JANE KOOPMAN ART AND JEWELRY

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from a girl who has never been able to keep her room clean
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5/20/2016

First Irises of 2016

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My sweet mama picked these for me from her garden. Both she and the irises are magnificent.
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11/28/2014

Farewell, Brian Griffith. And thanks.

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Anyone who heard Brian Griffith play guitar knew he possessed something remarkable. It wasn't just mind-blowing skill. It was artistry, imagination, and exuberance. The music world far and wide has been blessed by his musicianship, and Hamiltonians have been proud to call him one of their own. A couple weeks ago, on November 14, Brian suffered a heart attack and died, way, way too soon. It's hard to articulate the magnitude of this loss. I don't know enough about music production to make a clever metaphor, but if I could compare Hamilton's music scene to an orchestra, Brian's death is like having an entire section missing. It just seems incomplete without the sound he created.

Brian Griffith guitar
photo, Ivan Sorensen
I got to know Brian's music a few years ago, when I produced a brief video spot about him with my Dofasco colleague, Sean. Dofasco lent us out to the Hamilton Music Awards to produce some short videos about different facets of Hamilton's music scene, and it was no surprise that Awards founder Jean Paul Gauthier wanted a spot on Brian Griffith. Sean and I showed up at Brian's house, set up the camera in his dining room, and proceeded to record over an hour of conversation. 

Besides his immediate friendliness, what first struck me about Brian was his uninhibited  and infectious excitement about music. He was passionate about Hamilton's music scene. He was giddy about the new musical ideas he was working on. He believed music should be experienced anywhere with anyone: on the big stage, at a Hess Village club, around the kitchen table, or on the front porch. In my opinion, Brian had the talent and the resumé - playing with the likes of Daniel Lanois, Willy Nelson, and Emmy Lou Harris - to have a giant rock and roll ego. Instead, he exuded gratitude and even awe that he was able to participate in and contribute to music culture. One of my favourite moments of that visit to his house was when he showed Sean and I the blanket Willy Nelson gave him, draped over his couch like a granny afghan. He got a real kick out of it.

After the interview, I spent a couple nights shooting video of Brian performing at some clubs in Hess Village. He played solo, and that weekend he also teamed up with Harrison Kennedy and Sharon Musgrave. As I zoomed in on his fingers dancing across the frets and strings, I could appreciate just how masterful he was. His face was alight with all the expressions of a truly passionate musician: smiling, grimacing, squinting, eyes closed with raised eyebrows (serenity, maybe?). I remember this great shot I got of him turning his head from side to side in time with the music, his dreadlocks flying: I shot it on a low shutter speed, so his dreadlocks were these blue-lit rhythmic blurs flying across the screen. And as I would pan across the stage, it was abundantly clear that everyone was having a great time up there with him.

The last time I saw and heard Brian Griffith play was this past August at the annual Greenbelt Harvest Picnic, a music festival organized by Daniel Lanois and Jean Paul Gauthier that celebrates the agriculture and arts culture of the Hamilton area. Brian was on small stage in the middle of the crowd, jamming with Daniel Lanois, playing with the freestyle agility and artistry that so typified his musical presence. It's a great image: Brian jamming with a few guys, surrounded by appreciative listeners, with the sounds echoing off Christie Lake through the trees.

As I said before, it's hard to express the immensity of this loss. Another Hamilton musician Tom Wilson said it well, I think: "Brian was really what Hamilton music was all about. He was about neighbourhood. He loved playing on his block. Nobody else could give what he gave us. He inspired generations." I guess we can just smile with gratitude that we were able to enjoy the gifts he so abundantly shared with everyone while he was here.

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8/27/2014

Delighting in the Sights and Sounds of the Greenbelt Harvest Picnic

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For five years now, Daniel Lanois has celebrated his love of the land, great music, and his hometown roots by hosting the Greenbelt Harvest Picnic at Christie Conservation Area in Dundas, Ontario. Lanois spent much of his childhood and early music career in Hamilton, co-founding the legendary Grant Avenue Studio, and now he returns home every August to bring together an impressive assemblage of musicians, local farmers and visual artists, and organizations that promote the preservation and enjoyment of the Greenbelt.

My husband, Dan, and I have attended the Harvest Picnic every year, and we always enjoy ourselves. It has a relaxed, family-friendly feel, just like a picnic should. People can go fishing and swimming with their kids, buy fresh produce, and sample culinary delights from a league of food trucks, all against the backdrop of 12 hours of live music. It doesn't get much better than eating a fried chicken and bacon waffle sandwich while listening to Ron Sexsmith and enjoying ginger ice cream as Bruce Cockburn sings.

