My artwork was juried into the upcoming national 2024 Arizona Aqueous XXXVIII exhibition! Juror Tracy Lynn Ross selected my sparrowhawk mother and child papyrus paintings Syncretism and Potential.
The show will be on display from January 5 - February 25, 2024 in the Tubac Center of the Arts located at 9 Plaza Road, Tubac, AZ 85646. There are awards, so I’ll look forward to the announcement of those - presumably at the opening reception on Friday, January 5th from 5-7pm.
Every artist has a few pieces they’ve started but not yet finished… and then time passes. Some of them kick around for months or years before they get picked back up again - if they ever do!
This painting is a piece I began during my 2019 Argentinian artist residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden. I got it quite close to being finished at the time, but there were a few touches left to add… and upon my return to the US, I shifted focus to moving houses and beginning the next school year, then COVID hit… and I just never returned to it until recently!
This is a painting of a water hyacinth, which is simultaneously a beautiful tropical aquatic plant native to South America and also a globally invasive scourge. In places where it can withstand the winters, it quickly multiplies until it covers all the available surface area of bodies of water. In doing so, it not only crowds out other, native surface plants and can make surface transportation difficult (for both people and wildlife), but it also shades out the underwater ecosystem. Along with many other territories, it is an invasive plant in the US Southeast, and at one point the US Congress considered but ultimately didn’t pass a bill to introduce hippopotamus to Louisiana to help manage the water hyacinth population.
This is Adrift, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.25x14.5”, 2023.
"Adrift" water hyacinth painting by artist Shelby Prindaville.
And here’s the last batch of obvara raku ceramics from my recent workshop at Dakota Potters Supply - these are the burnished vases!
This first oblong vase was the only one that I saw and heard crack during the sequential baths. It is still usable decoratively, but it does have that asterisk about it so I likely won’t exhibit or sell it. (Note, I purposely selected photos of it that don’t draw attention to the relatively large crack.)
While at the workshop, I thought that was my only casualty - but when I was applying kitchen wax to the surfaces at home, I noticed this next squat vase has a small hairline crack as well. It’s not nearly as apparent as the above piece’s flaw as it requires close examination to spot. While a crack is never ideal, in a low-fired piece like these which was always going to be decorative (not water-tight nor food-safe), it’s far less problematic than it would be in a piece intended for that kind of usage. I’ll probably keep this one myself!
The rest of the below vases are completely unblemished. This little bud vase is the smallest of the bunch.
Next we have a larger, somewhat soft rectangular vase!
And finally, a somewhat flared cylindrical vase.
I hope you’re as into the obvara pieces as I am. I really like the aesthetics this process produces - but more than that, from a conceptual standpoint I love the organic chaos that creates those aesthetics.
In my previous post, I shared the obvara raku bowls I made on my October 21, 2023 workshop at Dakota Potters Supply. I also made some plates and platters! As always, you can click on any of the photos below to see them larger.
This first burnished plate depicts a bear, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
This next burnished plate is smaller than the first - it’d be good to hold jewelry or other small items.
A small obvara raku plate by artist Shelby Prindaville.
This final piece is the largest - it’s a platter or tray, and it has some light texture on its inside surface.
Here is the first batch of my obvara raku pieces from my Dakota Potters Supply workshop on October 21, 2023 - I made enough that I plan to publish three posts covering the artwork! This post shares my obvara bowls and bowl-like vessels.
Again, as background, obvara is a low-fire scalding-and-sealing process wherein you create a fermented sourdough/beer bath, plunge approximately 980°C naked ceramics fresh out of the kiln into it, wait for them to start to bloom with different tan-to-brown markings, and then arrest the surface carbonization process by rinsing the pieces off in a water bath.
The obvara process itself scalds and somewhat seals the surface of the pottery, but I went ahead and added a thin layer of kitchen wax to these pieces as well for extra protection and sheen unification. All of the below images in each gallery row are of the same artwork from different angles.
This first open bowl has a burnished-smooth surface!
