meredith cutler :: arts marketing :: artist

Never one to underestimate the motivational power of a good deadline, I've been hard at work planning my upcoming wedding and still managed to cook up some tasty Crostini goodies for the City Sampler: Boston, to be released February 16th!

The good folks over at The Sampler have officially shifted shop from SF over to Boston, my native city. A shout-out to Alison, who is now heading up their operations (and possibly thinking it's about time for some warm weather and a good sail...). Stay tuned...Groundhog's Day approaches.

I love arriving at my studio after the holidays, only to discover that a demonic crew of maintenance men have trompled through with their elephant (under the auspices of installing a heater) and destroyed everything!

Nothing like scraping solder drippings off of your works in progress instead of actually making progress on them.

Anyway, I received a big box of make-up cookies from management, but the thing that finally made my day sweet was this amazing, 10 foot wide pastel portrait of Michael Jackson that the moving company in my building was shuffling into storage for a local radio magnate. Obviously I snapped this shot with my cell phone, in the dark, but I had to capture it for posterity - you don't see something like this twice in life:

Not that I'm a computer geek, but I've been spending an inordinate amount of time scrolling through PHP files, editing auto-generated HTML, and updating my database these last few months. It is a very strange kettle of fish, let me tell you...since I'm usually painting with my left hand as I type with my right...or cutting out gocco prints on vellum with my right foot as I type with my left...you can imagine it's a bit of a disaster in my studio.  I've decided to throw caution to the wind and just upload the g*d thing to my webhost already, and get back to the finer things in life, like playing with paper dolls...

If all goes well, you'll all be reading this instead of this, and we can all get to know each other a little bit better! Thanks to all of my browsers for bearing with me while I learned how to reinvent the wheel...and thanks to Drupal for being the vehicle (that enjoys driving very fast, with me behind the aforementioned wheel.)

I've been itching to find a method for exploring surface design that doesn't necessarily involve a computer for some time now. When I did some research into the Print Gocco, I realized it could be a great tool for me. I purchased my Gocco from Liz at Felt Cafe East back in October, and have been getting to know my new tool over tha past few weeks.

First, I designed some holiday cards, as a seasonal project that would enable me to illustrate AND test the gocco on a branded imprint for my Crostini line of goods:

I really liked the way that the screen printing process allowed for me to brand my items, yet still retain this really hand-worked feel.

After my PG-5 and I got more acquainted, I could see so many uses for it's quirky, yet professional replication qualities. I've been printing on high-quality vellum this week, as a way to create the girls that I usually draw painstakingly in permanent marker. This is for a new canvas I'm working on:

I mixed the oil-based ink color myself - a fantastic, flat "off-black" to more closely match the Sharpie permanent marker color that you see throughout my Follow The Leader series. That settled, then, unfortunately, I had to cut them all out. I've named her Darla Sue...