April, 2015 | Beverly Shipko, Artist

Oreo Cookie Contest 2015

April 30, 2015 by Beverly

Part of the fun of the Oreo Cookie Contest is officially unveiling the winner from the previous year. Here it is. Congratulations to Samantha who took a funky bite out of this Oreo! (And it sold too!)

“Samantha’s Bite – 2014 Oreo Cookie Contest Winner”, by Beverly Shipko, Oil on cradled panel, 8 x 8 inches.

This year, the annual Oreo Cookie Contest was an overwhelming success. As you can see, we got a lot of participants. Now it’s time to get to work photographing these entries, and whittling down the finalists.

I love to watch people as they take their bites. The expressions on their faces before and after are priceless. Here’s Blake, who comes back year after year, and arrived this time with suggestions on how to market my work online. His entry which has a lot of potential – teeth marks and all!

And these are the girls who couldn’t stay away. Their enthusiasm was contagious – and they kept coming back for more (more for the sugar than the art).

For the first time, this event was featured in two online calendars.

http://rivertowns.dailyvoice.com/events/kids-family/906537/oreo-cookie-contest

Annual Oreo Cookie Contest

By popular demand, the Oreo Cookie Contest will return next year. And I’m already looking forward to being inspired by the entries as I am this year.

Time to get to work!

Open Studio 2015

April 29, 2015 by Beverly

Thank you all for coming to my Open Studio last weekend! You helped make it a wonderful weekend event on so many levels.

First of all, it was just plain fun to see old friends and patrons.

And then there were loyal Oreo Contest contestants, like Blake, who came back for another try year after year.

Part of the beauty of being on the RiverArts Studio Tour is meeting new people, and we had a steady flow the entire weekend. My friends Eva and Steve even brought their friends (middle couple) from Australia!

It was such a luxury to spend all weekend talking about art, past and present. We continued the art dialogue we had begun last summer with our first visitors, Barbara and Howard (and their friend Linda on the right), who we met at the Seward Johnson Retrospective at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ.

Barbara made the first purchase of the weekend with Jay’s Blueberry Tart.

It was an exciting weekend that opened the door to a variety of potential new ideas and opportunities – everything from future commissions, to a request for private lessons, the possibility of another demo and talk, and an offer to explore the possibility of licensing my images to an upscale clothing company.

A great weekend by any measure. Until next year. But please don’t wait a year to stop by this blog and check in.

Simple Solution for My Open Studio

April 19, 2015 by Beverly

With one week to go before the Open Studio , I am confronted by the usual problem: Too many paintings and not enough wall space.

Since the floor plan of our home is open and airy, the walls are chopped up. So how do you hang all the work you want to show? Maybe you can’t – at least not on the walls.

It turns out that there was an option that I had never even considered in past years. When Beverly from Gallery 52 came over to pick up paintings for her window display of my work, I quickly put some of the small paintings on the front stairs to take this archive photo to go with the consignment form.

I worked fast and didn’t think about what I was doing. Then Beverly suggested using the stairs to display my work during the Open Studio. It’s a well-lit location and the work “greets” people when they first walk in.

Wow, I thought, as I stopped dead in my tracks. This is such an easy and obvious solution to a problem I have had for years. Yet this option never even occurred to me.

And those stairs sure can hold a lot of paintings that otherwise would have stayed in boxes. Thank you, Beverly! It will be fun to try something new this year and experiment with possible arrangements.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are right in front of you.