markers to color the corn and watercolor for the background. I framed it with a layered frame and added some vintage yellow stamps (I don't recognize what they are from) behind it. I  used my favorite cow stamp on acetate, added some bright yellow trim and also some yellow washi tape. The corn word is cut from a sheet of paper.

        I had all these little plastic ears of corn I wanted to use, so I created a cornfield with die cut corn stalks and a stamped and fussy cut fence. I first stamped some corn stalks along the bottom for depth, and then I added the die cut stalks and the fence. The windmill top is a slightly altered sticker, and I drew in the legs. The corn seed packet was cut from a  sheet of paper, and I added the punch out quote. Funny, the quote was just laying on the floor as it must have fallen out of an envelope or package, I think it wanted to be on this page, and since it works great, I added it.

      Here's a close up of my favorite cow stamp so you can see it better. I colored in the daisy that was in it's mouth.

There you have it. That's a lot for today, so that's all for me. Have a great rest of your day!

Hot, Hot, Hot

      Hi everyone. Happy middle of the week.  Since I'm not around next week I want to get most of my challenge art posted this week. Today I want to share another page from my Harvest Journal for Aimeslee's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey

    I started with red and orange ink pads as well as some stickers I picked up a couple of weeks ago on markdown. The big peppers are from a stamp set I have. I finished them off by adding some colored glitter glue to them. The little pepper girl and the stamped quotes around the page from a Janet Klein set. I just love her pepper hat.

       It's hard to read the quotes, but they say: Keep it spicy and (the long one) the recipe called for salt, parsley and a sprinkle of pepper.

       I finished by adding some tiny red confetti flowers and a piece of retro looking trim down the center of the spread which is actually the center of my journal. 

     And I have a story to tell about an adventure my husband and I had on his boat this past Sunday afternoon. He was fishing for striped bass.  I decided not to fish because 1) I was more in the mood to relax  and 2) the hubby, although happy for me to have already caught 5 fish this summer, needed to catch one himself. We had very limited bait, but on my husband's first try he caught this large striped bass.

     It was actually too big to keep because here along the coast or New Hampshire (but also in Massachusetts and Maine) you can only keep fish between 28-31 inches/71-78 cm. (And only keep 1 per day too.) This guy was about 36 inches/91cm so Mr. Fish was released back into the water after we got a few photos.

     The hubby decided to throw out another line. Shortly after he did that we were buzzed by this guy. 

     We frequently see eagles while we're out in the boat as they nest on the islands where we cruise.

    He was about 5-6 feet over the boat, and I could have reached up and maybe even touched him. Darn, why wasn't I ready with my camera? He flew up into a tree nearby where we were.  And he sat there for quite a while. Enough time for me to watch him and even get a few more photos.

 

        But what I didn't realize is that he was watching us. About 30 seconds after I put the camera down and turned away, he swooped back down and grabbed my husband's bait fish. It was so fast, we only saw a swish of feathers. What we really noticed was the high pitched sound of the fishing line being pulled out quickly, the sound of catching a fish, but this time instead of the line going out in the water the line was going out above the boat and across the water. 

       There was a flash moment where we looked at each other wondering what we should do. The eagle had swooped back in and grabbed the bait fish that was hooked on my husband's line.  It was flying off  before we could scare it into dropping the fish (which we had to do once several years ago). Never mind the line, but the fish had a hook in it.

         While we went for the scissors to cut the line, it snapped and the eagle took off with the bait fish in his talons. Luckily when the line snapped it pulled the hook  out of the fish, but the eagle got the fish and flew off beyond where we could see him.

      That has me thinking a lot about eagles getting hooked when people fish. They're only looking to eat, but if the fish is small enough, and if the eagle swallowed the fish whole, that hook might be swallowed too. Granted  salt water hooks are meant to rust out fairly quickly because often fish swallow them in what is called gut hooking, but fish are in salt water and an eagle is not. I'm not saying people should give up fishing, and maybe this is a rare occurrence.  Maybe eagles are smart enough to not swallow a hooked fish whole. Eagles are  smart enough to know where an easy meal is.  Anyhow, it was quite exciting, but in other ways concerning because the hooks can pose some serious risk including the eagle having internal bleeding and dying.

