Latest bicycle paintings

I just delivered artwork and greeting cards to Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Holiday Shop 2010. Opening party is Friday November 19

People keep asking for more bicycle paintings. That's good because I love the subject and try to get out there at least 4x a week on my own bike. Here are the latest bicycle paintings, and they are packaged in a plastic box with a label...

W a t e r c o l o r

in a BOX

There are 7 individual "watercolor in a BOX" paintings and they will be on the wall somewhere as a group. As a regular artist with work in the PCA Shop year round, I have participated for several years in the PCA Holiday Shop. This is the time of year when they turn over a large amount of gallery space to an expanded shop and it runs from November 20 to December 31st. That is 6 weeks of extended hours- 7 days a weeks starting Nov 20. It's a great Pittsburgh tradition and PCA really works so hard to make this the BEST time of year for all their artists and makers!! When you go, be sure to let them know you appreciate the extra effort they make, and long hours they work, for all their artists at this time of year. To see the work before everything has been picked over I suggest you go to the opening reception Friday Nov 19 from 5:30-8PM  or try to go in the first few days to see the full assortment of great and cool stuff. 

My schedule is that on that same night Friday Nov 19, 2010 I will be at Boyd Community Center 1220 Powers Run Road Pittsburgh, PA 15238-2618 as an artist and vendor at their Holiday Market. I will also be at Boyd all day Saturday Nov 20.

On Friday evening December 3rd 5PM - 10PM I will be an artist and vendor at "I Made It For The Holidays". This nomadic indy arts/crafts festival is located INDOORS at Southside works right near REI.

Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Shop also has my vintage Schenley Park Print framed- and it is available unframed too

 and
my Homage to Famous Pittsburgers Print Series is also available at PCA SHOP framed -and they too are available unframed

So far I have prints available of Rachel Carson Homestead  and August Wilson.

Schenley Park Maps and Homage to Rachel Carson and August Wilson
are also for sale at my shop on my website:
http://carolskinger.com/store/prints/

Finally...I have a website and a shop!

http://carolskinger.com/

Finally an answer

to the often asked question...do you have a website!

It has a gallery of my work...and a shop

Bicycle paintings



I have put plenty of miles on my Specialized bike since getting it about 8 years ago and especially the last 4 years I have become a year round rider. In winter if there is snow and ice on the road I don't go but most of winter the snow and ice is kept off the roads, so I'm out there. I dress more or less as I would for cross country skiing- layers and nothing too heavy. You definitely see things you don't notice when driving. Cyclists have become a subject of my paintings and happily my bicycle  paintings have found an audience.

Exactly how many art supplies are at arm's reach when I am making a painting? And how much do those supplies cost?

Something artists do not like to think of when making art is how much is how much is it costing me to make art? Granted I spent most all of my travel budget to London, Amsterdam and Paris on paint in the London Windsor and Newton store on a trip years ago and still have one or two of those tubes left. Other than that I am always buying new paint.

So for me it's about $1100. in supplies on hand at all times.

Paper:  $50 worth of full watercolor sheets on hand

Paint: Watercolor professional grade Windor and Newton
$450 worth of watercolor tubes are always on hand. Much of watercolor painting involves putting pigment down and then removing some or nearly all of it while still wet- not very eficient but that’s how it is.

Paint: Acrylic  professional grade larger tubes
$214 worth of large tubes on hand

Color pencils
$150 worth  in Prismacolor pencils. Iindividual pencils cost $1.40 each.

Watercolor Brushes
$150. in watercolor brushes on hand (some are dead and just keep for the memories)

Acrylic/Oil Brushes
$80. In acrlic/oil brushes on hand

Other stuff I am using during painting process- papertowel, soft erasers, vine charcoal, pencil, digital camera, computer, prints of photographs.

House Portraits

Do real artists paint house portraits?
This artist does.

I can either visit your home to sketch and photograph it,

or I can work from your photographs. Here are some examples of my house portraits:

I sometimes like to paint a house at dusk when the lights come on inside. This is the house my cousin and her family lived in for several happy years. They are planning to build a zero energy home and  they wanted to have a portrait of the home they loved so much. The new owner also loved the house portrait and they purchased a high resolution digital print.

