While walking around Seattle, Kiersten and I ventured down to Pioneer Square and bounced into the different shops and galleries. One notable shop was a huge bookstore called the Elliot Bay Book Company, which spiraled on in different directions and levels, full of nooks and crannies and endless diversions. Perusing the art section brought me to the book which would occupy much of the 7 hour flight back home:

As someone who attends a life drawing group session (as an artist), it was fascinating to read about life drawing from the point of view of the model. The first few chapters cover the history of life modeling, and some of the early quirks (such as male artists only being able to attend life drawing classes if they were married) to current cultural quirks (differences between being naked vs. nude, social gender perceptions, and relationship interactions). I really enjoyed the commentary on some of the paradoxical social quirks and double standards, and also the model's quotes throughout the book. For a fascinating read (especially for anyone who's drawn the figure), be sure to check it out.

Kiersten and I spent last Wednesday through Sunday in Seattle, WA for the CPSA 16th Annual International Exhibition. The show was held at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, and the workshops and awards banquet were at the Renaissance Hotel. It was terrific getting to see some of my favorite artists again, and all of the little get togethers - lunch with the Scribbletalk artists, drinks after the banquet in the Visions lounge (with its incredible view of Seattle from the 28th floor) - were tons of fun. During our free time we ventured down (literally - Seattle is very hilly!) to Pike's Market, with its wild mix of fresh produce, seafood, and flowers, then to the very first Starbucks, onwards to the all glass walled ultra-modern library, and finally to historic Pioneer Square. We even had some family in the area, and got to spend some time talking over a glass of wine and (of course) watching wedding videos. The mood of the show was very different from last year's in Bethesda. The convention center is a very large space, and I found that it spread out the artists quite a bit during the reception. There was a quiet, introspective feel to it because of this. The space looks like it will get quite a bit of traffic from the public, though, so I think there will be more potential for exposure. Below are a few pics from our days in Seattle:

On Friday in Seattle at the CPSA 16th Annual International Exhibition I took John Smolko's workshop. I've always admired his work, and his distinct use of colorful, energetic lines in his pieces. John has been an award winner at the Annual shows multiple years. An experienced art teacher, he led us quickly through the basics of scribbling - a form of crosshatching used to weave together colors - and then into our morning exercise of creating block letters against a glowing background. In the afternoon we were able to choose from a range of subjects - pictures of John's students, still life objects. I chose a student's picture, and decided to keep in the theme of the colorful palette I had used for the morning exercise. With about 2-3 hours of work, the piece isn't completed yet - but I'm really happy with the progress on the piece. I plan on working on it further and finishing it. Here's a pic of the demonstration, and a scan of what I completed during the workshop:

"Cascade" earned an Award for Excellence at the Colored Pencil Society of America's 16th Annual International Exhibition. You can view all of the award winners at the CPSA website.

Today we went to the artist's reception for Mary Lou Steinberg's solo show at Something Special in Kingston, PA. Mary Lou's show is entirely collage - many beautiful pieces. Kiersten and I bought a piece - a scene of a late day sun shining on autumn colors. Check out Mary Lou's show through August 15th at Something Special, 23 West Walnut Street, Kingston, PA 18704.

The CPSA website now has images posted of all of the silent auction pieces.  There are terrific pieces by many great artists.  Check out the webpage here.

This is our favorite video clip from our honeymoon at Sandals, Montego Bay - we caught a couple of true party animals on film. [googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7328039180514452655&hl=en]

Just before our wedding, I bought a small digital camcorder. I waffled on it for a while - would we really use it that often? - but in the end thought it would be great to catch at least a few moments from our wedding on tape. I'm so glad we got it! Not only did we get the wedding dances on tape (I guess tape isn't really accurate anymore - but "SD flash drive" is a mouthful) - but Kiersten's uncle roved around doing interviews during the reception. Capturing everyone's words to us on our wedding day was really priceless. We knew from the start that our song would be "You and Me" by Lifehouse - we listened to it a lot when we first started dating. Since it turns out to be a fast waltz, we took a few months of lessons with Vince Brust Studios so we could actually waltz to it. Here's the video of our first dance together at our wedding reception:

Shawn and Kiersten's Wedding Dance

[googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5848774814715653406&hl=en]

Near the end of the night, we snuck in an Argentine tango dance. We've been taking lessons off and on for a while through Let's Dance , and this is the dance we probably know the best. Argentine tango is a very close dance, with complex footwork. I can't imagine how Kiersten danced it wearing a wedding gown with a train, but she looked terrific! The song is "Santa Maria" from the movie "Shall We Dance?" - which turned out to be a 4+ minute song - but it was a ton of fun to dance to:

Shawn and Kiersten's Argentine Tango

[googlevideo:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=189042144222083164&hl=en]

To Kiersten, my muse, my inspiration, and the love of my life.  Our wedding day was perfect, and I'm so happy to call myself your husband.

