Heart Dichotomy

                                                                            "Many Hearts"                               Eva Macie ©

The past few days have pulled my emotional heart in many directions. Watching Irene’s ravishing of our Eastern towns and cities is heart breaking. Brattleboro Vermont is the birthplace of my late husband and the home of many of his relatives. I think of our little house along Marlboro Rd next to the brook and wonder if it any harm came to it. My children spent the best part of their childhood there. Seeing the beautiful bridges being ripped from their foundations and washed away has brought up so many emotions that surprised me. I had no idea that my love of them remains so deep. I am sure it is more than the bridges, it is my history, and I am grieving. To everyone harmed in any way by all of this, I send my heartfelt love and prayers.

Along with the devastation of Irene, the other side of these emotions is gratitude for the awards and attention I have received lately. All together, these events led me to create the “Many Hearts” digital collage. The collage is a combination of a Citra Solv® image and thanks to Creative Catalyst Productions, a foam block print. A shout-out goes to Kelly Powers for writing about the process on her CCP blog. In addition, I am happy to say I sold the “Kimono” collage.                                                                                                        

'¡Olé!

'¡Olé!      Mixed Media   !4" x!4" ©Eva Macie

I am so proud and happy as I just won an “Watercolor Artist” Editors’ choice award! It was for the August ‘Creativity Workshop’ contest. The challenge was to create a work of art from some “repurposed” items based on the techniques used by Nancy M. Grisby, the author of the August ‘Creativity Workshop’ article.

The award was fantastic, $50.00 worth of Northlight art books and a 6 month subscription to the Artistsnetwork.tv. If you do not know about this site, I suggest you check it out as they have so many art instruction videos. You can view all of them online and at a reasonable price. I have been watching videos all weekend, and I am eager to try some of the techniques I saw.

The piece I created, shown above, started with an old water media piece I had not finished and put aside. I had some old ink jet prints I made from sections of a picture I took when I went to Spain in 1997. The picture was of a wall covered with old posters. I manage to tear a few pieces off this wall for souvenirs and I used some of them, along with the photo. The rest of the items are rice papers, old stamps, coins and other ephemera. This was a fun project that brought back many wonderful memories of Spain. Thank you Northlight and Watercolor Artist magazine for a wonderful contest and award!

CitraSolv Mixed Media Collage

"August"         Eva Macie ©

I have not been very hands-on creative the past couple of weeks. I am having some corporal tunnel issues from using my mouse too much with Photoshop. My other hand has also developed joint tenderness and pain. Strange, since my typing skills are so limited that I only use a couple of fingers to hunt and peck.  Two of an artist’s worse nightmares; the loss of good vision (which I am still dealing with) and use of the hands.

The piece I am showing I created a few weeks ago. It is a mix of collage papers, created with CitraSolv and National Geographic pages. In addition, some computer-generated images, an image transfer done with CitraSolv, also acrylic paint and ink. Honestly, the actual piece looks better than this. As much as I use a camera and Photoshop, without proper lighting, I have not learned to duplicate the appearance of the real thing to my satisfaction.