A Virtual Artist Residency with Thrive

Here it is, my residency, I will begin July 28th and end September 3 spending 18 days consistently making art.

Have you heard of the Thrive Art Community? Check them out, a great community for women in art.

Here is my residency statement, we created the statements together on a community Zoom call with a few break-out room sessions and feedback loops.

Ok, here goes. While it's fresh.

Commitment - I am committed to furthering my art practice during this residency by developing my linework with spray paint and painting with brushes on a variety of different sub-straights.

I will also take a morning to go out with my bicycle to wheat paste some posters I have ready to go. I will probably make some more in a different colour ink during the residency too. This is a form of guerrilla marketing I like that I adopted from Keri Smith.

I will attend the September Reflection meeting and check in regularly with the network.

Project - to work with my lines on velum over 6 - 40" photographic prints published in Vogue Italia that are ready to go. I purchased the velum on Saturday. I want to create a show with this series and release an NFT that is ready to go at the show.

To also work with spray paint to learn how to create small hard lines.

Time - Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 9 am - 5 pm with limited phone and computer use during this time. Lunch for an hour each day. An early morning paddleboard on one or two of the mornings, I live really close to the beach and usually get up at 6 am to have a smoothie, meditate and do yoga, if the weather is good I pop down for a paddle. 

**During the first hour of each of these days I need to make some marketing phone calls. There was someone who said once to do the hard stuff first during the day and this is something I have been putting off so I want to take the time now to do this and then put down the phone after 10 am and make art.

Space - my live workspace. It is ready. I have been collecting materials for the residency for the past week. I have spray paint, paint, paper, brushes and floor space.  I even have a bit of fabric ready if I want to try more hand-painted lines.

Accountability - I would really like a buddy to check in with for 30 minutes or so via face-time. I find this very helpful and also staves off the feeling of loneliness that can creep in for me because I live alone and it chased me a lot during the pandemic. A buddy has been found and our check-ins are arranged for Mondays at 10 am.

How is your summer going? Got any projects in the cue? I would love to hear about them.

A mural at Makeshift co-working space.

I reached out to Makeshift when I wrote my pivot grant back in January asking if they would be interested in a mural. They were! So I made my way over there to meet Monique, with a caveat, did I want a show for the month of March. Of course, I did. So when I went to meet her for the very first time I brought my ready to hang the show with me and a friend to help.

When I went back in April to take my show down I suggested the mural again, we stood in front of the main wall in the middle of the space and talked about what it could look like.

Not one for waiting or a lot of patience I saved up some tip money from my hostessing job (3 shifts a week) and headed to Home Depot with my idea. If you build it they will come.

I pitched the idea of a community mural celebrating Pride, LGTBQ, and that everyone is welcome in the space. Monique loved the idea, cleared it with her business partner and I got to work. This space is an easy one to be in, so bright, comfortable and welcoming. Co-working is something that is important to me because the feeling of community and belonging is important to me. You have both with Makeshift.

Still no word on the grant but as soon as I do hear you guys will be the first to know.

Here are some images from that amazing mural I created at Makeshift. Go see it for yourself, I would love to know what you think.

The final image in this series is one I created as a practice. I drew the faces on a piece of painter’s canvass primed with some house paint to see how I was going to paint the faces and to see how long the process would take. I am speaking at a symposium next month and I will use this practice as my custom-made Zoom backdrop.