Spring Cleaning (the pastel box)

IAPS 2015 Pastel Convention Next Week!! Yay!

I'll be driving up early in hopes to be pulled off the wait list for the Sally Strand pre-convention workshop, but in case I'm not, I'm looking forward to some mornings plein air painting in Old Town. 

A quick decision had me cleaning out my travel pastel box (a Heilman backpack box) last evening, mainly because after I'd cleaned it out four years ago (before the 2011 convention!) I'd noticed that I'd put the cool colors at the front and the warm colors at the back.

my box in 2012

See the little holes near the hinges in the middle? The convenient easel slides in there, so that's actually the back or "top" of the palette. Since I like working with my warm colors closer to me, this arrangement makes it inconvenient to use the attachable easel.

I wish I'd gotten a photo of my box before I cleaned it last night. (this shot's from at least 3 years ago) I hadn't realized how desperately it needed cleaning until I got all the pastels out and started slapping the foam strips against the inside of my trash can... Woah! Time to turn the air cleaner on Turbo! I ended up taking the vacuum cleaner hose attachment to each strip as well as the lids. Since I didn't have time for soap and water, it worked well enough, and by flipping the foam over it was almost like having a new box!

I also ended up with a huge pile of bits (almost) too small to use and shards of old pieces that were buried in the cracks...

A few of these are old favorites, so one of today's tasks will be to (try to) find the other halves of these among my extensive backup stock, if I still have them.

I've made a little box of cherished gems that I know I will need to search for at the IAPS "Candy Store" since I'm pretty sure these are the last bits of these colors I have...

Yea... any excuse to shop for new pastels! Lol!


And here's my clean box, ready for some plein air painting, and with plenty of space for some new colors in there among the blues and greens maybe...

So tell me... Am I the only one who goes years between cleaning out the pastel box?? When was the last time you cleaned yours? I'd love to hear from you!

Gallery Talk and Reception in Rockport, Texas

Last Saturday, May 16, was the Reception and Gallery Talk for my show Beauty of the Beast and multi-media artist Billy Keen's show Sacred Voices, at the Rockport Center for the Arts, in Rockport, Texas.
Billy has the Main Gallery,

and my work is showing in the Garden Gallery, the lovely room added in 2000 to this historic building.

Lisa Baer of Estelle Stair Gallery and Taylor Hendrix (Director of Operations at the Art Center) did a fabulous job hanging the shows. If you have the opportunity to visit the Center in person, it will be well worth it!

The Gallery Talk, hosted by Lisa, was a lot less stressful than I had feared (sitting in front of dozens of people and speaking!) thanks to Lisa's thoughtful conversational guidance. And I was lucky enough to loan my camera to a volunteer who caught the whole thing on video!

Here it is, after 3 days of editing in Windows Movie Maker. I added still shots of the shows at the end of the video talk, and found some beautiful music to accompany. Enjoy!

(I tried to update the thumbnail to a not-so-blurry shot, but it's stuck on this one! Two or three blurry moments in the whole thing, and it had to pick one for the thumbnail! Huh.)


Here are some more shots below...

Billy's show:

And mine:

Reception Night:

Before the Talk

Me and Billy