Art Bead scene has been holding 6 week challenges this year and today is the last day to post for the Art journey II. Yes, by the skin of my teeth, I have posted my pieces in the group’s facebook album yesterday. Now, for the blog post, let me elaborate a bit more about the challenge, the inspiration and my creations – the Zaretsky flower necklace and Zaretsky snow flower necklace.
ABS 2020 – Art Journey II
The inspiration for ABS 2020 – Art Journey II comes from Victor Zaretsky’s paintings. Victor Ivanovich Zaretsky (1925-1990) was a Ukrainian artist who married activism with art. The favorite themes of “Ukrainian Klimt” were women and nature. The women, luminescent were surrounded by flowers, and dabs of paint perhaps embellishing them. One of the reasons, that I love art based challenges that it exposes me to new artists and art movements all the time. Even at design school, we rarely study postmodern artists. When we do study them, the list rarely goes beyond Pollock, Duchamp, Warhol, Lichenstein or Leibovitz.
As a consequence, when I looked at Zaretsky’s paintings for the first time, Their likeliness to Klimt’s work hit me. I could only see shapes of paint and flowers. That transformed into my base ideas for jewellery. I wanted to use colourful beads of various shapes. The focal components could both look like flowers, but be about flowers.
Zaretsky flower necklace
This first piece is inspired by Nastya painting. Even with her puff sleeves, she has a pear shaped body that I felt could be only shown through a teardrop. I had a cut piece of metal left after I made the Strawberry thief arts and crafts necklace. It was the perfect shape and size, just a bit of a colour fade. I did a bead haul just before the country lock down, so I had a whole lot of beads to play with. The yellow beads are agates and red barrels are stone. However the rest of the beads are glass.
Using patina inks, I painted the metal in 3 layers. I started with the base for the yellow and red flowers. Then I did the shading for the flowers and leafy greens. The third layer was to add blue to the leaves and gold to the flowers. As my metal piece was beginning to rust, I applied gold to the circumference of the tear drop. I blended it in using patina sealant, sealing the piece in the process. I used the rich gold Dora hybrid metallic from the brand cadence. It is the best gold paint that I have ever worked with. I recommend it to everyone.
Zaretsky Snow flower necklace with colourful beads
The Zaretsky snow flower necklace inspired by the Kalina Snow painting. I have created the pendant – a painted and form folded copper component. The prints on her dress and the red flowers in the painting are what influenced this art component and the necklace.
Don’t the large spotted glass beads give the impression of snow? does anyone know the name of the technique? The pendant is painted with a combination of Pebeo Prisme Fantasy, patina inks and alcohol inks.
This challenge was an opportunity to get back to metal work. Now that Bluprint (previously Craftsy) is giving away free classes, I have started to watch classes to increase my knowledge base. I am watching Settings for Every Shape at the moment. Use this link to sign up for free and you can watch all 1300 classes for free till April 9th. Some categories are sewing, knitting, photography, paper crafts, jewellery, cooking, embroidery and painting.
I hope you found it interesting
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