Card Games Tree I and II

Note: copyright watermarks do not appear in actual art.

You never can plan anything in art. I originally designed this piece as a tag. Yup, that's right, very small with string through it, nothing too consequential. I acually painted the tree and border seperately. The original painting of the tree has red & black to match the border design. However, when I married the 2, I didn't like it. The tree did not differentiate with the border design enough (which made it look like a muddled mess). I fudged around with different experiments to try to resolve these issues. Then I found I liked it much more with the leaves turned a different color (to make it autumn-like while still keeping the playing card symbols). Success! I also decided to make prints from it. I will see if they make good tags, but for now I like them as prints.

Then I decided to try a different version. See below:

 

In this one, the tree has the same colors as the original painting while the border design does not.

The original mediums are: pen & ink, watercolor and a little oil based colored pencils to make the grass.

My relatives from my mother's side of the family are avid card players. Card games include bridge, Oh Hell and hearts with trumps. My grandfather insisted on games every night with all family members participating. Card symbols bring forth memories for me of good times with my family.

Both pieces are available in my Etsy store as small 5 x 7 prints. Perhaps there will be tags and other products with these designs after the date of this post. I still don't know what kinds of products will manifest for the brick and mortar stores that I am in.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Saratoga Faire CD featured on Celtic Radio Station

Saratoga Faire update:

Our CD "Saratoga Romance" to be featured on IRFT Celtic Radio on Monday, April 5, 2010. They will play the CD in its entirety. Start time of the show is 4:00 p.m. PDT: http://www.irftradio.comlu.com/

I think this is the first time since the CD was published that you can hear it in its entirety (i.e. no soundclips or selected cuts).

We also did an interview for 101.7 fm in the northeast for Community Cafe Hour (with John Kribs) with half of this CD aired plus cuts from my solo singer/songwriter project, The Goldenrod, as well as 2 cuts from Wing'd With Hopes (my Renaissance band CD with The Spirites Consort).

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

Exotic Birds

note: copyright watermarks do not appear in actual art
I painted the following 5 fanciful birds as a distraction around the time that I had the flu. I continued to make more after completing the initial one. The first one below was #1 in the series and originally used in a composite painting for wedding prints. You can see the wedding prints from my website here. I actually changed the colors and lightened the birds for the wedding prints, but this is how they look in their "true" unadulterated form:

All are painted on roughly 8.5" x 14" acid free bristol board except the kissing birds which were painted on 7" x 14" bristol. Most birds are about 11" in length using pen and ink and watercolors.

I will probably put the originals in a gallery & sell prints of them online. I haven't decided. But if you are interested in purchasing the originals, feel free to e-mail us and we can give you details about cost and shipping (make sure to inquire about specific pieces).

Exotic Bird I:

Exotic Bird III:

Exotic Bird IV:

Exotic Bird V:

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips) 

Celestial Bunnies and Celestial Egg

note: copyright watermarks do not appear on actual art

This is the newest Easter greeting card design. I completed painting it a week and a half ago, rushed it out to some of the galleries and shops I am in, and it's too late to put it in an on-line shop, so perhaps I will put it in next year. It's a sister to the Celestial Egg design I made last year, which I blogged about recently here.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

A Unicorn Escapes (also titled a Pawn Escapes)

Continuing with my love of millefeur (see my last 2 blogs)!

The second title refers to chess: any being that is not a king, queen, rook, castle or bishop is a pawn. I also blogged about a raven pawn here.

This is available at this point in time as a limited edition archival print at Lower Adiroindack Regional Art Center and through my Etsy shop.

This is a piece I did in 2008, but it is the first time I have posted it here. It goes with the general theme I have been working on since 2005 which you can find on my website here (the theme includes pottery, painting and fabric). A lot of it was shown for the first time at a 5 person show called Once Again at the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Center.

All of this is "additional" work and meant to fulfill artistic longings, so I don't have as much of this work completed as I would like. My "real jobs" at the moment are greeting card designer and musician. I try to work on my "show" themes when I can find time.

In this piece, I am just starting to get into millefleur mode. The copper border and unicorn choker is much nicer and richer than the scan depicts. It features playing card suits (hearts, spades, diamond and clubs).

Here is a detail of the unicorn:

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

The Unicorn and the Egg (and other Easter designs)

Continuing with my post from last time...