     I like to fish but I don't want to kill eagles. Maybe I'm just too much of a softy. (That is absolutely true.) That's enough for me today. Have a great rest of your day.

     

           

Time For a New Challenge

 Hi everyone Happy Tuesday.

      It's time once again for a new challenge at Try It on Tuesday. Thank you everyone who joined our Colorful challenge, and thank you Bleubeard and Elizabeth for being our guest designer for our last challenge also. I think many of you love color as much as I do, and I had a lot of fun going through people's art.❤

        Our new challenge still has some color to it, but this time we're looking for

BLACK AND WHITE PLUS 1 COLOR

     I chose this lovely fall green as my color, and I used green cardstock to die cut the leaves, tag and pears.  I then took just a slightly darker shade of that green to bring out the details of my die cuts.  I used a very old Spellbinders die set for all the cuts on my page. 

    The black and white background is some Paper Artsy/Alison Bomber tissue paper. I also used some black textured tape (so old I don't know who made it), and my stamped quote is the definition of a pear from a Janet Klein set. After my page had dried, I sprayed some green ink on my page just to brighten it up a bit. 

    Be sure to check out the design team's examples too, especially if you're stuck how to go with this challenge. Theses ladies have some super ideas.

      As always this challenge at  Try It on Tuesday  runs for the next 2 weeks and we accept all types of art.

     I'm also linking up this page to Aimeslee's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey The AJJ challenge is for art journaling and runs through the rest of the month.

T Stands for Last Week

      Hi everyone. Happy Monday to you. It is time once again for T over at Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog.    

      Last week we had some gorgeous weather at my house. My roses have forgotten it is just about fall, and they are blooming beautifully again. ❤

     I also finally gave my living room a good cleaning. I've been meaning to do this since early spring. Ha ha, you can tell I don't really like to do it. It's a good thing I had started when my brother called because after chatting with him for over an hour, if I hadn't started, I wouldn't have.

     I washed the windows, washed the curtains, gave a good cleaning behind the couch (boy was that full of dog hair-YUK!), and vacuumed the cobwebs out. However it is good to have it done. 

    One evening I even made an apple pie from some of the apples the hubby and I had picked the week before. 😏 It was yummy.

     This past Saturday I got together with 2 friends from college. One drove down from Portland, Maine and the other drove up from the burbs of Boston, Massachusetts. We went into Portsmouth (New Hampshire) for a day of window shopping, lunch and then an afternoon ice cream. Here's a couple of photos I snapped on our adventure.

The beautiful little petunia plant growing in the cracks of the sidewalk. I think someone planted it there in a space between the bricks but maybe not.

This cool wreath outside of a chocolate shop had cocoa pods on it. The pods were real, but dried.

A lock fence. Isn't it Paris the home of this custom?

The gardens in Prescott Park were really lovely.

 Peeling paint and a patina door knob. 

A very nice old front door.

Apple hands at a daycare center.

And my drink today is my beer with my lunch. We ate at a place called the Clipper Tavern, called that because the owners graduated from the high school where I taught and the school mascot is the Clippers.

     The salad was delicious, the water was cold and the Clipper Pale ale was tasty and really reasonably priced. And Lyn (Spyder) asked if I'd share my teapot/cup combo, but when I went to photograph it discovered it is in the way back of my cabinet, and I didn't have a chance to dig it out. Sorry Lyn. But I will get it out to share for another T day.

   My husband is  taking some time off from work, and we're heading north into our beautiful neighboring country and province. Besides practicing my limited French,  we'll be traveling this upcoming Sunday through  October 1. Since we're driving on this trip,  I won't be around for T day for the next 2 weeks. But I do have a couple of scheduled posts for AJJ and one for TIOT  so I won't be totally off the blog. I hope to have enough down time to stop by and comment on some blogs, but time will tell if that will happen (which is why I won't be joining T day). I hope everyone has a great couple of weeks ahead, as well as a super T day.

Sunday Art

 Hi everyone. I hope you're having a great weekend.

Today I have another journal page for Aimeslee's Anything Goes challenge at Art Journal Journey.  I'm also linking up to Gillena's  Sunday Smiles.

