Shows & Things to Show!

Whew! It's been a while!

While I'd like to be able to say that my hiatus is due to an extended snorkleing trip in the Fijian islands, I'm even more happy to say that I've been crazy busy with lots of awesome paperwork! I'm not being sarcastic. How can paperwork be awesome? When it's working with paper to churn out some of these pieces:


Above is a massive 4-piece, segmented work depicting the water of and land surrounding Lake Attersee in northwestern Austria. Each piece is 12 x 12" and at the thickest portions, there are 14 layers of cardstock. I would love to see this after it's matted and framed!

I've done quite a few sets lately. Another genius idea was this set of four places that traces four key locations that the buyer and her husband visited or inhabited in their young lives so far, and includes (clockwise from top left): San Francisco, Baja California, Amsterdam, and the Sunderbans of India.


Someone else ordered something akin to a "family pack" with different colors of the same lake:


Other fun custom pieces include Prince of Wales Island at the bottom of Alaska's "tail":


Table Rock Lake in southern Missouri:


And New York's Long Island done up in rich, harvest golds:


I finally worked out my plan for plastic-free packaging for my card sets:


I still have to incorporate them into my listings, and they could endure some more refining, but I like them for their simplicity, practicality, and recycle-ability!

Last month marked my second gallery exhibit, this one as part of a super cool show fronted by the brilliant Mr. Curt Lund. Curt just wrapped up his artist-in-residence term at the charming Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts in Fridley and for his grand finale, invited four other artists to join him in creating Geographies: a multi-media investigation of place. As fun and thrilling as it is to be part of any show, Geographies is so near and dear to my heart and what I do every day, that it is and will always be extra awesome to me. Here are some shots from the show:

Three all-white pieces (from left to right or west to east, if you will): San Francisco Bay, Lake Minnetonka, Manhattan


A bright, extra-dimensional piece called "Buoyancy":


This piece, two 6 x 6" layered "halves" of the same stack, I titled, 'Touched."


I invite people to touch this piece in the hopes that over time, it will begin to show the dirt and grime of a thousand hands. In a way, this reflects how we both connect to and corrode the land around us.

The show is up through the end of April, so if you're in the Twin Cities area, do check it out! There are more of my pieces than what I've shown here, and lots of other amazing pieces by the other artists in the collection.

Last Saturday, I joined Curt again, as well as a dozen other artists as an elite group vending our work at the beautiful Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It was a very simple set-up: we were each allotted a single, simply draped 6-foot table, set in a line along a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. The Walker staff treated us to some morning goodies, a lovely lunch, assistance whenever needed, and a free and amazing selling venue in exchange for half of our earnings that day. The turn out and response far exceeded my expectations and I sold out of a few things. You can see how spotty my card display looked below when my hubby and the kids stopped by in the afternoon:

I didn't intend to take my zip-up hoodie off, or have my hair pulled up, but it was warm and I was busy! It was a great day! One of the personal highlights for me was when an older gentleman asked me if I was from Bemidji. When I told him I was, he said that he knew my Dad. I pressed him for more information and he said he saw my last name on my info card, had a hunch, and then saw my blue eyes and knew I was my father's daughter. I was so chuffed to think that my eyes were the giveaway clue to my identity. I called my Dad after the show to tell him and he thought it was pretty sweet too. :) It was wonderful, too, to hear all the very nice comments people shared about my work. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I love what I do!

What's next? More custom pieces, each one different, each one with a story behind it. I am so lucky to be able to make pieces for people who find these so special. Who knew it would become so huge since my very first custom piece about two years ago?

Also, up next, is the very fun, very crazy, very awesome, St. Paul Craftstravaganza! This year's event is held in the same place as in recent years, the Fine Arts building of the MN State Fair Grounds. The event takes place one day only, on Saturday, April 30th, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. I'll be in the same place I was last year as well, just off to the right side from the main entrance.

There will be loads of other handmade goodies there from all over the state and region, with some of the most unique and high-quality items you'll find in this area. Please stop by and say "hi!"

Until then, I'm busy, busy, busy prepping more fun stuff for the show, as well as crossing off pieces from my custom to-do list. New orders from my shop will be shipped beginning early May, and my turn-around time on all my work should shorten considerably soon thereafter.

Thanks for reading through this meaty update! I hope to see you soon!

Alaska, Forida, New York, Oh My!

More custom requests have been filing in, with miraculously workable timing. Do you all get together behind my back and sort yourselves out, or am I just this lucky to maintain a lovely, nearly constant stream of requests? Either way, I'll take it!

