sculpture

My Artwork Illustrates a Chemical Review on Frontal Polymerization!

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“Frontal Polymerizations: From Chemical Perspectives to Macroscopic Properties and Applications” by Benjamin A. Suslick, Julie Hemmer, Brecklyn R. Groce, Katherine J. Stawiasz, Philippe H. Geubelle, Giulio Malucelli, Alberto Mariani, Jeffrey S. Moore, John A. Pojman, and Nancy R. Sottos, published by American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications on February 24, 2023, is a 62-page chemical review. My QuickCure Clay sculpture Catalyst illustrates Section 5.4.4. Frontally Polymerized Artwork in Figure 40 along with other QCC artists’ works.

The above article title links to the online review, and here’s the PDF version. Below is the relevant page!

Frontal Polymerizations: From Chemical Perspectives to Macroscopic Properties and Applications Section 5.4.4 with artwork illustration by Shelby Prindaville.

My LSU Vet Med Exhibition and Opening Reception!

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Here are photos from my solo exhibition and opening reception at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, co-sponsored by the LSU School of Art! The reception was amazing; over 80 people attended and they were all very engaged throughout the evening. We began with a welcome speech delivered by LSU School of Veterinary Medicine Dean Oliver Garden, followed by speeches from LSU College of Art + Design Dean Alkis Tsolakis and LSU School of Art Director Rod Parker, and then my artist lecture!

By the end of the evening, 6 of the 8 paintings/relief/sculpture were sold (only Hosts and Singularity remain available), and 3 of the 13 ceramics were purchased in addition to countless prints and greeting cards. Through the course of the rest of the exhibition, 3 more ceramics sold along with additional prints and greeting cards. I was a little surprised at how popular the mosquito reproductions were as they sold out quite quickly, but I’ve since learned there’s a well-known joke that mosquitoes are the state bird of Louisiana!

In the slideshow, you’ll see that in addition to the artwork walls and reproduction sales table, I also had a display table of some of the veterinary materials - medicines, chemicals, stains, tools, bones - I used in each of the pieces of artwork!

BROTA and Buenos Aires Outdoor Installation Pieces

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Here are two partner pieces I created to donate and install permanently in Buenos Aires after I leave with the help of BROTA! They are both mixed media pieces including acrylic, methylcellulose, toner, and marine varnish on a tree trunk cross-section, and will be diagonally mounted on wooden poles outdoors when installed. The institution that will host these works is yet to be determined. The two pieces are part of my Garden Memories series.

New Artwork: Catalyst

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Here’s some new artwork to kick off a new year! This piece was inspired by my encounter with two octopi on my last scuba dive this summer with Silviu in Arinaga while on residency at La Pedrada de Noemí. It’s pretty unusual to see the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, out and about during the day as they are typically nocturnal predators, but it was a very windy day with a lot of churning water and that must have drawn them out.

I have titled this piece Catalyst. It is mixed media including QuickCure Clay, aquabord panel, acrylic, and QuickCure Glaze Coating. Catalyst is capable of being displayed on a pedestal or installed on a wall. It is 13.5x14.5x6.25".

If you’re curious about the sculptural process with QCC, here are a few photos I took along the way. The first two are still in the uncured, sculpting stage and the second two are post-curing but pre-painting. I was actually quite drawn to the piece in its unpainted state, but I had to paint the panel at the very least due to its own mixed media, multicolored composition so I decided to go ahead with painting the whole piece. I might do a different version at some point that’s completely monotone, though, since I liked that quite a lot too.

Fall 2018 Teaching Schedule!

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It's that time of year - this morning USM held its annual matriculation ceremony, and tomorrow classes start!  I will be teaching Sculpture, Painting I, Typography, and Art Career Internship.  I'm looking forward to meeting new students and hearing how returning students have spent their summers!

Cerdeira Village Residency Journal 6 Photos 1 - My Artwork

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Here are a handful of photos of my overall exhibition space in the Cerdeira Village Elementos à Solta festival.  I already published individual piece images in my earlier posts, but here you can see some combined installation shots.

Cerdeira Village Residency Journal 5 - New Artwork!

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When I was shopping at the market across from the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, I saw a few azulejos tiles of rabbits, and I bought myself one of them - it reminded me a little of Albrecht Dürer's work.

