Valentine's Paintings

I'm having a blast making bunches of little love themed paintings.  No classic romantic love imagery, but love through a different lense (okay, when it comes to dogs and cats and ponies i am probably more schmaltzy than most greeting cards out there; unabashedly smitten with the creatures).  I'm especially enjoying the "Harpy Love" series.  I think women should embrace their inner harpy and anyone lucky enough to be partnered with a harpy should just submit.  These paintings have me penciling out some designs for a series of greeting cards featuring harpy love.  Does anyone out there know of a greeting card company that would be interested in printing these?  I am pondering whether i should even consider submitting them to the usual suspects:  "Harpy Birthday"  "Embrace your Inner Harpy".  More about harpies tomorrow and my association with a fabulous new feminist blog that features my work on their banner, with a credit and link to my website and etsy shop!  yay!  

Christmas Cards by Ursula Dodge

BRRRR!!!!  it is currently negative six degrees here.  yes.  right now.  i'm typing this wearing my flannel jammies, down booties, a girlie pink thermal shirt, polar fleece jacket and polar fleece hat.  This back room we cavalierly call the "office" is not in the warm part of the house, so I shan't linger.  I shall spend the day sitting in the room with the pellet stove where the dogs and their stacks of beds are currently decamped, and I will get a lot of painting done today {after a stint on the treadmill, of course}.  I feed my horses four times a day and I will kiss them quickly and make sure their blankets are properly adjusted, but we won't be getting very much face time in this weather.  Prospero is very understanding as he has grown into a fine gentleman and he does not blame me for the weather.  My little redhead, Portia, is less so.  Down time makes her Furioso!  She bucks and shakes her fist at the gods and tosses her head and looks like a crazed little Pict with her dreadlocked mane and her impossibly thick tail and her furry feet.  With all this spare time on her hands she has been busying herself disassembling my barn.  I roll my eyes every time I go out there and discover what fresh mischief she has devised.  None of it is dangerous, just unsightly, and my "to do" list to finish the barn when the weather is decent again, just keeps getting longer, thanks to my darling girl.

I designed a line of Christmas cards for Masterpiece Studios when we first moved here last year and I have had many people contact me about where to purchase them.  In the not-too-distant future we are going to be selling the products I design for other companies from our own website, for now you can google my name or you can go to Masterpiece's website and click on "Where to Buy" at the top of their home page and a list of stores will come up.  If you type my name in as the keyword on their search you will get a page that shows all the designs of mine that they carry.  Good luck, and let me know if you need any assistance finding something, or wait for me to get further down that path and I'll be selling them myself!  Stay warm, and as our friend Fred says:  "Summer's comin'!"

Three More For Friends & Family Show

Had a really successful day painting yesterday, and now I'm totally spent.  Slept completely and heavily through the night and was so surprised when the alarm went off at 5am...it felt as if i'd just blinked my eyes. Kate usually gets me up at 3 to go potty (that is one of my old weimaraners, if you follow this blog you will certainly see paintings of her), i wonder if she tried but i was so dead to the world she gave up.  that would be a first.   I'm working on a series of nine paintings entitled "A Compendium of Heroines"...each painting looks like a page torn from a children's book, a very old-fashioned children's book, more like a fairy tale with mystery and darkness and things that need to be solved and possible dangers on the hero's journey, except all the heroes are girls.  A world populated with talking animals and nature figure heavily, just like in my world :) Last night i finished the second set of three and i just had my groove on.  I stopped once briefly to eat some oatmeal (right now it has to be steel cut oats with walnuts and dried cranberries and maple syrup), and then i stopped for a while to eat dinner with my husband.  he watched movies while i kept painting and listening to the movies and frequently asking him to narrate, which could be completely annoying under certain circumstances, but my husband is very patient.  It was a thriller so there wasn't a lot of dialogue and the music would change and mostly i could follow based on that...maybe you're not surprised to hear that the final third of a thriller involves lots of high drama soundtrack and the actors grunting a lot.  So i would say "What just happened?" and eric would say "Someone just walked behind the car and she didn't see them...it's foggy."  Now that i think of it, the movie was probably much more interesting broken down and digested by my husband and relayed to me, like watching a movie through morse code.  

Finally Jumping In...

So.  It seems that my writer's block issues are deeper than I thought.  Just picking out the template and uploading the artwork were enough to put me into a state of shock for the last month and a half.  Then I got over myself and realized no one expects me to be a literary genius and that maybe I should just talk about the artwork and the rest will take care of itself...

2009 has a very different momentum for me than the last two years {which were all about getting out of Montana and landing where I needed to be, which is Deer Park, a rural community just north of Spokane in Eastern Washington State}.  2009 feels about the work.  

One of the first orders of business is creating a 9 panel installation for a show that my friend Rebecca DeVere is curating in Ballard, Washington {downtown Seattle morphs into Ballard as one heads north}.  The opening is February 14 from 6-9pm  here's the link to the gallery for directions and other related info:www.blowingsands.com

The piece I'm showing is called "A Compendium of Heroines" and consists of nine 10x10" wood panels, each featuring a different young girl and a chunk of her narrative.  Here are really hideous pictures of the first three {solving the "photographing work/lighting problem" is on the TO DO list}.  When they have dried I will scan them and re-post them.  I think I will have t-shirts and cards of them on my cafepress site {see link at upper left} and prints on my etsy site, {see link at left}.