My very kind brother Alpha helped me deliver my show to Dixon this morning. It was exciting to see all the pieces all dressed up and ready to go out on the town. It was even more exciting to pull up behind a huge Rodin statue to unload my work. I continue to be thrilled at this opportunity to have an exhibition in a museum, the kind of museum that has huge traveling shows by Rodin come through.

I got a sneak peek at part of the Southern Impressionism show in the main gallery, and I can't wait to see the whole thing. The museum reopens Sunday, November 1, after its summer of renovation, and my exhibition will be a part of that.

The official reception for my show will be Thursday, November 19 from 6-8, with my old friends the Tom Lonardo Trio playing jazz. I can't wait. I'll also do a gallery talk on Wednesday, November 11 at lunch time, talking about my art hero John Constable, how he shaped my art and subject matter and work habits. I'll also talk about the process of making multi-color prints with multiple blocks. It's a slightly arcane process for most of us, but great fun.

So this happened today. I went to Dixon to have a final meeting before my exhibition, and Laura Gray told me there was a banner of one of my prints out on the corner of Park and Southern. The plants have eaten my name a bit, but it is a total thrill to see my work blown up and out on a museum banner. A career moment for me.

It's funny, because this morning on my walk I noticed a spotlight of a sunbeam picking out one tiny sapling in the Old Forest. I took a photo and posted it on fb. It felt like such an encouraging image that we all get a spotlight at some point in our life. This afternoon when I saw the banner, I flashed back to that spotlight, feeling like it had been an omen. I just read The Alchemist last week, and it talks about being open to and aware of the omens in your life. It feels superstitious to me to wait around on them for decision making, but a wise man of my acquaintance today said, when I told him of my feeling about an omen, "A lovely thought. It's good to cultivate a sense of wonder wherever you go." I love that idea of being open to wonder around me. And, as E.M. Forster said, "Only connect."

A lovely day.

I just finished the St. Francis print that has been in my head a good while now. I managed it in time for the Blessing of the Pets at Memphis Theological Seminary, and I was glad for them to use it in the worship.

It's a very personal print. My housemate Neil is representing St. Francis. He also does a rocking Jesus in his bathrobe, patient man. That's my beloved Mr. Darcy, of course, receiving the blessing. My sister's donkey Crispin and one of her llamas is represented (the llamas were off campus last time I was there, so this is more of a nod to her having them than her particular llama, since I couldn't sketch and photograph it. The cat is Mikey, once of the best cats I've ever known, who now lives with my ex but is still in my heart. And the baby owl was the reason for this print. A friend of Neil's rescued it and brought it to visit one day. I photographed and sketched it, and a friend of mine suggested that instead of Jesus, Neil would look great as Francis with the owl on his shoulder. So the print was born.

It's on 14x22" paper, and I've just put it up in my online store at https://squareup.com/market/martha-kelly-art. I also printed several just after getting home to my printing press so I could have them at the Pink Palace Crafts Fair in Memphis this weekend. They should be dry enough to package tonight. I'll be out there in the demonstration area showing printmaking the next three days. 10-6 Friday and Saturday, and 10-5 on Sunday.

I've been proofing as I carve, playing with colors. I think I may do a variable edition on this. The solid red is a bit too bright, but a darker red might be fun. I may also try one in blues and greens and purples as well. But so far, the top one is my favorite.

It's been fun to get my Dixon show finished and be able to work on something fun and just for me. This is an aspirational print for me. I'm not there yet in achieving this, but there have been some changes in my life over the last month or so that are moving me closer to this goal, which feels very good. So here it is. A wish for all of us. Less tempest and more teapot. 

I saw this phrase a while ago (I wish I could take credit for it), and it appealed to me on several levels. This print popped into my head because I love polka dots. After a long serious bout of printmaking doing landscapes for my show at Dixon, I decided to treat myself to a little light hearted work. 

I'm still working on the bottom part, and I want to play with colors when I get the block finished, but it's far enough along to show you what I'm up to this week. 

This is a print of the forest path I walk every morning. I thought I had it ready to print final copies of (I was intending to go with the middle option above), but in my jet lagged state after Paris, I accidentally omitted the green block and ended up with the top left. I realized that the cool green was too jarring, and I liked the warm shades, so I tried it with the dark red leaves at the top right.

