I just finished the second piece in my crystal series, which I’m titling Displacement. It is a companion piece to Reclamation. This series explores ocean acidification as well as natural reclamation of manmade constructions and catastrophes.
Displacement is a mixed media relief including driftwood, aragonite, calcite, and salt crystals, acrylic, and QuickCure Glaze on a wood panel, 7.25x6.75x3.25”, 2021.
Shelby Prindaville, Displacement, mixed media relief including driftwood, aragonite, calcite, and salt crystals, acrylic, and QuickCure Glaze on a wood panel, 7.25x6.75x3.25”, 2021.
I had a few items I needed to pick up at Lowes recently, so I stopped in. As you might suspect of a person who has over 200 plants, if I go to a place for any reason that happens to sell plants, I will also look over the plants. You might be surprised to learn that despite being a person who has over 200 plants, I still sometimes not only look over but also buy plants from Lowes and Home Depot. This is really to their garden sections’ credit; these two big box stores do not just offer the same tried-and-true suite of plants year in and year out but rather - a bit belatedly due to the scale of the endeavor - follow houseplant trends and occasionally offer exciting and somewhat hard-to-find options. (Though if a plant is for sale at Lowes or Home Depot, it isn’t going to be rare for too much longer.)
On this day they had some new-to-me begonias in stock. For the longest time, I wouldn’t grow any begonias because the first time I tried - probably over a decade ago by now - the begonia died extremely quickly and I held a grudge against the whole genus. However, this past summer in quick succession I bought a cane begonia I liked the look of on extreme clearance and obtained a free cutting of another; both did relatively well for me and then I acquired a small Rex begonia a little later. Over this winter, that Rex begonia has begun to flourish and charm me and the two cane begonias have continued to do relatively well. As this nascent collection of begonias was forming, I also began to research more about begonias and now… well, I’m giving them a real try. It’s too early to say whether they’ll be suited for me or I for them in the long term, but I’m enjoying the discovery process.
So, I walk into Lowes’ plant area - which is fully indoors due to the winter - and spot two interesting new begonia cultivars for sale: ‘Linda Dawn’ and ‘Benigo.’ I begin to investigate them closely. The price point is on the high side - $20 each - because they are relatively rare, of medium size, and come with ceramic cache pots. I hem and haw as I look them over about whether I want to pay this much, but I grow more and more inclined not to because the begonias are very clearly partially eaten. In fact, as I really examine the plants, all the young and mature leaves are damaged and missing parts. Only the very newest growth looks whole. It looks quite a bit like caterpillar damage, so I start to think that the greenhouse these were grown in prior to being shipped out had a caterpillar infestation. I don’t see any current caterpillars, though, but I assume the plants were probably fogged as they were shipped out. I decide to walk away, but I’m sad because I would enjoy trying these plants out in my collection if I didn’t feel like the price was unfair for the quality of the plant on offer.
I double back and make my way to a garden center employee I spotted earlier. I ask if there’s any chance I could buy a small cutting or if they might offer a discount on the plants because they are all partially eaten.
The garden center employee knows exactly what I am talking about, and shares with me how the plants are being damaged, which is a genuine surprise to me.
The birds are eating them.
You see, all big box stores with garden centers have become little urbanized ecosystems of their own, complete with wildlife. Pigeons, sparrows, finches, the occasional hawk - there are some animals who spend their whole lives living at a big box store. And this Lowes’ indoor birds have been eating birdseed for sale supplemented with plants they enjoy munching on. Hemigraphis alternata is a very enjoyable snack, and so are these begonias in question.
My new begonias - ‘Benigo’ is on the left and ‘Linda Dawn’ is on the right.
(Apparently this Lowes had for a period of time in the past put kill traps out to catch the birds, but they have since switched to catch and release at a nearby nature center which is a much more humane policy.)
In terms of pest identification, the birds are good news for me in that I am pretty confident I won’t accidentally and unknowingly introduce one of their birds into my collection - which does happen sometimes with insect, fungal, or mildew infestations.
The garden center employee adds that they were considering clearancing these begonias anyway because the plants have been around since Christmas without selling and now there is all the accumulating bird damage, so I am given clearance prices and happily walk away to give both begonia ‘Linda Dawn’ and ‘Benigo’ a try!
It’s pretty neat to see former students continue achieving in art! A former student of mine, Paul Stouffer, who took one-on-one lessons from me while I was in graduate school at LSU is a finalist in the 2020 Pabst Blue Ribbon Art Can Contest.
In late December I was invited to participate in an upcoming exhibition and fundraising support event called The Maskuerade for local art gallery Vangarde Arts which has, as is unfortunately the case with many arts organizations, suffered during the pandemic.
