Pratt Fine Art Center Open House

On Saturday I attended the open house for Pratt Fine Arts Center. Mostly prompted by my cousin who works there I finally went and checked the place out. Pratt is an incredible resource to the artistic community of Seattle as they offer not only classes and workshops, but studio equipment access as well. They host a wide variety of disciplines from glass blowing to printing presses to metal casting.

For the open house they had just about every teacher giving demos - the most showy and exciting of which was the bronze pour: 20 hours of prep for less than 20 minutes of pour. Hence the very large crowd for the show!
They also had a kid activity room where Seattle's future artists could make their own print. All you need is some spare Styrofoam to carve into with a pencil tip and some paint. Fun!
My favorite however was the printmaking studio which included letterpress, silk screening and mono print demos. I came back and watched the mono print teacher twice just to see how her print was progressing. And not only that but every time she sent her paper through the press - cranking the wheel gently and smoothing the blanket as it was pulled under the rollers my heart just ached to be doing my own printing.

Good thing then that Pratt offers artist studio access ...

Belltown Art Walk this Friday

"You're Not the Boss of Me"
by Betsy Schrairer

My good friend and fellow Calendarling collaborator Betsy just ASTOUNDS me. This gal has talent AND stamina. Not only did she pump out a half dozen gorgeous black line drawings for our calendar project in less than a month, but she also has an opening this Friday displaying FIFTEEN of her gorgeous, incredible hand stitched embroidery art works. I mean, just look at the stitching detail in this bunny - and it is only one of many.

Betsy darling, I'm so super proud to get to say "yeah - she's my friend" =)

If you're anywhere near Belltown this Friday you should stop by Stylus during the Belltown Art Walk to see some amazing embroidered drawings by Betsy as well as some incredible papercut work by Brooklyn artist, Devon Kelley-Yurdin. This is not an opening to be missed!

Details can be found here: Winter Art Show at Stylus

Urban ArtWorks

In the last couple months I got to work on something pretty darn cool and art related through my day job. I met and contracted with ArtWorks to solve a graffiti problem on one of the buildings I'm managing. It's an old brick building in Pioneer Square that served as a plumbing warehouse back in the day.

Now, you may or may not know that removing graffiti from brick is incredibly difficult and expensive. And the City of Seattle requires landlords to immediately remove graffiti - within 48 hours or something ridiculous and superhero-esque. Yikes! On a building where you can just paint over graffiti that is no problem. But on brick? Huge pain.

So an alternative plan was needed and in comes ArtWorks.

ArtWorks is a non-profit organization that works with at-risk youth to empower them within the arts by working on public mural projects. Their work has been cropping up all over Seattle since 1995 apparently - but I first took notice a year ago when I saw these incredible painted panels hung on a construction fence downtown near the Central Library. It was such a lovely thing to see art along the sidewalk instead of a drab plywood fence shielding the site.

At first I thought that perhaps it was some artist group just trying to get their work out there. Turns out I was right - but ArtWorks took it a step further by being an arts group mentoring youth to get their work out there. Many of the youth that end up in the program have been prosecuted for tagging - ArtWorks gives them an artistic outlet that is public and legal. I was impressed and may even end up volunteering for them sometime soon.

And needless to say I was thrilled when I got to head up a project with them through work. The mural above is my favorite of 8 murals we commissioned for our building. Here is another one:

On Friday I ended up spending the majority of the workday out on site coordinating the installation of all 8 murals. Each one consisted of four 8 foot panels that we had to place, align, mount and anchor. It was also totally up to me to figure out how to space the murals around the building which was more difficult than I thought it would be!

You would think 8 16 foot murals would fill a space pretty well but I was astounded just how small they all looked once we got them all up - as you can see!