Raven Skye McDonough, Collage Artist, Tells Her Story

21^st Century Athena – 36” x 36", Paper Mosaic Collage on Canvas

Being born under the sign of Aries, I get easily bored -- with art and nature being the only exceptions. This internal “drive” to move forward, has propelled me to experiment extensively with different media over the years, in order to visually convey a story I am trying to tell.

As a child, growing up in the suburbs of Boston, MA, I started creating art with crayons and colored pencils.  I transitioned into working with pastels as a teenager, then was introduced to oil paint during high school and continued to use it as my main media to create with, at the School of the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, MA.  My art focus back then was mainly to depict traditional representational subject matter such as still life’s, landscapes and the figure.

After Art School, it was difficult to find an art-related job so I had to put my artistic abilities aside. I transitioned into working with computers and technology in different capacities for the next 19 years while along raising my son, Bart.  

 

Sunset over Monadnock, 36” x 48” Acrylic on Masonite

In 2004 life changed drastically with my son going to away to college, a divorce, and the sale of our home.  I got back into painting accidentally when my  friend Karen Rocklin-Weare invited me over to her home to play with some acrylic paint and canvas that she had laying around.

Imagine my surprise when abstract imagery started coming out of me onto the canvas! I was hooked and painted every spare moment I could while holding down a full-time job.

From painting large abstract paintings in acrylics I transitioned into plein air painting landscapes in oils after meeting Modern Master Painter Stan Moeller of York, ME. With the encouragement, instruction and mentoring of Stan, so much of how I create (solving technical issues and composition) goes back to the things I learned with him. Watching Stan critique my artwork, and the work of other artists in his workshops, really helped sharpen my eye.  

Raven working in her Venice, FL Studio

After a couple of years, I felt something was still missing in how I wanted my artwork and personal style to look and feel. I wanted to combine the abstract and representational styles into one. It was during this time that I took a one day watercolor and collage workshop with Bill Earnshaw of Bedford, NH and fell in love with incorporating paper into my work. It wasn’t long before I covered all of the canvas with collage paper and a new style of Paper Mosaic collage was born.

Third Eye of the Tiger, 16” x 20” Paper Mosaic Collage on Canvas

The inspiration behind my art has primarily come from my love of nature and wildlife. I wanted to be a veterinarian growing up because of my love for all animals. This is the reason you find all kinds of critters and birds in my artwork.

With the relocation from New Hampshire to Florida in 2010, I now find inspiration from spending  time exploring the Florida landscape, its rivers, and the Gulf waters. Photographing and watching the amazing array of tropical birds has led to some very vibrant pieces.  

Double Trouble, 20” x 20” Paper Mosaic Collage on Canvas

I have created my share of what I call “pretty pictures” over the years which are lovely to look at but don’t really tell a story or raise awareness about social or environmental issues.

Spring Equinox, 24” x 48” Mixed Media Collage on Canvas

After much introspection, I have been compelled over the past 5 years to have my art tell a story, mainly using my collage and mixed media techniques as the tool. The different “mixed media” I currently use include: acrylic paint, paper of all kinds, venetian plaster, molding paste, clear tar gel, and crackle medium.

Most of my current inspiration is drawn from my own spiritual connections and from my nightly dreams. The subjects range from anti-war, environmental issues, political concerns, women’s issues, and the human journey to becoming an enlightened being.

Amazing Grace, 10” x 20” Mixed Media on Canvas

I have also been exploring the fine art of Assemblage. This is where you take random and discarded 3-D items and “assemble” them into a sculptural piece, which will either stand on its own or hang on the wall. This appeals to the “pack rat “in me that wants to save everything and make something new with it, with a further benefit of saving it from contributing to the landfills.   

When creating any kind of art, my intention is for the viewer to be drawn into my artwork long enough to forget their troubles and experience a moment of peace and thoughtful reflection as we navigate this hectic and crazy world we live in. 

