ecological art
After I painted After the Rain, I still had one sheet of the Nao Washi paper I had purchased left, and I was still very interested in working with the sumi as well - so I decided to make another in the same vein! This time, the subject is a grey heron (Ardea cinerea) I spotted hunting in a river. I fortunately finished this painting just ahead of when I needed to pack up at the end of the residency!
This is Edge of Motion, sumi and acrylic on washi paper, 5.3 x 15", 2025.
Once again interrupting my Japanese posts to remind you that the invitational You Want a Piece of Me? exhibition which I previously posted about here ends on August 17, 2025, so due to the gallery’s open hours you have two more dates left in which to stop by! I’ll get more into that below, but first, let’s do a deep dive into what I did.
This show asked artists to create art using a jigsaw puzzle, or puzzle pieces, as part of the art - and to leave at least some portion of original puzzle visible. You may recall that last year we did a similar challenge using board games, and here is what I did for that Advance to Gogh show in 2024!
For You Want a Piece of Me?, I needed to recycle puzzles - but I don’t own any, so I stopped by a thrift store and perused their offerings. I ended up buying three puzzles, mostly based on the differing scale of the pieces. I hadn’t decided what to do yet, but I figured owning these puzzles was a good first step. They were, in order of scale: L.O.L.Surprise! Floor Puzzle [large pieces], Milton Bradley lambs puzzle [medium pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle], Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle [small pieces, 1 original piece held in an octopus tentacle].
I pondered what I wanted to do with them for some time, as I wanted to make something that was still my own but that also satisfied the challenge parameters. I eventually decided I’d make a sort of topography out of the puzzles. This required actually building them, which for the 1000 piece puzzle took far longer than I wanted it to; I ended up building the other two easily but only assembling a few sections of the Milton Bradley Big Ben waterfall puzzle until I had enough connected material to satisfy my needs.
Then I built up a patchwork foundation, purposefully rejecting any edge pieces as I wanted the sculpture to communicate growth potential along its full border. After I glued it together and somewhat leveled its base, I then sculpted an octopus atop it. I formed the octopus out of QCC, clutching a mid-sized puzzle piece in one of its tentacles and a small piece in another. I also added some sand ridges. After curing, I painted the whole sculpture! Here are some progress pictures:
And here’s the finished piece! This is Construct, acrylic, QuickCure Clay, glue, and puzzle pieces, 16x25.67x3.25", 2025.
If you want to see Construct and the other Gallery 103 You Want a Piece of Me? entries in person, you can stop by either tomorrow (Saturday, August 9th) or next Saturday, August 16th between 10am and 1pm. Gallery 103 is located on the ground floor of the Ho-Chunk Centre located at 600 4th St, Sioux City, IA 51101.
In my travels in Japan, I’ve repeatedly come across calligraphy tools, artwork, and even participated in a 5th grade calligraphy lesson last year in Yamanashi City! In art classrooms in the US, the primary liquid ink we use is India ink (sometimes called China ink). Sumi is a bit different; the primary differentiator is that liquid sumi is typically soot bound with a synthetic glue that is not waterproof, so it can be lifted even after it dries. India ink is typically waterproof after drying. Sumi also has a more expressive and variable tone compared to the uniform performance of India ink.
In Japan, there is a type of artwork called sumi-e, which are ink wash paintings. They are often 100% sumi, though some add small accents with red ink and you can find some outliers that expand the color palette just a bit further. By adding acrylic paint, however, I have definitely strayed outside of making a traditional sumi-e. This would be better classified as mixed media, inspired by sumi-e. I painted atop a washi paper I purchased at Nao Washi in Saga.
The subject of this painting is a Japanese native freshwater crab (Geothelphusa dehaani) called sawagani (サワガニ). I have seen these crabs all around Japan, often in and around streams but also venturing further afield in evening rains. I encountered this one on the street while biking home from the studio one night right after the rain had stopped.
This is After the Rain, sumi and acrylic on washi paper, 5.3 x 15", 2025.
Painting tanuki (Nyctereutes viverrinus) unintentionally became a multi-year quest, which lived up to the yokai version’s reputation for illusions and light-hearted trickery.
I decided to paint them on the fan-shaped washi paper which I dyed with indigo (aizome) in my workshop in Tokyo in mid-May. Due to the coloration of the washi and the folkloric aspect of tanuki, I chose to paint them in a limited color palette which isn’t completely monochromatic but which has indigo as the key color.
Tanuki are nocturnal, so the English title Blue Hour felt appropriate as the blue hour is a term for the short period of twilight just before sunrise or just after sunset. The Japanese title is 藍影 (Aikage), which means Indigo Shadows.
This is Blue Hour (藍影), acrylic and traditional indigo dye on fan-shaped washi paper, 7.7x15.75”, 2025.
There’s a word in Japanese that doesn’t quite have a satisfying translation to English: 新緑 (shinryoku). It’s the new, lush green of early summer. One of the plants that always captures that feeling for me is the ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba). I wanted to capture 新緑 in a painting of ginkgo leaves.
