Author: lauramchugh

My good friend and photographer Nancy West and I are collaborating on Photojojo’s 2 Tag-team Photo Projects For You + Your Pal.

We’ll each be taking a photo and combining them with our pal’s random photo every week. We’ll see what kind of synchronicity this provides.

Here’s the first one: Nancy’s photo of Riley swimming with his favorite frisbee and my photo of some lights at Ray’s Sushi in Hayward.

My kids (CMM and WDM) and I donated blood yesterday for the American Red Cross. Families that donate together stay together!

I’m teaming up with one of my favorite and inspiring artists, photographer Nancy West, to have a “trunk sale” for our friends and family in October and November. This is an excellent opportunity to get in on buying some unique pieces for yourself or as gifts this holiday season.

Details:

Sunday November 8th Hosted by Laura McHugh
739 Third Avenue
Half Moon Bay CA
10 am – 4 pm

Feel free to bring friends out for this fun day of shopping and meet the artists! We hope to see you there.

Julia Nelson-Gal was kind to send me this photo of my entry to the Pacific Art League’s current show Mostly Black & White.

I can’t seem to get over there to see the show in person, and I can’t read what the ribbon says. So, for now, I’m thrilled there is something hanging on the piece.

Here’s Julia’s entry on the right, which is fabulous. So cool that ours ended up being hung right next to each other.

I had a weekend full of art – but the kind of art that involves talking about it, hanging out with like-minded people, hearing lectures about it, shopping for the tools to do it… and feeling a sense over several weeks now (years, really) that I don’t know what I’m doing and that I will never find my oeurve.

Hearing Tony Scherman speak at IEA starting something shifting in me. I’m still not sure what, but I did come home from the conference feeling like I could sit with encaustic again. I had such a great experience in the first workshop I took with Eileen Goldenberg a couple of years ago. She’s such a fun and inspiring instructor and she makes you MOVE! Then, I came home and couldn’t replicate any of it. My work was gloppy and uninspiring. It looked like a kindergartner had been let loose with modeling clay of the worst kind.

I went to the IEA conference last year and got reinspired and came home and tried it again – another run at the elusive mistress that is wax. Some success, but it was not sustainable. I know – you are thinking “to get good at something, really master it takes Practice, Practice, Practice.” And that is true and I have not been putting in the time, but still expect results.

So again, reinspired by this year’s IEA and a visit to Daniella Woolf’s open studio wherein I saw a brief but wonderful demonstration of her doing encaustic that is more the type of encaustic I would like to be doing – mixed media collaging. I came home and made these two pieces.

I’m feeling more competence. And that is good.

I also saw a ribbon on my piece (triptych) through the window of the closed gallery at Pacific Art League. That didn’t hurt. I think I won something….