Thursday, November 8, 2012

The Omnia Scroll Exhibition



The Omnia Scroll Exhibition 2012


 The Omnia Scroll Exhibition launches at Brighton Jubilee Library UK on 14.11.12 to 12.12.12.  A global arts collaboration and international collective exhibition touring the world annually.  Connecting new artists, exhibitors, galleries and the public alike.


The Omnia Scroll and Exhibitions explore the interconnectedness of all things (Latin for all things is Omnia), with each other and our planet.

Everything is alive; everything is interconnected.

Presenting Clive Hedger (UK) Alberto Martinez (UK) Carla Mascaro (Italy) Stephen Meakin (UK) Masakazu Yamashiro (Japan) Yvonne McGillivrary (UK) Bert Monterona (Canada) Nikhil Kirsh (Iceland) Teresa Young (Canada) Penelope Oakley (UK) Angel Ortiz (Mexico) Keith Neary (UK)
Artists will exhibit their original artworks and each work exhibited will form part of the collaborative work thus creating “The Omnia Scroll” an ever increasing, continually growing work of art, images transferred onto silk fabric cotton canvas panels which will be connected and embroidered with gold thread.  As each exhibition takes place and grows so does The Omnia Scroll, one piece of art, many artists’ creations, continually evolves.


2012 Exhibition Curated by Penelope Oakley & Keith Neary
www.penelopeoakley.org  Monday 10am-7pm Tuesday 10am-7pm Wednesday 10am-5pm Thursday 10am-7pm Friday 10am-5pm Saturday 10am-5pm Sunday 11am-5pm

Friday, October 12, 2012

Recent Art Awards and Exhibitions Last Quarter 2012

About Recent Artwork:
http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
A Dream of Sentient Paisley
A work in progress by
Teresa Young.
http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/Well it's been an interesting year, but I certainly didn't get as much painting done as I would have liked! 
I've been experimenting with new techniques lately just to keep the creativity going, so I just finished a couple of paintings in the last week that were acrylic, but used acrylic gold paint for highlighting. It's very glittery and shiny! I like it! Unfortunately, the paintings are so new, I haven't managed to get good photos of them yet. I'll have to include them in a future post.

The Omnia Scroll Worldwide Tour:
Coming up on November 14th to December 12th, 2012, I am one of thirteen artists exhibiting at the Brighton Jubilee Library, a gorgeous venue as the ceiling goes up and up, and there is a wall of windows extending two stories that borders on the street.
My good friend Penelope Oakley, a wonderful artist in the UK and I collaborated on a painting this year that will be a part of this exhibition. As well as the painting image I've embedded above, 'A Dream of Sentient Paisley'. The artworks in this exhibition will be the initial images added in high resolution printing onto a banner that will expand over time called the 'Omnia Scroll'. This is pretty exciting as this is going to be an ongoing projec that expands over time. Penny is in talks to curate further exhibitions in this project path in Italy and Mexico. I'm hoping she manages to get something going for Canada at some point because I'd love to see this come to my home country!
For more details, please go to www.PenelopeOakley.org.

Physical Exhibitions of my paintings:
As I post this, I have artwork in two physical exhibitions, one in Berlin, Germany and the other in a very nice local restaurant in Hubbards, Nova Scotia Canada.
The Berlin exhibition starts on October 18th and runs until the end of the month. The restaurant exhibition, which is at a local establishment called 'The Trellis', is a group exhibition which the local art association I belong to puts on annually in October. It's called 'Home Grown 2012 - A Visual Feast' and started on October 6th and will run until November 3rd. There are some beautiful paintings in there, over twenty artists submitted this year, and as the owner remarked during the hangings, the artwork just gets better every year! Trellis Show 2012



http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Something To Do With Creepy
Starying Eyes, Glass art by
Teresa Young.
Another local exhibition I have the honour of being included in is occurring starting October 20th and ending on November 3rd, 2012. The exhibition is the result of a local competition called 'Creature Feature', a Halloween show!

