Please join us for Downtown Helena's June First Friday, at 1+1=1 Gallery. We're hosting a sidewalk cafe´with chalk games, kid-friendly refreshments and some adult-friendly art inside the gallery. Currently we are showing our annual art jewelry and figurative art invitational exhibit. Gorgeous art -- and lots of choice of one-of-a-kind jewelry in a wide range of prices. Hope to see you!
Well, we are making our Hygge Open House a true Helena tradition. Every year we’ve offered this fun event, attendance has grown and folks are telling us they look forward to it! Our hope is that by next year, all of downtown Helena will take part in an annual mid-winter Hygge Festival.
This year, our 1+1=1 Gallery Hygge Open House is just one day — Saturday, Feb. 3rd from 10 to 5 — designed to get you out of your cabin (we know you have the fever) … safely over the ice and down to the gallery to enjoy some delicious homemade warm food, hot drinks, energetic live music, a special presentation by a special guest about Hygge and a coffee tasting, a fascinating wood carving demonstration and a peek at the brand new printmaking studio we’ve been working hard on all January. Don’t miss this event. We will be so happy to see you on the 3rd!
Warm your bellies
Warm your hands
Warm your heartsMaybe we’ll generate enough warmth with hygge, to melt our icy streets!
Drop in to the gallery anytime on Saturday and be surprised by what you find! Ask us about hygge. Experience it. Listen to a special guest talk about Denmark and hygge. Take in our current art exhibit. I’d say “chill out with us” but it will be anything but chilly at 1+1=1 that day. See you.
By request of some of my older art students, I am trying something new this summer. It’s a series of plein-air drawing and painting classes for teens on eight Mondays. We’ll focus on learning to draw from life and nature, by observing carefully and practicing basic and more advanced skills.
Sketching, painting and a bit of photography
Landscapes and close-ups; rivers, mountains, trees and grass; people, bugs and birds; natural scenes and city scenes; wildflowers and seedpods
Watercolors, water-soluble pencils, pastels, graphite and pencils, ink pens, mixed-media, acrylic paint, charcoal and collage.
This year will be our Third Annual Young Voices Art Exhibit at 1+1=1 Gallery (sometime during the school year.) All four of my teen adventurer-artists will be able to participate in the preparation for the exhibit, at no charge. (Students’ families pay for inexpensive frames.)
Self portraits are a form of creative, artistic expression that dates back to the first mud-paintings on cave walls, and from classical painters and sculptors to contemporary artists. Most artists don’t create self portraits to sell. But it is an incredibly useful way to practice the arts of introspection, observance, self-knowledge and self-expression. For kids ages 9 to 13, introspection isn’t something they admit to doing regularly. I expected my students to be challenged, maybe uncomfortable, certainly pushed outside their comfort zones. They did some beautiful expressive work and I am sooo proud of them. Two students who could not attend today’s sesh will do this same project in one on ones with me later.
Watch for announcements and invitations to the 2nd Annual Young Voices exhibit opening November 8th where you will be able to see their artwork in person and meet the artists.
Today in our Kds Creativity Sesh we learned about self portraits and created two types of portraits.
First we watched a slideshow/collection of self portraits by artists both well known and unknown, including some by other students. Then we looked at some of the more unusual or creative self portraits and talked about why artists make self portraits and what they might be trying to express about themselves.
I gave my students an assignment to take lots of photos of themselves ( using a digital remote and an iPad on a stand) with the end result of 8 different emotional portraits. They chose their favorites to work with.
Next, the kids used either Photoshop or a mobile app to distill the color portraits to a black and white, posterized, sketch-ized or comic-ized image. We printed those on Bristol paper, glued them to very large sketch Bristol and they added paint and papers to create self portraits.
The students used some of the remaining expressive self-portrait photos to learn about enhancing the emotion of an image by the way one chooses to process the photo. Some of their photographic results are above.
Also, please check out some of their mixed-media self portraits below and let them know through comments, how you respond to their endeavors. Thank you!
Some of the photo-enhanced selfies:
Flub-ups, Oops and Leftovers Make Cool Collages
Sometimes one of my paintings or drawings just isn’t up to snuff… But that’s okay. It’s chill. I don’t worry and — I definitely don’t toss it! That’s like gold in the hands of a collage artist (that would be you, or your kiddo, in this fun class.)
I’m pretty excited to venture into doing my own classes for kids. I’m starting this year with once a week classes for 9 to 13 year olds. Next year, I will probably branch out to younger and older kids, especially if we have a gallery manager who can take over some of the work. [grin]
Energy movement, expression of form, creation of meaningful, new forms. Invented tools. Unique paint brushes. Drawing with found objects and natural materials. Creative. Expressive. Fun. Outside-the-box!
Our second Kids Creativity sesh for 9 to 13 year old kids, is all about abstract painting and mark-making. It’s about breaking out of the urge to paint like a photograph, or realistically. It’s about expressing the feelings we have, or the feeling of a thing. It’s one way to get away from, “I-can’t-draw-horses-that-look-like-horses-so-I’m-giving-up,” to “Oh! I love riding horses (riding my skateboard/climbing trees/swimming …) and I know how that feels! I can paint the way it feels!”
Boys and girls alike, will get into this boat-sculpture-making class. When we’re done with our boats, we’ll have a free, follow up morning when the students will learn about making an installation-art project in the front window of the gallery!
Remember watching clouds and figuring out what shapes you could see with your imaginations? Or making ink blobs and turning them into something “recognizable?” That was always fun, right? We stretch our creative minds outside the box by letting natural or found objects suggest to us what they want to become … fantastical creatures, weird monsters, make-believe machines, whatever our imaginations see when we really LOOK at the found objects.
