Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Happy Hanukah! Oh please just try to be joyful!
Sales Floor Promotions good until the 24th of December:
All pre-stretched canvas is 50% off!
All M.Graham Paints are 40% off!
If you buy a Nitram baton and refill, you receive a Nitram portfolio bag for free!
The Nitram Baton is a charcoal holder with a square, grippy barrel for holding Nitram Mignonettes securely while drawing. The charcoal advances easily, while keeping hands clean in the process. Soft, dark, and velvety smooth, Nitram Mignonettes lend themselves to the gestural flow and expression required when drawing from life. The Baton is 8″ (20 cm) long. The Mignonettes are approximately 3/16″ square x 6″ (4mm × 15 cm) long.
If you buy 3 M. Graham oil paints, you get one 37ml promotional* tube for free!
*the color of the paint is determined by which ones M.Graham pre-ships to the store, it is not by the customer’s choice.
Upcoming new product for 2022 from Ampersand
Oversized Gessobord
2″ DEEP Cradled 48 x 72
Museum Series Gessobord is a trusted professional quality prepared wood panel for artists. The superior quality acrylic gesso ground does not dull colors and the wonderful lightly sanded surface provides exceptional brush control with both oils and acrylics.
Made with premium warp-resistant 1/8” FSC-certified Hardbord™ and protected with an exclusive Archiva-Seal technology, the surface is acid-free, non-yellowing and truly archival. The cradled frames are handcrafted with premium grade 13-ply birch plywood for maximum stability and a clean, finished look. New oversized Gessobord panels are also available in 48 x 48 and 48 x 60. Made in the USA. Each Gessobord is handcrafted in Buda, Texas
The Art Store Art Show & Sale
For the month of December and the early part of January, the Art Store studio has been used as a gallery of our students and employee’s artwork. This will be an annual show and sale of any students’ work during the attending year for our classes and workshops.
Oils, acrylic, watercolor, bronze and resin sculpture and leathercrafting is available for all to see.
Prints are available as well as originals
Our present painting instructor, Jennifer Hamilton has brought in a series of paintings for all of us to view. You can also see oil, acrylic and mixed media pieces by her students.
Caroline Linscott has also given us a NEW whimsical owl watercolor to be on display and sale. She will be doing our watercolor workshop in January if you need to see her handiwork. Not pictured……..you will have to stop by.
This show will be open until 8pm on Saturday the 18th of December for late night shopping at the Art Store. The Den is also hosting a Skate and Art Event. Feel free to stop by.
CRADLED CANVAS BOARD
FREDRIX presents a firm, versatile surface for a variety of media. Our Artist Series Cradled Canvas Board is finished with our USA-primed poly/cotton archival quality canvas.
The canvas has a universal acrylic titanium formula that is suitable for painting in acrylics, oils, water soluble oils, alkyds, spray paints, paint markers & permanent markers.
Landscapes by Ojibwe Painter George Morrison Adorn 2022 USPS Stamps
The modernist “challenged prevailing ideas of what Native American art should be,” says the US Postal Service.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is unveiling a new collection of stamps honoring distinguished Ojibwe artist George Morrison, whose abstract expressionist works defied the largely exoticist expectations for Native American art and cracked open its formalist possibilities. Five reproductions of Morrison’s landscape paintings will be featured in the spring 2022 Forever Stamp release.
In the announcement made on the first day of National Native American Heritage Month, USPS named Morrison as one of the “greatest modernist artists and a founding figure of Native American modernism,” who “challenged prevailing ideas of what Native American art should be, arguing that an artist’s identity can exist independently from the nature of the art he creates.”
Born Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo (Standing in the Northern Lights) in Minnesota’s Grand Portage Reservation on the shores of Lake Superior, an era when Native Americans were barred from both voting and citizenship, Morrison attended the Hayward Indian School in Wisconsin, before returning to Minnesota due to poor health. In 1943, he graduated from the Minnesota School of Art and received the Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Traveling Scholarship to study at New York’s Art Students League. After receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris and Cote d’Azur in 1952, Morrison flitted between professorships across the country, before finally returning to Minnesota until his death in 2000.
