Cedar Lee July 8th, 2008

My new painting shows the rising sun burning away the darkness of night.  It embodies the concept of balance in the universe–yin and yang.  Sun and moon, day and night, heaven and earth, fire and water, hot and cold.  For fun, I have included the constellation Orion, (can you find it?) and a shooting star.

I painted the sun and moon in such a way that they could be allegorical characters, so looking at their interaction may conjure thoughts of epic myths and creation stories.  The swirling colors bring to mind the incredible photos of galaxies and nebulae taken from satellites in outer space.  Whatever you may take from it, it is an inspiring image.

Because this painting implies the enormity of the cosmos, and is full of dynamic motion, it is titled “Cosmic Dance.”

Acrylic 36″ x 42″

What it looks like in a room:

Details:

The psychedelic qualities of this painting made me recall a poem I wrote when I was 16, called “Psycho Sunrise.” Despite its obviously being written by a 16-year-old, its descriptions are vivid.  Click here to read it.

In other news, my painting “October Hawks” is currently on display at the HoCo Open 2008 show at the Howard County Center for the Arts.  The reception for the show is from 6-8 pm on July 22.  Unfortunately, I’ll be out of town on that day, so I won’t be there.  But if you live in the area, stop by and check it out–the show includes 100 pieces of art done by local artists.  (And, by the way, as the gallery installer for the Arts Center, I am the person who hung all 100 paintings.)

The exhibit will be up until August 17th.  The address: 8510 High Ridge Road, Ellicott City, MD 21043

The next month and a half are going to be crazy for me.  My husband and I, between the two of us, have six trips planned this summer.  The shenanigans include two family reunions, house-sitting in NC, visiting friends and scouting out galleries in Ohio, contra dancing in Indiana, and white water rafting in West Virginia.  Kevan will also be going on a road trip with his cousins.

So if I appear to drop off the face of the earth for a little while, that’s why.

• Art Career Happenings , New Works: Cosmic Dance
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Cedar Lee June 2nd, 2008

I just got an order for 7 paintings from a woman in Utah who will be opening an art gallery in the fall. In the past year, and in particular the past several months, I have been blessed with sales of my artwork. The most extraordinary thing about all my recent sales is that almost all of them were made by people coming to me–finding me, through word of mouth, through referrals from my collectors, and through the Internet. I don’t have an explanation for this snowball effect–I feel like I really haven’t done much to deserve it.

I keep an Excel file with information about every painting I do, whether or not they are sold and who bought them. Some of the buyers are anonymous mystery collectors–customers of my galleries that never had any personal contact with me. But I have the names of a lot of my collectors too. I’ve only been keeping good records like this for the past 2 and a half years, and regretfully, I never kept any information about paintings I sold before then, or who they went to.

In the past 2 and a half years, though, 41 people (or households, I should say–some are couples or families) have become collectors of my art. 12 of these collectors own more than one of my paintings. I know that some of my paintings have been purchased as gifts for other people. I have also given my art as gifts to many of my family and closest friends. So, I have no idea of the actual number of people in possession of my art, but it’s a lot more than 41.

In the past 12 months, I have sold more than double my sales from the previous 12 months.

If this trend continues in my career, I see my dreams coming true. I will be a success story in a typically brutal and thankless industry. For this, I feel more grateful than words can express.

The moral of the story: if you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to buy a painting from me, do it now while I am still relatively unknown to the public and while my prices are still low. I tell my collectors that art is always a good investment, because they’re getting something they can enjoy every day of their life forever, even if its value never goes up. My art is a good investment for this reason, and also because its value will go up. I am too tenacious for it not to.

I grow my garden with the same tenacity that keeps my art career going, and like my art career, it is now more bountiful than ever before. One of my first harvests of the year: sweet strawberries and crisp white icicle radishes:

More bounty–mulberries from a tree my husband and I found in a local park while walking our dog. The tree was bursting with ripe ones, so we took some!

I’ll have new paintings to show you soon!

• Art Career Happenings , Garden
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Cedar Lee April 12th, 2008

Sorry for the lack of updates–glorious spring is finally here and I’ve been spending more time outside than at my computer. Everything seems to be picking up speed.

