Now showing at The Stirring Art Gallery

The Church by Jennifer White 

Artist Statement:
Jennifer White’s work reflects a deep interest in the church, particularly in the way church families work. Drawn to studying the seven churches in Revelation as a base for her work, Jennifer explores obstacles the church faces, and the different conditions, positive and negative, church families can find themselves in. For more information about the series, please visit www.squidoo.com/churchandart.

"Neither Hot, Nor Cold" - Church in Laodicea by Jennifer White

Artist Bio:
Jennifer White is a professional artist living in Olive Branch, Mississippi. She graduated from Union University in Jackson, TN with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art. Her goal as an artist is to create art that touches another others and changes them for the better. White finds blueprints to be visually inspiring and often uses lines and grids in her paintings. More than a simple element in her painting, White uses the lines as a symbolic reference to God’s plan and role as “Divine Architect”.

Expressions of The Stirring 

"The Stirring" by Richard Fudge

 

Art is an integral part of the Stirring. It’s presence in the service draws people in to one of the many ways others can use their talents to worship God. For The Stirring’s 10th anniversary, 10 artists were asked to each complete a painting expressing The Stirring in their own unique style. What do you think of when you think of The Stirring? How would you visually express the experience or character of The Stirring? 

Participating Artists:
Annalisabeth Craig; Alberto Cabrera; Chris Reed; Gail Wilkins; Glory Hamilton;
Jill Harvey & Hope Special Needs Students; Jeff Rower; Jessie Miles;
Kathy MacDonald; and Richard Fudge.

Both Opening Sunday Oct 9th for The Stirring's 10th Anniversary 

We're celebrating 10 years of The Stirring this Sunday! It will be a night of art, Stirring worship and special music highlighting the years of memories that have brought us through this decade. Eli Morris will touch our souls with a message remembering the foundation on which The Stirring was built while looking with great anticipation to what our future holds.

We'll host an Afterburner in the Foyer following the service complete with snacks and live entertainment. This is a great time to browse the Gallery upstairs featuring local artist, Jennifer White, along with other beautiful new art. Bring a friend and let God use His music, message, art, community and atmosphere to create a stirring inside of them.

We will open the doors around 5:20 PM and as always coffee, tea and StirringKids* is available during the service. If you are unable to attend that evening, be sure to follow the live Twitter feed (@TheStirringHope) and "Like" our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/thestirring). Please consider joining us as we celebrate you, the community that is The Stirring.

*Please pick up your StirringKid prior to celebrating with us at the Afterburner.

Stirring at Hope Market Square

Please come check out The Stirring's booth at Hope Market Square tomorrow! We'll be selling original art by many of our Stirring artists and brand new Stirring merchandise. Visit us in the Gym near the stage. See you there.

2011 Art of Caring

After sketching out a t-shirt design for ShareHope's Walk of Remembrance and Hope (above), I decided to go ahead and take the sketch all the way to completion for this year's Art of Caring donation. The painting is based my piece Not Alone, a 9ft x 8ft painting is apart of the art collection at the Baptist Trinity Hospice House & Kemmons Wilson Family Center for Good Grief.

"Better Near to You" by Richard Fudge.
Donated to the Baptist Memorial Health Care Foundation's
annual Art of Caring reception and silent art auction.

Recommended listening: "Near to You" by A Fine Frenzy

This is my 5th year to participate. It was a real honor to participate and donate my work to such a great cause. It's also fun to see a bidding war erupt over your work. It's a wonderful compliment. It was almost as enjoyable as hearing compliment after compliment paid to my girlfriend and the lovely dress she was wearing. The two combined to make a really memorable evening.

Alberto Cabrera: August guest artist at The Stirring

Alberto Cabrera has been volunteering to paint at the Stirring for many years. Maybe longer than I have. He's also painted at other churches. He's definitely one of our favorites and we hope that you'll plan to attend this month to see the piece he's creating.

Alberto painting live at The Stirring. 

Photo credit: unknown from The Stirring's facebook page.

Charlie Forrester - Guest Artist at The Stirring

Our current guest artist at The Stirring, Charlie Forrester, will have his first art gallery exhibition. He has been asked by Downtown Pres to display some of his work in their gallery this Friday night at Trolley Night, from 6-9 pm, 502 S. Main. His work will continue to be on display at Downtown Pres through August. I'd really encourage you to go down and check out his work and enjoy the rest of Trolley Night.