The Psychology of Peace, 36” x 48” Paper Mosaic Collage on Canvas

This is Week 19 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Raven’s story today. To see more of Raven’s work and connect with her, please visit her website. You can also connect with her on Facebook.

Lori Kiplinger Pandy, Sculptor, Tells Her Story

I didn’t take my first art class until my last semester in high school. My teacher saw some real promise in my work and introduced me to the world of art possibilities. More than just paintings, art was also design, magazines, books, film, cards, shopping bags and more.

After that class I changed my plans from being an English teacher to becoming an artist and won a small scholarship to Ringling College of Art and Design where I majored in Illustration.

My art career has been quite varied and I spent 30 years as an Art Director, gallery artist, advertising artist and book designer/illustrator. My husband, seeing how burned out I was struggling with my perfectionism and constant publishing deadlines, suggested I try something different. So I took a portrait-sculpting workshop and discovered my love of sculpting. When I picked up clay I found it was love at first squish.

After years of trying to paint things to look round, with volume and form, I simply moved the clay under my fingers and it WAS round, with volume and form. I seemed to instinctively understand the scale, proportions, balance and musculature of my subjects but in reality my 30 years of drawing and painting were being manifested in a new medium.

While taking a figure sculpture workshop at Brookgreen Gardens, I shipped my nearly finished sculpture back to my studio. The armature came apart in transit and the ruined clay sculpture rolled around in the box – becoming cubism instead of realism. Had this been one my paintings, I would have been devastated over the lost work and in dread at recreating it. Never before had I realized how much work and stress went into each painting and how I the finished works always fell short of my expectations.

Yet my reaction to the shipping disaster was simply disappointment that I had wasted good money in shipping. Even more curious was the lack of a knot in my stomach at the lost hours of work or the worry about even trying to replace it. Instead was the quiet knowledge and confidence that I could simply sculpt this piece again as good, or probably even better, than before. And what’s more – I was happy to do so.

That is when I realized that I now valued the process of sculpting - finding the forms, balance, proportion and giving the work meaning and a story more than the finished work itself. It was liberating to be free from worry of the final product and more focused on the act and meaning of creating.

Armed with this revelation I re-sculpted the piece from memory and enjoyed the process even more the second time and “Waiting on the #9” was eventually cast in bronze.

It has been a few years since my switch from paints to clay and I have been learning about armatures, different clays and the collaborative nature of casting works in bronze. While the bronze process is long, laborious and expensive, the joy of expressing myself in expressive swirls of fingerprints and tool marks in clay makes it all worth it. But realizing that after 30 years I have finally found my medium and my voice is, quite simply, priceless.

This is Week 18 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Lori’s story today! To see more of Lori’s work or connect with her, please visit the following links:

Websites:

www.KiplingerPandy.com

www.LoriKiplingerPandy.com

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/kiplingerpandysculpture

Pinterest:

https://www.pinterest.com/kiplingerpandy/lori-kiplinger-pandy-sculpture/

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorikiplingerpandy

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/kiplingerpandy/

Leiah Bowden, Energy Portrait Painter, Tells Her Story

Sometimes – maybe usually – you see something or know something and you only see it for what it seems to be; you don’t know what you are seeing or knowing may engulf you, what complexities or subtleties create the whole that stimulates your perception so that you see whatever it is you see.

When I was a teenager, I found that quite spontaneously I found myself thinking about a few people I knew very well – my best friend, my parents and brother – in terms of a color. I didn’t see that color around them. I conceptualized them in association with specific colors.

I don’t think I ever focused on seeing colors as a meditation or during meditation, but there is no doubt that my life-long habit of meditating – of entering a slightly altered state in order to relax, to commune with my higher self, with the divine, in order to receive guidance from those sources/points of consciousness within my own unlimited and eternal Self helped me develop an ability to relax my perceptual barriers -- the ones that we maintain in order to get along in society and maintain friendships with people even though they roll their eyes at what we say. Of course, if we have enough of a sense of self-nourishment, we eventually realize that our open-field skills put us in heaven, and closing that door is not worth hiding.