Vangarde Arts has been a great supporter of the arts in Sioux City as well as of Morningside College, so I happily agreed to participate. Vangarde provided each invited artist with a white cotton 3-ply face mask, and asked that each mask be made into a unique artwork. The pieces are then to be auctioned off with the proceeds going to support their organization.
This was more of a challenge than I think many viewers might realize for several reasons:
The substrate (the face mask) is rather small and of a defined form already, so there’s limited room to work.
As an artist, I think you want to embrace the media you’re working with - so making it unrecognizable as a face mask to me ends up defeating the purpose of the challenge.
While I think one could pretty easily paint on a cotton mask as a canvas, I question whether viewers will easily differentiate an original painting from an existing fabric print. This meant I felt I needed to get somewhat sculptural while still embracing the substrate and its intended function in order to really make it transform identifiably into an original artwork.
I didn’t want to lose my own artistic focus and hand - I wanted to make this piece work within my oeuvre rather than existing outside of it.
I mentally wrestled for weeks just in trying to develop a concept, and then with only a vague starting point in mind I then physically wrestled with the mask itself for a couple weeks to try to see if that manipulation would inspire me to come up with an artistic solution. Finally all the reflection and experimentation paid off, and with an idea in mind all I then had to do was execute it!
This is Synthesis, a wearable mixed media artwork including a white cotton mask, thread, acrylic, gel, Cladonia rangiferina “reindeer lichen,” Tillandsia usneoides “Spanish moss,” pine needles, and bark. Its dimensions are 7x13x4.5”.
Synthesis, a wearable mixed media artwork including a white cotton mask, thread, acrylic, gel, Cladonia rangiferina, Tillandsia usneoides, pine needles, and bark; 7x13x4.5”, Shelby Prindaville, 2021.
The Maskuerade exhibition will have open house hours on February 11, 12, and 18 from 6-7pm in Vangarde Arts which is located at 416 Pierce St, Sioux City, IA 51101. An online auction will be open from February 15-18, and a silent auction and Fat Tuesday on Friday celebration will be held February 19 at 6pm with a live auction following at 7pm.
If you’re reading this from my blog, well, you’re in the heart of my social media already! I share the most content here, and I always publish new artwork on my blog first. However, I’ve been asked by some colleagues and students what my social media presence is like, particularly regarding my professional social media, so let’s get meta! (Also, note that I run my web browser in dark mode, so that’s why all the images below have dark backgrounds with white text. I find dark mode to be easier on my eyes.)
I retweet this blog, meaning that every blog post I make is also put onto my Twitter account. It’s 99% of my Twitter content; once in a blue moon I will tweet something other than a blog post, but it’s quite rare. I don’t reach many new viewers via Twitter since my own activity on the site is so low, but because it takes no effort to retweet these posts I figure I might as well.
I also publish most new artwork on Facebook and Reddit. On Facebook, though I make art posts public, the engagement is almost entirely from friends, colleagues, and former students. Reddit, however, engages complete strangers.
Often, I publish new artwork on Instagram too. I should be more consistent about posting on it, but for me Instagram begins to feel repetitive given my other sites/applications usage. Occasionally, I also share artwork on MetaFilter, which is text-based and a much smaller and more heavily moderated community than Reddit but is in some ways similar.
I have made artwork, reproduction, and commission sales via my blog, MetaFilter, Facebook, and Reddit. Sales are not my primary goal in engaging with viewers through social media - and I really should set up a shop at some point on this website so I can just direct buyers there - but they are another nice indication of audience appreciation!
An image of one of my paintings (Velocity, if you’re curious, as I went with my most recent work to date) is going to be sent to the Moon on a shielded microSD card in a 'Moonbox' from NASA contractor Astrobotic, so my work will be in a lunar digital archive! (Until radiation breaks through and wipes it away.)
A fellow space enthusiast who purchased a Moonbox to send microSD cards up and had extra storage available shared this opportunity with me (and others) and I excitedly submitted and was approved. I wanted to know what kind of exhibiting artist this will make me since international is no longer enough (and galactic seemed too broad), so I asked a bunch of friends and students what adjective means the Earth and Moon together.
There was a lot of speculation - interstellar also seems too broad, and the offerings of stratospheric, universal, lunatic (haha), and interplanetary didn’t fit the bill either. But my friend Bernie Langer came through with "geoselenic,” which is exactly the term I was looking for! (Apparently it’s of Hellenic derivation; Bernie also followed up with the Latin-derived “terralunar” which I like even better but which sadly hasn’t yet made it into a dictionary.)
Also, I can’t mention being a geoselenic artist without linking some relevant forefathers.