I met the owner and saw this house in the summer but felt it would work well as a winter portrait. The owners collect house portraits of all the places they have lived. They bid on the chance to have me paint a house portrait of their home at a fundraiser for Fox Chapel Crew Club.

This was a going away present from one family to another. I am guesing the parents and children had some great memories together in each other's homes.

This was my most recent house portrait. The young children of the family were seated on kitchen stools waiting to see the painting of their home. Their mom opened the cardboard portfolio while I watched and it was such a pleasure to see their faces light up with pleasure when they saw it!

I work in many different ways and I am comfortable with the mix of work. I recently enjoyed this piece in the NY Times  about Wayne Thiebaud who has worked in many areas of both applied and fine arts even if most people know him for only his paintings of pastries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/arts/design/03wayne.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=wayne_thiebaud

One part of the  long article which gets at what I mean is this..."Mr. Thiebaud’s original aim was to be a commercial artist, a field he deeply respects. (“I still paint as if an art director is looking over my shoulder,” he said.) Over the years, he has worked a sign painter, a theatrical production designer, an art director, a poster designer, a fashion typographer and illustrator (his subjects included lipstick and shoes), a comic strip artist, a cartoonist for the Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles and, fleetingly, as a teenage “in-betweener” at Walt Disney Studios filling in the figures of Dopey, Pluto and Jiminy Cricket."

Homage to famous Pittsburghers

Homage to Rachel Carson

Homage to August Wilson

The first layouts for a print series where I pay homage to famous Pittsburghers were completed in November 2009. My photographs and my electronic alterations to my photographs are the media. What I would consider an original version using 4 images per piece, was shown, "honorably mentioned" in Pittsburgh Society of Artists "Small Works" exhibit, written about and sold at Borelli Edwards Gallery in Pittsburgh in April 2010.

Last week I picked up the first run of a small digitally printed edition, featuring 9 images in each print more like the scope of my first layouts. I want this group to be more in the "poster" department and less fine-arty but I want the print quality to be very high. I will not limit the run, or number the prints, as you would for a silkscreen, a stone lithograph or an etching, but they are very high quality prints.
Here are the first two images, copyright 2010 by Carol Skinger
Kurt Shaw's review of "Small Works" has an explanation for the images I choose to put together in each homage.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/museums/s_677507.html

I donated a framed copy of Homage to August Wilson to the newly renovated East Liberty Public Library in September 2010

Fake Urban Plan -East Liberty- Pittsburgh, PA

Pittsburgh Society of Artists Guild “Urban Dreams” Exhibit

June 4th-July 9th 2010

Fein Art Gallery (on Pittsburgh’s Northside)

519 East Ohio St

Pittsburgh 15212

Hey I got a Juror's award! Yeah. It’s my Fake Urban Plan  for East Liberty, my painting on top of an archival print of a sattelite photograph, (archival printing thanks to Heiko Spallek) my vision- featuring 80 green roofs, organic gardens, pools and a lazy river moat ride around ELPC- East Liberty Presbyterian Church (architect Ralph Adams Cram). A large outdoor film screening theater and stage is right in the middle of things. I titled the film area “Chris Ivey Summer Film Festival”. He’s been doing interesting work making documentaries about the people who live there- and who were moved there because of urban renewal and are now having reactions to the latest successes (NY Times recently described East Liberty as coming out of a 40 year coma with Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Google as tenants) in East Liberty. So I decided to give him a big stage and a screen. Who knows he made need to host a summer film festival one of these days.

Plus there is lots and lots of stuff written on the frame by me- a poem about Urban Renewal- (not by me), info about the really big real estate snowball that plopped into Thomas Mellon’s lap with his marriage to Sarah Jane Negley-not exactly a coincidence, and this, which I wrote about green roofs on the frame: “cows will not graze again on the liberty (English usage: a liberty is free land for grazing) but birds, butterflies and insects would graze on 80 green roofs of East Liberty, while storm water run off, building insulation and outdoor air quality would be improved by living green rooftops. East Liberty becomes Liberty Green"

This is a bit like starting a rumor- maybe hearing about 80 green roofs will become 80 green roofs!
Makes me wonder what other fake stuff I could propose that could become a reality.