This is another older card design (from 2009). Have I said before that I like the olde Renaissance style unicorns more than the present-day horse unicorns who are more associated with acid drenched rainbows and mountain vistas than gardens and pretty Renaissance maidens? When I was around 13 years old, my mother pinned up prints of the Unicorn Tapestries (from the MOMA cloisters) in my room. Then my grandmother gave me a book about Renaissance era unicorns at Christmas shortly afterward. Who knows why they wanted to impress me with unicorns and millefleur (it wasn't something I sought out or asked for, in other words). Anyway, the art made an impression even after I grew up, left home and the prints disappeared. I always seemed to be thinking and dreaming about millefleur through the years, even when I was making big statement art in my twenties and thirties (which I don't show on the web at the present time since it is adult & I wouldn't want to confuse my fantasy-artist/ethereal-musician public image, at least not at present). Ornate tapestries from the era are the only pieces of art that can make me cry. I like millefleur even more now than then, as natural paradises are bulldozed and modern, hard edges take up every available visual space in every aspect of our lives. 

Granted, this is a very unpopular niche to be in, especially in the art world. I am not a "serious artist" (and frankly surprised when this art was accepted by the jury at the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Center for a show). Okay, I am not serious. And why should I be? My unicorn designs seem to appeal to 13 year olds and that seems fitting.

More Unicorns are here on my website.

Here is a close-up:

Giant eggs, eggs falling from the sky, celestial eggs & other assorted wacky Easter ideas are in some of the shops in my area as well as newly listed in my Etsy store here.

Celestial Egg:

Easter:

Bunny with Red and Gold Eggs:

How Spirit is Born:

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Bunny with Big Egg (Easter card design)

(note: copyright watermarks do not appear on image)

This is a card design I completed in 2009, but I am posting it today because I thought I should post something (it has been awhile & all of my present work has yet to be scanned).  I have the bunny for sale in a number of shops in my area and in my Etsy store here (or you can browse through all of my present card listings at Etsy here).

This design is from my original painting. The egg, sky, birds and rabbit were painted with watercolor paints while the grass and flowers were drawn with oil based colored pencils. The original design was a lot more colorful, but I decided to desaturate a version in the computer to make it look old and vintage, if slightly Renaissance in flavour. This is the desaturated version.

I have 6 new pieces to post as soon as I can find time to scan.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Shamrock with Knotted Background plus What Happens When You Spend Too Much Time on Etsy

note: copyright watermarks do not appear in actual image.

I was uploading the above image on Etsy last night after a full, exhausting day. It is a greeting card on off white, vanilla colored card stock. Then I went to bed. This is what happened:

I dreamt that Etsy charged me $85 to upload the image of the shamrock. I contacted them on the phone and said: "My understanding is that a listing is 20 cents, not 85 dollars!"

The woman on the phone told me that there was nothing she could do and that I needed to talk to my bank representative. So I waited in line at the bank and finally talked to a teller. I was passed off to a number of bank employeees. Every time I was passed off, I got more and more angry (as if they were doing it on purpose to make my life miserable... which is about how I feel about banks these days, especially the ones that have been bailed out, that they create circumstances to keep/make the general populace in debt in any possible way, especially through deregulation and through convincing the government that they are too big to fail).

Finally when I got to an employee that could give me some answers (an employee in a tight business suit... it was so tight, in fact, that it hugged her knees together so that she couldn't move them apart at all: not even sit in a natural way, but off to one side). She got on her computer and told me that the reason that the listing was 85 dollars was because I had uploaded a huge picture.

"But, it's a greeting card! And I can't make 85 dollars on a greeting card! I just wouldn't upload such a huge image when the product itself is so small!"

And then she turned her monitor around to show me. Just one pixel of the image took up the whole screen and you had to scroll like mad to see the whole image. In fact, you couldn't see that it was a shamrock at all because all you saw was one huge pixel after another.

Of course, I was laughing when I awoke and so was everyone else in my life. "That'll cost you at least $1,000 in postage to send that shamrock!" someone said. "Also, you'll need a tractor trailer truck to move that shamrock!"

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

Wedding and Anniversary Custom Art Archival Print with Two Trees and Two Doves

Note: the copyright watermarks do not appear in the actual art. You may have to zoom in to see what it really looks like.

This is a piece I have been slowly working on during my phase of painting very detailed pieces. The detailed pieces are still not completed, but I managed to complete this one.

It is a series of custom prints that I am working on just for Etsy. I had been browsing the site one night and saw a number of tree and dove art pieces for weddings and anniversaries and most were stark graphic depictions in 2 - 3 colors. I thought I'd try a more painterly approach and see what happened. The sky is actually painted seperately from everything else because I wanted to try a number of sky colors. I'll be posting those versions soon in the same place.

The piece is indeed up in my Etsy shop here. I notice that it is getting more views than usual, so maybe Etsy is a wedding store? A place where people buy gifts? Who knows. It's my first on-line store experience aside from CD stores and my website store and I'm still trying to figure out who the community is.

I have been sick with the flu for awhile… huge necessary detour… and this art piece seemed like a good one to take a chance on as my fever was diminishing (with a few symptoms lingering). I just didn't feel comfortable delving into pieces that are taking a long time to design and complete and where a wrong move could derail months of work.