 

Also, Charlie is a full-time artist who is also available for painting murals and/or doing illustrations. I've put a couple of examples below. You can contact him @ cforartist@yahoo.com

 

 

 

Lending my art to a T-shirt design

I was commissioned to create some art for ShareHope, a program of NEA Baptist Charitable Foundation, formed out of the desire to help families whose lives have been touched by the tragic death of a baby through pregnancy loss, stillbirth or in the first few months of life. They have an annual Walk of Remembrance & Hope and wanted to use my art for their t-shirt.

Below is the sketch which will be converted into a full color tee-shirt design. I'm suppose to be getting one once they're printed. I'm also working on creating a 16"x20" painting to donate to the Art of Caring this year based on this drawing. 

Becoming a roadside attraction (for an evening)

"How close to the interstate is your house?" is not a question one expects to receive via text. Especially a friend who lives in Nashville. Yet this was how my home became an impromptu roadside attraction last evening for the Collin's family. I shouldn't be so surprised. It's not that unusual for me to host private art viewings at my home for potential art buyers. But usually it's scheduled a few days in advance to give me time to clean up. On this occasion, I barely had enough time to get home from work and make the bed before these guests arrived.

But out-of-town visitors are rare. This is only the second time I've had the honor. It was good to see Robyn again and give a little tour to her kids. Everyone even got to leave with a signed Chester greeting card. Hey, you can't be a real roadside attraction without some souvenirs.

Katy Tucker: Guest Artist at the Stirring for May

 
Our guest artist at The Stirring during May is Katy Tucker. Katy has been creating some really great artwork live on stage this month. If you've never been to The Stirring, I strongly encourage you to come check it out. The Stirring meets every Sunday at 5:30 p.m. at Hope Church at 8500 Walnut Grove Rd. in Cordova, Tennessee. For more information, visit www.thestirring.net. 

 

Amber Rubarth - Final Poster art

Just wanted to share with you the final poster art and email banner for Amber Rubarth's tour in Europe. It's very exciting to see it complete and in use on her facebook page and emails. There was talk of a t-shirt based on the illustration but I haven't seen it yet. I've even received some nice comments and emails from her fans.

 

And for comparison, below is my original art.

 

File this music video under art inspiration

Kina Grannis - Valentine from Ross Ching on Vimeo.


Now, I'm not really a fan of the song itself (good melody but the lyrics are a little too cutesy). What I really find inspiring is the flip-book style animation of the guy looking for a valentine. That's why i keep watching the video. I wish there were more proposals than just the three shown. I want to talk about them but I dont want to spoil it for you. So just watch it.

Anyway, i thought it was pretty clever and original video. Makes me think of Chester and his Anti-Valentine cards.

Going on tour with Amber Rubarth

So a few people have asked me "So how do you know Amber Rubarth?" since I started posting some pictures on facebook of an illustration that I've been working on for her European tour. So here's the long story. Amber Rubarth is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. I first heard her play at Otherlands in Dec 2009. It was a very sad time for me. My wife had left me two month prior and I had finally begun to accept that she wasn't coming back. Because many of Amber Rubarth's songs paint a picture of heartbreak, hope, and healing,  it really spoke and connected with me. It seemed as if the songs had been written just for me... to help give me the words I needed for the grief and pain, to help me find hope, and to help me find love again. Her songs became the sound track for my life for much of 2010.

Take "Novacaine" for example. I can relate so much to this song. I dont think you could write a more perfect song about how we deal with heartbreak. I even had an experience like the one mentioned in the song: "I ran into the doc last weekend at the grocery superstore. He asked me how's it feeling and I said it's barely sore." I did many paintings and drawings playing with the meaning and imagery of that song.

“Dormant” © Richard Fudge 2010 Inspired by Amber Rubarth’s “When Will the Spring Come Again”

 

I ended up doing many drawings and paintings inspired by the lyrics of her songs. It is not unusual for me to gravitate to certain songs or to attach songs to the inspiration or meaning of a painting. I often list "recommended listening" with photos of new work on this blog. But I don't believe that a single artist has directly influenced more work than Amber Rubarth.