This year I'll be one of the artists donating a piece to the CPSA silent auction at the 16th Annual International Exhibition in Seattle. Since "Cascade" will appear in the exhibition, I thought it would be fun to use one of the other poses from the session for the donated piece. There are size constraints on the auction pieces, so this is smaller than I usually work on Colourfix:

8" x 9" Prismacolor and Lyra colored pencil on brown Colourfix paper

Thursday evening was the awards ceremony for the 2008 Wilkes-Barre Fine Arts Fiesta. Cascade took 1st place in Graphics, and Distraction was awarded an honorable mention.

Today the accepted artists list was published on the CPSA website, and "Cascade" was accepted into the CPSA 16th Annual International Exhibition. Show dates are July 2 - Sept 29 at the Gallery of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, Seattle, WA.

Cascade and Distraction were both juried into the 2008 Fine Arts Fiesta. Show dates are May 15 - 18th at Public Square in Wilkes-Barre.

Lambent won first place in its category, Pastel/Colored Pencil, at the Wyoming Valley Art League Spring 2008 Member's Show. There was a great turnout on Friday for the show at the Midtown Gallery in Wilkes-Barre.

Derwent Coloursoft, Derwent Signature, and Prismacolor colored pencil on green Pastelbord, 5"W x 7"H. Completed 2008.

Kiersten and I thought it would be fun to have a colored pencil cameo of the two of us for our wedding reception. This piece is the companion to my self portrait - she's sitting in front of the same window. We're planning on displaying the two of them together.

Here's how they'll look together:

 

2 minute conte crayon on sketch paper, followed by 60 minute Derwent drawing pencils on toned paper:

After about a week, I've got my website restored to roughly what it was before my "err, didn't mean to delete that" incident.  I took the opportunity to add a few improvements.  You'll notice some visual tweaks such as frames around images, and a snazzy tag cloud at the bottom (click a keyword to see all related posts - for instance, all artwork done on blue colourfix paper).  Now that it's been a week since the latest Wordpress upgrade, programmers have also released updates for many of the broken features ("plugins").  In particular, one plugin allows me to embed Flickr hosted images into any post or page as a Flash gallery.  If you look at my header navigation menu, you'll see 'Photography' and 'Paper' links - click one to see an example. A subtle implication of this is that many of my images are now hosted on Flickr - so if I accidently delete a folder in my website, they still exist.

Earlier this year my laptop's hard drive became corrupted and needed to be reformatted. As most of my artwork scans resided on my hard drive, they were lost in the reformatting. In this case, though, I had copies on my website, so I was able to download them back to my hard drive.

The thing I've learned from all of this is, now that artwork has moved from the realm of slides to scans, it's worth noting that it is remarkably easy to destroy or otherwise lose digital files. It's good practice to have at least one backup - either hosted offline on a service like Flickr, or burned to a DVD.  I'm becoming increasing fond of offline backups.  Paired together with my own copies, it should provide a good failsafe for lost files.

Today we had a portrait model, without our usual 2 minute gesture warm up - just went right into the portrait: ~35 minutes sanguine drawing pencil on toned paper

After some head scratching, my fears were confirmed as I realized my deleting frenzy during my Wordpress reinstall resulted in deleting a folder called 'wp-content'.  As the name might suggest, it contained the content of my site (doh!).....in particular it happened to contain an 'uploads' folder which was home to everything I've ever loaded onto my website.  So, in the true spirit of computers, the void which all of my images disappeared into was actually triggered by me unknowingly hitting the delete key.  It reminds me of the old "To err is human.  To really mess up requires a computer."

My website provider did agree to restore the missing files for me - for a starting price of $150.  Considering I could do most of this for free on my own - it would just take a couple days of uploading a gajillion files - I opted for the DIY option.  Tonight I spent about 3 hours putting all of the colored pencil images back.  Over the next few weeks I'll start replacing the photography, shows and events, and personal photos.  A few things are gone for good - not all images I have backups for - in particular some of the work in progress photos for older drawings like Pensive - but on the most part, bear with me and the photos will slowly rematerialize.

Before the crash, I was kicking around the idea of offline photo systems like Flickr.  They have the advantage of archiving all of your images elsewhere in the event your computer hardrive goes up in a small mushroom cloud, and you get delete happy with your Wordpress directory structure.  Something to consider a bit more.

This weekend I felt a tinge of nervousness when I saw that the software I use to publish this art blog (Wordpress) offered a version upgrade to 2.5. Nearly every previous version upgrade has resulted in disabling of my website for several days - mostly due to incompatibility with many of the plugins I use (bits of programming that add features to the site). This time the upgrade started a chain reaction of little tweaks to get used to the new version. The last of which, a little plugin that would let me work on the look of the website without taking the many pages offline, quietly crippled the site, even after I disabled and removed the offending plugin. After reinstalling many files from backup, the site is up and running - sort of. You'll notice many images have disappeared throughout the pages. So, bear with me for a while until I figure out how to get them back, or, worst case, upload them all again. It got me thinking about the increasing technological demands on the artist. Where our domain was previously paper, pencil, and slides, now we've moved to digital images, webpage submissions for juried shows, and online blogs. Webpages can require anything from a little bit of technical savvy, to writing actual code to get what you need. The exposure you get from webpages is terrific - but the requirements are getting increasing technical as well. Just a little rambling as I ponder which digital void to begin searching for my missing images.