my art
I managed to squeek in a couple layouts over Christmas. My sister and finace' came up for a visit and the crop room turned into guest room with the help of a couple plastic tubs and some space under the bed. That meant I needed to get my croppin' on if it was going to get done before the show in Northfield. I decided to go with two layouts of the same picture because this show is aimed at non-scrapbookers. I thought it would make a nice compare / contrast kind of thing and picked 2 different styles that were a 180 from each other. One, artsy with almost no intervention and the other allot of journaling. Both blue, both 12x12.
For those of you just tuning in, we're showing Scrapped at an art gallery in Northfield, MN on Friday January 5th to kick off it's official opening with a Scrapped screening and an exhibit of scrapbook layouts for a month. It's all art, no commercial interest, no products for sale. Just a gallery showing what scrapbooking can do to be an expressive medium. Nick and Steve the gallery owners are looking to attract allot of local attention because they're in a great location for walk ins and kind of ground zero for the cool bomb in Northfield. If you'd like to submit a layout ( times almost up ) you can do a layout of any size on the theme "my art" and mail it to Scrapped, 16308 Highwood dr, Minnetonka, MN 55345. Layouts won't be returned, but saved because I hope to be able to do some more shows of scrapbook layouts as art around the twin cities.
Thanks!
wes
The letters "my art" on one of the layouts isn't black on art and whitishon the my... It's a silver foil kind of lettering that was just reflecting my clothes as I bent over to take the picture. :0)
ho, ho, huh?
Connie and I went down to Grezzo Galleries last night to go through logistics of the scrapbook show and screening on the 5th. Cool place. Hopefully it won't be -freeze your butt off cold - on 01/05/07 because the gallery is smack dab in the middle of Northfield with a nice waterfall, town square and all kinds of Christmas lights in front. Hey scrappers: bring a camera.
Meet Nick and Steve. They co-own the gallery and are wrapping up some of the other artists merchandise in the pictures to go full on wall hanging art and line the place with scrapbook layouts for their first official show. You, yes you will have layouts on this wall with a month's worth of onlookers, college students and passers by viewing your creativity. Steve has been doing framing in Northfield for over four years and has many people drop in for the bread and butter aspects of a gallery, not to mention the St. Olaf and Carlton students out for a night on the town stopping by on their coffee shop runs. This is one of the coolest ways I've seen to get the word out about scrapbooking. Alot of this crowd wouldn't walk into a craft store and wouldn't know what to do with all the raw materials of embellishments and tools but will love dropping in and checking out the finished project on exhibit. I'm thrilled!
Good or bad, guys are entering the scrapbook world and it's not looking familiar. Nick ( to my surprise ) has seen Scrapped a couple times and is going to do some layouts for the show with pictures and thoughts of his dad who passed away last year. Expect some flames, ink and edge... all the things you will want to pass down to you son when he asks asks about grandpa and what you did when you were his age.
From Ireland with Love
I got some pictures from a woman in Ireland who watched Scrapped with her scrapbooking group. I asked if she could send pictures of the movie with something uniquely Irish for the blog so I got the jackpot. Scrapped at Ladies View Killarney, Scrapped at the Toric Waterfall and of course... Scrapped with a Pint.
Thanks a Million! ( didn't want to expose her identity unless I knew it was OK. I don't know how many scrapbooking guys might be looking to get some luck of the Irish... )
The pictures are so beautiful that now I wish there wasn't that stinkin' DVD case in the way.
It's ON!
We've got a theme and an address to send layouts to for our great gallery opening on January 5th!
Good News: Scrapbooking is going to be appreciated as high art for expressions sake in a gallery of art fiend onlookers who probably know nothing about scrapbooking.
I had a two year apprentiship under an artist and worked at a guild in the mediums of charcoals, watercolors, pastels and wood carving. I wasn't so good but I can talk the talk and I will go toe to toe with anyone who thinks the scrapbook arts are reserved for the basements of middle America. It's got expression, passion, composition, emotion and creativity.
Bad News: What the heck am I thinking? You don't have time for this stuff! ChristmaHannuKwanza is coming and then there's New Years. Bad timing. yes, I understand and plead for your mercy. :0)
Here's the details:
Theme: My Art
Layout: 12 x 12, 1x1, whatever you want. It's your art baby! It just has to be a scrapbook page.
Deadline: Must be recieved by Tuesday Jan 2nd.
Reward: Telling your friends who are "published" that you were actually in a gallery show. Many of you will have pictures of your layouts on the Scrapped website and blog.
Send Layouts to: Scrapped, 16308 Highwood dr, Minnetonka, MN 55345
Please give us a name and location to display adjacent to your work.
Layouts won't be returned, they will be kept and accumulated into albums for more mobile showings to new scrapbookers and to challenege current scrappers to take pride in their work.
So this means that I will have to shovel off my scrapbook table that's crammed into the corner of a spare bedroom and get work. You know all those magazine layouts and DVD's that are floating around to magazine subscribers that show celebrity scrapbook rooms with custom cabinets, desks and daylight color lighting? Well get a juicy look at this celebrities scrap room. Nice huh?! To be fair, I've been traveling a little and collecting new scrap gizmos everywhere I go. If I'm only home for 1-2 days I just pile it up on the table and need to stop collecting and start cutting and sticking.