When she came back to Memphis in Oct 2010, I was excited to see her play again. So before her set, I gave her a print of one of my doodles (Dormant shown above) and I requested that she play the song that had inspired the drawing. It's a good thing I had requested it because it wasn't on her set list. In fact, it had been so long since she'd played "When Will the Spring Come Again" that while on stage she asked "Richard, is this the right strumming?"

It was amazing how much things had changed in my life since the last time I had heard her play at Otherlands. I had lost my love, stopped believing in love, and learned to love again. The first time I saw her play I was alone and heartbroken, this time I was holding hands with a beautiful girl who loved me and whom I loved.

 

Fast forward to March 2011, Amber Rubarth emailed me to see if I was interested in doing an illustration for her to use on her upcoming tour. Um... YEAH!!  I was extremely excited to work with an artist who's music I so admire and had influenced my art. It's been one of my top 5 art goals to be commissioned to illustrate a favorite band's cover art or poster.

So below is the finished project. Well, the painting is finished. I just put the text in there as an example of how it might look with some copy. I'm just doing the illustration work on the poster. Someone else is doing the rest of the poster. I'll post an update when I get a sample of the finished poster, but for now you can enjoy the below painting and the song that inspired it. Hopefully, I'll get to work with Amber again and you can see more of the work here.

 

Book Update: Still at work

I'm either nearing the halfway point or I'm just past it. Although there have been a lack of updates, I have been keeping to my schedule. Sometimes you just have to give yourself a deadline, show up, and hope your creativity shows up too.  So I've got 3 main pages to complete. Seven pages are finished. But then I have the smaller inset illustrations. Below are a look at some of the finished pages. In other news, Chester may soon go on tour with one of my favorite singer/songwriters. More on that later.

Book Update #3: Getting Chester Dressed

I've been keeping to my work schedule on these. I've nearly completed coloring all of the Chester figures. There are a couple who lack pants and shoes (really wishing i could make some "no shirt, no shoes, no service" joke out of this but i can't think of one). Soon it will be time to color in his props and then ink everything. Progress is beginning to slow down as the work becomes more and more detail oriented.

Although i dont really have the space for one, all this work has really made me wish for a drafting table like the one i use to have. Normally I just solve this issue by commandeering dinning room table. Ironically, i sold that recently to a friend because, "well, it's not like I'm using it anymore. I dont host big dinners like you guys." Oops guess i did have some uses for that table. So now I'm down to small tables like the one above and i'm working from my coffee table. Oh well, it's no biggie. I'm making due and making good progress anyhow.

Cool video by Donald Miller about his book

Are you living a great story with your life? from Donald Miller on Vimeo.

Are you living a great story with your life? That's just one of the tough and insightful questions that this book asks. I really enjoyed this book. You should definitely check it out. 

Book update #2: super productive

Work continues at a brisk pace. I've got a system for this. I'll share it with you since you're going to see it play out anyways. It goes something like this: 1) background wash, 2) pencil in Chester, 3) prep for color, 4) color and shading, 5) ink. I know it looks like an assembly line, but i find that you have to keep them on the same pace. You dont want to finish the last one and see that gradually your technique changed and the first one looks totally different from the last.

So I've got five pages prepped for color. Five more are penciled. Seven more pages to get started.

Also, last night I planted a rose bush, cooked dinner, and swept leaves off my roof. Yeah, that productive. I really dislike sweeping the leaves off the roof. I'm always concerned that I'll lose my balance and fall. Last evening was no different. There was constant concern that at any point i'd tumble off the roof with the leaves or step through the roof. But after it was all done, i was very tempted to climb back up with drink and sit on the peak of the roof. It was an unusual perspective on the familiar scene of my backyard. It felt peaceful. Accomplished. Maybe I'll do it some other time.

Chester, It's Time to Book It

Would you be interested in a children's book illustrated by me featuring Chester? If you are, then you're in luck. I'm (finally) getting productive on this project. I've been putting this off for months and months... it's embarrassing. So March will be all about getting some work done. No more excuses. I've got 16 pages to illustrate (which is mind-blowing to me) and I'm giving myself a month to complete it. Not a lot of time, but I had loads of time before now and got practically nowhere. So here's day one's progress: 12 washes, 5 penciled in pages.

 

It's a start. I plan to make regular time on Monday and Wednesday evenings (I have a day job).  Also, I'm going to give it a couple hours every Saturday or Sunday. Three times a week should be good. After this first week I should know if that's enough time or if i need to schedule more. Be looking here for updates on my progress.