This second piece is another open bowl, but this time the surface has some light texture as well as a more variable form.
This third piece is burnished smooth and a bit more closed, though there’s a quite variable lip. All of the pieces I’ll be showing you are handbuilt, pinch-pot designs.
Next we have another burnished and even more closed vessel! This one was a favorite of my fellow workshop attendees; they loved how the obvara surface turned out.
While you can click into each of the above images to see them larger, I want to close this post out with just one large image of the last burnished bowl I made!
An obvara raku handbuilt bowl by artist Shelby Prindaville.
After asking about it repeatedly for three years, I successfully convinced the lovely folks over at Dakota Potters Supply to allow us to do an obvara raku workshop on October 21, 2023! Obvara is a low-fire scalding-and-sealing process wherein you create a fermented sourdough/beer bath, plunge approximately 980°C naked ceramics fresh out of the kiln into it, wait for them to start to bloom with different tan-to-brown markings, and then arrest the surface carbonization process by rinsing the pieces off in a water bath. Obvara has an even higher chance of cracking due to the extreme thermal shocks involved than non-bath raku processes.
Getting the chance to do raku is relatively rare, and many ceramists haven’t even heard of obvara, let alone had the opportunity to do it - so I’m really grateful for the experience! Joining me on the trip were Morningside faculty Paul Adamson, alumni Calissa Hanson and Deb Murakami, and students Laura Greene, Taylor Greene, and Lauren Hedlund.
In addition, I learned about honey raku from a ceramist at this year’s ArtSplash festival - it’s basically like horsehair, feather, or sugar raku surface carbonization, but with honey! I brought some along and we tried it out too - though I want to experiment with it some more at future workshops as I was so excited about the obvara opportunity that I only kept one textured plate aside for honey raku.
Here are some photos from the workshop itself, soon to be followed by pictures of my finished pieces! I applied for and was granted funding from our Faculty Development Committee to help with my costs, so I made and brought 18 pieces along this go-round - both to make up for any thermal shock victims, and because I didn’t need to apply glaze to my obvara or honey raku ceramics so I could get more processed compared to when I need to apply 1-8 layers of glaze to each piece on-site before firing (for crackle and copper glazes or ferric chloride dips). If you’ve been following my raku workshop production, 18 is about double the number of ceramics I typically aim to bring.
Whew, it’s a busy fall! My solo show Materiality has closed, and I’ve been hard at work with the aim of getting all the sold pieces from it into the hands of the buyers. Here are some photos of the exhibition and reception! I was very pleased with the show installation and flow, which was due to our amazing preparator Shannon Sargent. There was great community turnout for the reception - it was a fantastic event.
I was chosen as a 2023 Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs' Annals of Iowa cover art contest winner! Annals of Iowa is a quarterly journal from the State Historical Society of Iowa. Mine is the Summer 2023 edition, which is Volume 82, Number 3.
This is a competitive opportunity facilitated through the Iowa Arts Council. The cover artist not only has their artwork reproduced on the cover, but also writes an artist statement that “speaks to the artist's overall work, in addition to specifically referencing the featured work and its connection to Iowa history” which serves as the introduction to that editions’ contents.
“Founded in 1863, the Annals examines the deeds, misdeeds, and accomplishments of our predecessors and shows how those actions fit into the larger mosaic of Iowa's history. It is distributed to hundreds of subscribers throughout the United States and Canada, and its digital footprint is even larger, with with over 3.1 million downloads from readers throughout the globe, including over 850,000 downloads in 2022 (State Historical Society of Iowa).”
The digital issues are published online after a year, presumably to encourage subscription and/or individual volume purchases for more timely consumption. Below are a couple of photos of my print volume for now, and then next year I should be able to share the full digital version!
