Sprouts in Progress

Remember all that excitement I had over getting to play in the studio? I think I must have pent up the muse a little too much before letting her loose because the outcome was an all out art explosion! I went wild playing with acrylic wood staining techniques on a piece of alley found wood. Luscious!

I'm looking forward to continuing work on this piece tonight. Along with starting an new piece on fabric - one of my firsts in over a year. I will be participating in the City of Hope Benefit where artists were encouraged to decorate a slip or a corset to be auctioned off on September 11th at Stylus in Belltown. And my muse is actually looking forward to it!

Speaking of great events - I was able to attend one this past weekend. I was blessed with a ticket and some friends to join in the very first Seattle Sprout dinner! Sprout's website describes the event perfectly:

Sprout: Sustaining Emerging Artists is a locally sourced, community dinner that funds emerging Seattle artists with a vote.

Participants will pay a sliding-scale entrance fee for which they will receive a home-made dinner and a ballot. Diners will vote on a variety of proposed artist projects. At the end of dinner, the artist whose proposal receives the most votes will be awarded funds collected at the door. The work will then be presented during the next SPROUT. Artistic genres of all kinds are accepted and are encouraged to be works that are sustainable, local and forward-thinking. 

The food was delightfully donated by local businesses and P-Patches and they even had a gluten free dinner option on hand which had me quite impressed! My friend Grace Willard was one of the presenters and she did an amazing job sharing her work. (She also shares an excellent blog post covering the evening here) Grace was beat out for the $1000 raised though by a pretty amazing community service project for Women's dance. “Central District Women’s Community Dance Classes” was presented by Whitney Aguirre who did a demo dance performance for the class. Her proposal for the funding would have benefited the most people by not only supporting the continuation of the classes but the $ from the classes goes on to help fund REST that helps sexually exploited women. Kind of hard to argue with. 

It was a tough vote though because all of the project proposals were incredibly interesting. It was yet another moment of truly feeling blessed to be a part of Seattle's varied and diversely rich art scene. 

With so much inspiration going on all the time what else is a girl to do but have an art explosion in her studio?