This year, I showed up at the Picnic with my art and jewelry in tow. It was a great chance to meet people, see them interact with my work, and answer their questions. I think any art form takes on a different life when it's shared with others, and that was made abundantly clear at the Harvest Picnic, from the musicians on stage to me in my little pop-up gallery. 

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Gord Downie and his great big voice on stage with The Sadies
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My friend Tammy was a great help all day, charming booth visitors with her wit and winning smile.

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7/17/2014

A Sixth Grade Landscape - Part 2

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In my last post, I explained the story behind A Sixth Grade Landscape: an art piece I made out of trash items collected by sixth graders from Chedoke Public School. I visited the class in May to deliver the finished piece, and it was a highlight of my year for sure!

It was wonderful to see all the faces behind the unconventional art materials that went into this artwork. After I revealed the piece to the class, the kids came in for a closer look. Some of them could pick out the pieces they contributed: "that's my old friendship bracelet", "those are my old pencil grips". It was a delight for me to see the kids interact with this work that we had, in essence, created together.
upcycled art
Sixth Grade Landscape (photo, Jennifer Miscas)
After all the kids had a closer look at the artwork, their teacher, Jennifer, brought home what this collaborative art project was all about: "I hope this experience has helped you think more carefully about what we throw away, and to find creative uses for the things we might throw away every day". Her words so articulately echoed what drives so much of what I do in my creative work.

It has been such a thrill to meet a teacher and a group of students who are keen to be more creative and responsible in their approach to garbage. A few weeks ago, Jennifer sent me the article some of her students wrote about our project for their school newsletter. They've summed up the experience better than I ever could.

From Junk to Art!

Our teacher, Ms. Miscas, was inspired to take up a challenge she read about in Hamilton Magazine last summer. The article was written about a local artist, Jane Koopman, who encouraged people to begin collecting small throw-away items in a "Jane Jar". Once the jar was full, Jane would happily use the collection to create up-cycled works of art.

In September, Ms. Miscas challenged our grade 6 class to begin filling our own classroom "Jane Jar". She encouraged us to put items in the jar that represented us as 11 and 12 year old students at Chedoke School. By January we had filled our jar with broken pencils, hair bands, old toys, friendship bracelets etc...Jane picked up our jar and went to work creating a unique art piece just for us!

The reveal took place in May! Jane created a stunning picture that represented some of nature's most beautiful things: flowers, trees, and the sun, using many of the objects we collected. It was fascinating to see our pencil grips turned into blades of grass, and our play money turned into flower petals!

Not only do we now have a unique art piece to hang in our classroom, but we also learned that the smallest bits and pieces that we might normally throw away are valuable items to eco-friendly artists in our community.

We can't wait to start our next "Jane Jar"!!

Written by, Ahmad Hamadi, Mariam Rabaiaa, Kyra Guzylak-Messam, and Kailyn Walsh (on behalf of our grade 6 classmates at Chedoke School)

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7/3/2014

A Sixth Grade Landscape

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upcycled art
A few months ago, I embarked on a project with a sixth grade class at Chedoke Elementary in Hamilton. Jennifer Miscas, the teacher of this fine group of students, started a Jane Jar with her class at the beginning of the school year, and in January, she contacted me to see if I would create an art piece from the jar's contents. (You can read more about how this came about in my original blog post about the project's start.) I was thrilled and honoured by Jennifer's request.

I finished the art piece in May and delivered it to Jennifer and her class. And with my impeccable timing, I'm finally getting around to writing about it just as all the kids head out for their well-deserved summer vacation. Sorry, guys. Nevertheless, let me tell you the story of how some sixth graders' junk turned into fabulous art supplies.

This is how it all started: a big jar, full of lovely trash.

Jane Jar
I upended the jar and dumped the contents onto a tray to see what would emerge. The bright colours were what first caught my eye. With all the broken toys, school supplies, and accessories that are part of sixth graders' lives, there were lots of vibrant pinks, greens, oranges and blues. Then I picked out interesting shapes and lines, and an idea began to form: a sort of fantastical landscape. 