Back in October, I learned that the Sioux City Art Center Board of Trustees had a couple openings through a friend already on the Board - so I applied. In December, I had a virtual interview with City Council, and I recently learned that I was approved! I look forward to serving my community in this function for the next two years.
Sometimes viewers want to know how a piece of artwork was made, and if there are any in-progress pictures to show the process. I often don’t take as many photos of that as I could; I’m more focused on the creation than pausing for documentation, and I also think that too many process photos can slightly tarnish the magic of the completed piece.
Nevertheless, here’s a photo of the drawing in development of Velocity which underpins the painting! Usually I can get away with mostly only doing a contour and then painting the rest freehand, but this piece is so reliant on form, pattern, and detail that I needed a stronger blueprint for this one.
I ordered an item on Amazon, and it arrived not as described. I notified Amazon online of this, and they elected to issue me a refund without my needing to bother with returning the item. Great!
A couple weeks later, I’m scanning through my credit card activity as usual just to make sure there are no surprises, and I don’t see this refund. I wait another two days since this happened right around Christmas and I thought it might be delayed/pending without being listed as such. It still doesn’t appear, and other more recent charges have posted.
I call Amazon Customer Service and ask what happened to the refund. The CSR I got - who was a delight - said that contrary to their text description of what would happen, it didn’t refund onto my credit card but rather via an Amazon gift card. I replied that I’ve made some purchases via Amazon since then, and I didn’t see a positive balance or reduced order total. He said I already used the amount. I asked on what, and this is where it gets interesting - “I” used it on a recent Subscribe & Save order.
Subscribe & Save orders, as of this blog post publication date anyhow, do not show up in your order history, and the price you pay each time is not tracked anywhere on the website that’s viewable to the customer. Furthermore, the email I was sent about the item I was going to receive via Subscribe & Save didn’t mention a gift card balance or reduced cost. Unless I noticed on my credit card statement that the amount of that charge was lower than what the email indicated and connected the dots (which I didn’t), there was no other indication to me for what had happened to my refund.
Amazon gave me another refund since the first didn’t make it back to the original payment method, which was nice of them since I was apparently already secretly refunded. However, I think Subscribe & Save orders and payments should be viewable to consumers on the website order history for transparency and better user experience.
Happy New Year! I’ve been hard at work painting a painted turtle; it was a beast to draw and quite demanding to paint as well because of all of the pattern and detail.
I met this baby painted turtle (Chrysemys picta) while biking the Adams Homestead and Nature Preserve - I felt very lucky to have spotted its dollar-coin-sized stature along the trail!
This is Velocity, acrylic on basswood panel, 14x14x1.5”, 2021.
In my last ceramics blog post, I shared a range of planters I’ve created. (When I use the term “planter” for my own ceramic work, I am specifying that I have crafted them with drainage holes. I haven’t done so yet, but if I were to create a piece without drainage holes to house a plant, I’d call it a “cache pot.”)
I am most interested in making planters because of my extensive plant collection, so I’d say that for every non-planter piece I make, I make four planters. But I have made other pieces, including vases and bowls! Here are a few examples. The three vases all make use of my experimental embedding of iron oxide chunks, so they’re glazed in a “clear” that appears as a transparent tan.
Well, we submitted final grades last week and we’re officially moving on to preparations for next semester! I will be teaching Painting I/II, Graphic Design I, Graphic Design Internship, and Senior Art Seminar for Spring 2021.
Back in January, I began to try to learn about the discipline of ceramics for professional development as an administrator and artist (and maybe even further down the line it’ll be a course I feel capable of teaching, too)! Of course, the pandemic descended right after we had begun to kiln fire and we went remote mid-spring so then there was no more firing for a time which was a barrier to progress.
You may remember my blog post titled Pandemic Productivity which I wrote toward the end of March discussing this topic, and over the spring and summer I generated a number of pinch pot raw ware from home - and an end-of-summer bisque firing was done, so all of those pieces were ready for glazing in early August.
(If you’re unfamiliar with how to make ceramics, you take clay and shape it which when ready is called raw ware. That raw ware is then bisque fired in a kiln. Once bisqued, you typically glaze your pieces and fire them again at a higher temperature. The pieces that come out of that second firing are usually finished, though you can do additional treatments beyond that as well.)
My very limited previous ceramics glazing (I believe one finished cycle only?) had been with Cone 9 glazes, which our gas kiln is theoretically capable of… but the first set of pieces that came out were not only experimental in terms of learning how to glaze but also very underfired due to the gas kiln needing repairs. The underfiring negatively affected their watertightness and texture. We have since fixed the gas kiln, and I do have some pieces from January through March that had been prepared with Cone 9 glazes for my second glazing attempt and are presently still waiting for whenever we next fire the gas kiln.