My husband and I are working on our garden this weekend. One of my very best friends, Katrina, volunteers at a local horse farm teaching kids to ride once a week. Through her connections, I have scored a free, unlimited source of rich, already composted horse manure, the stuff I call “black gold,” for use in fertilizing my garden. Yesterday we procured 7 giant garbage bags of the stuff, and I have plans to go back for more.

Words can barely describe how giddy I was when I saw this mountain of manure at the horse farm. Ranging from colors of burnt sienna to a near-black charcoal, it is literally as tall as a 2-story building, and free for the taking. With the help of this beautiful addition to my soil, I am confident that I will grow the monster-sized veggies of my dreams this summer.

And, lacking the sheer awe of a 2-story-building-sized heap of composted horse manure, but probably of more interest to you, here’s the thing this post was supposed to be about:

Last night I attended Maryland Art Place’s “Out of Order” art show and silent auction, where I hung my painting “Glowing Water.” This is the third time I’ve taken part in this annual event, and it was fun! I met a lot of other artists.

Here’s me next to my painting:

As you can see, the place was packed:

And there was a lot of excellent art:

And I received many compliments on my work.

I’ll have new paintings to show you in my next update–for now, I’m off to dig in the garden!

• Art Career Happenings , Garden
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Cedar Lee June 27th, 2007

• Art Career Happenings
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Cedar Lee June 10th, 2007

I’ve finally taken some photos of our new kitchen to share with you. Sorry it’s taken me so long!

The last 5 pictures on the Kitchen Progress page (you’ll have to scroll down) show the finished kitchen:

Click here!

I wish I had taken “before” pictures of what our old kitchen looked like, so you could see what a drastic improvement this is…but alas, I didn’t start recording this project till after we had done all the demolition.

I did find one picture while looking through my photo archives. It’s a picture of me on Halloween a few years back (check it out, I’m dressed as a Bic ballpoint pen!) and you can kind of see the old kitchen in the background…a busy patterned brown and yellow linoleum floor, small tiles on the walls (note, in yet a different, non-matching shade of brown), dark brown appliances (you can see a piece of the stove on the right), a marble-looking countertop, which had yellow and…seriously, pink blotches in it, which you can’t really see in this photo, and very dark cabinets. Also, the lighting was a huge square fixture on the ceiling with fluorescent tubes in it…it was a very dingy atmosphere. And inside some of the cabinets and in the pantry, you could see the walls that were still painted Pepto-Bismol-pink by a former occupant with extremely bad taste.

Even worse than these aesthetic horrors, the old kitchen was terribly inefficient. The old pantry had a wall in front of it with a very narrow doorway in it, so that the shelves were very inaccessible. There was tons of wasted space, unusable corners, etc. The new design is open and spacious while still giving us almost twice the storage space as before and more than twice the usable counter space.

In the short time we’ve had our kitchen finished, we have gotten so much enjoyment out of it. It’s now a bright, sunny room with a place for everything and everything in its place. I love the new counters…an elegant, deep blue, our new modern light fixtures with aim-able spotlights, and I love how the tiling pulls everything together.

Of course, 15 years from now, a young couple will move into our house and disdainfully rip everything out of the kitchen and start over, ranting about the previous generation’s horrifically tasteless design choices.

In art-related news, I have another solo show coming up! I will be displaying paintings, some old, some new, at the Mayorga Coffee Factory in Silver Spring, MD for the entire month of July. If you are in the DC/Baltimore area, I’d love to see you at the opening. More details to come.

• Art Career Happenings , Home Improvement
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Cedar Lee February 23rd, 2007

The bitter cold where I live is starting to ease up, but I still have to get bundled up whenever I go outside. My poor dog is lacking for walks because of my reluctance to brave the cold. I’m going to Miami in April for my cousin’s bat mitzvah, and I bought a new swimsuit in anticipation of the trip. April seems a long way off, though I know it’s really not. If you can’t tell, I am most definitely a warm-weather person.

I’ve been indulging in fantasies–the hot waves of sunshine bathing the earth, the buzzing of insects, the proliferation of plant life that come with summer. Maybe you can recognize these fantasies in my two most recent paintings: July’s Abundance and Cyrano.

July’s Abundance
30″ x 20″ Acrylic on Canvas

Cyrano
8″ x 10″ Acrylic on Canvas

Good news! Starting in April, I will be represented by the RiverView Gallery at 224 N. Washington St. in Havre de Grace, MD. Havre de Grace is a quaint coastal town about an hour northeast of Baltimore, and the gallery is right on the waterfront. I just visited with the gallery manager and signed a one-year contract. Very exciting!

