Ed at Plaza

Yesterday I needed some paper for some new drawings, and so I dropped by the Plaza art supply store at 1594B Rockville Pike in Rockville, MD. Although this store is about five miles from my house, I had never been there before, as I had frequented the now closed Pearl store also on the Pike.

I stumbled on a great sale on stretched canvas (70% off), but the great discovery on this particular store is that there is a guy working there named Ed who is an absolute gem. This dude knows his art supplies!

In fact, over the last few years I've been doing most of my art supply buying online, and today I rediscovered the joy of going through a really good art store and discovering a host of new products that I never knew existed, thanks to this Ed guy, who is a talking machine who clearly loves his job.

He turned me onto these new washable charcoal pencils. They are charcoal pencils, but once down you can treat them like watercolors. And also the blackest charcoal stick/stump that I've ever seen put down on paper - also washable like a watercolor and leaving behind an absolutely gorgeous black.

And these new water soluble oils! Ed has experimented with them all and thus offered me a hands on opinion on which to try.

He also turned me onto Gamsol thinner for oils; odorless and truly toxic less and onto Golden acrylic ground! Expect new artwork explorations from the Lenster.

I went in there to get a couple of 30x40 sheets of acid free drawing paper and came out with $250 of new art supplies.

Plaza, this guy is a jewel - give him a pay raise!

Congrats!

In recognition of its Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction exhibition, The Phillips Collection recently honored six women for their leadership in advancing the arts.

See who they are here. Hint: One of them became a game-changer for me last year.

Juxtapositions


With around 100 or so folks at the opening and more than half the work already sold, Ellen Cornett's Juxtapositions at Studio His already a hit show. There will be a happy hour event on June 10; go check out this show!

Wanna a real good deal on an original drawing?

Not from me, but from whoever is selling this original drawing on Craigslist for only $45!

"A Woman from another World"
by F. Lennox Campello (c. 2006) 24.5" x 11.5"
The price three years ago was $400. Buy it quickly!

Virus

So far I've scanned about 20 of the 80 or so CDs that I've received (about 20 artists still missing) for my 100 DC Area Artists book project, coming to all bookstores in the Spring of 2011 from Schiffer Publishing.

And so far I've found one particularly evil virus which was a Trojan buried in her Word software and which was auto dialing the artist's C drive contents and probably sending it to a destination in either a particularly large East Asian nation or to an even larger Asian nation.

Artist notified and properly horrified. She then bought a virus software package, scanned her computer and cleaned it and promptly delivered a new CD.

2010 Bethesda Painting Awards Finalists

Deborah Addison Coburn, Rockville, MD
Sheila Blake, Takoma Park, MD
Deborah Ellis, Alexandria, VA
James Halloran, Arlington, VA
Katherine Mann, Washington, D.C.
Lindsay McCulloch, Chevy Chase, MD
Michele Montalbano, Burke, VA
Carol Phifer, Fredericksburg, VA
Nora Sturges, Baltimore, MD

The selected finalists will display their work from June 1-26 2010 in downtown Bethesda at the Fraser Gallery. The opening exhibition of the Bethesda Painting Awards winners is on Friday, June 11th from 6-9pm held in conjunction with the Bethesda Art Walk. Many of the finalists and winners will be on hand to discuss their work.

Congrats to all the finalists!

Mid City Artists Open Studios Tomorrow

Twice yearly, the artists in the neighborhood between Dupont and Logan Circles invite visitors into their studios. Next one is this weekend: May 22nd and 23rd.

Plan your visits in advance by flipping through the artists' pages online to see what you like, who is new, and who is participating. You can also download a map to plan your route in advance and guide you along.

Some of the artists participating are: Sondra N. Arkin, Chuck Baxter, Jane Cave, Groover Cleveland, Robert Dodge, Thomas Drymon, Gary Fisher, Glenn Fry, Charlie Gaynor, Betsy Karasik, Hannah Naomi Kim, Joren Lindholm, Regina M. Miele, Lucinda F. Murphy, Mark Parascandola, Rebecca Perez, Dave Peterson, Brian Petro, Peter Alexander Romero, Nicolas F. Shi, Richard Siegman, George H. Smith-Shomari, Isabelle Spicer, Bill Warrell, Mike Weber, Robert Wiener, Colin Winterbottom and others.