If you’d like to read my artist statement now, I’ve reproduced it here for you:
I am an interdisciplinary artist combining science and a wide range of art disciplines to examine the human role in shaping an ecological balance and encourage a more connected and conservation-focused approach. I served as the artist in residence at Whiterock Conservancy, located outside of Coon Rapids, IA, for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2021. While there, I began (and continued to work on post-residency) a body of work including painted reliefs, ceramics, and chromatograms. For my series Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy, I explored and documented this 5,500-acre non-profit land trust through ecosystem samples I collected – including plants, fungi, soils, ash, minerals, and water – and ground up into a slurry with denatured alcohol in a mortar and pestle. I then "printed" a variety of blends from different Whiterock locations onto filter paper using chromatography.
Chromatography is a technique for separating out the individual components of a mixture. For example, let’s imagine you have two different black inks. In the first, the black was created through mixture of red, yellow, and blue pigments, while the second uses only a true black pigment. If you made chromatograms with each of these black inks, in the first you would begin with black ink but end up with individual red, yellow, and blue sections; in the second you would start and end with black.
Each of my Whiterock chromatograms looks like an abstracted landscape and is literally composed from the landscape. They contain organic and inorganic pigment layers including chlorophyll A and B, carotenoids, anthocyanins, flavonoids, and metal oxides and hydroxides. This issue’s cover artwork’s ecosystem samples came from Whiterock’s Middle Raccoon River beach and Fig Avenue. The bottom of the piece beautifully displays the native blue clay and capillary action trails which reference Whiterock’s riparian habitats, while the top evokes prairie and oak savanna. Fittingly, Whiterock Conservancy is restoring one of the largest areas of native oak savanna remaining in Iowa.
Over time and exposure to sunlight, the less stable plant pigments in these chromatograms (the greens, blues, purples, and reds) degrade, while the more stable colors (the yellows, browns, and blacks) remain; my Literal Landscapes become more and more sepia as they age. To me, this is a reminder that our natural world is vibrant but vulnerable, and that we should relish what we have while stepping up our interventions to improve our ecological balance for future generations… or the living earth around us will continue to dull.
Shelby Prindaville
Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy 12 - Beach and Fig Ave, 2021, mixed media chromatogram
Here are the rest of the progress photo sets from my Phoenix Athens residency body of artwork!
Realms:
Heritage:
Pathways:
Radiance:
Ancient Origins:
I’m not always good about taking as many in-process photos as I could, but I do try to remember to do so! Here are the ones I took from my first half of Phoenix Athens residency artwork. Keep in mind the overall lighting, angles, flatness of papyrus, color accuracy, and so on are not that important to me when taking progress pictures; there are sometimes big jumps in the overall quality between them and the finished portfolio image, where I take great care with all of those factors. You can click into any of the images to see them larger and page through them.
Potential:
Syncretism:
The Seed:
Marginated:
Symbolism:
A photo of a section of a cave wall near where I harvested my pigment - this spot had just a couple of red ochre ribbons, but deeper into the cave there was a bigger deposit.
I started making the substrate for this piece in Athens, but I continued it after my return home and painted it here! The background is special - the substrate is made of white concrete mixed with natural cave pigment I harvested at in an abandoned silver mine tunnel on my friend’s monastery grounds and then processed into powder. I believe it is red ochre, which is one of the original archaic pigments used in ancient cave paintings. I also applied the red ochre to the surface for extra pigmentation.
The subject matter is a wild adult male red fox (Vulpes vulpes) which I got to observe on Mount Lycabettus due to the kindness of my field biologist friend Dimitris! He discovered that this fox shifts dens around 8am when the sun begins to infiltrate his early morning den; the one he moves into a narrow cave tunnel with two openings in a cliff face. Watching him navigate an almost sheer rock wall to get to that second den was witnessing a truly skilled athlete in action.
I like that the substrate and the subject both have caves in common, and though I glazed the whole of the fox irises with gold, a portion of them beneath the glaze are just the raw red ochre. I managed to finish this piece in time to install it in my Materiality show in Eppley Art Gallery, so it’s on display there through October 7th if you’d like to see it in person!
This is Ancient Origins, acrylic, artist-harvested red ochre natural cave pigment, and concrete on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.75”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic painting of a red fox atop artist-harvested natural red ochre cave pigment and concrete on a recycled wood round.