This fall we reopened Morningside College in person, and our ceramics course began again. It takes several weeks of creation before class bisque firing begins, and then once a decent stockpile of bisque pieces build up students begin glazing. Midway through this fall, I was able to rejoin the cycle by beginning to glaze my pandemic pinchware! The instructor teaching now prefers to fire at Cone 6 with our electric kilns. This meant any color mixing knowledge I had about our existing Cone 9 glazes - minimal anyway - was out the window, and I was starting from square one with the new Cone 6 glazes, many of which didn’t even have sample swatches yet. Again, there was a lot of experimentation and not a lot of control - but in only a few cycles I’m starting to develop some preferences! It’s also nice that these finished pieces have reached the proper temperature and their surfaces are, in contrast to the underfired pieces I’d done before, behaving as intended.
So, here are the first of my finished ceramics after almost a full year of work! All of these are planters with drainage holes, as the last three photos demonstrate. A couple are wheel thrown, and the rest are pinchware. They vary in size but most are relatively small - they’re all approximately 2-5” in diameter. Bigger pots are more time- and material-consuming to make and take up more room in the kiln so I’ve been sticking with smaller ones for now. I’ve made a few bowls (with no drainage holes) and vases, too, which I’ll share in a later post!
As you might imagine, making planters brings my interest in art and plants together nicely in that I can start to house my plants in my own pots! Transplanting during winter isn’t optimal so I’ve only done so where necessary, but here you can see a young Chlorophytum comosum - colloquially referred to as a spider plant - who desperately needed more space and has therefore been upgraded into a Shelby Prindaville planter with a top dressing to complement!
I’ve had two pieces - Balancing Act and Camelflage - selected for exhibition at the Cultural Center for Cape Cod in Massachusetts’ international show Wild Things which opens November 20, 2020. Only 87 of 707 entries (the most they’ve ever received!) made the cut, so I’m pleased that 2 of mine are included in that number!
You can already view the online gallery here!
I have been juried by photographer and arts administrator Alison Erazmus into Webster Arts’ Relationships national exhibition! Of 586 submissions, 64 works were selected and my mixed media painting Littoral Layers is one of those 64.
The show will open with a Facebook Live event on November 17, 2020, at 7 pm CST. Additionally, all exhibition pieces will be available on their website http://webster-arts.org under the Exhibits tab.
I was invited to serve as a judge for the Sioux City Camera Club’s print competition in mid-October, and it was a really fun experience! The competition was split into two parts: color, and black and white. I along with two other judges rated each entry on technical skill, composition, and interest. I was quite impressed with the quality of the submissions - we have some really talented photographers in our community! Category winners will go on to compete further on a regional level, so I’ll be interested to hear how those photos fare in upcoming competitions.
Judging-wise, I have a lot of experience in assessing artwork in terms of value, color, composition, and so on. I am also expert at Adobe Photoshop, so digital manipulation is totally in my wheelhouse. I am skilled at digital photography, but there’s more there that I’d like to learn, and in film photography I know the basics but haven’t immersed myself in that discipline since undergrad. It was interesting to see how my deep knowledge areas complemented those of the other judges and vice versa.
Recently, I was invited by my mentor and former professor Kelli Kelley to guest lecture via Zoom in Louisiana State University’s ART 4889 Advanced Drawing Workshop! It was fun to get a chance to catch up with Kelli and to virtually meet LSU art upperclassmen and graduate students.
I’ve been taking advantage of the beautiful fall weather we’ve had - I’m still biking the Adams Homestead & Nature Preserve twice a week, and recently I went apple and pumpkin picking with some friends in Mondamin, IA. I didn’t realize it until I arrived, but Mondamin is nestled right up to the Loess Hills, a beautiful landscape that features some nice hiking trails and overlooks, and which is host to a number of interesting species - including a native yucca plant! After enjoying Small’s Fruit Farm, I stopped by one of the scenic overlooks and took some photos as well as harvested a ripe seed pod from one of the Yucca glauca on site - more on that to (hopefully!) come. A section of the overlook land had recently undergone a controlled burn, which added another element to the already interesting view. As I was leaving to head back to Sioux City, I also passed this house with very eclectic and aesthetic brickwork.
I give propagations of plants out to students as gifts, and sometimes as prizes for answering art questions correctly (if more than one student is interested in adopting the plant). So far, students this semester have received Cyanotis kewensis, Zamioculcas zamiifolia, Tripogandra serrulata, Kalanchoe daigremontiana, and Kalanchoe beauverdii. Then this showed up in my inbox a few weeks ago:
If you’re wondering, I said yes.