Morrison’s career was marked by his formal experimentation with painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. Exhibiting with New York School painters Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, Morrison imbued his avant-garde works with the spirit of the landscape. Rejecting pictorial realism in favor of a formalism rooted in cubism and surrealism, Morrison’s colorful expressionist works and found wood collages sought to represent both organic figures and the persistence of both personal and cultural memory through abstract forms.
“I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe,” he declared in his memoir Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art. “That kind of magic, that kind of religion…A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.”
Although he described his intangible works as images with “no evidence of sentiment,” his horizon paintings — saturated with bright colors and sinuous lines — contain a radical sentimentality. To notice the changes in the sky and the earth and then regurgitate them back on the canvas to depict the natural world as a shimmering barrage of color is no small thing. “I can see the lake change by the hour, from blue to yellow to rose,” Morrison said of the lake outside of his studio along Lake Superior. “The basic thing in all paintings is the horizon line which identifies each little work as a broad expanse of a segment of the earth.”
The stamps feature miniature reproductions that will be unveiled by USPS at a ceremony slated for early 2022. “As always, the program offers a variety of subjects celebrating American culture and history. The vivid colors and unique designs of this year’s selections will add a special touch of beauty on your envelopes,” USPS Stamp Services Director William Gicker said in the press release. Hyperallergic
January Art Store Classes & Workshop schedule has been released!
Click on the image above to see our calendar
For January, the monthly classes of sculpture* and oil and acrylic painting continues. As well as a watercolor workshop has been scheduled.
To view the schedule of the classes and workshops and promotions, feel free to click the “events” button on our website or the image to the right.
*There has been a change with Sculpture Class on Saturdays. This class is now a monthly class with a minimum of 4 students need to be registered by the 6th of January for the month of classes to proceed. Single sessions will only be offered after 4 students have registered.
Artists Sunday organizers ‘not resting’ until the day is as well-known as Black Friday
You’ve heard of Black Friday and Small Business Saturday, but artists based in Seattle and elsewhere want to add a new shopping day to your calendar: Artists Sunday.
The campaign launched last year as a national public information effort to support local artists by encouraging people to buy local art on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
“The goal is to make Artists Sunday a part of the consumer consciousness, so it’s Black Friday, it’s Small Business Saturday, it’s Artists Sunday and Cyber Monday, and we’re not resting until that message is kind of universal,” said Chris Sherman, a Marion, Iowa-based photographer.
Artists Sunday, a volunteer effort run by Sherman and Seattle-based artist Cynthia Freese, gives artists and arts organizations access to free marketing materials to promote the day. They can also register to be featured in the searchable online directory of artists and organizations at artistssunday.com.
This year, more than 4,500 artists are signed up across the country — including 405 in Washington state and 121 in Seattle — for Artists Sunday on Nov. 28.
“We’re very thrilled with the number of artists across the country that are working with us,” Sherman said. “We love to work with communities, not necessarily just the artists, because the communities have a deep reach.”
Among the changes from last year, organizers streamlined the “tool kit” of marketing materials, including graphics for social media and posters, to be easier to access.
There were just shy of 4,000 artists signed up for 2020’s Artists Sunday, Freese said. After the holiday weekend, she sent out a survey to those that participated.
“We did send a survey out afterwards to ask how were your sales this year compared to last year and if they had a boost, and we had really overwhelming, happy replies from people saying the tool kit really helped them out and they noticed sales increased,” Freese said.
Sherman said the American Craft Council, a nonprofit located in Minneapolis, reported that on Artists Sunday last year, they saw five times the sales compared to a normal day of business.
