Candy and Helga

Last year around this time I sewed myself a pair of pants. I had so much fabric left over, that I could cut it out to sew a tunic like this one, this time with short puffy sleeves and a size tighter. And since then, the cut-outs have been lying around. The months passed and I painted and I designed patterns and then it was winter and who would wear short puffy sleeves in January? So now, with the weather getting warmer (and colder, and warmer, and colder) and a couple of short sewing sessions during last week, I could call this tunic finished and hang it on the wall:

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Or better, of course, start wearing it. And now, please bear with me, comes the photo shooting with Hubby on the terrace and some CameraBag filters, just for fun.

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And who are Candy and Helga, you might want to know. These are the names of the used filters.

Pattern 24/52

During the summer months I usually turn into quite a fruitarian, living mainly on and totally devouring all the colourful, sweet and juicy bounty that nature has to offer. Last week I tasted the first cherries of this year and with cherries you have to be kind of quick, because before you can blink twice, the cherry season is over. To preserve the cherry feeling for a while I made a summery pattern. I am still totally hooked on making inky messes on yupo paper, so I started out with these blobs:

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My Photoshop pattern turned out like this:

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This would look good on an apron or girl’s clothing. I tested the pattern on a cheery cherry frock:

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And now I am off to eat some more fruit!

Roses Near & Far

When I step outside our house onto the terrace these June days and look up, I have a view kind of like this:

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I’ll be leaving for Brighton/England tomorrow for the MATS Global Art Gathering. I have been taking the Make Art that sells online courses with the Lilla Rogers School over the last months and now it is time to meet up in Real Life! One day of inspiring talks, panel discussions with industry experts, creative exercises and seeing and talking to other artists, that I have come to get to know through their work and support on facebook until now. Lilla Rogers will be there, of course, Kelly Rae Roberts, art director Margo Tantau of MidwestCBK, surface pattern designer Rachael Taylor and creative people from all over the world.

This is my special treat trip that is being financed by my last year’s Two-Euro-Project – I couldn’t have dreamt of a better way to spend this money. A total fun trip and I will have some extra time after the event to go to London and meet some old & new online friends too (I lived in London for a while some twenty years ago …).

For the Art Gathering there also was a creative Lilla-style assignment similar to the ones in her MATS-e-courses. This time the review of the work will not be a video, but live on stage during the event. And the theme was – Englishness, whatever this meant to us. On a tea towel. I couldn’t help myself, for me it was tea & roses.

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The roses on the towel are not really English – they come from my aforementioned terrace and from Oldenburg. And now it’s time to pack and travel! You can follow my English adventure on Instagram, if you like.

Merken

Co-Lab III & IV

Doris Reske and me have just had some productive painterly weeks – we have our new exhibition at Gross & Gross in Oldenburg, where we show mostly our individual artwork and only one Co-Lab painting. But for upcoming art shows we would like to have more large Co-Lab canvases to exhibit. So we had two Saturday painting sessions recently and worked on two 100×100 cm canvases (40”x40”), which we switched often.

Colab 3 Doris Reske Cathrin Gressieker

After this three-hour-session one canvas was quite figurative and the second one totally abstract.  And they stayed like this during the next painting session:

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During the painting process the paintings felt like nowhere coming together and would need another painterly afternoon together, but then suddenly it clicked. And interestingly enough, each of us made the last stroke on the very painting we had started on.

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Pink Moment of the Year

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It is my birthday today.  And though it was on a regular working Monday, I just liked it that way.  Waking up to table of presents, a cake and flowers, taking a cold shower, teaching yoga classes in the morning and in the evening, a little bit of painting, drawing and designing, my lovely family, a bit of singing, a sunny day after a couple of rainy days, thoughtful friends, a little bit of lying in the sunshine in the garden, playing with my younger daughter, a little shopping and cooking, riding my bike, my loving husband. I can’t be feeling more blessed and thankful.

It really was a:

Cathrin Gressieker-happy birthday

Pattern 22/52

I close my Week of Poppies with a pattern.  I experimented with inks on yupo paper this week – strange thing that paper, synthetic and water resistent, that lets the ink stay very saturated on top. I was about to throw my first attempt away:

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But then I rather scanned it and took it into Photoshop for some play with shapes and opacity and voilà Photoshop magic:

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So this pattern could be used very well on a silk scarf.

Cathrin-Gressieker_mocck-up_scarf_yupo-poppiesLesson learned: always be nice to your crooked attempts and stay open.

A Week of Poppies IV

For the Poppy Weekend I show you a piece fresh from my pink studio, made this morning. It’ s been quite rainy around here lately and for the collage I combined this rainy feeling with popping poppies. This kind of collage is the recent lesson in Alena Hennessy’s painting course A Year of Painting II, where we are encouraged to make our own collage papers with inks and pens. I still had some older ink paintings on watercolour paper lying around in the studio, so I just cut up these.

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*Poppies in May*, 30x42cm (12”x16,5”), acrylic and paint pen on wood panel

What about a little sun on Sunday now? I don’t know about the weather, but I know that I’ll have one more poppy surprise tomorrow.