The annual North Charleston Arts Fest 2022 is open for business and runs May 4 - 8. The size and scope of this free event is impressive and the organizers make participating enjoyable. Lots of artists to wrangle in order to pull this off. No small task. Tonight is the Opening Celebration from 6-8pm. and there will be live music, painting demos, food, wine and beer. And on the other end, it will conclude with a Encore including music, more demos and "bubbles & bites." Hope to see you there and look for my two collages and two casein paintings amongst the hundreds of entries. Purchases support artists and the North Charleston Cultural Arts Department. 

I did not follow instructions, and pulled from each of my 3 reference paintings, instead of recreating one of them, to create a mash-up of Hello Beautiful, Farmers Market and Afternoon Tea. A change in scale was the name of the game. 

Off to Cape Cod to zero in on color with Mitchell Johnson. We worked on 18x24" which is big for me, but did all the mixing and painting with a tiny palette knife. I'm a convert. And to get my paintings home in a poster tube, I scraped the paint off which has the little grey cells thinking about scraping and adding on.  www.castlehill.org/#intro-page
www.mitchelljohnson.com/ Mitchell and Castlehill are both on FB and Instagram.

And the warm up for all the workshops was actually online with Eve Mansdorf and Tim Kennedy and facilitated by Black Pond Studio. Lots of greens, scraping (!) and literally attaching painted panels to expand the view. Great discussions and citriques with artists from multiple time zones. The trifecta of workshops was a wonderful whirlwind and I'm glad I could do them all.
www.blackpondstudio.com/ 
www.blackpondstudio.com/past-workshops/1/6

Well the Mother Figure show is wrapping up June 5 at Public Works Art Center in Summerville www.publicworksartcenter.org/ and I was honored to be included in this creative show exploring moms and motherhood. The community involvement with a message wall and photo wall made it very special.

The energy that community brings to a project is always an unknown and my submissions from a previous show also included helping hands and some unknowns. Part of my Women's Work solo show in 2017 included a call to women far and wide for "selfies" complete with hashtags and trinkets of love for a drawer assemblage. The response could not have been better. My collaborators were generous and creative with their submissions. 

May 2021 seemed like the perfect time for a reunion so twelve of us gathered for lunch, conversation and a trip to Public Works Art Center to see their contributions in another context. It was nice to connect the team members with others they didn't know. What a great bunch and I hope we can work together again. 

Here's a blog post for the Mother Figure show at Public Works -
 www.karynhealeyart.com/blog/its-may-a-time-for-moms-lessons-learned-and-chipping-in
And a blog post from the original show, Women's Work -
 www.karynhealeyart.com/blog/selfies-in-womens-work-show-who-am-i