Before I found my ability to see the color and flow of energy, I had been channeling guidance and information from my own multidimensional constellation of awareness for many years. I started allowing myself to write stream-of-consciousness writing in my teens. In my 20’s I allowed my mind to speak freely to me and wrote down whatever wanted to come, even though a lot of it sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. What I was experiencing were my own habitually suppressed thoughts. I thought I was going crazy, and was seriously concerned. But then, Lily Tomlin made it to national – and to my attention, and I understood that she, too, allowed herself to open to other versions of herself. So I knew I wasn’t crazy, that it could be safe to open to whatever I found in myself. Those two events – allowing myself to open to previously suppressed aspects of myself, and then realizing that that was okay, and that I was safe, were central to my subsequent ability to open to ever-widening circles and higher and higher spirals of consciousness as I contemplated my own identity.

In my 30’s I began to receive bits of guidance that came through like static, or a bad cell phone connection. I would be talking to a friend and all of a sudden, I had to stop saying whatever I was saying and instead, say what had come through my mind in order to be heard. This developed into longer and longer sessions, and eventually I had regular appointments with my guides, who dictated to me information about the human condition, consciousness, my own growth, the divine nature of humanity, and whatever I wanted to know about.

By that point it was clear to me that I was receiving a measure of enrichment that I could find nowhere else but in the upper reaches of my own connection with the divine, and that whenever and for however long I could “send up” to this connection, I would be in heaven.

Now – here’s the way I discovered that I could see energy as color: in my 40s, an extremely effective stress reduction facilitator (he chooses to use that phrase rather than healer, as he says that we can only heal ourselves, not others) worked on me every week or so in the early 1990’s, performing a form of intuitive energy work that came to him through his own multidimensional guides and co-workers. As he was working, he would often say to me, “Can you see that beautiful sea-foam green coming out of your heart chakra?” and other similar questions relating to the specific colors he saw as he focused on my body and its energy flow. And I would always say that I couldn’t and didn’t.

One evening, he told me that he was having some discomfort around his heart, and that when we were finished with my session, he wanted me to look into his field and tell him what I saw. I was amazed. “I can’t see colors!” I balked. But as soon as I said it, I knew that his question could well have been his way of jump-starting my next step. He knew I was very intuitive and we had combined our efforts in helping other people heal themselves, and we also had been working together in creating intuitive art, so he also knew that I had an active sensitivity to color. But I had not put the two together.

So at the end of his working on me, we sat opposite each other in a dimmed room, and I looked with a relaxed eye at and several inches away from his body, instructing myself that if Gary thought I could see the colors of his energy field, then surely I could. In a few minutes, I realized that I did, indeed, have a perception. I had a strong sense, as I focused my attention to the area around his heart, that if there were a color there, it would be a particular, very specific shade of red. I then second-guessed myself and tried to see if I was merely being influenced by the “roses are red” association.  Nope. It was that shade of red and no other. I told this to Gary and he indicated that I was right about that. He directed my attention to another portion of his body, and I found that again, I had a strong sense of an exact color, and I told him what it was. Again, he nodded, and pointed to other parts of his body, over and over, and each time, I found that my sense of a specific shade of color came to mind. I eventually described his entire energy field by pointing out what colors were there and what they looked like, how they moved and flowed. I was amazed. It was so easy!

He suggested that next week, I look at his field again, and, using the new pastels and pastel paper that he knew I had begun to use with unbridled enthusiasm, that I create a portrait of his energy field. I did, and that was my first Energy Portrait.

Within a few weeks I had done four or five of them, and was so excited with each one, with my friends’ responses, and with the sensual flow of pastel smears on toothy paper under my hands. I felt like I was flying. I had discovered something. A key that, used again and again, gave me access to more and more pathways into wonder.

I found myself telling people, “When I do these I am in heaven.”

This is Week 17 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Leiah's story today. To see more of her work, please go to the following links:

Website: www.lightspeak.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightspeakTA/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/energyportraits?trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile

Email: yes@lightspeak.com