Some of the Jane Jar contents could be used as-is, but a lot of the trash had to be modified to become part of the artwork. For example, I coiled all the friendship bracelets, hair elastics, and ribbon-y bits into circles, and set them with acrylic medium. I did the same thing with all the loom bands that had made their way into the Jane Jar. I later strengthened the loom band swirls with a coating of epoxy resin. 
upcycled art
the rough sketch
upcycled art
repurposed friendship bracelets, hair elastics, ribbons, and loom bands
As you can see below, the state of my desk was rather chaotic as I made all the components.
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The Best Art Supplies Ever

Eventually all the garbage and repurposed components came together into this assemblage art piece, which I titled "Sixth Grade Landscape". Can you see what's in it? Keep reading to find out . . .
mixed media art
photo, Jennifer Miscas
In my usual forgetfulness, I forgot to take a photo of the artwork, so Jennifer kindly provided me with this one. I've numbered the sections so you can see what went into each area of the artwork:
1. I made the sun out of a lid from a sports drink, a plastic basketball from a broken keychain, broken pencils, and broken pencil crayons.
2. The trees in the background are made from friendship bracelets and broken pencil crayons.
3. The blue flower has a lot of components. 
  • I made the lighter blue "petals" by painting toy money and wrapping pieces around pen caps and pencil grips; pen and mechanical pencil parts form stamens of a sort. 
  • The dark blue petals are made from a correction tape dispenser, which I embellished with pen parts and an eraser. 
  • My favourite petals are made from a toy dinosaur and a lego man embellished with a mechanical pencil hat and a plastic gear at his feet.
  • The centre of the flower is made from a plastic gear and a piece of marker lid filled with tinted resin.
  • I made the leaves out of more paper money, an instruction sheet for a Webkinz toy, and a piece of lined paper. I painted the leaves green and outlined some of them with lime green nail polish. 
  • The dots around the flower are made from loom bands and pieces of pen filled with tinted epoxy.
4. The magenta flower also has oodles of components. 
  • The centre of the flower and the petal at the bottom left are both hair barrettes.
  • The upper right left petal is made from a jelly bracelet filled in with tinted epoxy.
  • I made the remaining petals out of pages from a little cupcake-shaped notebook, perfect for forming interesting petal shapes. All but one of the petals have pencil grips in their centres with stamens made out of springs from pens. The other petal has a hair barrette as its centre. 
  • The purple dots around the flower are made from a ribbon dyed with acrylic ink. 
5. The bottom of the artwork is covered with sliced up pencil grips and a sliced up pen lid. 

I think that's everything . . . 

You might notice that not all of the components I made out of the kids' trash made it into the final artwork. These pieces are destined for another art adventure in my studio, and I have carefully stashed them away until their destiny is revealed. I have done the same with any of the garbage I didn't use from the sixth graders' collection.

In my next post, I'll tell you about Part Two of this story: my visit with Jennifer and her delightful sixth graders. It was a great time, and I can't wait to tell you about it, so stay tuned.

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4/2/2014

Inspiration Every Day

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Every day, everywhere we go, our eyes take in images. Usually, our brains don't register the interest, beauty, or complexity of the things we see because we're focused on other things. As a result, we miss a lot of opportunities for delight, inspiration, and heart lifting.

So lately, I've tried to keep my iPad mini with me when I'm out and about so that I can capture the mundane and spectacular sights that invoke responses in me. In so doing, I'm creating a catalog of images to peruse when I need a creative recharge, an idea for a piece of art or jewelry, or simply some cheering up.

Here's a sampling from my stash . . . no enhancements, no Photoshop . . . just the straight goods.
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roof beams at a winery in Prince Edward County, Ontario
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atriummy place in downtown Toronto
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beautifully dilapidated garage doors in Hamilton, Ontario
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My niece likes to play with Photo Booth on my iPad. This is a particularly awesome result.
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a bird at the bank

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3/19/2014

Artistry and Community: Paper Making in Nepal

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It has been a while since I wrote a post about a Ten Thousand Villages artisan. This is something I like to do regularly because I so much respect Ten Thousand Villages for advancing fair trade and handcrafting, and I admire the work of their talented international artisans. Today's post is about a collective who makes something dear to my heart: paper!
Get Paper Industry owl
photo, Ten Thousand Villages

Get Paper Industry

Nepal Map
Get Paper Industry (GPI) is an award winning handmade paper cooperative that has been making paper and paper products in Nepal for almost 30 years. The cooperative started with 14 employees but quickly grew when it forged a supply agreement with The Body Shop International in 1989. GPI now employees over 70 people, plus an extra 700 seasonal workers, many of them women. The partnership with The Body Shop continues to this day, and GPI has other trade partnerships with groups like Ten Thousand Villages.

