Fall Fair Time

It's that time of year again. I've submitted 9 images to the fall fair; 2 art pieces and 7 photos. I wish more people (artists) put stuff into the fair...I don't know if they can't be bothered, think it's beneath them, or plain forgot.
I do this because I like sharing my stuff and for the exposure. Ribbons are nice too but i want my name to become familiar to the community. Although I do professional quality assignments in portraiture, design and so forth and am slowly building up my portfolio of published work I do not consider myself a 'professional' yet in that I have not yet registered myself as a business. Probably next year...but for now since my opportunities for photography are the same as everyone else I don't feel bad about trying for the aggregate prize!

I've also put in a dried floral arrangement that I stupidly did not take a picture of. It's theme is traditional European (grain, poppies, cornflowers) with the addition of a weirdly curled onion stalk and embellished with a bit of sparkly pipe-cleaner bent in the shape of the poppies the pods came from. Opium poppies. That's right...a lot of people grow Opium poppies as an ornamental flower in their gardens although they may call them 'bread seed poppies'.

Just recently the police 'busted' an opium poppy grower in Chilliwack, B.C. who was on the verge of harvesting 8 acres of pods to make an Asian tea additive- lol! It's kind of ludicrous but I guess they had to since it's a controlled substance...8 acres isn't exactly a flower bed! Anyway, I got a few nice compliments from the people running the fair over it and it's mostly because of the weird onion. Will post picture later.

For Digital Art/Open:


An older piece for a dramatic Digital Art contribution:


My specialty has a category; Panorama. This particular image(s) is Kamloops, B.C.


For People/Open:


Again in the People/Open category:


Boxing Marmots- a fairly recent picture for wild animals category:


My little soul sucker for Domesticated animals:


Fine arts...an unashamed Trekker I am!:


For fine art a portrait of the che-F:) :


A cowboy in the action category:

Photography Exhibit at the Courthouse Gallery

I have an exhibit of some of my best photographs at the local gallery in Merritt, B.C. which I'm quite exited about!
This exhibit will run for nearly the whole month with a reception for it on the 16th.
Here's a link to a page I whipped up on my web site that shows miniature versions of my photos: Heidi's Photos at the Courthouse Gallery!
2 other photographers are showing as well- Anne Roberts and Jack Pickens. Spent most of the weekend just preparing my work, getting stuff on the walls, cleaning and organizing the gallery, putting together prices and get the advertising out. Oh yes, and updating all the web stuff where I can- the work that goes into it is really quite a lot- thank goodness Shirley Sauviet was there to organizing the hanging of the prints- I am totally useless at figuring out what looks aesthetic on the wall- I like the hammering part best!

Also went to the Black Powder shoot out at the shooting range to take pictures- espeically now that there is a medieval reinactment group taking part this year- and will go there again today and hopefully post some pictures later tonight.

Hope everyone is having a great Easter Weekend!

Feb. '10 update

A few weeks ago I finished uploading most all of my 2009 pictures to my stock gallery- a big chunk of that website done- just some captioning to do. Now I feel a bit freer to update more specialized galleries such as the carnival people of (primarily) West Coast Amusements, which is a company I worked on for quite a few years in the 90's. Basically it was there that I started to really get into portrait photography alongside the pencil portraiture that I was already then known for. Looking through those photographs is interesting in that it's not always obvious if I was improving...there are places in the sequence of images that shows plain old shutter bug shooting and then all of a sudden a rash of really nice portraits. It kind of speaks of the nature of the travelling lifestyle- rushing around a great deal of the time and only when we slow down and really look and consider our surroundings/subjects can we really see what it is that we're trying to capture.

Carnival People section is at the bottom.



I remember NOT remembering if I had shot so-and-so's portrait or not...there is a lot of repetition of some people and I know the flip side of that is there are people whose faces I missed. That was my goal at the time- capturing a ‘perfect' on-the-spot portrait with my camera...because that's how I aspired to draw portraits. (This obviously results in minimal success rates!) My attitude obviously changed along the way - it just doesn't happen that way often enough. I went through a lot of film (and pencil erasers) with a decent (but not exceptional) success rate of 1-2 out of a 36-exposure role of film if I'm being honest. Digital has improved photographic chances of success –even with a random approach, which I’m trying to avoid- but not the drawing! Anyway, I'm posting the good with the not-so-good and will eventually highlight my favourites.

