Art Every Day Month 2016

Art Every Day Month is here again! I’ve been participating for most of the past 11 years (the first time was way back when I lived in Switzerland).

This year is going to be a stretch for me, but it’s also a good way to challenge myself. In a few days my husband will be checking into the hospital in Glasgow for a stem cell transplant to treat his relapsed Acute Myeloid Leukemia. I’ll be away from my studio in Edinburgh for most of the month, so most of what I make will probably be in my sketchbook, and I probably won’t get around to posting it here every day. But I will push myself to make at least a few marks on paper each and every day this month. I think it will be good for my sanity to do so.

The above piece is a study for a series I’m working on which is tentatively called Person in Place. I’m setting out to explore relationships between human beings and location. Location can refer to one’s position on earth, or it can be relative, such as one’s physical proximity to another person. I’m drawing on imagery and narrative from a variety of sources, including photos and histories of immigrants at Ellis Island (where my great-grandparents passed through), figure drawings, my sketches and photos of cities and countries, and other sources. This series will be exhibited next August in Edinburgh, so it has a fair amount of time to evolve and develop as I play with the theme. We shall see where it ends up.