Chicago is considered the leader in the US for “green” roofs.
If you take even the quickest look at this site that fact is very apparent.
http://www.artic.edu/webspaces/greeninitiatives/greenroofs/main_map.htm

Then select “map” and you see a map of Chicago with all the green roofs! It would be hard to catch them.
My fake urban plan for East Liberty  is art and not a real urban plan- but if reality were to be inspired by the vision in my artwork- I believe Pittsburgh would become #2 nationally in green roofs.

My thinking about green as relates to my art piece:

• East Liberty and contiguous lands were once green before all the subdivisions first created by first Jacob Negley (laid out East Liberty in 1810) and then Thomas Mellon his son-in-law.
• Liberty itself used in the British usage meant free place to graze (not from the Revolution as I had always imagined) - so I’m thinking historically it housed a bucolic cattle grazing place (apparently there was also originally North Liberty, South Liberty and West Liberty). Since now there is only East Liberty- maybe now a name change can be considered to go with the “greening of East Liberty- hence “Liberty Green”
• “Green = $”  When thinking of the financial engine that the land Thomas Mellon acquired (as a result of his marriage to Jacob Negley’s daughter Sarah Jane) became,  it’s impressive how it fueled the many other business ventures he is more associated with
• Green the way we think now... sustainable, energy conservation, recycled and recyclable

So I am psyched to get a Jurors Award for this piece from Kathleen Zimbicki coming on the heels of the work I am developing on my series  Homage to Famous Pittsburghers!

This piece can be purchased on my website:
http://carolskinger.com/2010/11/17/fake-urban-plan-for-east-liberty/

Winter has arrived with a new concept for my Fake Urban Plan...I'm changing the  Lazy River Moat ride around East Liberty Presbyterian Church to ice skating around the massive circumference of ELPC for the winter!

August Wilson and Rachel Carson Homage

Well hooray! My piece titled "August Wilson Homage' received "honorable mention" and both pieces sold at the opening of "Small Works" Pittsburgh Society of Artists Exhibit April 10th at Borelli Edwards Gallery. This was all going on simultaneously with the “I made It Market” at Southside Works where I was a vendor the same day- but with totally different work.
Here is info about the Small Works Exhibit at Borelli Edwards gallery:

Borelli Edwards Gallery
3583 Butler Street
Lawrenceville (a Pittsburgh neighborhood), PA 15201

“Small Works” runs through April 24th,  2010
In the August Wilson piece I included the building where he grew up as the primary image, and the Carnegie Library in Oakland as the secondary image. He went to that library to read and read after dropping out of high school when he was wrongly accused of plagiarizing a 20 page paper on Napoleon ( and many other complications and hostile educational settings). Eventually the Carnegie Library in Oakland gave him his high school diploma, and he is the only one to ever have received a HS diploma from the library. The image of Rachel Carson’s homestead in Springdale is mixed with my images of coal burning smoke stacks there- a current environmental battle involving new scrubbers proposed by owners RRI out of Houston TX that would reduce sulfur dioxide emissions but increase lead and mercury emissions. High school students (among others in the region) in Springdale have even gotten into the act and have mobilized to demand a better solution- so that is a current news story that I have to think Rachel Carson would have to be proud of.
Architect John Martine bought them! John is a lead design partner at Strada, an award-winning Pittsburgh architecture firm. Of course I'm thrilled about anyone buying my work but I am especially proud to be in John’s collection! I have enormous respect for his work in architecture, and he himself is a really fantastic artist.
The two artworks are part of this same “art chapter” I am dwelling on –an homage to the (Pittsburgh) childhood homes and other sites of importance to Andy Warhol, August Wilson and Rachel Carson. The media is a departure from my watercolor, oil or charcoal and pastel work- it is all based on my altered digital photography- and things I find of interest about these individuals.  As I have developed this work I have gotten some good feedback from both Charlie Humphrey at Filmmakers and Eric Shiner of the Warhol.

One of the my fondest anecdotes came from my husband and my son who could not attend the opening so they went a few hours before just to see the exhibit at the  BE Gallery. They said they finally found my two pieces and five people were gathered around them looking closely at them and talking about them. That was a really great bit of feedback!

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/museums/s_677507.html
Arts writer Kurt Shaw write about the exhibit, including my pieces in the Tribune Review.