I'm also engaged in another project of digitally enhancing old photos that my father took for the purposes of stock imagery. This is a kind of specialized type of image- what they sometimes call vintage photography and is usually incorporated in art or illustration projects. More on that another time...

Art show coming up next month and I just selected what I’m putting in- pencil portraits from last year. I’ve kind of kept my drawing to myself in my focus on digital art and photography but seeing as I did so many portraits that I’m pleased with I will show them. Most likely the ones below and larger ones can be found here.

Art Show

My hubby went turkey hunting this past weekend and I drove him out to Kelowna to meet with his buddy Dave and then picked him up on Sunday and even helped close down the show at the civic center. He and Dave didn't get anything but they saw an immense amount of wildlife; whitetail, mule deer, intermixed deer, bear, turkeys etc. They stayed at a place called Parklane Resort which is in Christina Lake which Othmar has only good things to say about although the town shut up tighter than a clam in the evenings.



I should mention that we took the long way to Kelowna but nothing came up in the way of wildlife but that one goose that we saw on our trip to Osoyoos was back again in that Osprey's nest. How bizarre- that's a long drop down for her chicks if she hatches eggs way up there on a telephone pole. As my sister would say: "It's nature's way of weeding out the gene pool!"

Meanwhile, we had our May Art Show and Sale at the local civic center in Merritt last weekend and now all the art has been moved to the Courthouse Gallery for the next month. It was a really beautiful set up with all kinds of art from traditional to digital represented. A lot of work went into the set up- hanging and placing it all, getting the piano and musicians in, decorating the place etc. The end result was probably a bit of an eye opener for the attendees who probably think of Merritt less an artistic community than an agricultural one.




I've only put two pieces in the show- both pen and ink from quite a few years back. It's probably high time I started back with that kind of drawing since I quite like it.



Bigger view At DA



Bigger View At DA

Speaking of art; I plan on going to Vancouver next week to the Vancouver Art Gallery there which has a whole bunch of the Dutch Master's painting on exhibition in a loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. My sister told me about it and my brother as well who wants to go. Speaking of him, he just got Skype installed which, if you don't know, is (currently) a free long distance phone service that runs over the computer! Un-effing-believable. Not only is it (currently) still free it is also very user friendly and installed without a single, solitary glitch. The first program I ever used that had a 100% perfect installation and works without any problems.

There's a few other things I want to write about but I will leave it to a later post- our little adventure today, plans for my web site, issues that are bugging me on certain web sites etc. Hope folks had as good a week end as I did!

Sister And Stuffs

Yesterday was a fun day- my sister came up from Surrey to visit for the day bringing along a lot of stuff she wanted to offload on me ( the pack rat! ) since she just moved to a new place. Clothes, books and the like- she's trying to streamline her life and knows that she can always get stuff back from me- lol
We showed her around to places she hadn't seen before- like Nicola Lake which is still quite frozen on the southern end.
While my husband pitched stones across the ice as far as possible my sister and I "walked on water" as I jokingly put it. It was the first time she had really seen a mass of water this size frozen to the point where people could walk on it- it's still a novelty to me despite what I witnessed in terms of testing the ice at the fishing derby last month at Mammette Lake.

We also drove out to Lower Nicola for a cruise after popping into the Courthouse Gallery for a quick peek at the art that's now up from all the local artists and photographers.

Bigger view at DA
Edit: I've since decided to change the name of this piece to 'Haida Girl'.
I met a few people who I had seen on the first day when I brought my works in and was introduced to Opie who is a well known painter and jewelery maker ( carving in metal and gold ). He liked my print 'Spirit Of Haida' and bought it! I'm so proud of this because I'm not native myself but have a real love of that artistic heritage and Spirit Of Haida is my portrayal of the beauty of it and how it can inspire beauty. That was really a special feeling for me.

Bigger view at DA
Later on that evening my husband and I went to the official opening where I met a few more familiar faces and found out that one of my photos 'The Harness Maker's House' had been selected to win an award for the heritage category. Can't beat a day like that! Unfortunately their web site isn't updated to show what all the local artist's contributed so I will wait until the newspaper comes out to get some more info on the results.
Also in Merritt the Olympic torch passed through town. Merritt is really gearing up for the 2010 Olympics.
On another subject, my husband just became a member of the Outdoor Writers Of Canada and I'm quite proud of him for that achievement. He has been writing about and promoting hunting- in practical experience and from the preservation of the heritage it represents- for a long time now so this is kind of like an official stamp of recognition of that.