Here's a look at what I've been up to lately.

Auke Bay, near Juneau, Alaska


Auke Bay (detail)
This piece shows one of the few times that I used the darkest color for the land as the base layer, instead of working the four shades the other way. I think the effect works really well since the land closest to the ocean here is rich with giant evergreens, and just up the steep sides of these mountains are glaciers and snow caps. I also really like the greater contrast between the light blue of the water and the dark green of the land. Might have to try this with my next few Islands pieces.

Next up, warm and sunny, Sanibel Island in southwest Florida:

Sanibel Island


Sanibel Island (detail)
Because the topography is very subtle here and much of the island is marshy wetland, the buyer and I agreed that just two layers of green would suffice to represent the land in this area. I chose the middle of the Grass Green set for a nice, true-green tone with good contrast to those gulf coast waters. With all the little islands and lakes, I don't think we missed the other two layers.

Back up north, this time on the eastern side of the country, I had another request for the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. This time, I was asked to recreate the land's topography as well as the lake depths. It was fairly crucial to be as accurate as I could be as the buyer and her friend participated in a thigh-busting, 300-mile bike ride up and down this terrain, and these pieces were to be souvenirs of that event. It took a few tries, and quite a bit of back-and-forth communication, but I think we did O.K. in the end, and I'm very grateful for the patience and flexibility of this buyer. These pieces aren't the winners, but they'll give you a good idea of the project and all those lovely hills.

Finger Lakes

Finger Lakes (detail)

Staying in New York, but moving to the big city, I recreated a section of Manhattan's Upper West Side, along the Hudson River, and across from the Fairview area.

Upper West Side

Upper West Side (detail)It's a wonderfully simple piece with quiet sophistication, done up in creamy browns. I like how the river, at a distance, could almost be mistaken for a piece of bark, then the fabricated piers on the west bank reveal that it is something else entirely, and perhaps, to a keen observer, give away its true location identity.

What fun stuff you guys throw at me, and what a great way to "travel" the world. Thank you!

Working the Land

uffta (OOF-tah): interjection: Exclamation of Norwegian origin, popular in strongly Scandinavian settlements in the upper Midwest, used to express surprise, bewilderment, astonishment, pity, pain, and fatigue. Syn. yikes, oh boy, whoa nelly, hoo-wee, good gravy.

I'm happy to report that the custom requests continue to pour into my shop at a nicely steady pace. While many of them remain in the style of my original lake-style bathymetries, the most recent requests have begun to grow legs and climb onto land for a look at the good life. Starting from the simplest, though not necessarily easiest, to the most complex, here's a look at what me and my trusty lil' blade have been up to lately.

The first piece is basically a reverse of my typical pieces. Instead of the land being a single, solid white layer with the water represented in layers of deepening color, the water here is a base layer of white, and the land is layered on top in the shades from light to dark. Abstract veining, or a chunk of Mobjack Bay, near Gloucester, Virgina?


Going with more land-like coloration, another patron requested a 12-layer representation of Little Switzerland, North Carolina. If you notice, there's a handful of little lakes scattered throughout this area as well.


Incorporating the water into the land-based topographies took off from there. Starting small, here is the stunning Plage du Pyla on the southwestern coast of France.


From here, it was an all-out war against my brains and hands to work both the land's topography and the water's depth into a single piece. Here is an artistically isolated Marrowstone Island, from the great state of Washington.

(detail)
(entire piece)
And it didn't get any easier from there. A request for the Rhode Island coastline near Westerly:

(detail)
(entire piece)
And then onto the largest lake in New Hampshire: Lake Winnipesaukee. I counted at least 53 islands here, not including the little hills of land that were islands of another sort.

(detail)

(entire piece)
Finally, the biggest, most time-taxing, brain-busting piece to date was actually a set of pieces. Two pairs of pieces of two different areas of Quebec -- Rouyn-Noranda and Montreal.

(detail)

(both sets)
(detail)
To answer a question that I'm sure many of you have in mind at this point, YES, these take a good, many hours to complete, and cutting the pieces is only a small portion of the process. For many of these, especially those attempting to capture a big area in a much smaller space, it's difficult to find easy-to-read topographic maps that generalize the land's topography enough to be of use. Most of the time, I need to zoom in to see the lines, choose which ones to follow, and then zoom out to work the lines into the piece itself. I feel like I add more wrinkles in my brain by doing this. It is mentally exhausting, and it is totally worth it. The results look way cool to me, and I'm excited to tackle some more. Not all areas seem to translate as well as others, but they all have an artful final look, and, best of all, the recipients get to own an original art map of the place they love.

