Tracy McCabe Stewart Art Blog

5 Fateful Questions-A Great Post on The Happiness project’s Blog

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:43:23 +0000

I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin. She’s the author of the wonderful bestseller, “The Happiness Project” and the blog of the same name.

She has a great post on questions to ask yourself when making tough decisions. It was the perfect advice for me right now as my family is considering some big changes. Maybe it will be for you, too.

Enjoy!

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Inspirational Artist: Lorraine Roy

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:33:44 +0000

I have been crazy busy traveling this summer and working on some personal projects. I am also working on a piece for a large juried show next month, but can’t post any pictures of it. It will negate it’s eligibility to the show.

In the meantime, I thought I would introduce you to a fabulous textile artist named Lorraine Roy. She works out of Canada and I have been following her work for years. I love Lorraine’s textiles. Her focus is mainly on trees as subjects these days, but I first got hooked on her work when she was doing cloth representations of patinaed sheet metal. Unfortunately, she no longer has these pieces on her site, but you can see her gorgeous tree compositions. They are all a gorgeous mixtures of abstraction and realism; full of beautiful colors and texture. They are well work a look. Enjoy!

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Inspirational Artist: Chris Roberts-Antieau

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:47:08 +0000

I was walking around Asheville galleries today and ran into some of Chris Roberts-Antieau’s fantastic artwork today. I am not normally a person who likes humorous art, but her work makes me laugh out loud. Some of it makes me think and some just reminds me of my childhood. I especially love “The Unlimited Potential of the Human Mind” and “Feeling Sorry for Pluto”. and “Pot Roast on Fire” These pieces can be seen in her 2010 collection on her website. Make sure you enlarge them; there’s a lot of great detail.

Her website includes all sorts of fun stuff to look at other than just her art.

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Door County Art Crawl

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 02:25:18 +0000

I am currently in beautiful western North Carolina, but was in Door County for a few days last week. Door County is small, but they have a really high caliber of artwork in the galleries there. There are enough tourists with an eye to buy to support the area’s galleries. I visited some of my favorite galleries while I was up there. Unlike my previous visit, this time, I had my camera!

My favorite galleries not only have stellar artwork, but the owners have created these beautiful spaces to showcase art; often utilizing old barns or outbuildings and creating beautiful gardens to surround or display the artwork. The use of space is as impressive as the roster of artists. For me, they are a haven; a place of peace. I step out of the car and I feel myself immediately quiet and pay attention.

I hope to create an artist space of my own as imaginative as these galleries in the future.

My gal pal Nina’s husband, Richard Edelman had a beautiful sculpture exhibit going at the Woodwalk Gallery. It’s a great space and they had a gorgeous setting for his work:

Richard Edelman

Here are some shots of the gallery space. Here’s a converted corn crib:

Converted Corn Crib (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Here is a shot of the ceiling:

Corn Crib Ceiling (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

My favorite gallery of all is the Edgewood Orchard Gallery. First of all, they are the sweetest people on the planet. All of them. The owner, Nell, is an absolute peach. They have a beautiful space with a series of gallery bulidings connected with patios and a beautiful sculpture garden:

Edgewood Orchard Gallery"s Sculpture Garden

The converted barn serves as the main gallery:

Edgewood Orchard Galleries

here’s another shot:

Patio leading to additional gallery space

and here is some of the incredible artwork:

Sculpture by David Valentine

and a beautiful piece by William Jauquet:

William Jauquet Sculpture

and a lovely piece by James G. Moore:

James G. Moore

Here are some other great galleries I would recommend:

The Blue Dolphin House for great garden art, K Allen Gallery for glass, and the Fine Line Designs Gallery for both sculpture and indoor art.

I will post NC pictures when I return to Chicago. I can’t seem to get them off my camera!

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Hitting the Road

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:51:46 +0000

I am off to Door County, Wisconsin for a long weekend of art galleries and biking with my husband. I will have a quick stop home on Sunday and then I’m off to Asheville, NC next week. I hope to post loads of pictures.

Here’s one from a previous trip:

Blue Ridge Parkway (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

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Taming Dragons and Layering Screens

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:00:16 +0000

I know I haven’t posted in ages. I’ve been absorbed in revamping my garden. I downsized my big pond to a smaller one that requires less upkeep. It involved moving tons of flagstone in the summer heat. I wasn’t really feeling too creative afterwards.