In researching possible titles for this painting, I learned that the ginkgo tree holds particular significance in Japan as one of the “survivor trees” that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I watched a short documentary on the man who has dedicated himself to caring for these trees and the trees themselves here. I highly recommend watching it; it is a moving story.
I also was inspired by haiku about shinryoku and related concepts like wakaba and midorisasu, like this poem from the poet Teruko from the Rainier Haiku Ginsha: “は一色ならず色重ね (shinryoku wa hitoiro narazu irokasane) / fresh green is not one color but layered hues.”
This is Even the Shadows Are Fresh (新緑), acrylic on round wooden panel, 12x12x.875”, 2025.
As a little bonus, here are a few images I’ve gathered of ginkgo leave motifs around Japan!
I’ve wanted to paint a red spider lily (Lycoris radiata) for some time because of their Asian iconography. In Japanese, this flower is the 彼岸花 (higanbana), and it symbolizes death, farewells, and the afterlife across Asia. It is planted around graveyards due to its toxicity, which discourages animals from disturbing graves. In artwork and storytelling (including anime), higanbana often foreshadows an upcoming fatality. An interesting botanical aside about this plant is that the bulb blooms first; usually only after the flowers die does it send out leaves!
Higanbana blooms between late August through early October, around the autumnal equinox. Due to my teaching schedule, my visits have only been possible in the early summer, so I couldn’t see them bloom in person here in Japan. I also tried and failed to source a bloom in the USA; due to its floriography, florists don’t carry it and if I bought and planted a bulb, it typically takes 4-7 years to flower.
However, a friend and Morningside alumna is relocating soon to Tokyo, and she was visiting Japan last autumn. I asked her if she’d be able to do me the favor of taking a few photos of these flowers and ceding me the copyright. She was willing and accomplished the task, so when I arrived at Takeo-onsen, I began work on this painting right away!
This is Red Spider Lily, acrylic on lattice pattern brass leaf Torinoko paper, 11.6x17.5”, 2025. It’s impossible to simultaneously photograph the painting well and show the reflective sheen of the paper, so just know that this painting is far more regal in person due to the golden metallic luster of the substrate.
During my first visit to Yamanashi City, I shared with several folks from city hall that I kept being stymied in my quest to see species-standard tanuki; as a consolation, they took me to Yamanashi City’s Manriki Park in the hopes of sharing their capybara with me. I was told it was up to fate as to whether I’d glimpse him or not, as sometimes he prefers to stay indoors (out of view). Fortunately for me, he was outdoors when we arrived and I was able to take some photos of him!
I painted this Manriki Park capybara atop Uzurado dyed washi paper from Ozu Washi. Uzura means quail in Japanese, and is a reference to the “paper snow” or confetti scraps and speckles decorating the paper like quail plumage.
This is Paper Snow (紙吹雪), acrylic on Uzurado dyed washi paper, 21.5x17”, 2025. Note my katakana stamp signature on the lower left below the capybara’s feet - that stamp was an extremely thoughtful gift from Yamanashi City to me!
An acrylic painting of Yamanashi City's capybara on Uzurado dyed washi paper by Shelby Prindaville
I had mostly finished this painting in time to exhibit it at Arts Itoya, but I knew I wanted to work back into it before declaring it actually complete. Once I returned home from Japan, got past the jet lag, and had a bit of time remaining before the school year started, I tweaked a number of areas until I was truly happy with the resulting piece.
This is Fleeting, acrylic on decorative Japanese stationery, 10.7x10.7”, 2024. It depicts a male crimson marsh glider (Trithemis aurora), also called a crimson dropwing, in flight above water.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic painting of a male crimson marsh glider.
My third painting is of a little hermit crab I met in Yakushima who was determined to be on his way. While I was working on the painting, a local Japanese man who stopped in at the studio shared with me that the name for hermit crabs in Japanese is ヤドカリ(yadokari), which means “borrowing lodging” or tenant. This painting is meticulously detailed and somewhat pointillistic.
The title is tentative, but for now: this is Lifelong Renter, acrylic on wood panel, 14x14 x.875”, 2024.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic painting of a hermit crab, Lifelong Renter.
My second painting is atop an aluminum leaf paper. This paper was hard to work with, as the paint doesn’t grip to it as well as I’d like (and my new Holbein metal primer did not help), and the tape I used to anchor the paper to a board ended up removing the foil off the corners. However, I persevered! The subject is a male Japanese rhinoceros beetle, called kabutomushi here in Japan: Allomyrina dichotoma. The adults only live for 2-3 months after pupating.
I plan to carefully varnish the beetle before framing this piece, but I’ll do that at home - so for here, it’s done! All of the metal leaf papers are hard to photograph, but I’m pretty happy with the below image.
This is Pursuit (Ichi-go ichi-e), acrylic on aluminum leaf paper, 11.5x17”, 2024. The Japanese romaji in the title, ichi-go ichi-e or 一期一会 in kanji, is a four-character Japanese proverb that means “one time, one meeting” and is about embracing the present.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of a kabutomushi or Japanese rhinoceros beetle (Allomyrina dichotoma) on aluminum leaf paper.