Here's a digital layout I did to prime your pump! Feel free to do whatever you'd like with the theme. It can be about art you've collected on your walls like Norman Rockwell - velvet Elvis - Precious Moments figurines. It can be about baking cakes ( something I like to do ), feng sheui, tattoos, your pimped out minivan or the beautiful babies you've made. The sky's the limit.
Thanks! - wes
( as always, you can click on an image to see a larger version. )
artsy fartsy
It's official,
Nick, the guy who is doing the T Shirt designs ( yes, I'm making T Shirts out of both of the designs with some minor modifications because people seem to like both ) is also part of a new art gallery. He's worked at and helped promote an exhisting gallery which was a kind of co-op and has venutred off with some partners into building some fantastic retail space right by a river and oddly enough right around the corner from where Jesse James met his demise. ( Not the biker phenom but the real one who robbed banks. ) Jesse on the left is pictured here with his brother Frank on the right. It was the actual citizens of Northfield that started slinging lead around when the James / Younger gang pulled guns and started robbing the bank so hey, I'm not the first yahoo to be waving a shotgun around. It's a regular passtime here on the edge of the prarie that goes back a hundred years.
The grand opening is happening right away in the new year and we've worked it out to have the typical wine and cheese finger food thing but also have an openeing exhibit of Scrapbook pages and quirky Americana kind of stuff that will be kicked off by a screening of Scraped on Friday January 5th. The new year will be broken in with Scrapbooking going high art in focused lighting on white walls wish hushed and reverant tones. Yes, your vacation layout with pictures of the worlds biggest ball of twine can be hanging next to my layout of the thoughts on why we have big toes, next to pictures of little Benji's Bah Mitzvah.
This is going to be the convergance of cultures for me because I lived in Northfield growing up and my dad and stepmom live on a farm not far away. They'll be attending and bringing some cronies. Northfiled is the home to both the prestigeus Carlton and St. Olaf colleges. The population of the whole town is about 17,000 people with the colleges being so huge ( about 4,000 students ) that they actually statisticlly bring the average age of the towns population down to 23 years old. It's about an hour from the cities and surrounded by open fields. It's also ( as mentioned ) the offical place where Jesse James and his gang were destroyed with the bullet holes still in the wall of the last bank they robbed proudly displayed. So to wrap up the scene we're going to have an art show about scrapbooking in an ivy league town of 17,000 out on the prarie 3 doors down from a bank with bullet holes in the wall and it's going to be promoted with 70's hot rod art.
Here's the event poster. I'm dying of curiosity to see what you scrapbook ladies think. I love it but I don't expect you to.
I'm also recruiting for layouts. I need to come up with a theme and I realize that they are an emotional, creative and financial investment so I'm going to try and come up with some kind of free thing to give away for people submitting work to display. I'll post some thing later today with info and send it out through other blogs, online communities, email chain, etc. Heck, I might even post something on 2 peas but lets face it - they've turned into a mob of catty creatures that can really turn into a slamfest. I personally haven't been flamed there but I see and hear horror stories of people that have.
Viva Scrapbooking! The revolution will not be televised... no, wait a minute.
wes
image is everything
I had a crazy idea for T Shirts and got a friend of mine named Nick Sinclair to draw them up. He does hotrod artwork so it was a natural fit. I'm looking for some feedback so tell
me if you think these would make some good Scrapped T Shirts and which
one's your favorite.
Tell me what you think by clicking here!
The first one is the closest I could get
to a phrase I use once in a while when trying to convey the coolness,
toughness, urgency and downright ballsy-ness of scrapbooking to people. My big tagline is that Scrapbookers are the gaurdians of their family's history... and I mean it. So Custodis Prosapia Litterae is the closest match I could find in latin. Litterae is more like the accounts of or lessons. I tried words like "dictata" and "progenies"
but they just didn't click with me. I wanted something with guts,
something that looked cool and grabbed you by the throat and had
attitude.
This one I asked Nick to work his magic in something more true to his hotrod form and I asked for a souped up Town and Country Minivan with a woman smokin' tires getting to a day crop. I wanted to take something percieved as uncool, nerdy and mudane as a soccer mom in a minivan and elevate her to hot rod mamma.
Maybe make a T Shirt cool enough for her husband to wear but still
convhttp://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
ey some passion in scrapbooking. Like Scrapped itself I was trying to poke fun with scrapbooking, not at it.
Cold Country
Rebecca sent me pictures of a trip to Thief River Falls, MN which is almost Canada... but not quite. She stopped by Cold Country Scrapbooks and was pleasantly surprised to see ( ta da! ) a teenage guy that scrapbooks! What are the odds of that?! I think Tim Holtz had an influence here. This is Rebecca wth Harriet Worker, the owner and her son Jim.
You've got to check out his layouts. Very cool Jim. You've inspired me to clean off my scrapbook table and get back to work. It's buried in paper and embellishments right now. That's where Rebecca and I are a 180 degree difference: organization. :0)
This is why I love Minnesota. Everything you need right next door to each other. How cool is that?
Do you have any layouts done by a man in your life? Please email me and I'll post them!
wes
