Sharon Hodgson Art Blog

“Light After Dark” – live painted on acrylic on 70 x 90 cm stretched canvas in 3 hrs at The Company House in support of the Avalon Centre. Final live auction price of $725.

I live painted a charity event in town in support for the local women’s sexual assault center. http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/Event?oid=1505626

Admission was $35 a ticket, and sold out weeks before the show.

Mary Ellen MacLean hosted this event with a range of comedic special guests. There were bizarre costumes and physical movements that were fun to paint. Christian Murray and Mary Ellen MacLean are experts when it comes to physical comedy from their years in the Jest in Time.

Cathy Jones from This Hour Has 22 Minutes starred as well, with a huge beehive wig on her head and great standup. Great line-up of acts all around.

[And forgive me if I forget to mention names or get names wrong - I'm a faces person striving to remember names, so please correct me if I make mistakes.]

The work auctioned off for $725 at the end. I was up on stage holding up the work to the scrutiny of a bidding war among those in the audience, but I think it was the high ticket item of the night. It went for more than two skybox tickets to a Toronto hockey game, also on the auction block.

This all happened at The Company House. You know how much I love painting those bright red walls…

Thought I’d mention again – on the correct night of the week no less – that my friend DJ Atmosphere is playing on radio4by4.com right now. If you like house music, check it out:

http://www.radio4by4.com/english.shtml

Here’s some screencaps from the show in progress tonight:

His blog is here, with regular news on shows and free sets. He hosts 3rd Planet House on radio4by4.com every Tuesday at 10pm AST. Don’t miss.

“Good Food Emporium” – acrylic on stretched canvas. 2010

The Good Food Emporium is a nice spot to paint. The space is long and narrow with booths all along one side towards the back. There was a gathering of people near the front all dancing, casting long subtle shadows reaching down the floor of the cafe.

If you want to see this one in person and you live in Halifax, drop by the Good Food Emporium. It’s going on the wall on Monday.

I’m going to paint at the Good Food Emporium tomorrow – got the OK to do so. I’m intrigued by their desire “…to make artistic-minded events a regular fixture at the Good Food.” That sounds like the sort of thing I would get excited about… that and I like the venue name. By the posters on the wall, they seem vegetarian, vegan and environmentally-conscious. There are also hints of support for local artists on the walls.

It’s a smaller cafe but the vibe is refreshing. I had a spontaneous coffee with friends I’d never met before in this spot just yesterday, and now I want to paint it. It made me remember why I used to love going out for coffee with engaging folk on a regular basis.

I am stoked at the notion of painting this cozy North-end Halifax meeting spot. I’ll post the completed work here as per usual.

[Life's too short to NOT go out and paint the town.]

I was pleasantly surprised last week to see one of my works in a webcast! One of my paintings has become a fixture behind the DJ booth in a regular webcast hosted by DJ Atmosphere  of Atmosphere Entertainment. You can tune in tonight for 3RD Planet House at radio4by4 TUESDAYS from10pm-2am AST to hear music by DJ Atmosphere and others in the crew.

You can find out about their new set downloads, webcasts and more on the Halifax DJs blog.

Getting married? Need professional wedding DJ services? Look them up!

This work is on a 70×90 cm stretched canvas canvas, painted with acrylics between the hours of 9pm and 2am on Saturday at the Paragon Theatre in Halifax.

I ended up at the Paragon Theatre live painting Skratch Bastid at the last minute. A buddy of mine wanted to see his show and wanted me to be there painting. He’s old friends with Skratch and a fan to us both, and wanted to see me paint the show He arranged the OK for me to be there. Skratch Bastid lived up to his reputation of being very encouraging of the participation of other Canadian artists in his work. I set myself up about 10 feet from the stage behind a railing on a rise in the flooring near level with the stage itself. I wanted to try and corner myself off from the throb of the crowd and yet still have a good shot of his performance to paint it.

It’s been a couple years since I last live painted DJs. I’ve never painted hip hop before last night.

Stage hands moved the DJ table up towards the front of the stage right before he got on, which is hilarious if you’re a live painter painting things as they are happening. (Well, to me it is.) …because it means all the detail and rendering you did on the table with the turntables when it was further back on the stage has to be brushed out with a big swoop of black and then you paint things in again. These pieces evolve as the evening goes on… some nights more than others.

