Emergence

About 6 years or so ago, my amazing and talented and visionary sister, Shell LeDrew, did a photo shoot - or two - which captured beautiful and ethereal images of a young girl underwater. Shell had a vision of this, and followed it through. The young girl was dressed in a white dress and swam in an outdoor pool with a beautiful scarf. The images were very successful, and Shell won the Arts and Letters competition one year with one of the images, had three which were juried into an exhibition, had a show at a local successful artsy-fartsy restaurant, and on and on! I tried to capture the images in paint before, but not with a lot of success. Last fall, Shell handed me the box of original photos from that shoot, and I've been picking away at it ever since. I started one last fall in my lessons with Rodney Mercer aka super awesome artist, but it's really this winter that I am getting on a roll with them. Brought some of them to Rodney and Jamie-Lee Cormier last week to have a little look - see and artistic analysis and was happy with the initial response. I have big ideas in my mind of what I'd like to do with them and where I'd like to go, not sure I can bring that dream to fruition but I am really going to put some work in on it. Currently I am working on some small studies (11" X 14") in acrylic. I ordered a bunch of nice oil paints last week - lots of blues to explore the blues in the waters. My hope is that I can continue to work on these smaller studies and as I am learning, begin to re-work them much bigger in oil. big dreams!!!!!! NOW FOR THE BIG NEWS! ;) Shell and I are having a joint exhibit at JL Gallery in Corner Brook in June. No guarantee at the moment, but, if all goes according to plan (or vision, or hope or dreams or something like that!) you may see these studies reworked as bigger paintings as a big part of the exhibit. Shell will be contributing her photography and we are super excited to be getting out there. It's a bit scary to us in some ways, but it is also part of my motivation for painting these days. If the paintings and photos are going to be on the walls for all to see, we want to do an outstanding job.