Street Painting in Rancho Cucamonga & Burbank

April 16th I will be painting at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art in Rancho Cucamonga for Family Day at the WIG: An Earth Day Celebration!

This event is open to ALL AGES and is meant to introduce families to arts and sciences and features hands-on art activities, live musical and dance performances, public art, face painting, informational booths, free giveaways and much, much more!

April 17th you can find me at the Downtown Burbank for the Downtown Burbank Fine Arts Festival. This year marks the City of Burbank's Centennial. Expect to see some familiar faces and icons from Burbank's 100 year history.

Both events are free and open to the public. Swing on by!

xx
t

Santa Clarita Festival of the Arts

This year Susanne and I have been selected to be featured artists at the Santa Clarita Festival of the Arts. We have participated every year since its inception and are pleased to be part of it again.

For Santa Clarita, we have always reproduced artworks from Asian artists that are colorful and illustrative. This year will be no exception, but the artwork will be much larger and more challenging than every before. I'm really excited about this piece! At this point we are hoping for cooler weather, and lots of love and support from the community.

This FREE festival is this weekend, Oct. 2 & Oct. 3 And filled with all kinds of art: music, dance, performances, woodcarving, plein-air painting, sculpting, pottery, photography and, of course, street painting.

If you are in the neighborhood, please come by and see us!

xx
Theresa
www.LaFemmePastel.com

Art Is So Much More

This past weekend I was asked to participate in a Chalk Festival being put on by the Simi Valley Public Library and a local Girl Scout troop. Hosting and running a community event would help the scouts earn their Bronze Award. I was proud to help them toward reaching that goal. I got down to Simi Valley around 7:45 a.m., packed in my street painting stuff and waited until just before 8:00 when the Troop Leader and other Chalk Artists arrived. It was a lovely day and I found a nice shady spot under a tree to set up my initial grid and sketch. As Mother’s Day was the following day, I decided to recreate a cropped version (for modesty’s sake) of Gustav Klimt’s Mother and Child, c. 1905.


What I did not know as I set up for the day was that this experience was going to change the way I look at street painting.

As usual, I sketched out the piece and went through the process of choosing which pastels were going to make up the flesh tones of this particular portrait. The earphones went on and I began to draw the mother’s face. A few hours into it, I was ready to do the last minute shading and highlights and move on to drawing the child. At this point a large number of girl scouts, troop leaders, and families were crowded around at my piece and trying to figure out my technique. I ended up turning of my trusty iPod and giving an impromptu lesson on shading and highlights. The children had lots of questions and I was happy to answer them. I am no art teacher, but as a mother and a person truly passionate about the arts, I very much enjoyed the interaction.

I spoke with a local public school teacher about how the schools have had to reduce their art programs. It’s becoming a widespread phenomenon as California searches for ways to reduce its budget. How heartbreaking it is that music and art is being cut from curriculum when there is so much interest in it. Not to mention the incredible benefits of an arts education. No one has summarized it more fully than education advocate, Eliott Eisner:

10 LESSONS THE ARTS TEACH

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.


SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. http://www.naea-reston.org/

I feel that all the artists who participated were actively advocating Arts education, and giving the community the opportunity to see art being created. All of the painters indulged the children (and some adults too!) about our process: creating grids, using proportions, discussing the history of the artworks, allowing them to experiment with some of our pastels, and allowing them to draw along side us.

President Barack Obama once stated, "The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create." I hope that by making public art, I have been able to spark that kind of creativity in the minds and hearts of future leaders.

Downtown Burbank Fine Arts Festival

This weekend I will be hitting the pavement for another Street Painting adventure.

Downtown Burbank Fine Arts Festival
Saturday April 24, 2010
10:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M.
&
Sunday April 25, 2010
10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.

Four blocks in Downtown Burbank will be filled with more than 100 award-winning painters, ceramicists, photographers, chalk artists (that's me!) and more.

It's an art festival that also benefits area schools, with an entire block devoted to the Burbank Arts Education Foundation.
http://www.downtown-burbank.org

Did I mention it's FREE?!

See you there.
xx

Deadly Murals

This past Sunday we participated in the Dia De Los Muertos Festival in Canoga Park. There was music, food, arts, crafts, altars, custom car show, and of course, street painting.

Dia De Los Muertos (aka: The Day of the Dead) is a holiday celebrated in Latin and North American countries. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember loved ones who have passed on. There is a common misconception that Dia De Los Muertos is the "Mexican Halloween." Actually, it is believed to be a fusion of an existing Native tradition of honoring the dead with the Catholic holidays All Saints' Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls' Day (Nov. 2). And although face painting and dressing as skeletons is a part of the festivities, it is intended to make light of the very serious subject of death and loss and to celebrate our short life in this realm. Traditions include building offrendas (or altars) honoring the deceased. Offrendas are usually decorated with sugar skulls, marigolds, photographs, favorite foods and beverages of the departed.

At this particular festival, all the street painters / muralists chose artworks in the spirit of Dia De Los Muertos: from paintings of deceased family or pets, to skeletons, to representations of Latin American culture. We chose to do a reproduction of a Sylvia Ji painting. Ji is a California artist whose portraits of beautiful women in calavara face painting have gotten much attention in the low-brow and urban art scenes. In fact, many people at the festival immediately recognized her work, which made it easy for festival goers to approach us and talk to us about the original artwork.



At the end of the day all the artists voted for their favorite street murals under the following categories: "Funniest", "Scariest", "Most Beautiful", and "Best in Show" There were so many amazing and diverse street paintings so it was a very pleasant surprise when we were announced as the winners for "Most Beautiful."

Thank you for everyone who came out and supported us! It was a great time. The event staff were friendly and helpful, the children were so enthralled with the artwork, there were thousands of people, we reconnected with some street artists we hadn't seen in a while and we even got our photo in the Daily News. All in all, it was a great way to spend a Sunday.