After I finished the turtle sculpture, I decided I would do a rabbit and a bird as a partner piece to the turtle and nest mostly due to that market experience.  When I started looking at various images of rabbits in order to find one to sculpt, I decided that proportionally and structurally, a hare would be more interesting than a rabbit.  And given that I had been thinking about rabbits and hares due to this azulejos tile that reminded me of Dürer, I decided to base my sculpture off of Young Hare.

It was really quite fun sculpting a watercolor painting, as it were, and one that I highly admire.  I started off again with a styrofoam and wire base and then added QCC and began to form the body and head.  

I added the feet in three separate parts, and finally the claws and ears.  After every part was added, I detailed the fur and added some jackalope-esque branches in front of the ears.  This all took several days to come together, and obviously there were parts I had to construct myself in attempting to realize a three-dimensional animal out of a two-dimensional painting of it.

I had planned on sculpting a bird with the hare, but I liked the hare so much alone that I reconsidered.  As I was trying to decide what to do, I thought about how I would progress with the painting of the hare.  In the beginning I had thought about painting the rabbit in azulejos-inspired colors as well, but I realized when doing the turtle that the style that the shell and eggs looked quite good with it because they were fairly smooth, but when I tried to paint the turtle head and legs with various tints of blue, it got too busy and weird due to their pebbled surfaces (so I reverted them back to the clean white).  The fur of the rabbit is quite heavily textured, so I decided to paint it in a fairly realistic coloration through referencing Dürer's piece again but turning the colors just a little bit cooler in a nod to the azulejos theme and my own practice of using blue as a dominant color in my own work.

In deciding to paint it in naturalistic colors, though, I thought the two pieces wouldn't seem very related, so I figured I should do a bird - but a detachable bird, in case I ended up displaying the pieces separately as well or in case the bird didn't turn out so well.

I knew I wanted the bird to be in the azulejos color scheme, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to approximate an actual species/patterning like I did in the slider turtle shell design.  In the end, I decided the bird should be even more clearly a reference to the azulejos tiles; then there would be this strong representation in the bird and the eggs, a referential-but-also-naturalistic one in the turtle, and then an almost entirely naturalistic representation in the hare.

So here it is!  I also haven't accurately measured or titled it (though Young Hare will show up in the title somehow), but it is a mixed media ceramic sculpture including QCC, acrylic, and found branches.  Some of the photos below are of it in bright sunlight, so the cast shadows on the bird can be a little hard to parse, and all are against a brown/gray background which can make the branches difficult to differentiate too, but I will take photos of it in a white gallery space as well.

Cerdeira Village Residency Journal 3 - New Artwork!

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When I woke up for my first morning in Cerdeira Village, I was still a little tired and quite sneezy - I thought I would escape from my Kansas allergies but there are apparently still plenty of plants I'm allergic to in Portugal!  I soon shook it off, though, and Julia and I made breakfast and started to get to know each other.  Next I went to set up my studio space; the atelier is downstairs and next door from the residency housing.  I took over two small pottery tables and a bigger workshop table and began working on my first piece.  

When I proposed my project for this very competitive residency, I took note of how ceramics-oriented the website was and my proposal was to make some fully 3D pieces out of QCC since of late I've been doing only relief work with QCC.  For my first sculpture, I decided I would create a slider turtle with branches growing atop its back supporting a nest.  I picked a turtle for a few reasons - 1) I'd sculpted two turtles a few years ago out of QCC but never felt I fully resolved their form and wanted to improve upon that work; 2) there is a multicultural myth that the world is supported on the back of a great turtle; 3) I hadn't seen very many animals in Portugal yet given that I'd only been there a couple days, but I had seen at least two different species of slider (red-eared and yellow-bellied) at the Estufa Fria in Lisbon.

I started the sculpture by carving a rough approximation of the shell out of styrofoam.  This was mostly to save on clay usage - I can only carry one bucket of it at a time due to the size and weight it occupies in my luggage, so I want to be smart in how I use it up - but also helps with the weight of the piece, which is important because I will have to ship my artworks back to the US and weight sharply increases the shipping costs.

Then I applied QCC in a relatively thin layer around the styrofoam and began to shape and detail it (hacking out bits of styrofoam as well if I needed to).  The shell took a lot longer than I thought it would to really shape properly; I did not finish it the first day.

I continued work the second and third days on the turtle.  After finally detailing the shell, I moved on to the head and feet.  I did them all separately so I could be very considered in my markmaking, and finally I assembled all the pieces and added a tail and other final detailing by the end of the third day.  I had planned to make the branches and nest out of the QCC as well, but I became enchanted by the local lichens that grow on the trees here and ended up pushing real branches into the turtle's back before curing the whole piece.

