2017 Little House Silent Auction

2017 Little House Silent Auction

OffCenter's Albuquirky 2017 Little House Silent Auction will be held this year in Albuquerque at the Sumner & Dene Gallery at 517 Central NW on Friday, May 6 from 5-8pm.  Help fund OffCenter Community Arts Center by coming out to the grand event and purchasing one of the 100+ little houses donated by Albuquerque artists.  The silent auction will be in conjunction with downstairs openings for artists Frank McCulloch and Friends.

My submission to this year's silent auction is a little out of the ordinary for me.  It is titled "Surfer Girl" -- I've never been on a surfboard in my life, but I have lived next to the ocean . . .

You can take a look at my post from last year to see one of the 4x4" "blank" wooden forms provided by OffCenter.  And, if you want to see most of my submission to the Little House Silent Auction over the past years, click on the "Little House" label to the right and all of those posts will come up.

Here we go with this year's submission:

For the 2017 auction, we were limited to a "footprint" of 6" x 6" -- so my 4" x 4" little house sits on a white sand (handmade paper) 6" x 6"base.   I really wanted to have the little surf shack be in white sand, but didn't want to create a mess, and was extremely happy with how well the handmade paper worked!

I roofed the house with pieces of extremely skinny bamboo -- a little over 1/8" diameter pieces.  The window frames and front door are also bamboo.

Each corner of the house is covered with tiny little white shells.  I made a front door mat that has people footprints and kitty foot prints.  (Surfer Girl's kitty is sitting in the shade under the clothesline on another side of the house.

I found a package of really (and I mean really) cute flip flop embellishments.  A pair of purple and blue polka-dot flip flops sit by the front door, and another pair is on the clothesline side of the house.  A pair of sunglasses sits on the windowsill next to the "Hang Loose" front door.

Surfer Girl's clothesline sports two bikinis -- one with a shell bra and a polka dot bikini to coordinate with her palm tree flip flops.

Her surfboard is propped up on the side of the house next to the windowbox, along with a pair of her swim fins.

And, finally - the fairly nondescript back side of the house with a palm growing out of a pile of shells.

Art in a Lid

Art in a Lid

Here in Albuquerque, the National Hispanic Cultural Center hosts a "Happy Arte Hour" each month.   I thought that the Arte Hours would be too "chi chi" for me, so I had never attended -- until last month when Cynthia Cook was the featured artist -- the Arte Hours are usually connected with a current show at the NHCC and Cynthia's work was being featured along with 3 other artists in a collage show entitled Fantasia Fantastica.

When I heard that Cynthia was the featured artist for Happy Arte Hour, I finally broke down and decided to go.  And, as it turns out, the event is not at all chi chi -- it is quite informal and relaxed and attended by a lot of "makers."

If you haven't seen Cynthia's work, she usually works quite small -- often her assemblage/collage pieces are the size of an Altoid tin or smaller.  Cynthia doesn't maintain a web presence, but you can do a google search and find a few images of her work,

Round tins with about a 3" diameter were provided for our use for our art projects, but with my funky left thumb that only bends about 30% of what it should bend, I have a challenge working that small.  We were told that if we wanted to work larger, to bring a tin.  I had just been given a vintage green and red Christmas tin (fruitcake?) with a 6" diameter that I took with me to use.  Here's the backside of the tin lid:

We were given some general instructions and turned loose to find images for our project.  I had brought an image of a vintage vamp that I wanted to use, along with a seed pod from a trumpet vine and some distressed marbles that I had found while walking/gardening.  Now there's a strange combination of items . . .

While searching for images, a theme of "round" began to emerge -- I was choosing only images of round things or images containing round things.

So, here is what I ended up putting together:

My vintage vamp is pressing forward and and wading through a collection of  very large bizarre round objects.

I loaded up the trumpet vine seed pod with the distressed marbles,

and when I got home I drilled 3 holes in the rim and added some round beads on head pins going from the outside of the tin to the inside of the tin, covered the rim textured braid,

and used a fine line of champagne colored glitter glue to highlight the edges of some of the round things.

I experimented with a few additions to the piece, but decided it was finished,  and named the piece "SurROUNDed."

I tend to like to make things in a series, and I already have another tin lid waiting for me to create a companion piece.