Artists and organizations across the country can register on the Artists Sunday website for free and will be given access to marketing materials and a listing on the site’s artist directory, patron directory or partner directory.
Those interested in purchasing art this year can search for participating artists, galleries and organizations in their area from the directory on the website.
“The whole idea behind Artists Sunday is: Look, embrace this day as your own, and here’s the marketing materials,” Sherman said. “It’s really not about promoting us. We just want to be an enabler, we want [the artists] to be able to promote themselves and use the tools we give them to do that.”
Sherman said he got the idea after seeing an uptick in sales on his own site after Thanksgiving in 2019. He teamed up with Freese last year to launch Artists Sunday out of Seattle.
“Art is the connecting tissue for our local communities, it supports local economies, you know,” Sherman said. “Artists are local, they buy local, they spend that money local. So supporting artists is supporting that local community.” The Seattle Times
Gift Certificates are for sale!
Don’t Forget that our gift certificates are in $25 increments. Any artist loves to receive our Art Bucks for the holidays.
These can be purchased through our website on the front page by clicking on the Salvador Dali image.
Holiday Gift Ideas
Every year the Art Store brings in some great art themed gifts for others. Some have been listed above. The holidays also mean that we have the best studio furniture there is. The Futura craft station has returned as well as the Best Lobo easel for your painting and drawing needs. Other easels for the desktop and free standing ones are available as well.
Best’s Deluxe Lobo Easel is an easel to accommodate the watercolorist, pastel artist, and oil painter. It tilts forward to reduce glare and prevent dusting, and backward to form a table for gessoing, watercolors, and varnishing. Its retractable mast extends upward to handle a 62″ canvas, and folds down to a compact 65″ height. The painting tray can be adjusted from vertical to horizontal in just seconds. A hinged, oak veneer plywood shelf beneath the frame provides storage for books or supplies. Top and bottom painting trays have rubber grips to hold a canvas securely. It’s made of hand-rubbed, oil-finished, solid red oak. Some assembly required.
Studio Designs Futura Craft Station
This stylish table has a 38″ W × 24″ D (97 cm × 61 cm) tempered safety glass top with a 24″ (61 cm) pencil ledge. The tabletop angle adjusts up to 35°.
Features include three molded plastic slide-out drawers for storage.
The table is constructed of heavy-gauge steel for durability and includes four floor levelers for added stability. It’s great for drafting, drawing, or crafting.
Assembly is required. Covered by a 10-year manufacturer’s warranty.
Our annual Stick it to the Man Sale has returned!
Last couple years (2019 & 2020) was my return to the store, found to be in a very poor condition. All of which has been remedied including my health in many, many ways due to the community supporting my efforts to rebuild. Now its time to evolve and thank the community for the support over the last two years.
What is this sale? If you have ever owned and managed a retail store before, inventory management is everything. The goal of a retailer is to be at the same inventory value or lower than the previous year. Hence the “clearance” sale you see at the end of the year. If not followed, the “Man” taxes heavily the difference.
Why do this? The IRS will be hiring 87,000 agents for 2022. You know there will be audits coming for small businesses in this current business environment.
How? The store’s goal is to NOT pay tax on the same items we have had for years, especially from year to year. So better to liquidate the inventory than donate your efforts to the IRS.
When? Starting on the 27th of December, 2021, we will be selling all products from the sales floor at 25% off the listed prices. This is including the already clearance items and promotional items. This sale ends on the 4th of January. THIS IS AN AMAZING TIME TO USE ONE’S GIFT CERTIFICATES.
This 25% off is not on only one item, it is over the entire purchase. Large items, small items…….all of the them! As many as you need. Its time to stock up as you never know what may be happening in the near future. This even before the hyperinflation price increases caused by the current administration’s decisions are affecting our upcoming 2022 prices.
Better give back to my community of 42 years than give it to Brandon <eyeroll>. –Keith Kendall, owner and manager, The Art Store, LLC