I fished this dragonfly out of the pond and he seemed quite content to dry off on my fingertip:

My Pet Dragonfly

Here’s a shot of the new pond. I dismantled the waterfall, but have water bubbling through this millstone:

New Pond (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Three of these cute green frogs moved in the new pond. So far, my big frogs haven’t returned. This guy likes to hide in my lotus plant:

Green Frog with a Personal Umbrella

Here’s a couple of shots of parts of my garden. I have gone heavy on the grasses and shrubs because my Great Dane and other big mutt mow down anything much daintier:

Tiger Eye Sumac, Hibiscus and Grasses (C) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and here’s more grasses in front of my garden shed:

Garden Shed (C) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and a shot of my old pond:

Fish! (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

and I did manage to put multiple layers of screening on my latest piece. It combines both regular and metallic paints:

Screened Layers (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

Here it is with hand dyed silk organza over it. I like the look; a bit more subtle:

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Vat Dyeing and Dramatic Toad Rescue

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:38:04 +0000

Okay, the rescue wasn’t really all that dramatic. I did a bit of vat dyeing today. When I came down to the basement, I had some little toads staring at me through the window wells. we’ve had rain of biblical proportions the past few weeks and these little guys got washed through the grates. It seems to happen every time we have really heavy rains here.

Toads!

I finally used a great silk screen that I made at a workshop with the fabulous Barbara Schneider (I love her workshops!). The effect was made by dribbling the design goop and letting it drip. I love the effect. Here it is on some hand dyed fabric. I’ll be using this for my latest cave piece:

dribble screened vat dye

and here’s a scarf I screened vat dye on while I was at it:

vat dyed scarf

It’s all one screen, but different colors.

Another layer tomorrow!

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Studio Music-Enter the Haggis

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:40:34 +0000

One of my favorite bands was playing on the north side of Chicago last night. They are a Canadian Celtic rock band called Enter the Haggis. I have most of their CD’s, but they are really best seen live. I also really like their live recordings.

Enter the Haggis-Photo by Carrie-Ann Ponte

I am usually up obscenely early during the week (think farmers and sunrises), so am pretty much dead in the water by 10pm. For this occasion, I got hopped up on caffeine and managed to stay awake for the whole show!

I love to listen to these guys when free motion quilting. They set my toes tapping. Here’s one of my favorite tunes of theirs via YouTube. Enjoy!

Enter the Haggis

and more:

More Haggis!

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Back to the Caves

Tracy McCabe Stewart — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 01:02:30 +0000

Cave screen:As you may have noticed, I haven’t gotten a heck of a lot done in the art department over the last few months. I did revisit a whooping crane piece I’d started before leaving for my trip to Japan, but wasn’t really engaged enough to stick with it when design problems arose. It is currently in pieces waiting for me to get interested again.

I noticed, over the past few days, that when I thought about starting or working on one of my bird pieces, I’d start drifting away. Suddenly, any thing else was more interesting: laundry, walking the dogs, solitaire, you name it. Interestingly, when I thought about doing some work on my cave series, I began designing and working the logistics of the piece out in my head. I guess I need a break from the birds for a while.

I began working out fabrics and creating new thermofax screens to use in the piece last night. I haven’t decided whether this will be a pure fiber piece or a piece that combines fiber and etched copper like my Lascaux pieces: Horses and Bulls I and II.

Anyway, here are some of the new screens I made based on the cave paintings in Altimira, Spain and Lascaux and Chauvet, France.

I am going to try to get some screening done over the weekend. We are getting house stuff done next week (carpeting). I need to empty out all of our furniture for the job and move it all back again when they are through. It will be completely chaotic here for most of the week.

Have a great weekend!

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Tracy McCabe Stewart — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:07:12 +0000

I have been working on my preening Whooping Crane piece the past few days. I’m happy to be back in the studio and motivated, however, progress has been one step forward and two steps back.

I did quite a lot of work on the wings, but it started looking like some weird bird angel. Obviously, the shape of the wings is off. I cut things apart last night and hopefully when I piece the bird back together it will look like something from the avian family, rather than the Great Holy Whooping Crane.

I will post pictures when I have something done that I don’t find embarrassing:-)

In the meantime, Christine Kane has posted a video of Simon Sinek from the fabulous TED series. It’s about marketing directly from your passion. It’s really about presenting what you do in life in an authentic way, rather than “selling’. I can definitely see applications in my own life, especially in art marketing. It’s pretty long, but if you have 18 minutes to spare, it’s worth the watch.

In the meantime, a daily moment of Zen. This is a shot I took from a flight I took to Knoxville, TN. I don’t know what the body of water was, but it snaked around all over the place. I loved the organic shape of the river system obscured by clouds:

Over Knoxville (c) Tracy McCabe Stewart

I think I’ll be thinking about how to apply the content for a while. I would love to hear your thoughts on art and marketing-or anything else!

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