I’ve been helping Deanna install and promote her first museum show, at the Grants Pass Museum of Art.  About 25 large pieces representing a year of creative output.  Quite impressive.  And an extensive installation project!

If you can’t stop by, you can see a little youtube of the installation and opening night here.  And more details and photos will be coming soon to deannamarsh.com.

Off the Path is now available for retail sale at the High Hand Gallery in Loomis.  I had given them a copy to play in the gallery and apparently had a number of inquiries about it – so now they have a stock of albums for sale.  My first retail outlet!  Deanna is a member of the gallery cooperative, and there are some amazing other artists showing there as well – my current favorite is Foothills by Merle Serlin.  Drop by, stroll the amazing gardens, have a top-notch lunch in the conservatory, enjoy the gallery, and pick up one of my CDs as well.

Have a gallery or other outlet near you that you think would be an appropriate retail outlet?  Let me know, I’m looking for more ways to share!

I’ve volunteered to play some live music for the popular Loomis Art Loop, Sunday afternoon 10th May starting after noon sometime and continuing for a couple of hours.  A perfect time to bring a picnic, enjoy the music, acres of blooming iris gardens, and see some of the new work created by local artists (including new tapestries by Deanna Marsh and jewelry by Doug Horton).

Jason and I will again be playing our eclectic improvisitory mix of jazz, new age, folk, and world music (violin and keyboards) for the opening of a new exhibit of figurative work at the Blue Line Gallery in Roseville.  Join us there on November 15th between 6:30 and 9:00PM.  I’ll be using this opportunity to start more actively promoting my Spontaneous Reflections podcast.  Come by if you can!

1) Project Auburn, a celebration of civic pride and elbow grease, in addition to renovating the classic State Theatre, has renovated the rear garden of OLAS, making it a great site for sculpture, relaxing, and entertainment.  I helped put the fence up and did some of the repainting a few weeks ago when hundreds of volunteers turned out to make Auburn a better place.  Kudos to the Rotary Club and other civic organizations for making our town a better place!

2) The Auburn Art Walk, a recurring evening of open studios and galleries, occurs every Second Thursday throughout the summer.

3) OLAS is celebrating the new landscaping, in conjunction with the Art Walk, with a show entitled From Earth To Sky, August 14th from 6:00 to 9:00 PM.

4) I acquired a new keyboard, a Yamaha CP300, at long last giving me some mobility to my music.  (And making it easier to get quality recordings, more about which later.)

The outcome of all these fortuitous circumstances?

Jason and I will be playing our usual eclectic mix of improvisatory world/new age/jazz/undefinable music for the event.

If you’re in the neighborhood, come on by!

Listen to this, and then check out this.  Wow.

Just launched last weekend’s project - a restyling of Deanna’s web site at http://www.central-park-studio.com.  The best new feature this round is the addition of a feed for her events and announcements, replacing a mishmash of events, news items, and pullouts that was hard to maintain.

I’ve come across a number of interesting variations on panoramas on Flickr lately, some of my favorites illustrated below.

Anyone intrigued by The Little Prince would naturally gravitate towards polar panoramas - in which a 360 degree panorama (or at least a nominally joinable one) is transformed into polar coordinates, resulting in your own tiny world to explore.  Makes the world seem much more manageable, don’t you think?

I often like leaving the edges of a panorama raw - the shapes can be quite interesting.  In this vein check out Mareen Fischinger’s panographic compositions - well over a hundred photos collaged to transform their rather mundane, colorless subjects into brilliantly rhythmic pieces.

And then there’s the physically created panoramas, like this polaroid emulsion lift panorama from Cℓea tecℓea.

Or this moody, slightly spooky panorama stitched (in a darkroom I think) from sequential but otherwise unrelated photos on a film roll. View it large.

Deanna’s latest gallery showing opens tomorrow at the 2257 Gallery.  In anticipation, I’ve updated her web site with photos of a number of pieces from the Wrapped in Light series.  These eight works were done in collaboration with abstract expressionist painter Sondra Hersh, and incorporate metal, fused glass, and acrylic painting in a way that I’ve never seen before, breaking the boundaries of a rectangular canvas in three dimensions.

If you are in the area and missed The Spark Expanded at the Artisan Galley in June, this show features many of the same pieces, and the gallery is open 7 to 5 Mon-Fri.  Worth a visit, maybe between 6pm-10pm on July 15th, when there is an artist’s reception.  See you there!

At right is one of my favorites, entitled Intent.

Well, I haven’t been blogging much lately, instead spending my evening hours designing and building a web site for my wife Deanna’s metal and fused glass sculpture.  And last Friday we finally launched the Central Park Studio website!

The site only contains a few of her many works, some of those which I had easy access to or already had workable photographs of.  We plan to photograph more and put up new pages every couple of days.

I haven’t built a website in a few years, and learned a few things:

• Now I understand better why people have been clamoring for transparent png support in IE.  IE7 supports it, but I had to sniff browsers and do tricky tricks to get it working in IE6.
• IE is much more forgiving than Firefox.  A small error (in one case a missing quote) affected IE not at all, but set Firefox on a serious tailspin.
• Up front investment pays off.  I generate the site from a small number of XML files using XSLT.  This allows me to quickly add new artwork, as I don’t even have to create a page for a new piece, just add a bit of metadata about the piece and the images associated with it.  Once I got this working well, adding new images was an almost exclusively Photoshop task.
• Photoshop drives me crazy.  And rocks!  For doing lots of image adjustment, color matching between images, sizing and so forth it does a great job.  I really wish however that the adjustment controls weren’t all buried in a submenu.  Have I overlooked a handy image adjustment palette for one-click access to all the adjustment tools?
• Buying a domain name and hosting space is easier and cheaper than I would have believed.  I set aside a day for it, and the site was up and running, including email, within a couple of hours.

Anyway, check out the site, link to it ;-), and send me comments.  I’ve only tried it on IE7, IE6, and Firefox.  I’m sure there are many improvements that can be made (I’ve already got a list going).  Enjoy!