Online Exhibitions and Competitions:
 Other exhibitions include the '14th Annual Abstraction Juried Online International Art Exhibition' a group show that results from the Upstream People Gallery's competition that ran last month. I managed to place as one of the finalists in this competition (yay!), gaining special recognition for two of my pieces: 'Chaos Out of Confusion' and 'The Ripple Effect'.



http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Exhale by Teresa Young
Another competition I entered online and managed to win in a month or more ago was on a gallery site called the 'The Abstract Artist Gallery'. Pretty close to my heart, considering my art style!The competition was titled 'The 2012 International Abstract Art Contest' and contained three separate categories where you could win, as well as an overall winner designation. I was lucky enough to win the best in category award for 'Whispers and Other Worlds' with my fantasy abstract piece 'Exhale'.



http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Mother Earth is Hiding by Teresa Young
The arts network in Ferarra Italy that I'm a member of had a competition over the summer, and I was a finalist in it! The Vivid Arts Network Conscious Creation 2012 Fine Art Competition had a good response for entries, so I was quite honoured to win special recognition for my painting 'Mother Earth is Hiding'. The really nice thing about this award is that the artwork was included in an article in the Art Tour Magazine October 2012 issue, check out pages 24 and  31 on the preview link here.

Two other competitions that I was recently notified about:


http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Undersea Fantasy by Teresa Young
Shadows an online exhibition with the Linus Galleries website, based in southern California, US. The online link is in the process of being created, so I have no link to attach to this one. The painting that placed in that competition is Undersea Fantasy, which I created a nice statement for. It's pretty special to me as it was a product of my nostalgia for scuba diving in my youth!
Years ago, I was quite fond of scuba diving in the northern Pacific Ocean, exploring near the smaller islands around the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The undersea plant life in that cool water is quite different from the bright and colourful areas found in the far southern seas.
Since the ocean is so much colder, the colours are muted, and shadows predominate. The diver experiences a subtle, yet dangerous atmosphere, which makes for an enticing and mysterious experience. In this abstract acrylic artwork, a mass of dark patterns and colours dominate to capture that almost forgotten allure from my past aquatic adventures...




http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Synthetic Sunrise
by Teresa Young

 Open Art Exhibition – October 2012  Online Gallery Light Space & Time. I was lucky enough to receive a special recognition award for my acrylic painting, 'Synthetic Sunrise'.
I really liked doing this painting due to the sunset palette of colours I ended up creating there. It's quite powerful to work with the dark and moody colours to envision a future where our sunrises are something out of a dark fantasy.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Killer Instinct!

Misty-the mouse slayer!
On this past weekend, my year+ old cat had an epiphany...  She caught her first mouse!
I live in a 100+ old house (renovated of course!), and the basement is separate, so mice in the fall can get in if they are determined. And believe, cold mice can get pretty determined!
So, every fall, they come in, and after about a dozen get caught in the mouse traps and it's done.
Mice are pretty gullible, they can't resist the lure of cheese, so the traps work, year after year... Stupid mice! Learn guys, learn!  Sorry, I digress...
Misty, (the cat!), heard a noise in the kitchen and figured out that it was terribly interesting. I watched her and saw her develop her stalking style, pretty cool.
Finally, the mouse came out and she got it!
You could definitely feel her excitement, and when my son whooped, she dropped it. A first-timer mistake, she'll never do that again!
The result of this is a cat that is totally obsessed...



http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Undersea Fantasy by me.
She looks at birds out the window, wants to KILL them so she can find out what they taste like! 
She's wandering around wired like she had ten cups of coffee, and only naps intermittently.
And believe me, naps were the point of her day up until now...
Unfortunately, lovely cat though she is, I believe she could go too far on this one...
She doesn't want to sleep at night, she wants back downstairs (NOW!). The mice might come back!



http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Cat Dreams by Teresa Young
Really, I'd leave her out all night, but she has a bad tendency to destroy plants when not supervised...
I keep telling her, they're not salads, but she isn't listening!

Back to Misty, she can eat, but sleeps intermittently, and as soon as the sun comes up, she figures, at last! And everyone in the world probably knows it's time to rise because of the racket she makes...

I'm really hoping the honeymoon phase ends soon, I'm so definitely NOT a morning person, and cute as she is, this could get old fast;-) 

What's the cure for a mousing obsession?

Monday, September 10, 2012

Trying to reprogram negative thought trains

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Enjoy Yourself by Teresa Young.
I've noticed myself getting more negative over the last couple of years. Which is a serious issue, because I start to feel like I'm pushing against a wall whenever I try to get something done!
I think this is pretty common for most of us as we get older, but I've got an opinion (when do I not!) that artists are more susceptible to loss of faith in themselves due to our sensitive natures. 
That sounds pretty bad, but I think it's a side effect of what artist's do how they are wired.
Maybe we're like racehorses? So skittish and high strung because we are overly aware of everything!


http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Path of Intuition by Teresa Young.
In view of that gibber jabber I just went through above, I decided to take a workshop course on how to change my attitude to life! It's called Blast Off! and it's run by Alyson Stanfield, who runs a site called Art Biz Coach. I've never done anything like this before, so it's an experiment that should be interesting to say the least!
Literally, she has us trying to derail our negative thought trains by working against them with our own 'affirmations' or 'intentions'. We have to create these and repeat them to ourselves daily in order to create the habit of thinking in new ways.
It really does make sense, think about how much time we spend thinking negatively, out of fear of things like disappointment, humiliation, pain and so on... A short time over the course of a day to try to counter that just makes so much sense!
Maybe we all need to just stop and take a breath once in a while and pat ourselves on the back, and affirm that we like and appreciate ourselves. It's not a bad idea!

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

My Journey Through Life, Evolution of an Artist's Style

My Journey Through Life, Evolution of an Artist's Style.

I've created a storyboard of stages in my life and the style of painting and drawing associated with that life phase.

Just a sort of interesting visual progression of how I, and my art style evolved over the years.

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Fear, The Spice of Life!

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Exhale by Teresa Young
It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

In theory anyway.  I mean really, it's a natural progression, right?  I started off drawing with crayons, just like everyone else in the industrialized world, and then I moved on to pencils, and pencil crayons, and so on...  I've used charcoal, solid graphite sticks, pens, and so on...

But I didn't count on FEAR.  After years of thinking about it in the back of my mind, I finally got up the gumption to go out and buy it...

I did install it, I really did! And then, fear took over, and I put it back in it's box... You know, because it's so delicate, I don't want to drop it, to step on it by mistake, whatever!

I suppose you might be wondering what I'm talking about by now...

It's a natural progression in our society, it only makes sense... It's a stylus and tablet digital drawing pad. And I don't have clue at this exact moment why I thought I could adapt to something so ALIEN to what I've always done when I draw!

But I have a system that seems to be consistent and sort of works for me. I force myself past my own paralyzing fears by plopping myself right in the middle of them so that I have to do something about them... It's how I learn how to overcome a phobia of water to learn how to swim when I was thirteen... And it wasn't a fear, that was a phobia! I almost drowned at five years old, so the phobia developed out of that, I had fallen into a wading pool and cracked my skull open, and ended up unconscious, face down in the water... I don't remember much, but I do remember the ambulance!


http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Fear of the Future by Teresa Young
So back to FEAR.  I have learned over the years, that the way to force myself into something I want to do and I am really afraid of doing is to get past that wall of fear somehow... Jump in that river, sell that house and move to where you want to be. Huck it all at thirty and go back to school and do something about it!  Just don't let it defeat you.

The really hard thing about fear is that once you conquer one, there's always, and I mean ALWAYS, another one waiting in the wings!

But life would be so boring without Fear!  If everything was easy, then it wouldn't mean a darn thing when you accomplished anything, no personal buy-in, no jump in your endorphins, no fear....

Ah well, I suppose I take that thingy-bob out of it's box soon and try some of the tutorials and chip away at my fear a bit!

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Web Changes Eat Away At Traditional Markets




Change is good, isn't it?
It seems to me that our world in the middle of fundamental changes in how things are bought and sold. I know that seems like the understatement of the century, but I take a bit of time to notice these things.
In past posts I've commented on how the world around us, and the society we live in has been affected by technology. Being a voracious reader, I've even bought books on the subject, trying to get my head around it.

Do we notice it when we live in it?
Can we really comprehend how widespread a change can possibly be, when we're living in the middle of it?
And make no mistake here, we are all in the middle of this, at least in industrialized countries. Otherwise, the global economy wouldn't have had such an immediate and great effect everywhere when it tooks such a major downturn a few years ago!

Remember when buying was different?
Think about this in a more personal, closer to home way. 

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Apathy Breeds Entropy, Acrylic
on canvas, by Teresa Young

When we walked through a mall in the eighties, we saw bookstores, music stores, clothing stores, specialty stores of every description possible lined up in the aisles. To go shopping, most of us went to a mall (be it strip or indoor!) and endlessly looked at merchandise, then decided on what we wanted and bought it. Simple as pie.
We could touch it, try it on, try it out, whatever. It seemed like the only way to do things at the time.
The new, shadowy world of buying stuff online was considered risky, and not many people did it. Just Internet geeks who understood how all those unwieldy search engines worked. Nobody else seemed to find it very convenient, and it was a novelty.

There were other things we bought as well, called services. And everyone used a middleman, such as travel agents (in the case of holidays and business trips!) and realtors (in the case of property transactions). We rented objects such as movies and cars from businesses designed to provide services to us. This was a large sector of local economies the world over.

A small thing happened
But I noticed something scary in the nineties.
It started slow, but eventually, everyone noticed it.
Suddenly, it seemed like every music store I'd ever frequented was having a closing out sale. Over a three or four year period, almost all of them went out of business.

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Dance, sketch by
Teresa Young.
I couldn't stand it anymore, and I asked the manager of one of my favourites just as he was closing his doors. Apparently, selling music CD's online killed the stores in the malls.  And only one or two international francises figured out what was coming, and moved part of their business to websites, assuring their survival in the coming storm...
Most of us didn't think much of this, at the time. It seemed pretty innocuous.
Just a glitch!
Little did we know, it was actually a sign of things to come for other industries...
The smartest entrepreneurs jumped on the Internet bandwagon and put their goods and services there before you could say 'Chapters', or 'HMV'.

Store after store goes online
It seemed to start with music stores, then bookstores, then most specialty stores. In order to survive, stores needed to get online to reach a wider market base. It made sense, little stores that cover a tiny niche market had low survivability prior to the Internet. They just couldn't reach enough consumers to cover their cost of doing business.

Want something? Google it!
We started to see Internet sites that catered to business sectors that were never widely seen previously. And Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, they all helped the consumer find these little stores.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born, and people began selling that as a service as well.

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Bookface, Acrylic on wood, by
Teresa Young.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias were now found in just about every garage sale. Who needed them? All we had to do was go to the Net and answer our questions quickly and easily.
Mind you, this created a whole new mentality, if we couldn't get what we wanted, be it information or stuff, we lost interest very, very quickly.
Marketing became an even bigger business than before as it modernized with the growth of the Internet.

A Brave New World! (with apologies to writer Aldous Huxley)
We all became quite used to stores being put out of business by online sites, and suddenly it became the way to do business everywhere. This actually wasn't a bad thing, as market reach expanded, the necessity to locate your business in a city declined. Now, many online stores are located in out of the way places, business is decentralizing, leading to the decline of cities as business centres. (Suck it up cities, it's about time, you did the same thing to country based industries and stores years ago!)
It was as if someone gigantic entity had through a huge spiderweb over the Earth, and it connected everything whereever it settled. The global economy became a daily reality.

Then Something Changed
But change isn't a static force, it just keeps burgeoning forward, like some sort of major organic life form gobbling up it's food source.

http://teresayoung.artistwebsites.com/
Surreal Locomotion by Teresa Young
We can never be sure where it started, it was so insiduous, but the first noticeable market casualty was the travel industry.
All of a sudden, Expedia© and Travelocity© were everywhere. Why bother calling a busy travel agent when you can book online? And the deals, no high overhead, remarkable flexibility, travel agents couldn't compete with the scale and convenience.
The travel industry was revolutionized by the advent of online software sites that allowed you to check the data on travel bookings, air flights, hotels, everything to plan your trips with ease. This destroyed the demand for travel agents, and only a small minority of existing travel agents survived the revolution.
This new type of industry focus is now happening in the Real Estate industry, boards that used to control the data of listings within that industry have been forced to downsize as Zillow© and Top Producer© consumer sites eat away at their market share. Large companies are forced to compete with small, online companies that adapt to the changing market more quickly thanks to Internet tools and flexibility of thinking. As it happened in the travel industry, consumers are starting to by-pass real estate agents, the middleman is starting to disappear.
It's starting to hit many industries in turn, art galleries, retails stores of any description, services that require some sort of coordination, these are all becoming transformed into something new and different via the Internet.

Mobile Technology Drives Change Away from Established Websites
Things are moving forward faster and faster, and none of us know where it's going next, as consumers rapidly adapt to tablets and phones as their interface of choice.
Since people are on the go constantly, they interact with websites all the time, and there's a whole new industry dedicated to optimizing for mobile devices, creating apps for download, and getting rid of the extra chaff on a site so the mobile users are attracted to a site and keep coming back.
For instance, on my artist website, two thirds of the traffic through the site is on mobile devices. And this is probably not confined to art websites, but to websites in general.
Speaking of art websites, with the swell of mobile surfing, artsites that get the most hits are the ones that have moved away from flash animations and static pages that don't adjust well to differing mobile screen sizes.
Maybe we all need to rethink our blogs and websites to adapt to a changing world.


Thursday, March 22, 2012

New Art For 2012

Also published on www.teresa-young.net:

http://dalifan-teresa.deviantart.com/art/Confidence-In-Motion-283290016
Confidence In Motion-Feb.2012-
by Teresa Young
Clown College shown at
ARTOUR-O in Florence.
I've been doing a fair bit of drawing and painting this year, getting my feet wet with interacting with other artists online.

I've really found that it can inspire you to create more art to look at what other creative people are up to online!
http://www.teresa-young.net/art/something-to-do-with-creepy-staring-eyes/
Something To Do With Creepy Staring Eyes,
Feb.2012-by Teresa Young

Earlier this year, I created a lovely acrylic painting an art contest run by Subaru Canada that finished with an exhibition at the Toronto Auto Show. While I didn't win, it was fun to get my artwork out there and have people see it in a non-typical setting! Confidence In Motion was my entry into the contest;-) I finally finished my glass painting of an eye, had a bit of trouble finding a title for the work, and in fact, I became attached to the working title I had put on it, so I decided to keep it!
http://www.teresa-young.net/art/sunrise-of-symbology/
Sunrise of Symbology, Mar.2012
-by Teresa Young.

http://www.teresa-young.net/art/entubation/
Entubation, Mar.2012
-by Teresa Young.
I was also part of a group exhibit at Artists Haven Gallery in Fort I Lauderdale FL during the month of February.
I exhibited a couple of paintings in a group exhibition in Florence at the beginning of March, Vivid Arts: A Retrospective, as part of the ARTOUR-O Florence 2012 Temporary Museum of Contemporary Art Auditorium al Duomo Via de' Cerretani, Italy.
Lately though, I've been spending time on DeviantArt, getting to know other artists. My site there has grown, and does contain a fair amount of work I don't have on my regular site. As the loading times and storage there seems to be a bit better for usability.
http://www.teresa-young.net/art/exhale/
Exhale, March 2012
-by Teresa Young.
http://www.teresa-young.net/art/a-particular-venom/
A Particular Venom-March 2012,
 by Teresa Young
Well, I think I'm getting overlong here on this post, or I'm really out of practice, so I think I will just add in the rest of my current 2012 art pieces for people to take a look at;-)




http://www.teresa-young.net/art/cut-to-the-quick/
Cut To The Quick, March 2012-by Teresa Young.

http://www.teresa-young.net/art/dreams-of-lothlorien/
Dreams of Lothlorien, March 2012-by Teresa Young.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Reading the whole night through!

Well, two nights ago I did it again...  Indulged my secret addiction and ended up staying up all night to do it.  You'd think by middle age it would no longer be a problem!

Nope, not talking about sex, but reading... I have a terrible habit of not being able to stop! I can stop a movie in the middle and take a break, I can stop a game after awhile and do something else, but I get a really good read going on a quality story, and bang! I'm done for.

When I read a great story it transports me into that world, I get connected to the characters and care about what happens. It's almost like I'm there, I literally almost feel immersed into it. I've never gotten that type of experience out of other mediums. Maybe I'm a freak of nature, but ever since I was eleven years old and I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a weekend, I've had a problem with moderating my reading habits...

Sure, read before you go to bed, it'll definitely help you get to sleep!