     This is a page out of my harvest/garden journal that I'm just about finished with. I love how it's bright and cheery.

      The background is an old sheet of denim style paper that's been sitting around since I did a lot of scrapbooking. (I bet it's at least 25 years old if not older. I guess it was  time to use it!) I thought it worked great for a garden theme because you might wear denim while working outside. The fence is a very old stamp by Cornish Heritage Farms. They went out of business a long long time ago ( like maybe 2010 or even before that) , but even though I'd never used it, I could never get rid of it when I did a supply purge. And finally I had a place for it. 😏 I like the details and size since it's big enough to fit across my page.

     The other images came from some other various stamp sets. I stamped, fussy cut and colored the watering can, and then I cut it so the handle would slide behind the fence post. I love the rooster who I'm guessing is getting us up and wanting us outside in the garden. I used several ink pads on the stamp to color him in. He was also a bit tricky to fussy cut, so I left the white edging around him. Finally the quote is stamped directly onto the paper. 

       I painted in the grass, and then to add some brightness to the page I added the sun yellow daisies at the bottom. I decided I wanted to add a sun also, but I didn't decide that  until everything was already glued down. Since the sun should have gone behind the rooster and fence, I decided just to leave it off.  Perhaps Mr. Rooster had a bit of a sleep in and the sun is already high in the sky. 😏

      I thought I'd also share a few more photos from my art walk last week at Alnoba. If you missed my first post about the walk and are curious, you can find it here: Alnoba part 1.

The sign in the back is by Hank Willis Thomas and is a fun play on the words. It is titled Love Over Rules.

This red installation was made of lots of lobster pot line, woven together and painted red. It is by Orly Genger, and is called Going, Going, Gone. You can also walk on top it, so I gave it a try.  It's not really squishy, but a little bit.

Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week. 

      

Art Walk Part 1

    Hi everyone. It's the end of the week already, and Friday the 13th too. I just realized that as I wrote this. Be sure you don't walk under any ladders or let a black cat cross your path. (Grin)  😜

   This past Tuesday morning I went on a sculpture walk with 3 friends. The walk was at a place called Alnoba in Kensington, New Hampshire which is in the southeastern part of  my state not far from the Massachusetts border. Alnoba is on private property, and it is also a private business where you can book retreats and weddings, etc. However, they do offer art walks because they have quite a sculpture park on the property too. We had signed up for an artist lead art walk.  It started at 9 AM, and since I had almost a 90 minute drive (with morning traffic) to get there, I had to leave the house pretty early.

    The art walk was for 3 hours and actually ran a little bit longer. We didn't even get to see everything because the park is about 400 acres of land. However, I really enjoyed it, and I'd like to go back sometime on a different artist lead walk.

     Here's some of the art we saw. I have some faces so I'm linking up to Nicole's Friday Face Off.  I'm also linking up to Gillena's  Friday Lunch Break also. 

Let me start with this statue, which was one of my favorites.  It's called Colossal Fragment by Lionel Smit.

Not only was  the front view cool, but so was the back. It doesn't even look like the same sculpture, does it?

And if I stepped to the side and took photos, they were even different. And fascinating.

The artist who took us for a walk was Joseph Gray. His medium was stone. On the property he had several eagle benches.

He sees eagles in  certain flat stones, and if you look carefully you can see the head and tall feathers.

Joseph Gray  also did this large statue which I also really liked.

Can you see the Japanese tea house on the hill in the background?

I enjoyed hearing the artists' stories about how he created his art. This statue was originally one piece, but to get it into  its present location it had to be cut into 3 pieces. 

And here's a couple of pieces that don't have faces created by other sculptors.

Indeterminate Line by Bernar Venet

This blue piece in the woods  was harder to reach so we never walked any closer. Can you see it among the trees? 

Blue Gilead by Murray Dewart

Let me end this post with this HUGE fire pit that they burn during the retreats. It gets such a large fire and gets so hot you can see the granite stones on the side have even cracked and split off chunks.

I think it in itself is a work of art.

That's all for today's post. I'll have more next week. 

Have a great weekend and week ahead.