Salem Art Festival & Portland Open Studios

On Friday, I worked a booth at the Salem Art Festival, spreading the word about Portland Open Studios!

Portland Open Studios is a group of just over 100 artists in the Portland, OR metro area, myself included, who will be opening their studios up to the public during the 2nd and 3rd weekends in October.

If you are local to Portland, put it on your calendar! You will be astonished to see where and how different artists work. The variety of techniques and mediums we all use is truly impressive. It is a great way for any art lover to meet a lot of artists and pick our brains. And, if you feel compelled to seek some new pieces of art for your home, this will be a perfect opportunity to do so.

I will be at my studio greeting visitors during the whole event in October. Otherwise, I would take the tour myself!

If you will be taking the tour, you have to buy a tour guide & map. A tour guide is $15 and covers 2 adults. Kids under 18 are free! This comes with a mobile app as well. You also have the option of buying the mobile app alone, which still gets you admission and a map, but does not include as much info about the artists, for only $4.99. You can purchase your tour guide here, anytime between now and October!

So, in between explaining this exciting upcoming event to people at the PDXOS booth in Salem, I worked a little bit on this Lotus painting in progress, working with a palette knife and cold wax medium, as well as with oil and brushes, to show some of my techniques.

I got a lot of curious visitors. Some of my favorite people to talk to were younger aspiring artists and little kids!

This month I am working on several of these large Lotus paintings so they’ll be ready to deliver to this handcrafted furniture store/new Portland gallery next month, Eco Art PDX–their focus until now has been beautiful handmade wooden furniture, but now they are expanding to include an art gallery. I’ll be among the first artists showing there. Pretty cool!

The Lotus paintings will be taking a lot of my time for the coming weeks, but I have other projects in the works, ready to start when this group of paintings is done–lots of blank canvases are awaiting new images!