Man, this DJ moves around – does not stop the entire time he’s on decks! Hard to paint someone who’s always moving and mixing things on the spot… doing things that would be impossible for most. Those who do not appreciate the complexity of what he’s doing might dismiss it. He spins and scratches records as if they were a musical instrument. I tried to capture some of his common motions. Someone was always around him taking pictures. Towards the end some people got up on the stage behind him and started dancing.

The painting on the wall – with the woman with the giraffe’s head – is a work by Peter Farmer, Pargon’s own resident live painter. Visiting this venue is worth it to see his artwork on the walls as much as hearing the musical talent. If you are in Halifax, check out Peter Farmer’s work in person!

And if you have a chance to see Skratch Bastid at one of his future shows, do not pass the chance by. Incredible skills.

Here’s my latest SPEAK! painting, on a 2×3 ft canvas. I really seem to be pushing the bright colours lately [she types as if this is something odd for her]. My candle went out towards the end so I was painting with occasional unidentified colours.

Two by Two play at SPEAK, with Brendan McLeod headlining. Open Mic as per usual. The man with the guitar is Brendan McLeod (described in quoted text below), the rest of the musicians are Two by Two, and I included a few open mic performers or hints of them… and plenty of the crowd. Two by Two played jazz and improv background beats to the words of the performers on stage. It was a totally different SPEAK experience to have music. Suddenly every poet becomes a rockstar.

“Brendan McLeod has been Vancouver’s SLAM poetry Champion, the Canadian SLAM poetry champion, and finished second at the 2005 World SLAM championships, held in Holland. His first novel “The Convictions of Leonard McKinley“ was nominated for the 2008 RE:Lit Award for fiction. His music group, The Fugitives, was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award.

Two by Two rocks post-modern fusions of funk, jazz and blues performed by a quartet playing a classic Hammond B3 organ sound. Comprised of Matt Myer on Hammond’s XK-2 organ synthesizer, Dustin Lindensmith on tenor sax, Ross Burns on guitar and Paul Keddy on drums, Two by Two’s repertoire is selected from composers such as Ray Charles, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, Jimmy Smith, James Brown and Stevie Wonder along with originals from the group.”

I was surprised to see I’m in the myHRM calendar this year! For the month of June you can stare at my big stupid grin painting the Coal Train mural in Dartmouth… the one I got to meet the mayor for? That mural has made it to the paper before. I guess I’m “clipart” in an HRM ad campaign, because I spotted myself on a billboard and a TV commercial for this as well.

Psst… are you an artist in HRM who would like to create beautiful colourful works of public art? The myhrm.ca site has forms and contact information to make it easy for you to create a public art project or find info about new ones as they come up. Check out the myhrm.ca site and get your public art project rolling!

All I can say is if artists were to reach out through some new process to find out spaces where their creative genius would be appreciated, we could really beautify this town… despite all the industrialization. Maybe we could give people living here something beautiful to look at. You know how murals beautify a neighborhood, make people want to live there, and then property values go up? There’s value to what artists can do. Even graffiti artists. There just needs to be places and zones and systems of seeking and granting permission to artists to make this region colourful.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be live painting Light After Dark at The Company House on February 4th. As usual, I will paint the event itself, and the completed work will be auctioned off to benefit the Avalon Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This is your chance to support a good cause and possibly get yourself an original live painted Sharon Hodgson.

Show starts at 7, and the comedy portion of the show starts at 8. (I am stoked about that! I have been wanting to live paint comedy for a while now…) Tickets are $35.

Below are live paintings I have done in The Company House in the last few months, to give you an idea of what to expect from me stylistically when I live paint this show. [More on these works here]

The red walls in The Company House are fun to paint.

Hope to see you at Light After Dark on Feb 4th, 7pm at the Company House, benefit for the Avalon Centre. If you see me, say hi!

“Martini Ladies” – 100cm x 80cm. Acrylic on stretched canvas. 2010

Let’s start the New Year off right. The New Year’s Eve of 2009-2010 featured a blue moon for the Western Hemisphere on New Year’s Eve, and a partial lunar eclipse on the Eastern Hemisphere (who will experience their blue moon in January. Nerd nerd nerd.)

Cheers to the new year.