Nepal is among the world's poorest countries. Almost half of the country's working age population is unemployed or under-employed. Because of this, nearly 2 million people have left Nepal to seek work in other countries, leaving their families and communities behind. With Nepal's population of 27 million, GPI's employment opportunities might seem like a drop in the bucket. What stands out to me, though, is that GPI has provided job opportunities for such a long time through so much political and economic uncertainty, and the cooperative has provided employment for uneducated women, a demographic that typically has few employment opportunities in Nepal. 

When GPI started in 1985, they made paper primarily from the lotka plant (like this one): 
lotka plant
Get Paper Industry notebookphoto, GPI
The partnership with The Body Shop introduced GPI to various recycling methods. So for the last 25 years, the cooperative has made paper from waste paper, cotton discards from the garment industry, and agricultural waste like banana fibres, straw (jute), and water hyacinth. The GPI artisans create paper pulp by mixing the recycled fibres with water. The pulp is then pressed between wooden plates to squeeze out the water and flatten the paper, and the resulting sheets are dried in the sunshine. GPI has a waste water treatment facility to filter all the water used in their manufacturing. The entire process honours handcrafted quality and environmental responsibility.

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photos, Ten Thousand Villages
If making gorgeous paper products and providing sustainable employment wasn't enough, GPI also promotes community development through its sister organization General Welfare Prathisthran (GWP). Four per cent of GPI's revenue goes to GWP, which coordinates initiatives in four major areas:
  1. Girls' education: In Nepal, girls' education is generally not prioritized. GWP's ongoing response to this includes operating five primary schools specifically for girls.
  2. AIDS awareness: GWP has over 100 staff conducting AIDS awareness activities with sex workers, factory workers, police forces, truck drivers, and students. The organization also works to prevent trafficking of girls and women.
  3. Environmental conservation: GWP sponsors planting programs to rejuvenate vegetation in depleted areas.
  4. Income generation for girls and women: GWP runs credit and employment programs to help girls and women gain sustainable income. 60 groups involving nearly 1000 girls participate in income generating programs like chicken farming, goat keeping, buffalo keeping, cow raising, paper making, and hairdressing and esthetics.
Whoa. Amazing.

It's pretty easy for me to get deliriously excited about a piece of paper. But I can get downright passionate and weepy about a piece of paper that has dried in the sunshine after being carefully mixed and pressed by a Nepalese woman working for Get Paper Industry. There's a great deal of good, compassion and strength behind that delicately textured sheet of paper.
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3/5/2014

Collaborative Upcycling, Sixth Grade Style

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Chedoke Elementary
In a sunny and busy classroom in Chedoke Elementary School, a fabulous group of sixth graders has been collecting junk for me. Their wonderful teacher, Jennifer Miscas, contacted me earlier this year to let me know her class had been filling a Jane Jar, and she wondered if I'd be interested in creating an art piece from the contents. Um, yes!

Jane Jar
Jennifer encouraged her students to fill the classroom Jane Jar with the scraps, trifles and toss-aways from their own lives, along with the trash items I usually collect. So, in addition to the plastic bottle lids, candy wrappers and dried up pens and markers I'm accustomed to receiving from my garbage collectors, this sixth grade class collected such things as pencil stubs, broken toys (awesome!), worn out school supplies, random stickers, and frayed friendship bracelets (I'm sure the friendships have far outworn the bracelets). The jar is not only an assemblage of upcycling treasures, it's also a time capsule: a time capsule I hope to capture and honour in the artwork. I'm going to upend this brilliant jar, let the contents scatter all over my desk, and see what ideas spring forth.
Jane Jar
This collaborative project represents everything I love about upcycling and art: a bridge for strangers to meet, a chance to capture moments in time, an opportunity to take a pause - however brief - to think about what and how much we throw away. And it's the start of something completely new. Lots of the junk in this jar will emerge in the art that I'll create for Jennifer and her sixth grade class. The rest of it will eventually find a purpose in something else I make, be it more artwork or a piece of jewelry. The possibilities are curious, colourful, exciting and abundant!

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1/21/2014

A January Project: Organize my Art Studio

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art studio organization
I've been sort of dragging my feet into the new year because, throughout the closing months of 2013, I resolved to dedicate the month of January to getting myself organized. I'm not one for new year's resolutions (because I know I won't keep them), but January is the natural time to take stock of how last year went in my home and with my business, and determine what needs to get done in the months ahead. November and December were a flurry of activity, and I looked forward to January when I could take some time to assess. Now that January is here . . . I feel pretty sluggish about making plans and getting organized.

