Here are the rest of the progress photo sets from my Phoenix Athens residency body of artwork!
Realms:
Heritage:
Pathways:
Radiance:
Ancient Origins:
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork Progress Photos Set 1 of 2
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:
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 10
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.
My Phoenix Athens Solo Show: Athenian Habitat
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.
The 2023-24 Academic Year Has Begun!
in Teaching
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!
Materiality Solo Show in Morningside's Eppley Art Gallery!
in Exhibitions
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!
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 9
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.
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 8
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.
My Final Week in Athens!
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.
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 7
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.
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 6
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.
Week 5 in Athens
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!
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 5
When I first conceived of a nine-tile piece (Marginated) and a five-turned-into-four-tile piece due to one of the pieces being destroyed at a sandblasting facility (though then one of the four remaining tiles broke into two during sanding, so it reconverted to five total pieces-and-fragments), I had planned to paint an animal on the larger composition and a plant on the narrower one. I imagined it might be a tortoise and an olive branch, and as time passed and I gathered experiences and reference imagery, both ideas resonated more and more strongly.
Athens is named as such because Athena and Poseidon battled out becoming the city’s patron god through each giving it a gift. Poseidon gave a salt-water sea, while Athena gave the gift of an olive tree atop the Acropolis. The olive tree was deemed the better gift, and so the city was named Athens with the patron of Athena (and was punished with insufficient fresh water by Poseidon). Olive trees are ubiquitous in Athens and Greece, growing in the ground as well as in decorative containers throughout the city. They are easy to identify due to their iconic appearance. Their fruit, oil, and wood are each major industries, and squatters can even gain land rights by planting an olive tree on contested parcels. The olive branch has become a worldwide symbol of peace.
I decided to paint an olive branch with immature olives on it, and atop the roughened glaze sections, I kept its coloration standard while on the raw clay body I converted it into a hot/burnt color palette that bring global warming, fires, and drought to mind (as I did to a lesser degree on Marginated as well).
Once again, this piece can be displayed variably, and/or in combination with Marginated.
Symbolism, acrylic on five partially deglazed 19th century ceramic tiles and tile fragments, variable display dimensions with core dimensions of 17.25x5.5x.25", 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic painting of an olive branch on partially deglazed 19th century tiles, displayed in an alternative layout.
Upcoming: People and the Planet Exhibition at Touchstone Gallery
in Exhibitions
My Aedes aegypti mosquito painting Hosts was juried into the upcoming People and the Planet exhibition at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, D.C. There is both a more selective in-person and a larger virtual gallery, and my work was accepted for both. When I applied, I thought given the show dates that I could make their mailing deadline after my return to the US, but they’d like it earlier than I expected so I had to elect to only exhibit in the virtual portion. The show will be on view from August 2-August 27, 2023!
Gallery info:
Touchstone Gallery
901 New York Ave NW
Washington DC 20001
202-682-4125
Open: Wednesday - Sunday 12-5 pm
www.touchstonegallery.com
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 4
I am so happy with how this overall project turned out! The tiles fought hard to keep their slick glass surfaces and people kept trying to persuade me to give up, but after a lot of failed attempts, I eventually prevailed in removing the top-most surface but leaving most of the glaze, crackle, and chip defects (and adding more defects of my own in the process).
From conception, I had planned on a nine-tile ceramic artwork and a five-tile-and-fragment ceramic artwork. One of the whole tiles ended up completely ruined while at the second sandblasting facility, so I was down to nine and four. I was initially pretty sure my nine-tile square artwork was going to be a tortoise, but I tried out a variety of compositions… and confirmed that a tortoise was my favorite option!
This project is exciting in that it is an experimental fusion between ceramics and painting, and it also uses as its substrate antique tiles from the 1840s. The multiple components means that I can display this piece in infinite ways; the “core composition” is of course the most resolved option but irregular spacing and/or scrambling encourages additional viewer appreciation for the artistry of each tile in its own right as well as introduces additional room for conceptual narratives around ecology, encroaching human environments into the natural world, negative space, abstraction, and time.