 Afterwards, I did add a nest and two eggs made out of QCC into the branches.

On the fourth and fifth days, I painted the turtle, nest, and eggs white.  I had got it into my head to reference the azulejos tiles so common to Portugal in the painting of the sculpture; the starting point was turning the natural light tan of the clay the bright white of the glazed tiles.  I had only brought one type of paint with me - my Golden OPEN Acrylics - which are great for normal painting needs but are really poor as a base coat due to their long dry time.  Here in Cerdeira Village, they seem to dry even slower - in fact, barely at all - and I ended up just going ahead and painting the turtle shell with an azulejos-inspired, painted-turtle-shell-based design on the sixth day here despite the shell still being faintly wet.  I also painted the eggs with a small decorative motif seen in the corners of some azulejos tiles.  The turtle and eggs took almost a week to dry, but aided by my eventual realization that I needed to put them outside in the sun to assist, they were handle-able by the time I needed to install them in their exhibition space the morning of June 2.

So here's the piece!  I haven't measured it yet, nor titled it (I've got some ideas mulling), but that will come.  It is a mixed media ceramic sculpture including 3P QuickCure Clay, acrylic, and found branches and lichens.

A Sneak Peek at My In-Progress Sloth Bas Relief

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As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching an extra course this semester - Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art.  The course is structured into a few different sections, with the first exploring my own interdisciplinary interests (science and art, particularly involving the fields of ecology, biology, anatomy, botany, and my collaborative work in chemistry with Dr. John Pojman developing 3P QuickCure Clay).  

For this segment, the students must use QCC and make at least one piece of artwork that explores the fields listed above that are interdisciplinary interests of mine.  Since it's such a personal-to-me assignment, I decided I'd join in on the project.  I'd considered doing a sloth for a while - I met and got to directly interact with one named Peregrina in Peru during my 2014 residency there - but I didn't want the piece to be too cutesy so I kept dismissing the subject matter until I felt ready to tackle it with a somewhat more complex take on the animal.   I decided the time is now, mostly due to finding this elongated panel (its dimensions are 6x12") which felt like a perfect match to the gangly nature of the sloth.  

I plan to paint it, so the end piece will look considerably different than this, but here's a sneak peek at the relief work before adding any paint.

Exhibition Photos from La Maison Verte Residency at the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine

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Here are a few images from the La Mason Verte June 2016 Artists in Residence Exhibition I had in the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine.  My exhibition was entitled Garden Lore.  The door, obviously, is permanently installed, and was about 20 feet away from the display area I used for the rest of my pieces.  Note how the garden staff tidied up the door's surrounding area for the exhibition and added a permanent sign with my details on it!  Two of the photos below (the ones with a bit of an apricot tint) were taken by photographer Abril M. Barruecos.

La Maison Verte - Artwork 7

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My seventh piece at La Maison Verte was my intervention in the garden - my conversion of the water-pump door into a piece of artwork.  The door is 41x31x6" and is a mixed media installation including the original door materials, a poplar plank and back braces to replace the rotting base, 3P Quick Cure Clay, acrylics, screws, epoxy, and satin polyurethane.  It's titled Genius loci.  The piece is meant to be permanent, but of course the eye stalks and tentacles of the snail are relatively fragile so they may break if visitors to the garden are not gentle with it; that's in keeping with my overall message about the environment.  Nature provides us with so many rewards but in turn requires some human consideration and restraint.

Below is documentation of the project from start to finish!

And finally, a panoramic view to finish the post off:

La Maison Verte - Artwork 6

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I was bound and determined to finish a sixth piece in time for the exhibition in the Jardin Botanique de Marnay-sur-Seine, and I did it just in time!  This is 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on an 8x8" birch panel.  I'm calling it Climber. 

La Maison Verte - Artwork 5

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Here's my fifth piece!  It's 3P Quick Cure Clay and acrylic on a 8x6" birch panel.  It features one of two indistinguishable (apart from dissection) species - either Arion ater, the black slug, or Arion rufus, the red slug - enjoying one of the many rainy days we've had here in France.  I'm titling it As Right as Rain.

La Maison Verte - Artwork 3

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My third piece is pretty much done!  It's titled Under the Bonnets and it's 3P Quick Cure Clay, balsa wood, and acrylic on a 6x6" birch panel.