I’m about to release my second collection of 2021, aka my second collection ever made. My Pride 2021 collection (viewable on the home page) is inspired by some of my favorite LGBT+ people and events throughout LGBT+ history that mean a lot to me. This collection gives me a lot of hope for continued change and acceptance of all LGBT+ people in the world.
Creating collections is still very new to me. I’ve had another collection in the works for a couple of months now but one day I just felt so inspired so I switched gears and created the Pride 2021 collection instead. I really love the idea of creating many related paintings and releasing them all together. That’s how my inspiration often comes. I get a big idea and many little ideas erupt from it and come together into one big unit. This collection is of course inspired by pride month, but the other collection I’ve been working on (still unnamed) was inspired by metal in the garden.
I really wanted to try painting metal out of the blue one day and as soon as I started thinking about what metal object I could paint I realized that there were so many good options. I could paint a trowel, a bucket, garden shears, a shovel, almost any garden tool really. And the ideas just kept rolling out. I’ve since lost that desire to paint metal so much but I know that the collection will be finished some day. It feels wrong to release the paintings that are done without the remainder of the body of this unit, so they will stay scattered around my studio giving me inspiration until the rest of them are finished.
I’m also working on another series of paintings. I want to create a large collection of smaller paintings of different chicken breeds to be made into greeting cards/postcards/prints. I’ve been painting both the rooster and the hen of each breed. So far I’ve done the silver laced Wyandotte, the speckled Sussex, and the Bielefelder Kennhuhn. I plan on researching lots of different and unique chicken breeds to paint for this series. Eventually I want to keep it going with other animals like cows, pigs, sheep, or rabbit breeds. I actually have this crazy idea to paint my own homestead encyclopedia book of animal breeds and all sorts of veggies and do all my research to put information on everything in it. I think that would be really fun to work on throughout my life. (Similarly, I want to make a picture encyclopedia of birds across the country and all photos are ones that I’ve taken myself.)
I recently came across a post on Instagram about affordable art and it was really interesting. Art is not cheap. It takes a lot of time and energy to make, the materials can be quite expensive, and there are many other costs associated with creating, sharing, and shipping art. This post brought up the point that art should still be accessible to all people. I agree with that to an extent, only because I don’t believe in lowering the price of the art to be more affordable because then it’s not fair to the artist putting all of their time and resources into the pieces. But I do love the idea of creating collections of smaller works of art with the intention of being more affordable. And so I’ve done that! As a surprise, on July 1st I’m releasing a collection of ten pieces, all little bees, that will be just $40 each. They are 4″x4″ pieces painted on acrylic paper.
For now that’s all the ideas I have 🙂 I hope you love the Pride 2021 collection and The Hive collection coming out in the next few days.
