Friday Egg: "Elliptical Red/Blue"

Today's egg is an idea I have been working with this year. I have become fascinated with the interior of the eggshell and what the pores of the eggshell do with the dyes as I work my design on the outside. Usually, this beautiful scattering of colors is only seen after an egg breaks and at that point most people aren't in the mood to see how gorgeous it is inside. I want to bring this beautiful "conversation" between my work and the reaction of the eggshell to the fore without the disaster preceding the discovery, so I chose a goose egg that I was not particularly fond of and sawed about a quarter of the shell away to reveal the internal scene. And because I wanted this work to be about what was happening inside the eggshell, I decided to paint the exterior a matte black to hide my own half of the interaction and accentuate the beauty of what the eggshell had to say. In one of the photos, I took a close-up of the exterior and you can still see some of the etched outlines of my design in the black paint. One difficulty I had in photographing the work is that the dots of color are so beautifully diffuse that it is impossible to perfectly capture the image because it looks out of focus. This is definitely one that you should see in person if you can. 

Which you can! As I mentioned last week, the East Austin Studio Tour is coming up, Saturday and Sunday, November 12 - 13th, 19 - 20th from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. all four days. I'm stop #75 on the tour. For more information on the tour or to find out where my studio is, go to http://east.bigmedium.org/.

If I have enough photos of my work, I may just keep posting works that you just have to see in person to entice you to come on the tour. 

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Pinwheel!

Color! Spinning patterns exploding from a central flower! All on a topsy-turvy starflower base. This goose egg was a lot of fun to make, but please don't ask me which colors I used or the order they were put on because I simply can't tell you. Every color! All the colors!

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Species of Water

Today's piece is called "Species of Water." The blues remind me of the varied shades of blue and green you see in different kinds of water: ocean, lake, ice, deep and shallow. These chicken eggshells were injected with dye and allowed to sit and think for a few days. I then cut teardrop shapes into the eggshells using a diamond wheel on my Dremel. This was definitely the hardest part and I lost about a third of the eggshells that I started with.  I then carefully arranged the eggshells in different configurations until I found the one most pleasing and attached them to the white framework. I love looking at the various colors inside of each eggshell. I find it interesting that some eggs allowed the dye to migrate through the pores to the outer shell while others kept it completely inside.

Just a note: eggshell dust is hazardous to breathe, so if you are ever tempted to cut into an eggshell with a Dremel, use a dustbox or cut outside and wear a paint project respirator with filters for vapor/paint/dust. If you smell eggshell dust then you are breathing it in and you don't want to do that.

Happy Friday!

Friday Egg: Starry Seas

Friday Egg today is similar to the one I posted a couple of weeks ago, but in a completely different colorway. I like to see how choosing different colors can completely change the feel of a piece. I call this one "Starry Seas" because the eggshell decided that the pores of the egg would show on the open water areas, where I left the wave blank rather than draw stripes. It looks to me like stars in the sky reflected in a wave. I love the effect and I am happy when an eggshell asserts itself like this.

Friday Egg: Carousel

I'm baaaaaack! It's been a while! I've been out for summer break, traveling and dealing with a house renovation and the nuisances that come with it. But I'm back at the kistka as of Monday and really excited to be working on some new ideas.

This is a chicken eggshell done in bright and festive colors that reminded me of a circus carousel, just like the one we rode this summer at Valley Fair in Minnesota!