The below gallery of images is from my Phoenix Athens Gallery solo show!
Athenian Habitat by Shelby Prindaville
Exhibition dates: 15 – 22 July 2023 at Phoenix Athens Gallery, Asklipiou 89, Athens, Greece
Reception: Thursday 20 July 2023 19:00-22:00
I am really happy with this body of work; everything installed on the walls was created in five weeks, and I even managed to complete the piece displayed on a small easel in the front window before the reception.
Time flies, and we’re starting up another school year again! This Fall 2023 I will be teaching Design, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design Internship, and Advanced Studies in Graphic Design at Morningside University. I will also be taking Intro to Japanese!
I’ve been fortunate enough to receive Morningside University Ver Steeg and Morningside Experience Grant funding to support my research through my summer artist residencies at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine and Phoenix Athens these past couple of years - and now, I am exhibiting that artwork (as well as artwork from my Whiterock Conservancy residency, raku workshops, and general studio practice) in a solo show on campus in Eppley Art Gallery!
I titled this show Materiality because of the wide variety of media on exhibit; for artwork in this show, I dug my own wild clays, made my own ash glazes and saggar-fired plant vines onto pottery, built substrates out of recycled wood and concrete, worked atop unusual surfaces including antique ceramic tiles and papyrus, incorporated a wide range of veterinary materials, harvested natural cave pigment, and made use of scientific processes including chromatography and frontal polymerization.
Materiality is on display August 23-October 7, 2023. It’s open to the public on weekdays during business hours, which will be 8am-5pm once we have student workers begin their shifts, but until then it’ll be 8am-4pm. The show reception will be Wednesday, September 26th from 3-4pm - I’ll give a short artist talk, we’ll serve refreshments, and the event is free and open to the public!
Shelby Prindaville's Eppley Art Gallery Fall 2023 "Materiality" show poster.
Having that one hoopoe sunbathe in what felt pointedly for me was a genuinely amazing experience, and even though I think the pose is somewhat challenging for viewers, I knew I needed to paint it.
Each time I’d walked past or into olive wood stores, I considered if I wanted to purchase an olive wood slab to use as a substrate. There were a lot of slabs that had been made into cutting boards, complete with runoff depressions and handles, but several stores offered flush slabs (I imagine with the intended usage being cheese and serving boards). One day, I was in another olive wood shop and I decided to sift through all of their flush slabs, and I found one with a really compelling wood grain design that in my mind referenced the hot summer Mount Lycabettus landscape, and I could envision putting the sunbathing hoopoe atop it. It was a smaller slab than I ideally wanted, but then again, whatever I acquired would have to fit in my luggage… and size was important but so was the wood grain design - and this one was pretty perfect. I dithered about it for a little bit, and then decided to take the plunge and get it. Post-purchase, I went into another olive wood store to see if I’d immediately regret my choice by finding a better slab, but they did not have one that positively compared with mine so I took that as a win and stopped second-guessing it.
The hoopoe’s distinctive, high-contrast plumage is particular enough that on this and the previous hoopoe painting I needed to do a full shaded drawing first (rather than merely a contour drawing, which is what I typically can get away with). As I tell my students, time management is crucial to being a productive, well-compensated artist - the faster you can finish a piece while keeping high standards, the sooner you can begin the next. The only other painting in recent memory that I’ve done a full shaded drawing for is Velocity, my painted turtle painting.
The underlying drawing, which I think gives you some insight into the difficulties I faced working atop this high-contrast substrate.
Drawing my sunbathing hoopoe on top of the olive wood was really difficult. Not in terms of making marks - that was fine! - but in terms of accurately putting a competing design on top of the loud wood grain already present. Even the placement and size itself was difficult to determine! Then once I began, sometimes the drawing perfectly aligned with the wood grain, which itself was startling and caused me to second-guess my work, but other times I had to dismiss what the wood grain was doing and superimpose a different line.