Besides business planning and attending to some household projects, I am trying to reorganize my art studio this January. Not that I didn't try, oh, maybe eight times already in 2013. Each time I went through a crazy busy few weeks, I got frustrated with the clutter and chaos that accumulated (see evidence above). This month, I'm determined to devote the time and energy to designing a creative space that will really work, that needs only minor adjustments in the year ahead. As I embark, it feels a little insurmountable.

See Jane Get Organized.

So, I've decided to document my haphazard journey through the headaches, blank stares, and exasperated sighs of sorting out a busy space so that others - especially other messy creatives like myself - might learn some things along with me.

I've thought a lot about what I need my art studio space to be. I've done a lot of research about storage ideas and room layouts (oh, how I love you, Pinterest), but when it comes down to it, the most clever or most beautiful ideas won't work if they don't suit my space and my work habits. So, I've come up with three qualities that my art studio must have: 
art studio
markers

1. Practicality

The things I use the most must be within easy reach (in close proximity to where I work, at a shelf height I can reach).

I need some empty spaces where unfinished projects or odds and ends can reside until I have time to put them away. Several organization blogs and books I've read say that you shouldn't have empty spaces where clutter can accumulate. Clearly, those authors are not as flawed as I am: my reality is not so orderly, so I'm going to accommodate my more casual working style. So there.

I have a lot of things to store in my studio: upcycled materials, tools, art supplies, books, shipping and packaging supplies, and jewelry making supplies, to name a few. I want to group them together according to their purpose so that it's easier for me to find things.

2. The Capability to Evolve

My work habits and projects change over time, so my storage and organization can't be so permanent that they can't be altered. That is to say, I don't think I'll ever have a studio with spiffy built-ins or wall-mounted shelves, a la HGTV. I opt for open shelves and an eclectic hoard of different sized containers that can accommodate my changing work.

3. Inspiration

art studio organization
I spend a lot of time in my studio, obviously, so it needs to be a space in which I want to spend time. It must be bright and comfortable, and most importantly, it must inspire my creative senses. For me, that means using quirky upcycled storage pieces, hanging other people's artwork on the walls, taking some time to add decorative flourishes to mundane storage items, and having an idea board where I can tack up random images/objects that tickle my fancy.

Starting at the End

It's hard to know where to start when I survey the mess of bits and pieces that call my studio home. So, I have tried to picture what I want the end result to be. My hours of Pinterest perusing have shown several possibilities that usually fall under two extremes.
The Magazine Art Studio Perfectly Staged for Creating . . . um . . . Conversation?
craft room
source: Pinterest
Seriously? White shag carpet? Imagine it in six months with paint globs, glue gobs and tiny pieces of paper all through it. Certainly, there is a place for everything, but as soon as the occupant of this idyllic aqua oasis takes anything out of a mason jar to do some work, they'll have nowhere to put it. Unless they wear a giant apron with big pockets. But that would be rather uncomfortable.
A Real Artist's Studio Where Chaos is its Own Form of Organization
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source: littlemichaelbigworld
True, this is more representative of my sense of order, but I would cry if I had to work in here. This is the art studio of twentieth century Irish artist Francis Bacon. I get a little short of breath just looking at this photo. How did this guy find anything? Perhaps he knew what was in and under each heap of stuff. I often use my creative nature as an excuse for my messiness, but this is a little extreme even for me.
I'd like my studio to be something in between these two extremes. I can sort of see it, so I've started setting to work. I'll keep you posted . . . .

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9/10/2013

2013 Greenbelt Harvest Picnic

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On August 31, I had the delight and honour of being part of the Greenbelt Harvest Picnic. Now in its third year, the Harvest Picnic is organized by Daniel Lanois, a prolific producer, songwriter and musician who was raised in Hamilton, Ontario. The event celebrates the farmers, growers, artists and artisans of the greenbelt in and around Hamilton, with over 12 hours of live music provided by up-and-coming and well-known acts.

This is such a fantastic event: it's like no other music festival I've ever been to. My husband, Dan, and I have attended the Harvest Picnic with family and friends for the past two years, and have always enjoyed its intimate and celebratory atmosphere. This year, I displayed some of my artwork and jewelry, and being at the Picnic in this capacity gave me a deeper appreciation for the festival's spirit. People walk around carrying stalks of garlic and bunches of kale purchased from the farmers. Parents and kids learn together about seeds and plants, and the various creative processes represented by the many artists and artisans. I met wonderful people of all different ages and walks of life, living in various parts of the region (and further afield), all feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about the place I'm so glad to call home.

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