A Smile in the Making

Today my neighbor and I drove up to St Peter's Village. She had visited it many years ago and thought it would be nice to see it again. It is located off of Hwy 23 west of Hwy 100 north of Exton and south of Pottstown.

We got there early and found a nice little antique shop open with a friendly proprietor. The bakery across the street was open also. It had a walkway and deck built out onto the back of the building which is built on the banks of the French Creek. The creek was filled with huge boulders and I could imagine the flowing waters would be rather spectacular after a good rain. There also was a cute little artisan run jewelry shop Blue Stone Jewelry and a wonderful art gallery St Peters Art & Framing with a yoga room in the back which looked out over the same banks. While neither my neighbor nor I are into yoga, we thought the room would be very conducive to meditation.

Our trip back took us through Unionville where we discovered a large red brick historic building housing the Unionville Gallery, Three French Hens and Zarrika. We decided this was a place to return to. While alot of the inventory is market pieces, I thought that the selection was quite unique. So often you will see the same thing in store after store -- almost like they bought a packaged deal. But this place really felt like each product was picked by an individual.

I had spent the previous day in Philadelphia visiting my friend Kim Senior. We stopped at the Print Center to see the current exhibit by Doug and Mike Starn. The images of dessicated leaves were printed on wide lengths of photographic paper which were tacked to the wall. The process which was done with digital exposure using traditional developing methods (ie, chemical process as opposed to a computer generated print). While literally paper thin, the result produced an image with quite a bit of dimension -- which become more apparent viewed from different angles.

There also were some prints done on a thin transparent paper (which I neglected to find out what it was, or the printing process). They also were displayed in 12x18 (approx) sections of 4-9 tacked to the wall. There were at least two layers of the same print adhered together with encaustic wax --not unlike the result of ironed fall leaves between waxed paper. The paper had an amber cast which almost made it look like puff pastry. They were quite delicate looking and we were not sure how often they could be displayed in such a manner.

We stopped by the Philadelphia Art Alliance and saw an exhibit by an ceramic artist, SunKoo Yuh. While I found the pieces to be somewhat disturbing, the glazing was absolutely beautiful. Multiple layers of glaze were applied and then wiped off in spots to expose the colors beneath.

Kim then took me to Pearl Art Supply on South Street. Three floors of art supplies. One could easily spend a day there.

Kim and I talked about color management and color profiles with regards to our computers and getting good prints. She had had some work done by Cathy's Profiles, which she highly recommended.

All this art and inspiration the past few days of course makes me want to get going on new work. I will have some new pieces in my Etsy shop once I get the photos edited. Then of course there is the next Illustration Friday topic. Scale. So watch for that one.