The subject is the larger, presumably male adult marginated tortoise I met on Mount Lycabettus - at least one group of locals call him Petros. When I was thinking about what to title this piece, I realized that marginated also means “marked or characterized by margins,” such that the word describes both the subject and substrate and therefore seemed to me to be the perfect title.
Marginated, acrylic on nine partially deglazed 19th century ceramic tiles, variable display dimensions with core dimensions of 16x16x.25", 2023.
My Fourth Week in Athens
in Residencies
My fourth week in Athens was pretty friend- and tourism-focused! On Monday, I met up with a childhood friend who is now a Greek Orthodox nun, and then visited Sounion with the Phoenix Athens residency director and his college roommate where we took in the Temple of Poseidon and swam in the Aegean Sea. Tuesday I was able to get a little studio time in, and then my colleague and good friend Stacey came to visit that evening through Saturday morning! We hopped on a cruise to visit several Greek islands, and then stayed for two nights in Aegina. We did a four-hour ocean kayak tour (it was amazing but also as a solo kayaking novice, I think two hours might have been more within my comfort zone) around Agistri and several nearby uninhabited islands, rented bikes and biked part of Agistri as well, went swimming and snorkeling a number of times, and generally had a blast. We then returned to Athens and visited the Acropolis Museum and the Acropolis itself!
On Saturday, I tried to hunt down a local artisans’ festival Stacey and I had driven past in a taxi, and I finally found it… but it wasn’t going to open for a couple more hours so I decided to visit it on Sunday instead. I then spent the rest of the day in the studio. Sunday, I went back to the Monastiraki flea market and Plaka districts as they were nearby the festival (which ended up not being that exciting, but I would’ve wondered if I didn’t go!), and I purchased a carry-on-sized piece of luggage that should hopefully help me be able to get all of my artwork back to the US. (After research, shipping seemed less advisable than taking it with me, but I was already close to the weight limits on my way here and am making artwork that involves heavy materials.) Then that afternoon, it was back into the studio!
My Solo Show at Phoenix Athens!
As you can probably surmise, I tend to post a week or so after whatever it is I’m doing. It takes time to process photos, write up posts, title and measure artwork, and so forth. It’s also nice to space out new artwork posts, so that online viewers have time to appreciate each one! This means that though I’ve only published three finished pieces and covered three weeks here in blog entries so far, I’m actually part of the way through my fifth week and have finished six pieces of artwork with two more in progress… and my solo show is rapidly approaching.
Below are the show details and statement, for anyone who happens to be in Athens!
“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
Shelby Prindaville is interested in the human role in shaping an ecological balance and creates art pieces centered on the beautiful fragility and resilience of the natural world. Her interdisciplinary art practice demonstrates the joy of contemplative engagement with nature as well as provides a taste of the sorrow a disconnect with nature can bring.
Shelby encountered each of the animal and plant species depicted in her paintings on Mount Lycabettus during a sequence of hikes undertaken throughout her residency, and drew additional inspiration from ancient Greek ruins; the Greek history of conquest, influence, and cultural fusion; urban construction materials; Athenian museums’ broken artifact presentations; a spotting scope’s field of view; the etymology and mythological background of the Eurasian sparrowhawk’s scientific name; and the law of conservation of energy.
While in residence at Phoenix Athens, Shelby has been working with new-to-her materials that have been locally or regionally sourced – concrete, broken segments of marble and paving stones – and in some cases, historically meaningful: papyrus and 19th century antique tiles. These materiality explorations and her desire to give her finished pieces their best chance of long-term archival stability have necessarily involved experimentation and occasional failure or redirection. She has visited two sandblasting facilities, used an angle grinder for the first and several subsequent times with a variety of different heads and attachments, tried out crackle paste, and limited herself to a color palette inspired by archaic natural pigments.
