I Blog For…Art!

It was fun to finally get the chance to see my art hung side by side with my sister Lily’s in our show at Artiste Winery. The opening was yesterday, but it will remain up and available to see and purchase until December 28th.

The entrance to the middle room, where our paintings were shown. Two of Lily’s paintings hang here.

A corner crammed with my paintings.

Lily’s paintings on the left, one of mine on the right.

I painted these from photographs by Ernst Mutchnick. I also painted the models’ faces for the photo shoot.

A cluster of my paintings.

Lily and some of her lovely paintings.

Artist and model, daughter and father. Lily and Barry Nathan in front of Lily’s paintings.

Lily and I with our singing teacher, who stopped by for a look at the show.

Daiken, Lily, Rob, Michele, and Mac.

Lily and I with friends.

Lily and I with friends Rob, Daiken, Mac, and Michele.

Lily in the foreground, and my mother getting creative in the background.

I’m grateful to Simo, who put together a video that gives a taste of the show and surrounding wine-tasting and gallery rooms. Just to clarify, he shows some of the art that goes on the Artiste wine bottles, which is not ours. Enjoy!

(12-4-08 UPDATE: Everything is ready and at the gallery! Wahoo! We’re hanging the show with Cyndi at Artiste tomorrow. Hooray!)

How amazing to discover the many road blocks to showing art! I never thought my own mind would work against me, but it has! Even my subconscious has joined the fight, railing nightmares against any ambitions I might have. But give up, I have not!

The hard way to frame:
By hand with a miter saw kit!

After putting in an effort to make some of the more basic frames myself, I found a much smarter method: taking the task to a professional. Imagine that!

Susan Granger at Solvang Graphic Arts Gallery & Frame Shop was very helpful and did a great job matting and framing my pieces. Susan runs a very professional shop, with two kinds of mat cutters running the lengths of half the walls in the back room, and a table-saw to cut custom size frames for seriously stunted artists like myself that stretch their own unconventionally sized canvases!

I love the technical aspects of showing! I wanted to do a series of posts on learning to make frames, but I ended up throwing myself into the midst of the process this last week without much time to post about it. I wanted very basic frames that would make the work stand out and didn’t like the idea of hanging the canvases bare on the wall. My compromise was buying very thin strips of pine from Ace Hardware in Santa Barbara, and later, from Nielson’s Hardware in Buelton when I ran out of the first batch.

If you need framing or matting done, contact
Susan at:

Solvang Graphic Arts Gallery & Frame Shop
(805) 688-2025
1693 Mission Dr # B101
Solvang, CA 93463