The painting was also tedious, in that the smaller-than-desired size of the slab meant the artwork too was a bit smaller than I wanted and I had to use my three smallest brushes to paint the whole piece. I also needed to layer the paint and build it up, as the high-contrast wood grain design bled through my first few layers of paint (particularly the white areas). I’d guess the white areas have at least six applications of white paint to achieve my desired opacity.
After I added the sun, it looked too anemic; a simple gold circle in the olive wood sky blended in too much. I slept on it, and the next day I decided to add a darker gradient halo to the sun. This detail was instrumental; I am really pleased with how much it enhanced the artwork.
I managed to finish this piece just before my show reception, so I snuck it into the show by placing it on a small stand on the gallery display counter. A number of viewers remarked at how natural and easy the piece looks in that it all flows and sits exactly where it should. Given how difficult it was to execute, that was rewarding to hear.
The field biologist who had taken me on a couple Mount Lycabettus hikes and knew I was painting hoopoes arrived and brought with him some sparrowhawk and hoopoe feathers he’d found. One of the wing feathers he brought perfectly aligns with my painting, which is really cool. I toyed with the idea of incorporating it into the painting, but decided not to do so (yet, anyway!).
This is Radiance, acrylic on natural olive wood slab, 7.5x16.5x.75", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic on olive wood slab painting of a sunbathing hoopoe.
The wooden spool end before the mosaic and concrete.
I’m always interested in manmade constructions altered by the environment and time, and when I kept finding broken fragments of marble paving stones, concrete pathing, ceramic tiles, and so forth, I started picking them up. After amassing quite a collection, I decided I’d make a mosaic that referenced some of the artifact displays I’d seen in Athenian museums, so I took the angle grinder with a diamond blade to them to cut them down to at or below my desired height.
I then put one unique piece per type into the second recycled wood round from the electrical spool - this one had the upraised interior wooden frame with a circular outside and a square inside. (To block the holes, I had already cut and glued down a piece of masonite to the back - see the image to the left.) Once I found the layout I wanted, I put a smoother white concrete (compared to the previous large-grogged grey type I used in Realms) in and around it. I thought I probably wanted to paint it, but by this point my show installation was the next day so we just installed it in that mid-way state.
Once installed, my show was up until my last day in Athens, so I then took it down and brought it back to the US. Then I began to test out different possible compositions in Photoshop, and I settled on painting a couple rings of color - the inner gold and the outer blue - around the central composition in a design that references the mati aka evil eye charms. The three cool-colored mosaic fragments in the center are intentionally reminiscent of an eye as well.
After I painted the two rings, they looked too new, so I weathered them a little and made the blue border bleed into the white band inside to soften that edge.
This is Pathways, found marble, concrete, and ceramic paver fragments with acrylic and concrete on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.1.3, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's Greek pathways mosaic relief.
With my show installed, I freed up some time and the weather dropped a few degrees, meaning Monday was a good day to spend some time outdoors. The newest Phoenix Athens artist in residence, Zarah, had arrived the previous week and kept busy touring an island and spending time with a friend, but I managed to successfully suggest we take a road trip in her car (with gas and tolls paid for by me!) to visit my childhood friend who is now a Greek Orthodox nun named Sr. Theoterpi outside of Lavrio / Laurium (respectively, the Greek transliteration and the English name for the port). We had settled on Monday as the day we’d visit The Holy Monastery of St. Paul the Apostle.
The drive there took about 55 minutes, and we had to park a little bit downhill from the monastery as Zarah’s van was having a hard time with the steep hills - so we walked the rest of the way! Sr. Theoterpi greeted us and offered us some refreshments before giving us a tour of their church, the gardens and grounds, four chapels, a small cemetery, their farm and orchards, and a nearby cave system previously dug out to mine silver, where the sisters have harvested natural pigments for use in their artwork. I harvested some pieces of rock that had some of the most common pigment, a cinnabar-like color, and also got to see some very small bats sleeping on the ceilings. I also picked up a small slab fragment of marble that had been disposed of outside of the caves which I might want to paint atop… we’ll see! After our cave excursion, we were provided with a lovely vegan lunch and after a bit more exploration, we visited their gift shop and then headed out. It seems a shame not to visit the sea when you’re so close (in Athens, you’re at least 45 minutes away from beaches) so we stopped by a beach for a very brief dip and then made our way back to Athens.