You can say it with me: Uffta!

Topography Card Sets @ MoMA Store Online!

If you live outside New York and want your own set of the custom-colored, 4-card set of these topography cards, you're in luck! They are now available online at the MoMA Store site.

And to answer your question before you ask it, no, I haven't wrapped my brain around the fact that the listing for my cards exist in the same sales category as the Tim Burton, Andy Warhol, or Frank Lloyd Wright notecards. That's just a bit bigger than this noodle can handle. ;)

Custom Pieces for Awesome People

The requests for custom pieces continue to roll in and have been my "bread and butter" lately. Each one is a new challenge that helps me to learn about places on the map as well as new techniques to render those places. Here's a look at some of the latest custom pieces I've created.



I was thrilled to recreate the lakes I lived nearly for nearly 9 years: Mendota, Monona, and Wingra in Madison, Wisconsin. The heart of the city of Madison, the state's capital, sits in the middle of the isthmus between these two sister lakes. Just before we moved back to Minnesota, Madison adopted the tag line "Madison: Lake, City, Lake." Clever, huh?



Two big trends have emerged in my latest batch of custom requests: islands & Canada! The close up above and the piece beside it is my version of the Lake of Bays in Ontario, not too far from where my hubby I honeymooned. What a gorgeous area!

Only an hour and half away lies the equally "Swiss-cheese" like body of water known as Lake Joseph



Man, do those prehistoric glaciers know how to tear it up, or what? :)

Taking the cake for "most timely" request is one of the Vancouver area. It was neat to work on this piece while the Olympics were taking place.



Not quite into Canada, but following a similar shape pattern is the lovely and historic Lake Champlain that sits between eastern New York and western Vermont.



This request came with a color set I haven't used in my own topographies but looks stunning none the less. Yes, you can order a topography to match your walls, or get close anyway.

I made another piece in this color set about a week prior and the colors were specifically chosen to pay homage to the vineyards on Martha's Vineyard:



I worked on my first couple of 8-layer custom requests. One for the very real and beautiful island of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands:



And one for the very surreal and lovely Never Neverland from Peter Pan!



Another island I conquered is that of Mumbai, India. I had no idea it was an island as it's barely cut off from the mainland by a river. Per the patron's request, I didn't feature any of the nearby land to accent the specific island region, and I added a star next to her hometown.



Below is a piece representing Samish Island in northwestern Washington. This island used to be an actual island, but after dikes were erected the land bridge emerged turning the island into more of a peninsula. The buyer of this piece described the area's lush flora and fauna to me in her request and it made my lust to visit Washington even greater.



The most complicated custom piece I've created so far is the piece I made of the Savannah, Georgia delta area, as part of a three-piece, custom-color set. Once I wrapped my mind around the idea that I was cutting out islands rather than trying to cut out the inlets, the process somehow became easier. Well, a little bit. It was a labor of love and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.


The other two pieces in the set were one of Chicago, seated at the southwestern corner of Lake Michigan, and Manhattan, with it's famed bridges connecting everyone to "where it's at." I'm not certain, but I think the Manhattan piece might be the first piece I've made where I've included bridges.



There's a three-way tie for my favorite custom pieces of the last two months. In no particular order the first one is this 12 x 12" piece of the chain of lakes near Fairmont in southern Minnesota.


Because I was taking in such a good chunk of land as my subject, the scale of the lakes was quite small and it was tricky moving the blade in such tight little curves. Overall, I really like the abstract look of it. It's the sort of piece that, when framed and on display, someone might say, "My, what a unique piece of art," whereupon the owner of this piece proudly exclaims,"It's a hand cut recreation of the chain of lakes near where I grew up." And to this the first person gasps excitedly and is left speechless at the wonder of it all. *cheese* ;) In short, I like it because, to me, it is both cool art and cool geography.

Second is this piece of Cape Neddick in southeastern Maine. This may be the first coastal-centered piece I've made and I really like the overall composition of this piece and the high contrast between the stark white on the left and the deep aqua on the right. And the cut of the ocean into the land is killer.



Finally, there's this piece. A piece made of custom colors chosen to represent striations of land as from erosion. I don't think I would have thought of this on my own, and the colors together seem to brighter and stronger than the sum of their parts. Yet another reason why I love making custom pieces.



As my work and techniques continue to evolve, I hope you'll see some of the details in these custom pieces in my non-custom work as well. I love my job!