Shelby Prindaville is the Art Department Chair, Gallery Director, and Associate Professor of Art at Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa, USA. Her studio practice combines her interests in the sciences and art. She has been selected as a World Wildlife Fund tour artist, was invited to be the first-ever artist in residence at a veterinary school in the United States, and has previously completed twelve other artist residencies. Her website artbyshelby.com displays her work across a wide variety of art disciplines including painting, mixed media, relief, sculpture, ceramics, and interactive installations.
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 3
This is my first Eurasian hoopoe artwork! It is painted on a natural tree trunk slice which I obtained here in Athens. The central element, the “seed,” is the unaltered center-most part of the wood as well as its hollow. It also subtly references the “mati” or “evil eye” which is a prevalent design in Greece.
I plan to paint at least one, maybe two more hoopoe pieces… though I may not have time to complete them while I’m here in Athens. We’ll see!
The Seed, acrylic on tree trunk slice, 15.25x15.5x1”, 2023.
Week 3 in Athens
That Monday was another studio day!
The next morning, I went back up the morning at tortoise time as I figured it couldn’t hurt to get some more tortoise photos, and I was still wanting some more hoopoe shots - I had seen the hoopoes out at both late afternoon and early morning, so I thought I might as well attempt both at once. I indeed got some more tortoise images, and then spotted a Eurasian jay from afar. After some time wandering and watching, I then found a hoopoe to photograph and with time, this one let me get relatively close for a spell before flying off. Then either another or the same Eurasian jay showed up in a tree above me. After that, I found another (or a previous) hoopoe, and this one seemed to truly understand what I was about. Occasionally, an animal I encounter seems to get that I’m not a threat in any way and am in fact someone they might want to show off for. After we spent some time together, this bird made direct eye contact with me and then sunbathed, which when performed by hoopoes has led to some long-term misunderstandings by ornithologists and bird enthusiasts due to their remarkable behavior. They spread their wings and flop onto their stomachs, and then recline their head all the way back until they are worshipping the sun. It is WILD. I am reserving my photos as I plan to paint and I think sharing reference imagery kind of spoils some of the magic in my artwork, but you can google it! As I was leaving, I met Giselle the puppy again, and she was determinedly enjoying herself despite her owner being several hundred meters away yelling for her to come. I gave her a swift cuddle!
That evening, I went with the other art professor to see a "new artists under 40” exhibition, and we met up with the other, former artist in residence (who stayed beyond her residency to vacation) and had dinner and visited a new-to-me neighborhood.
On Wednesday, I spent time in the studio and then attended a different, massive contemporary Athenian exhibition (50 curators were involved!) in the evening. Then Thursday through Sunday were all studio days since I knew I was going to be spending some significant tourist time in the following week.
The images in the below gallery are Giselle, and some photos from the second exhibition I attended!
Phoenix Athens Residency Artwork 2
This is my second finished painting completed as an artist in residence at Phoenix Athens in Greece! It depicts the wild sparrowhawk mother of the chick I previously painted. The Eurasian sparrowhawk’s scientific name is Accipiter nisus, with “accipiter” being Latin for hawk and “Nisus” due to the Greek myth of King Nisus/Nisos (who in most versions of the myth is turned into a raptor upon his daughter’s betrayal).
I’ve always been interested in syncretism and occasionally infuse religious references into my artwork. Working within various European, Greek, and Egyptian traditions and media and adding my own conservation-based values into the mix here, I was inspired to give this female sparrowhawk a halo. The word “halo” comes from the Greek language and is artistically used for Greek deities including Helios, Eos, and Eosphorous, but the stylization I gave mine is more traditionally associated with Christianity though it is believed to have originated in Iran.
This is Syncretism, acrylic on papyrus, 24x16.5”, 2023.
Shelby Prindaville’s acrylic on papyrus painting of a female adult Eurasian sparrowhawk with a halo, titled “Syncretism," 2023.