My first museum art sale...

Dennos Museum is hosting a small works art exhibit and sale in May, and my photomicrography prints are totally in! It will be a good chance to introduce some new work to the public, maybe some color images and more abstract stuff than the series at the gallery. Of course, it will also be a good chance to create some publicity for the series on sale, too. Yay for being a shameless art-whore!

Hotshot!

One of our local news stations has a nightly bit called the "weather hotshot," which features a photograph of the weather, taken by a viewer. Last Saturday, the coolest meteorologist of them all, (who also happens to be a personal friend,) featured one of my photomicrographs, below, of a snowflake! It was very exciting!

Unfortunately, it happened during a weekend when the rest of my family was downstate, but my sister was able to record it for all to see.

It's good to have awesome friends in television.

Retail Ready at Last!

For the past four weeks, I'd been worrying about my official "retail ready" gallery deadline, which happens to be tomorrow. I'd never sold work before this series, so I had a lot to do, and a lot of mistakes to make. Whenever I made progress, it didn't seem tangible, and there were many setbacks. However, sitting here looking at the sheer number of pieces that I made during that time, I'm experiencing an unprecedented sense of accomplishment. There are two framed 16x20's, two framed 11x14's, six framed 8x10's, eight matted 11x14's, and eight matted 5x7's. That's a total of 26 pieces that had to be printed, cut, mounted, signed, and sometimes framed. In addition, I had to design description cards from scratch for each image, and attach those to the finished pieces.

It was a lot of work, but I learned so much about photo printing and mounting. The finished pieces look really great.

I hope I get to do this again someday.

A Little Bit of Backstory...

The posts I originally made when this blog started didn't really give a history of how the ball got rolling for me. Here's some backstory. (Note: this was written in October 2009, but I backdated it so that it would show up at the beginning of the blog.)

In December of 2008, I got a microscope with the intent of using it for rockhounding, which is one of my other hobbies. However, it was the middle of one of the harshest winters we've had in a long time, and there were few rocks to hound. I ended up turning my shiny new microscope toward things that were nearby. Soon, the Secrets of a Modern Kitchen series was born. Here's the image that started it all, which I call "Table Salt on Cork".

Secrets of a Modern Kitchen dealt with simple kitchen ingredients as subjects, including salt, sugar, oil & water, condensation, and more. Later, after I tired of kitchen subjects, (it was a looong winter,) I turned the microscope on the snowflakes outside. Snow is incredibly challenging to photograph, and I'm still not quite pleased with those images. (However, they do sell well.)

After receiving much encouragement from friends and family, I decided to shop local galleries to see if they were interested. Art and Soul Gallery picked up my kitchen series right away, much to the surprise of my now-husband. His mother is an artist, so he knew how hard it could be to get a gallery contract. Luckily, we live in a community that strongly supports local and emerging artists, so I was able to find a gallery who would give me a chance.

That should be sufficient backstory to get a reader started on this blog, which is really nothing more than the chronicle of an emerging artist. I hope you enjoy your visit!