Moments Show Opening

June 24, 2010 at 3:36 pm | Posted in art, country life, country living, family, flowers, gardening, knitting, Life, love, marriage, photography, relationships, romance, socks, travel, yarn | 93 Comments
Tags: art, culture, family, farm life, knitting, photography, travel, Upstate New York

My summer art show, “Moments”, opened this past Friday night at Shawn’s Gate Gallery in Medina, New York. The day before my husband and I along with our good friend Roger G. worked together to hang the paintings. The gallery was not air conditioned, and the summer sun was on duty in the western sky. Nonetheless, we enjoyed working together and the men did a great job of bringing my vision to life in how the paintings were hung and arranged.

When I originally planned this show I took the actual wall measurements from the gallery and did a mock up of the walls on my computer using Photoshop. Next, I planned the paintings I would create based on how I wanted to occupy the space on the walls with my art, how much empty space I wanted, etc. I also did mock ups of the paintings and put them in position to figure out what kind of colors and subjects I wanted hanging and how they would relate to one another.

There is one painting still on my easel — a 30″ x 30″ oil of a single sunflower. I have a few more petals to complete on it and I just could not finish it in time to hang it in the show. That was a disappointment, but with a little bit of tweaking in the arrangement of the paintings the missing piece was not noticeable to the public.

I have taken a few days off, but will get back to the sunflower painting and complete it shortly.

Meanwhile I have posted six of the large, new oil paintings of Moments on my new J. L. Fleckenstein Fine Art website. As I get photos ready for the rest of the show I will post them over the coming weeks.

If you are in the Western New York area and would like to see the show live and in-person, it will continue to hang until July 28th. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 2:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Plus, right across the street is Zambistro Restaurant where several more oil paintings of mine are on display.

Some of the pieces in the show and at the restaurant are available for sale; many are available in print form in sizes ranging from 6″ x 6″ up to 8″ x 16″. We are also offering custom framing now for originals as well as prints. The frames are beautifully finished by a disabled friend of mine who is quite an artist herself. We had an Amish fellow in the area build the frames for us in unfinished red oak, then my friend gave a unique finish to each frame based on which painting or print it was intended for.

The results were so beautiful we decided that we will start framing my oil paintings in the same way, as well as offering custom framed limited edition prints of most of my paintings for sale.

The photos you see here are in order of appearance are:

1. East Wall: New Oil Paintings
2. South Wall: Four New Oil Paintings, Three Older Oil Paintings and One New Watercolor
3. North West Wall: Four Older Watercolors Newly Matted and Framed
4. South West Wall: Three Older Watercolors Newly Matted and Framed
5. South East Wall: Several Matted and Framed Limited Edition Prints

If you are interested in note cards, prints, framed prints, or originals from this show you will be able to do so offline at the gallery, in my Etsy store, or on my fine art website. Not everything is available right now, but several pieces are available along with their prints. As new items become available I will send out email alerts to those who are on my mailing list.

Of course we also have the June sock yarn give away to discuss. Again, the yarn that is being given away is hand dyed by fiber artist Kimber Baldwin of Kimber Baldwin Designs and Fiber Optic Yarn. Kimber is designing twenty four hand dyed colorways in her Moments series, Foot Notes Sock Yarn inspired by my photography and fine art. The first two colorways were announced last month (Rhoda and Jackie’s Lilacs), available on her website and in her Etsy store. Last month’s lucky winner chose Jackie’s Lilacs for her free yarn. I purchased one hank of the Rhoda colorway and I have to say that Kimber did a beautiful job creating a yarn that embodies the beauty of my Rhoda flowers (Rhoda the Tree Peony). Next week I will begin designing and knitting my very own pair of socks in the Rhoda colorway.

As for the June Sock Yarn Give Away (colorways to be announced), here is how June’s give away will work. There are three questions listed below. To be in the running for June’s Sock Yarn, you must answer all three questions correctly. Enter your answers by leaving a comment to this post. The winner will be chosen from a random drawing of those readers who answered all three questions correctly. So, here goes:

1. How did I meet my husband?
2. What is the name of one of my knitting patterns?
3. What is the title of one of the six new oil paintings I posted on my fine art website this week?

Answers must be submitted no later than midnight on June 30, 2010. The drawing will happen by July 6, 2010 and the winner will be notified via email and will be announced in a blog shortly after the drawing. The winner will get to choose between two Moments colorways announced by Kimber Baldwin at the time.

Helpful Hints for Answer the Questions:

Q1: When We Were Cowboys
Q2: I Live on a Farm Website
Q3: Moments online show at JLFleckenstein.com

I have to end off for today. There will be more announcements and photographs related to the Moments art show, including a drawing in July for a signed, limited edition print.

We have wild raspberries ripening as I write, strawberries in a great old big patch at my friend Lora Partyka’s farm waiting for me to pick for my annual strawberry preserve-a-thon, and local cherries ready to be u-picked as well. Summer is here and it is an especially abundant one here in the beautiful rural farmlands of Western New York.

Hope you have access to some delicious, ripe berries wherever you are and I look forward to sharing more with you shortly.

~firefly