Also, my painting “Mountain Storm” is going to be featured on the cover of the winter issue of Zahir, which will be out in October of 2007.

From Zahir’s website, www.ZahirTales.com:

Zahir is a tri-annual print journal dedicated to publishing the best in speculative fiction by both new and established writers. Each issue features an eclectic mix of literary fantasy, science fiction, magical realism, and stories that are not so easily classified.

• Art Career Happenings , Art Gallery Representation , New Works: Flowers , New Works: Portraiture
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Cedar Lee January 16th, 2007

The Poets & Painters event on Saturday night was a success! I met a few other working painters in my area and made some new friends and valuable contacts. It was a night of poetry and music, and my senses were overloaded even during the parts when I was not painting on stage.

As for the painting part, I felt like I really had no idea what I was doing, but on the upside, this freed me to experiment. At times it was really challenging–how do you take a piece of music that is going so fast you can’t keep track of the lyrics, or a poem that covers very abstract ideas, and use that input as inspiration for a painting, as you are listening to it?

Me, listening hard:

Some of the time, visuals popped into my head as I listened to the performers, and I just went with that, attempting to paint what I saw in my head. Whenever I drew a blank, I just tried to paint how I was feeling, by use of certain colors or brushstrokes (for example, frenetic vs. calm energy, passion vs. sadness, etc.) I was working under time constraints–the rules said I had to start a new painting every time a new poem or song began, and this gave me literally less than 5 minutes to work on most of the paintings. This yielded some interesting results–some paintings that were very uncharacteristic of my usual style, and some that felt more like doodles to me than completed artworks.

But the crowd was really excited to see me paint.  I got lots of applause, which made my heart flutter! I sold 2 of the pieces I made that night, and all-in-all, it was a lot of fun. I will probably do it again.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed this week. My husband has a cold, and I’ve been trying to keep him supplied with medicine, juice, soup and hugs. My dog threw up everything she ate yesterday and hasn’t eaten yet today, and I’m worried about her. I’ve got a huge pile of paperwork waiting on my desk, and I’m trying to keep up with getting orders for posters out quickly. I have 10 portrait commissions lined up at the moment, for which I am so truly grateful, but as you must know if you too are a busy person, being swamped with business sometimes makes you feel frazzled!

I am looking forward to the springtime!  I just can’t get it off my mind. I’m probably affected by spring fever more than anyone I know–I get it bad, starting at the beginning of winter, and lasting all through spring almost until summer. My dreams lately are filled with things like long days spent outdoors, warm breezes, twittering birds, and healthy little buds and shoots popping out of trees and dirt. Every year, the springtime jump-starts my creative energy, filling my mind with imagery and great ideas for paintings.

Every year, I never even realize quite how dead I was feeling all winter, until the springtime makes me feel like I’m coming back to life. Maybe you can relate? Maybe I’m just being melodramatic. *sigh* (Silly melodramatic artists!)

Here is a peek at what’s going on in my studio today:

• Art Career Happenings , Art Studio , General Ramblings About Art, Creativity, Philosophy , Life
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Cedar Lee January 10th, 2007

This weekend I will be trying something new and scary: painting live on stage! I will be a part of a monthly performance called “Poets & Painters.” Here is a description:

“It’s the place where truth tellers and truth seekers convene for the ultimate display of ancient arts. As a poet takes the stage, the painter creates a visual interpretation of the performance. Blending this into perfect synergy is a live band, and feature vocalists. With a lineup of professional independent artists, as well as unknown newcomers all on one stage, it is an exercise in artistic improvisation and a collaborative showcase never before seen. It is truly the best of the best!”

Needless to say, I am a little bit nervous about the idea of coming up with a completed painting in the time it takes someone to recite a poem, and having that painting be relevant to the content of the poem, and doing all this in front of a live audience watching my every move. I’m also really excited about it. Let’s see what I can do, eh?

This event will take place on Saturday, January 13th (as well as the 2nd Saturday of every month) at Mayorga Coffee Factory in the heart of the downtown Silver Spring, MD arts district.

Address: 8040 Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD 20910

It’s $15 at the door, and the show starts at 8pm.

• Art Career Happenings
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