They were too dark, so I tried the three below, and I think I'm settling on the left-hand version for subtlety.

Then I decided I should try it in green as well. Facebook friends were lobbying for a series of different seasons. I think they were right, and I'd like to maybe have it as a set of three. Final prints still to come.

Dixon Gallery and Gardens has their main museum building closed for renovations this summer and was looking for some classes to offer to keep the education program going during that process. They asked me if I would teach a printmaking workshop in my studio, since I have a printing press there, and they said they would bring the tables and chairs. I was delighted, and the workshop was this past weekend with eight students.

I hadn't taught it before, but the two afternoon format turned out to be perfect. I asked everyone to come in with a black and white image or two that they would like to make a print from, and I was impressed with everyone showing up with drawings or photos to work from. They progressed from tracing the drawings to cutting the linoleum blocks, transferring the drawings onto them, carving, prepping their paper and setting up registration, and printing. Everyone did one full print and went home with a small edition of prints, and some people started a second print to take home and keep working on.

Block printing is one of the few forms of printing that you can do at home without a printing press. I did three years' worth of professional prints rubbing on the back of paper with a wooden spoon, and I wanted everyone to be able to go out and keep printing if they wanted to. Everyone did some printing with the spoon to get the feel of that as well as trying my press, and the class materials included a set of carving tools and some other basic materials that they could keep and use at home.

It was such fun to have a whole group of excited and motivated students in my work space all weekend. I work alone at home for much of my work time, and it was such fun to have a neat group of people to spend the weekend (two four hour afternoon sessions, which was just about right) making art with me.

I was also deeply impressed with the quality of the prints everyone made. It was exciting to see all of these progress from the first drawings into finished prints. Here are the prints created by the class.

I would really enjoy teaching this workshop again and am pondering hanging out my shingle for it again in January. Let me know if you'd be interested in joining me for some printmaking.

Dixon asked me to come up with some thoughts about my upcoming exhibition that they can use for the newsletter. Here is what I came up with. (Above are color proofs of the print I created for the exhibition poster. That was way fun to do.)

"My work and work habits both are highly influenced by John Constable, my favorite artist. I took the title of my show, "My Own Places," from his letter to a friend in which he writes, "I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." Constable did not follow his generation on the grand tour to paint Italy. He painted the river he grew up next to, his village church, his home, his best friend's home at Salisbury, and later Hampstead Heath just outside his door.

Similarly I spent the first dozen years of my career painting the landscape in and around Memphis. I could easily say that my family's farm and Overton Park made me a painter. Constable was also one of the first painters to do finished paintings on site instead of just studies, and his practices influenced the Impressionists. He also did hundreds of small studies of clouds and plants on site to inform his studio work. All of my work starts with an onsite sketch or watercolor. Any print I create grows out of work I created sitting in that place, recording that moment in time and what drew me to the scene.

A summer in Greece in 2003 gave me the gift of painting beautiful and exotic places, and I have enjoyed painting on my travels in the years since. But I was delighted to be invited to create a show of current Southern landscapes to complement the exhibition of Southern Impressionists that Dixon will bring to town this fall. It's a beautiful opportunity to refocus on the scenes that made me a painter and which continue to delight and enrich my work. In the tradition of Constable, the places in the this show are my "heart places." Overton Park, where I walk daily; my family farm; a farm in North Carolina that have visited and painted through the years; and Dixon itself. Growing up in Memphis I have been amazed and schooled by the exhibitions here while I simultaneously kept painting the lovely gardens. Dixon has helped make me the artist I am, and I could not be more honored to create a show of my home landscapes to hang in the place that has inspired me over the course of my life."

I've been in and out of town and also working on some other projects, so this print has been limping along for a few weeks. I was really ready to get it all put together in a first color proof and see what it's looking like. With some prints I have a pretty good idea as I'm going along, but others are harder for me to visualize, and this is one of the latter.

I wish I'd been a little more conservative carving the "windows" in the green areas. I would have liked a little more shadow on the undersides of those areas. There's no going back in carving -- once it's gone, it's gone. But I can try some shading in the ink to see if that would help.