I haven’t decided if I’m actually done with this piece or not, but it’s done enough I felt like sharing it. Sometimes I have to put things away for a few weeks so I can come back to it with a fresh eye. As soon as I’ve settled into our new house next month, I’ll be looking for a decent place to scan works for prints.
If you would have told me 4 years ago that I would be working in watercolor, I’d have laughed at you. Too finicky. Too much work. Too time-consuming. Yet here I am.
These days I don’t have time to sit for 8 hours like I once did in art school studio classes. Which I recently discovered wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, it forces me to slow down. I’ve imposed a rule of only working an hour at a time now on a single piece of art, because I realized that the danger of working large amounts of time is that rushing need to be finished. Rushing keeps me from learning a medium. Rushing keeps me from really figuring out how to become better, because art to me is a constant movement towards improving and mastery. I’m not there yet. I doubt I ever will be. But in this case, rushing is what has kept my work in the past from being the very best it could be. Not allowing myself to stop when I was mentally tired of something has kept me from actually growing as much as I can. Art is about quality, it’s not about quantity. Sometimes I forget that. Or sometimes I need to be humbled by that reminder.
I’ve been holding onto this set for a couple months as I plot out exactly what I’m going to be doing with these lampwork butterfly wings and beads by Mandrel Beads. After a month of trying to win some in auction, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to get an Etsy listing purchase. I spent some birthday money, so I’m not entirely sure I’m going to end up selling the pieces I make with these. I’m a little too massively in love with them to let them out of my hands, but we’ll see what happens.
I’m a little more than dewy-eyed over lampwork in the last year. I had a love of it before, but it’s intensified more recently. I have a little stash I’m slowly working through.
Someday I hope to make lampwork beads, but until then I prefer to make sure the beads I buy support small business and independent glass artists. That way I know that the quality is high.
I received a new graphics tablet for the holidays this year, and it’s been completely awesome. After a couple of studies of eyes, I started to work on this piece of Freya. This is my first 100% digital painting, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out.
You can buy prints of this image here.
Note: I have no control over what items my image shows up on from what I can tell, but let me just say I didn’t make the image for a duvet cover. The tiny picture on it looks ridiculous in the preview photo. Please don’t buy it. Ha.
Secondly, the works I do of the Gods I have made the decision to offer under Creative Commons for non-commercial use with no derivatives (works based off of it). If you are interested in a commercial license, please email me at Notawiccan (at) gmail (dot) com. If you use this image on the internet, please be sure to provide attribution below:
Freya by Camilla Laurentine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://wunderkammerjewelry.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/freya-prints-now-available.
Today my planner says I’m supposed to write and post a mission statement to start this blog. That is a great plan, but I haven’t really nailed down what my mission statement as an artist and one-woman company should be. It’s held me hostage on starting this blog and a business plan. Basically if you don’t have a mission statement for this sort of thing, apparently no one is going to know what you’re about. Or that’s what basically any business blogger and most of the small business training I’ve had has told me.
Here is the problem… Sometimes I don’t even know exactly what I’m about. Sometimes it changes. Sometimes I wander along aimlessly before stumbling into a new passion that lights up my soul for a few months and before it rolls into another space where I’m a bit indifferent about the subject. It’s actually one of the reasons I enjoy writing, because it gives me an excuse to research whatever it is that I’m immensely interested in at any given moment.
Having sat down and listed out the things I wanted to focus on for this blog, I decided on the following general categories:
This blog is going to be very much about art. I want a place to document my journey as an artist, my inspiration, my process, and my triumphs. I wear a lot of hats. A lot. Artist is the easiest label for about 20 different hats I wear, since I work in a multitude of mediums. Currently painting both in watercolor and digitally have caught my interest. I sculpt. I work with fiber. And more often than not I make jewelry and am passionate about metalsmithing.
Which brings me to fashion, which really is just an extension of art to me, but one of the first things I wanted to be when I grew up was a fashion designer. I’m interested in design, clothing, and beauty that channels the Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic in all its forms, from Art Nouveau to Pre-Raphaelite to Belle Epoque to the Reform Movement. I am so deeply in love with all artistic and design movements from this era. It bleeds into everything I create or style. This may actually be the over-arching theme of the blog.
(Though you won’t see me giving up my general vintage roots any time soon.)
But since my blogging tendencies tend to delve into my life experience as much as my life’s work, I wanted a place to talk about chronic illness and disability. I want to talk about disability rights, my struggles as a woman and artist living with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and offer up some of the ways I’ve figured out how to make life a little easier. I want a place to talk about what it’s like to be an artist with a mental illness, because I believe talking openly and honestly about both mental and physical health is an important part of not only coming to terms with my own reality, but also helping erase the larger stigma behind neurodivergence and chronic illness. This is part of me, of who I am, and the truth is that I cannot hide it. Nor does the world need to be sheltered from it.
And honestly? I want to share some recipes with you, especially if you happen to be gluten-free or egg-free, because cooking on a restricted diet is overwhelming. Especially at first. Especially when you’ve got a disease that causes fatigue and you’ve got a small child in your house. This won’t necessarily be a food blog, but anyone who knows me knows that I can’t help but share recipes or take pictures of produce. If you’re coming to this blog due to food allergies or intolerance, you are new to this diet change, and you are freaking out (which is 100% normal and part of the experience) please take my hand. Over the next year or two, I’m going to be hopefully walking through what to do.
With all of that said, welcome to my blog! True to the name of my jewelry and art, Wunderkammer by C. Laurentine, this blog serves as a cabinet to house the collections of wonders and rarities that make up my life. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I will enjoy writing it.
Wunderkammer by C. Laurentine 