While we were at the monastery, my phone went off four times with emergency alerts about wildfires in neighboring areas and on multiple sides of Athens, and then on our way back we saw two raging ones really close, along with a number of fire trucks and personnel - but frankly there was little they could do other than attempting to control fire breaks. The air tasted bad and the winds were super strong so about 15 minutes’ drive away after the second raging fire, we saw little smoke startups from wind-blown sparks in a previously unaffected area - it was clear the fires were going to be really widespread. Later that evening, the government shut down at least some portion of road so I was really happy that we had driven instead of bussing and that we had picked that day instead of later in the week.
As another heat wave began the next day, this time called Charon, I visited the Museum of Cycladic Art. I then spent the rest of that evening and the next day and a half painting… and then on Thursday evening, we had my show reception! I’ll do a separate post with photos on that.
Friday I worked on the concrete substrate to a new piece, and then in the late evening I walked around the Plaka neighborhood again. It had become so hot that I could really only go out at night! Saturday, I worked again on the new substrate and began some preliminary packing. Sunday was my last day, and I spent pretty much the whole day taking down my show and packing it, Tetris-ing my suitcases, weighing them, shifting items around and reweighing, and so forth. My brand new luggage I bought to haul some of my artwork back, which seemed to be of good quality, unfortunately pulled a seam, but I patched it together with superglue and opened up the extension section to relieve the pressure (I was trying to keep it shut as tight luggage is better, but obviously the luggage needs to remain whole for that to work!).
Sunday evening, Dimitri, Maria, and Zarah gathered to send me off with a toast. I woke up very early on Monday morning, wrangled my three pieces of luggage downstairs and outside, and then took a taxi to the Athens airport! Though there were a few travel hurdles, none were monumental and approximately 27 hours later, I was back in my own house.
This painting was the third I started… but the seventh to finish! Many people have asked me how long it takes to finish a piece of artwork, and the answer is harder to provide than they might think because I’m usually working on multiple pieces at a time and each one’s process and progress looks different.
The substrate for this is once again papyrus, but for the first time I experimented with using crackle paste. This was particularly experimental in that you’re supposed to use crackle paste only atop rigid surfaces, and papyrus is flexible. This meant that as the crackle paste seized, it actually buckled the papyrus beneath, leading to less dramatic cracking in the paste but creating a very irregular topography and shrinking the overall dimensions of the papyrus. Painting a relatively detailed and representational subject on this surface was really difficult, which led to me fighting with it for weeks. I might’ve even abandoned it, except every visitor to my studio remarked on how much they looked forward to seeing it finished and that it was already a favorite! Eventually, I made peace with it and could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
I am really pleased with how it turned out; my studio guests were right to urge me to complete it! Also from a completionist angle, my Mount Lycabettus tortoise times were always spent with two tortoises - I painted the larger, presumed male tortoise on the antique tiles, and this papryus piece depicts his smaller, presumably female companion. It feels nice to have finished portraits of each of them.
This is a tentative title: Heritage, acrylic and crackle paste on papyrus, 15.5x21.75", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic and crackle paste on papyrus painting of a marginated tortoise.
After my sparrowhawk photoshoot the second day with my new field biologist friend, I thought I might want to pay homage to the spotting scope’s field of view by working on a circular composition. Dimitri helpfully found me some wood-and-cardboard spools in the neighborhood trash, and he salvaged them. After taking them apart (they were bolted together), there were two wooden circles on each end. One was flush with holes for the bolts and center, and one had an extra central wooden ledge around the center along with the requisite holes. The Phoenix Athens residency director Dimitri is really into working with concrete, and I like trying new media so I embraced his suggestion to test it out!
I cut down a piece of masonite and glued it to the back, and then put some mesh over the top of the holes to help strengthen the cement’s fill of them. I then mixed up the concrete and added some crushed local snail shells I had collected on Mount Lycabettus as well.
The concrete adhered pretty well, but it wasn’t very level on the surface. I filled in most of the worst of the cavities with matte medium and then went to work drawing and painting atop it! I decided on a composition with three of the Eurasian sparrowhawk chicks, and I added a subtle dark vignette as another nod to the spotting scope.
I confess I am very nervous about how any of these rounds will handle the transit back, as they slightly exceed the width of my largest suitcase; it is flexible, so I can squeeze them in, but I can’t really do anything about their getting hit on those two sides. I can pad out the top and bottom, at least! I’m hoping they’ll be OK, but if they break, I hope they break in such a way that I can try to patch the pieces à la the archaeological fragmented displays I’ve admired in Athenian museums.
This is Realms, acrylic, concrete, and crushed snail shells on recycled wood round, 17.5x17.5x.75”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's circular acrylic and concrete on wooden panel painting of three Eurasian sparrowhawk chicks.
I started off my fifth week by working in the studio, this time with the angle grinder and a diamond blade, cutting all my found pieces of street and paving tiles and stones to approximately the same height and then cementing them into a mosaic. I continued working in the studio (mostly painting) on Tuesday and Wednesday as well. On Thursday, I took an early morning hike up Mount Lycabettus again with my new field biologist friend as he had located one of a wild male fox’s dens, and knew I’d like to see it! Fox time is even earlier than tortoise time, so afterward I had breakfast at a cafe on the mountain and then revisited my two tortoises. The smaller, likely female tortoise had just finished her repast and began to enter her burrow. The rest of the day I was back to work, and I kept it half of Friday as well… and then, it was installation time for my show.
I bought L-shaped installation screws from the local hardware store and installation went relatively smoothly… except for one wall, which after we laboriously installed most of Marginated (I paired one tile of it with one tile from Symbolism in a separate spot) had a too-big-to-ignore blank area, but it was too small for any other artwork. I really didn’t want to move Marginated, so I thought about it and realized that a small mirror would be conceptually powerful and aesthetically perfect. I’d titled my show Athenian Habitat, so a mirror puts the viewer into the ecosystem - which they are - and adds some actual life and movement into the exhibition. The next problem was where to find the right mirror! I thought it was possible one might be sold at the general store I purchased my tree slice from, and I was right… but they were only sold as a part of a mixed media home decor sculpture which had two circular mirrors but also several decorative tin discs and a metal rod and plate display.
I went to five other stores (a home goods store, a pharmacy, a supermarket, and two hardware stores) and none of them had what I wanted and weren’t sure exactly where to go though I was recommended Ikea (which is quite a distance away!). I didn’t want to spend another day or two hunting for another option, so I decided that one of the mirrors in the mixed media home decor sculpture would work… if I could get them off in one piece, as they were soldered onto the other metal design elements and armature.
I had to overpay for the components I wanted since they came attached to a bunch I didn’t, and then as I walked back I began just trying to dissemble it by hand. I got the smaller of the two mirrors involved off pretty easily! Then I started working on the big one as I arrived back at the gallery. Dimitri came over to try to help, but he shattered the larger one in his attempt. I eventually got it off anyhow, but the shattered glass was distracting rather than complementary so I went with the smaller of the mirrors.
On Saturday it was really hot, so I had intended to go to the Byzantine & Christian Museum but I ended up just going back to the studio to work. Dimitri and Maria put together a barbecue dinner (with some vegetarian options!) that evening in part to celebrate my exhibition opening, which was very fun! I did make my visit to the Byzantine Museum happen on Sunday, though, even though it was again really hot (due to the heat wave named Cerberus), and then Dimitri and Maria had such a nice time they wanted a redux dinner… but this time the police shut down their outdoor grilling. They persevered with hot plates and a griddle indoors, and I enjoyed their Za'atar pita dressing!