It's not a masterpiece (as so many gifty things aren't), but something that may have appeal in that community.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)
My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

Owl in a Heart and Mediaeval Heart II, 2 Original ACEOs

Owl in Heart ACEO (tiny original in ink and watercolor, paper size: 2.5" x 3.5", image size: 2.25" x 3.25")

Mediaeval Heart II ACEO (tiny original in ink and watercolor, paper size: 2.5" x 3.5", image size: 2.25" x 3.25")

Note: the copyright watermarks do not appear in the actual art

These are both up for sale at the moment in my Etsy shop. This is probably the last of the original ACEOs for awhile as I have a lot of bigger, more ambitious art projects I am trying to finish. We (Saratoga Faire) are also in rehearsals for The Dance Flurry Festival.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

Knotted Hearts with Knotted Backgrounds, Mediaeval Heart Original ACEO and Art Opening for Barbara Idleman

First up: Knotted Hearts with Knotted Backgrounds (note: the copyright watermarks do not appear in actual art)

These are my newest pieces. Shown are 3 variations, but there are more. I have them at a few shops and online at my Etsy shop.

They were a take-off on my Knotted Shamrocks with Knotted Backgrounds. I thought this idea might translate well into heart designs too. I hope to have some prints out there soon of two of these designs. Right now they are in greeting card format.

Second: Mediaeval Heart I. This is my first original painting ACEO. It was a challenge to paint and draw so small. But I enjoyed it and I liked the fact that it didn't take an endless amount of time the way so many of my other pieces do. The smallest pieces I have painted are 5 x 7s. This even seemed small at the time because previously I had only been painting very large works, the smallest of those being 18 x 24. There is a first time for everything. The design is original even if the title alludes to the Mediaeval period. This is for sale in my Etsy shop because I just couldn't figure out what brick and mortar galleries to display it in and this was the fastest, easiest way to put it up for sale.

I am working on some pieces that are taking an endless amount of time and have a lot of intricacies. I hope to have them finished sometime this winter (if at all possible) and will post as soon as I can. In the meantime, I might be playing with some smaller works.

Lastly: this is a picture that my friend, Ann Casselman (note copyright) took of me with my pottery & sculpture in the background and sent to me via e-mail at Barbara Idleman’s art opening at Hubbard Hall Projects. The show is called, A Vision in Fabrics: A Tribute to Barbara Idleman. There was also a wonderful write-up about her which made me cry. Barbara was a special woman, wise, tactful, friend to all. I wish I had a picture of her work or of the opening, but I don't. I always forget to take a camera.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

First Night Saratoga and updates on my website

This is a picture of our band, Saratoga Faire, at First Night Saratoga 2010 (© Ray Bedard). We played to a packed crowd all night and sold quite a few CDs. There are more pictures of our band on our facebook here.

This photo and other music photos of 2009 are also on my website here. You’ll notice that this link takes you to a blog page. I do my own website blog every January summarizing the previous year (in this case it is about 2009). I had been doing that for years before starting a blog here on blogspot in September. Note: the blog on my website won't be repeated here, so take a look if you'd like.

The reason I started a blogspot? I started selling on Etsy. I thought it would be a good idea to announce new work I was putting on Etsy (for on-line customers). This wasn't so necessary for my brick and mortar stores: I didn't feel it was necessary to post on my website (& in fact, I didn't think my website was all that important for the art side of my life, which is why all of the music buttons are at the top).

I felt that people who were interested in my art would go see it in the stores and galleries I have listed on my website. But having an on-line store is a whole other venture. My only exposure to selling on-line is through CDs (but unlike etsy, these on-line stores take care of the actual marketing and selling for me)… and also selling some art and just a few CDs via paypal off of my website.

When I was entertaining the thought of starting a blog, I thought I would only focus on my art for my etsy store, but then realized that unlike other visual artists, there would be gaps in my creations as I often get called away to perform, record, write music, rehearse, etc. So it was only fitting that I should blog about music too. Both are important to me, inspire me and define who I am (and a number of people have remarked to me that I can't just let my singing voice go silent in an art studio all day and night).

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby

Hearts Within Hearts Knotted, one in may green and pink and the other in aqua and salmon

You may have to click on the pictures to see a less blurry version.

Note: copyright watermarks do not appear in actual art

Hearts Within Hearts Knotted is the title to 2 pieces.

These are two new designs I started in 2009, took a break from to practice and perform music and came back to and completed in 2010. They are available in my etsy shop and artfire shop.
I have a fascination with intricacies. It is noticeable in my 2-d art in terms of borders, hearts and shamrocks. In my 3-d art it is most noticeable in the borders of my relief sculptures and the rims of my pottery.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby