4″ x 6″, gel pens

4″ x 6″, colored pencil

In an interesting move, Google now asks notable artists to provide them with free art for its new browser, Chrome.

The best part is that Google solicits this type of work from notable artists like Joe Ciardiello and Melinda Beck. If it was general crowdsourcing, I could understand it somewhat - emerging illustrators or hobbyists don’t mind to work for exposure only, just go look at those contest places all over the web. It’s still means using and abusing people to me, but since those people don’t seem to mind I don’t particularly care either. But to approach someone who worked for the likes of ESPN and Rolling Stone and ask for a freebie is an insult. Those artists had plenty of exposure already and were paid for their work too. It’s not as if Google could not do the same.

So maybe crowdsourcing does have a nasty effect on the rest of creative community: if so many artists have no problem with working for free, the rest are expected to cave in and do the same, accepting it as a new norm.

The festival moved to the Pioneer Memorial Park, Mountain View this year. It’s a smaller place than the grounds of the Triton Museum (or so it looked to me), but the park is right next to downtown Mountain View - a place that is more popular than Triton. No, seriously, many people have no idea what the Triton Museum is or even that Santa Clara has an art museum.

Fine Arts League of Cupertino and Campbell Artists’ Guild, to clubs to which I belong, were sharing a lawn at the edge of the park. I was showing with FALC and chatting with CAG friends too - nice!

Kushlani Hall only brought her jewelry; no encaustics, no oils or oil pastels. Her jewelry was gorgeous, of course.

Saw the finished piece that Holly Van Hart was doing at the FALC demo in May. It’s changed a lot, and I still liked it very much. She also had a larger painting similar to that one, and they complimented each other nicely, hanging on the same panel.

Haven’t seen what Donna Orme was doing for almost a year, so it was a special pleasure to stop by her display. I am yet to see a single monoprint of hers that I didn’t like. I can’t even pick a favorite because if I turn my head and look again I’ll change my mind. Her work is that awesome.

Found some great new art that I haven’t seen before: graceful watercolors by Cheryl Kampe and dreamy acrylics by Nance Wheeler.

4″ x 6″, colored pencil

4″ x 6″, colored pencil

The third weekend was the quietest out of all three. There were almost no visitors, very few people even walked by. Maybe it was the heat, maybe something more interesting was going on in the neighborhood, maybe we didn’t do enough to promote the event.

Slava and me were showing at the Great American Framing. Marsha Sims, Kathy Sartain, Cathy Zander from the 1st SVOS weekend at Community School of Music and Arts were here again, and I met other artists that I don’t remember seeing before: Lei Min and Linda Salter.

Lei’s oils are beautiful and energetic. She used to do commission portraits and showed me an prospect from her solo exhibit with awesome portraits of Taiwan, Philippine, and Malaysia prominent figures and of their family members.

Linda Salter paints and draws many different subjects: great portraits, still life, figure drawings, landscapes. She seems to work in every medium available - oil, watercolor, graphite pencil, pastel, ink - and always experimenting. She was doing nice small ink drawings while in the gallery. Made me want to pick up my ink and brushes again.

We still had some guests, some good conversations with them and with each other, and I saw the local University Arts store for the first time. To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. It’s huge, it’s full of great stuff, and what I can’t or won’t use myself is still fascinating to look at. I am not going to their San Jose store, ever.

Got my horse photos, thanks Irina!

4″ x 6″, pastel pencil

6″ x 4″, pen and ink, colored pencil

I liked Holly’s work since the first time I saw it when she joined FALC. Today she did a demo for the club, and it was a great one. Holly painted an abstract city with a palette knife, using a photo of New York as a reference or, better to say as a starting point for her artwork. I read about this technique before, but not a single author pointed out that it was noisy. Holly said that music helps to get over it, and I would imagine after some time you just stop paying attention to all the funny sounds that a palette knife makes. For me, the way Holly was going through the demo was of big help too. She explained her process, eagerly answered all question, and eventually got the audience involved into the creative process - people were making suggestions, calling her to the back of the room to take a fresh look at the painting, sharing their experience with oil and abstract art. It got very lively, and when the time was up I didn’t want to leave.