Blog has moved!

It's been a busy year since I last posted on this blog! I worked on several interesting projects, and took on a big new position that has been shifting my life around, in a good way. And for most of the year my website has been undergoing a design shift which includes a new blog feature. From now on, you can access my blog at www.emilygarfield.com/blog. I'll continue posting about my process, new items and cool art I've seen. I'm looking forward to posting more regularly now that the new blog is up!

New Holiday Cards

I just finished adding my new cards to Etsy! I have three new designs this season, in addition to the winter stars design from last year and the Christmas tree map from the year before. Click on the images below to see their Etsy listings!

If you're local (and want to save on shipping!), I also stock similar cards at these retailers:

13Forest Gallery (East Arlington) - all four designs, sold singly and in packs of 6
Blue Cloud Gallery (Ball Square, Somerville) - all four designs, sold singly and in packs of 6
Bestsellers Cafe (Medford Square) - Christmas tree and holiday flowers, sold singly
Abeille (Brookline Village) - Christmas tree cards, sold singly

"Somewhereville" Solo Exhibition at Bloc 11

I spent all evening on Wednesday working with the amazing art curator for Bloc 11 Cafe in Union, hanging what I just realized is my first real solo art show since college. It's a lot bigger than that one was, too -- there's 44 pieces of my art on their walls right now, and when we finish hanging the last few pieces there will be over 50! Here's some photos of the process:

The work in the show spans the three years I've been drawing maps -- we were joking that it's sort of a retrospective, though for a very new artist! I've also been hard at work in the last few weeks finishing several new pieces for the show. I'm especially excited about some new experiments on view in the vault area. I took scans of older map drawings and composited them together with line drawings made from photographs taken over the years to create digital collages that add narrative and texture to my work:

The exhibition runs through December 14, and there's an opening reception on Sunday, December 2 from 5-7pm. If you're in the area make sure to check it out! Here's some more photos of what you'll see:

New composites on display in the vault room:

 Matted small drawings hung in the hallway:

(we decided it was a performance piece, since they move

  when you walk down the hallway!)

Framed works in the main area:

New Consignors

Last week I had appointments every single day to either bring work to existing consignors or shop it to new ones, all over the greater Boston area. Many of the new stores were contacts from Arlington Open Studios, and everyone was looking to stock up for the holidays -- I ended up seeing my holiday cards a lot earlier than I would have expected this year! Here's a list of new stockists I've added and what they carry (in addition to Blue Cloud Gallery, 13Forest and Mobilia Gallery, which also received a new necklace this past week for their upcoming necklace show -- more info to come!):

Cambridge Artist's Cooperative
Harvard Square
- A wonderful coop gallery on Church Street in Harvard, showing the work of many local artists. They currently have a selection of my imaginary map cards.

Abeille
Brookline Village
- Part bead/jewelry supply store and part jewelry/wearables/housewares boutique. They currently have some of my pendants and stud earrings as well as holiday cards and Boston area map cards.

Bestsellers Books
Medford Square
- A really lovely little bookstore/cafe that recently reopened on High Street in Medford Square. They have holiday cards (from all three years!), Boston area map cards and a small selection of imaginary map cards.

Artful Heart Gallery
Arlington Center
- A beautiful gallery space right at the beginning of Broadway that shows jewelry, wearables and art by local artists. They currently have a selection of earrings as well as pendants.

Note that the cards in most of these locations (along with Blue Cloud Gallery in Ball Square and 13Forest Gallery in Arlington) are exactly the same unit retail price as on Etsy (and at my craft fairs), so if you're local and looking for a card you can skip Etsy's shipping fees by shopping at any of these retailers instead! The next craft fair on my schedule isn't until mid-December, so keep these locations in mind if you have any card needs (including holiday cards!) before then.

Gel Transfer Mini Canvases

I was looking for new options for inexpensive and reproducible product options recently, and started playing around with transfer techniques, which I first learned about in intro art during freshman year. I was particularly interested in gel medium transfers, where you use acrylic gel medium to transfer the ink from a toner print-out onto another surface. In class we used it mainly to transfer to other pieces of paper, which seemed slightly pointless, but after poking around on the Internet I got inspired to try it with wood and fabric instead. I found that it works well on gessoed canvases; my preliminary project has been making adorable tiny canvases for a giveaway (more info on that at the end of this post!!)

I start out with a piece of printed image around the size of the canvas or larger. The great discovery of this round of transferring has been that you can use full-color images with no ill effects. I had always been told in class that you could only use black and white Xerox copies, so I was pleased when the color in my transferred drawings came out almost as well as the original watercolor.

I have a lot of gel medium hanging around, so I got to experiment with different weights and styles. For this canvas I've used gloss gel, and applied it in a thinnish coat all over the canvas, then placed the image on top of the gel face down.

Then I burnish the image all over to make sure it sticks, starting from the middle and moving to the outside to reduce air bubbles as much as possible. They tend to introduce holes in the image, which can be interesting but hard to control. 

After the paper dries, I spray the back of the paper with water to saturate it and start to rub off the paper on the outside. The idea is that the ink sticks to the dried gel medium and the paper rubs off. 

Once all the paper is off (which often takes several tries), I paint it over again with gel medium to seal it, and then it's done!

I will probably be offering these on Etsy in the near future, but for now the only way to get one is to purchase a $10 ticket to RAW Artist's Showcase, a spectacular night of art, music and fashion in Boston on September 13th. In order to participate in RAW, artists are obligated to help sell tickets to the event, so I am pleased to offer these canvases to thank you for your support. The retail price of these canvases will be at least $12, so regardless of whether you use your ticket, this preliminary offer is an excellent deal. Canvases are only available to the first 20 people to buy tickets before September 10th, so act soon!

UPDATE (9/01 2:00pm): There are currently only three tickets remaining in the giveaway, so if you're interested in a free map canvas but haven't gotten your ticket yet, now's the time! Thank you everyone for your support!

ArtBeat and "Map Your Own Davis Square"

Last weekend I had a booth at ArtBeat in Davis Square with some of my work as well as an experimental crowdsourced mapping project where visitors could add their experiences to a map of the Davis area. I've never done an interactive project before, and it was definitely a learning experience. I tried to anticipate what problems might arise, and I'm pleased to say that there weren't any big problems, besides participation. I think that there were just too many steps -- I tried to make it as open-ended as possible, which helped a little bit, but still most people just passed by, even if they expressed interest. It's also the kind of project that only really gets off the ground when enough people have added to it to show value (and make individual submissions less prominent), so that can easily push it into a cycle of non-participation.
The booth started off with a list of instructions, flyers for recording inspiration, stickies and a blank map:

By the end of the festival, the outer edge of the map was covered with stickies, and the corresponding dots were interspersed throughout the map:

Some selected stories:

and other booth shots:

Wish You Were Here at A.I.R. Gallery

I currently have a small map in a group exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The exhibition title "Wish You Were Here" refers to the postcard format that all the works are in, but I feel like it works especially well with the type of work I do! Here's the piece I sent in:

I haven't been able to see the show, and probably won't get to New York before it comes down on July 15th, but a friend took some photos of the exhibit for me:

Interview with Babel/Salvage

I recently participated in an email interview with Babel/Salvage, a blog/small press/fledgling boutique in Seattle. Check it out if you ever wanted to hear me muse about what I do for pages and pages. The interview is currently at the top of their blog, but the permalink is here: http://babelsalvage.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/featured-artist-emily-garfield/

New Booth Setup

For the Holly Fair last weekend I thought it would be a good idea to refine my booth setup, which is usually just a bunch of random stands and boxes that I've acquired over the couple years I've lived in the area:

It's always worked out for me in a sort of homey way, but I recently realized that the huge variety might end up overshadowing or obscuring the work. I also wanted to make sure visitors knew that both the maps and the jewelry were made by the same person. I did some brainstorming with a friend and decided that the deep red chests (which I came upon by lucky chance at a yard sale just days before my first craft fair ever!) should determine the look of the rest of the setup, since they're my favorite part. Besides those dark-colored display pieces, though, most of my work (especially the jewelry) looks better on light colors. I decided to go with a frame theme to connect the art to the jewelry, and also to set off the jewelry in their own spaces for each type. It's difficult with work this varied and individual, but I think my solution worked out pretty well:

I kept the earring stand, but painted it to match the fittings on the red chests, and replaced the old plastic cross-stitch mesh with light cream cross-stitch fabric, which still has holes for earrings to go into but is less translucent (so the earrings don't end up being backlit, which gets annoying) and also more organic-looking. I also kept the red frame with white lace since it's always caught people's attention, and goes well with the chests. For the flower earring display, I scrapped my old system of a cigar box with plastic mesh (too distracting and thrown-together) and hung the earrings with more space on two blank canvases hinged together like a book. I like the way it all comes together, and I think visitors enjoyed discovering the jewelry without having to search for it. We'll see if it works as well in the darkness of the Burren's back room this weekend!

Boston Globe Blog Article

I recently found out that the Boston Globe's blog posted an article about the Ahts Boston festival that I participated in over the summer, and included a photo of me and a short description of my work! Click here to read the article.

Copper Printing

Yesterday I went with some friends to New Bedford Open Studios, and we had an amazing time. I especially enjoyed learning how to impress materials into copper at Sue Kowalski's studio (which is beautiful in itself -- it's in an old church!). We placed dried plants on copper strips, and then put a harder brass strip on top and ran it through a roller press. Because the copper is softer, when the plants get squeezed between the two materials they impress their forms onto the copper. I used milkweed pod silk, which is pretty much entirely without substance, so it didn't make much visible effect until I darkened the copper strips with liver of sulfur and buffed off the top layer. The patina stays in the lower indentations made by the plant material and makes the design easier to see. Here are some examples:

Milkweed pod silk

 Milkweed pod silk with some seeds attached (which exploded in the press...)

Shepherd's purse, a much more substantial plant

Sanding off the patina struck me as incredibly like working in the darkroom, and selectively dodging or "bringing up" certain parts of the image. The big difference is that when printing plants with cyanotype or other sun prints, the print is made by the differences in opacity, while with physical printing the print is made by the differences in thickness. Of course, there is a direct relationship in many ways between the thickness of a plant and the opacity; in fact, when we were having trouble placing the plants, Sue reminded us to think of the "shadow" of the design (basically the negative space) to judge whether the design would be too dense. The resulting patinaed prints did look pretty much like what you would get from a sun print, but with added texture.

Spring Green Earrings

I've been experimenting with new colors of fabric for my twiggy flower earrings. I'm really excited about these ones -- the combination of light green fabric and pearl beads makes me think of the first snowdrops of spring. I'll be rolling these out at SLAM at the Burren next weekend for their Easter-themed craft fair on April 23rd. Hope to see you there!

First Friday Photos

First Friday last night was wonderful. It was great to be able to show so much work in one place, and I got a lot of great responses to both the maps and the pop-ups. I was especially grateful to the other artists in the building who came by to see my work and give their critiques. Here are some photos of the event for those of you who weren't able to attend.

People looking at the work:

There were some dogs in one of the studios down the hall, and they wandered through every so often, padding by the art and circling the snacks table, just like regular open studios visitors!

 Someone told me the waterways in the maps looked like this awesome effect she'd gotten by applying rubbing alcohol to a store receipt:

The best part about being in the building was getting my other artist/gallerist friends to come and critique my work.