The first painting I completed at Arts Itoya is of two backlit hibiscus flowers from Yakushima. The substrate is a gold and silver leaf flecked Torinoko paper; I added the translucent green coloration. I was inspired by the dark fantasy iconography of flowers in anime, particularly in Hell’s Paradise as well in Demon Slayer and Suzume.
This is Duality, acrylic on gold and silver leaf flecked Torinoko paper, 14.37x11.6”, 2024.
Shelby Prindaville's acrylic painting, “Duality,” of two hibiscus flowers on decorative washi paper.
This was my first time doing slip resist naked raku ceramics, and it was definitely a learning process for everyone at the workshop, with more experimentation still needed moving forward! I did a fair amount of research the night before the workshop, and I was really glad I did. When we arrived the plan was just to do a one-step slip resist, but I had discovered David Roberts’ ceramics and wanted to try his technique. That required a two-step process (step one: dip into the slip resist, then let dry and step two: dip in clear glaze), which I convinced Wanda to let me do as well.
We began with the one-step system, but it was producing very low-contrast results for everyone. Some of them are still very cool, but I really wanted some full value finishes! As we fired the first of the two-step pieces, we saw that it was garnering better results. We’d already gotten through the majority of the slip resist pottery by then, but we pivoted the last third entirely to the two-step process regardless of whether folks wanted to carve through it. You may recall my last two pieces didn’t get fully fired, so I left them with Dakota Potters to refire another day. I recently got them back and in my opinion they’re the best of the bunch!
I put ten ceramics through the slip resist process; three were one-step and seven were two-step pieces. Unfortunately, we did find the two-step pottery were more likely to suffer casualties in the kiln. One of my two-step ceramics shattered so fully that it was just trashed there. Another blew a chunk of its side out, but is otherwise actually pretty cool so I plan to use a rotary tool to sand down the jagged edge and keep it.
Below I’ll show my eight undamaged pieces! First, two views of my first David Roberts inspired dish wherein I carved through the two-step surface to leave black lines:
Next, one view each of a one-step vase and bowl:
The below orb was also a one-step piece, but I added wax resist to the rim before dipping into the slip resist. Despite its low contrast, I think the pure black rim, the high burnish, and the shape contribute to making this one of my favorite pieces from this workshop. Here are three different angles of it:
Next, we have one image of the largest piece I fired at this workshop, and two views of another attempt at carving through the two-step surface on a small tray.
Here is the first of the two pieces I left behind to get refired - a large two-step orb!
And finally, the second of those two, an oblong vase:
Overall, I’m quite happy with these results so far, though I’d like to figure out how to regularly preserve larger white areas for even higher contrast. My burnishing was more successful on some pieces than others, but I do think it was worth the effort and I plan to continue to burnish for naked raku ware.
Some artists primarily work in transitory media - their artwork dissolves, melts, is eaten, is a performance, and so on. Often the documentation of this sort of artwork in many ways supplants the original; suddenly the photograph or video is the primary way that audiences engage with the piece. Andy Goldsworthy’s work is a good example.
Most of my artwork is intended to be of archival quality - I want it to endure for centuries, if not millennia! However, some of my pieces do have a more limited lifespan, at least in terms of continuing to match the photo documentation I took when I created the original artwork. My chromatography series are in that category, and I discussed this in the artist statement I published in this summer’s Annals of Iowa journal (Volume 82, Number 3). Here’s the pertinent excerpt:
“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.”
What does that change actually look like, you might ask? I thought it would be interesting to rephotograph one of the chromatograms to show you! Here is a side-by-side comparison of Literal Landscapes: Whiterock Conservancy 1, mixed media chromatogram including natural ecosystem pigments, alcohol, and gel medium on filter paper, 8x8", 2021; the first image was taken immediately after making the piece, while the second was taken over two years later.
To be clear, I still find the current versions compelling! The aging process of these chromatograms unsurprisingly mirrors what happens in nature as plants progress through seasons. They’re currently evoking autumn to me, while their original versions were more spring/summer. I bet a photo taken further down the line would show continued movement towards the monochromatic, so I might repeat this experiment again in a couple more years to try to determine when they will achieve their final evolution.
As was the case with my last new artwork, I began this painting while in residency at BROTA and the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden but didn’t finish it until now! It’s another painting of the water hyacinth - an attractive plant that due to human spread is now an invasive menace.
My first painting of this plant, Adrift, is intentionally more flat and graphic. It focuses on shape, color, and contour. In this painting, I wanted to add more realism through volume, depth, detail, and light via water reflection. The substrate is another beautiful handmade paper by Ato Menegazzo Papeles in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This is Incursion, acrylic on artisanal handmade paper, 19.5x15.5”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville's second painting of a water hyacinth.
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 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 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 smooth 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 smooth bowl I made!
An obvara raku handbuilt bowl by artist Shelby Prindaville.
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.
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.
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.
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.
