Represented at the Art a la Carte shop!!!

There's a new art shop opening in our wonderful hometown of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania and I have been invited to have my work at the store! We delivered watercolor and acrylic paintings as well as some small fiber art pieces to the shop today and were delighted to see the space, right on one of the main streets of town - Art a la Carte, 107 South Allegheny Street, Bellefonte, PA. The store is owned/operated by Elizabeth Hay, artist @ https://www.elizabethhaydesigns.com/. Easy parking available behind the store in the city lot. The "soft opening" will be Thursday, May 8th, 2019.

Here are a few of the pieces I delivered today - just a little taste of what is available there. So many local artists have work there making it a must-stop for anyone interested in finding unique, original art, clothing, hand bags, jewelry, scarves, glassware, and more!

Above: a framed watercolor entitled "Paws" - for obvious reasons! - Pat Dolan

Below: a framed watercolor entitled "Little One" of a young African child. - Pat Dolan

Below: a collage entitled "Her Last Song" - honoring our elderly - Pat Dolan

Above: painted fiber art entitled "Little Red Bird" - Pat Dolan

Below: painted fiber art entitled "Raven" - Pat Dolan

And a few acrylic paintings of birds, of course! This one is "Female Ruby Throated Hummingbird."

Many of my friends are also displaying their work in Art a la Carte. Among them, Carol Korte @ https://www.facebook.com/carol.f.korte and Mary Beth Wiseman @ https://www.facebook.com/mbwiseman. And of course, Elizabeth Hay has her own botanical jewelry! And many other creative artists so do stop in for a visit when you are in the area!

Unfortunately, we will be out of town for the opening, but we are wishing Elizabeth Hay and all the artists a fantastic opening followed by a long, successful adventure together!

Happy Easter! Happy Passover! Happy Spring!!!

Metallic Leafing - Part 2

This is the large art table in my studio - covered with my gold/silver/copper leafing paraphernalia. They've been waiting for me to get back to them... Meanwhile, I've been planning our vacation, so there they sit...waiting.

I did manage to complete a few of them - both organically abstract. The 8" square one is marbling on a gessoed panel - no leafing involved. Just an experiment.

This smaller, 4x6" gessoed panel has both gold and silver gold leafing and the addition of acrylic paint.

They now hang with "Blue" (my black cat watercolor completed last year) in our entryway. The colors certainly go well together!

The following two pieces are both 4X6" gessoed panels.

This one has metallic leafing fragments adhered over sealed watercolor. I've laid the feather on top, but have no idea how to attach it without gluing it. And if I use glue, the feather will clump up and lay flat, making it much less attractive, in my opinion.

This one has both gold leaf sheets (very shiny) and liquid gold leaf which is quite dull by comparison, and has a mat finish. Again, I've laid a feather on it without yet attaching it. I like it this way, but may have to come up with a different solution to completing these two small pieces.

I'm thinking of painting ravens/crows on several of the leafed pieces still on the table in the first photographs. I also want to paint birds on the collaged sheet music attached to canvas in that first photo.

Updates will follow as I begin to get back to studio work once again!

Planning a Trip to "On the Street Where They Lived!"

Here's a small map of the immediate area of all the Burgenland villages from where the Gangl/Grieman families lived and farmed. This side of the family immigrated to the USA primarily in the 1880s.

I've been caught up in planning our upcoming trip abroad. We're hoping to see the various homes where my Austrian ancestors once lived, visit their neighborhoods, churches, and countryside. All of these two branches of the family lived in rural areas - one branch lived in Burgenland, Austria, south of Vienna. The other branch lived at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany.

It's required a great deal of research to document the various addresses involved - and the addresses all have changed as of the 1920's or so, making it a bit of a challenge. But others in our family have already visited and were assisted by many English speaking residents They even got to visit one of the GGGGrandparent's homes! They also visited two different wineries owned by GANGL families - with whom we may be very distantly related!

Toward that end, I have been refining the Ancestry.com family tree, adding details and sources - all rather time-consuming, but useful work! I've also arranged our lodging and travel plans, which was more stressful than I thought it would be! When visiting Ireland, we stayed at B+B's everywhere we went - not so for Germany, since we don't speak the language... But hotels are hard to find in the small towns where we wish to visit!

This is the actual street in the small village of Wallern, Burgenland, Austria where my Grieman ancestors lived. An on-line acquaintance grew up living in the family home! He sent me this photo from the 1950's, saying it's dramatically improved from the dirt streets of that time. The house is across the street from the Roman Catholic church - on the right side of the photo - the house with two windows. I'm totally excited to visit both town and the church, where our ancestors were baptized, married, & buried and to see the family home for well over 100 years.

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The other branch of the German/Austrian side of our family are the family names of Schmidt & Mueller, from the town of Bilfingen (A. Pforzheim), Baden, Germany, in the Kampfelback Baden region on the northern outskirts of the Black Forest. Below, a map of the region.

And one grave site I would like to visit, the ancestors of our 1852 immigrants, ...

The gravestone pictured here is my 5xGreat Grandparents: John Albert Beihofer (1754-1820) and his wife, Maria Catherine Roth (1756-1820) buried in the graveyard of the Cemetery of Kampfelbach-Bilfinger (Enzkreis) Germany. It is amazing that this stone still exists since the common way cemeteries are operated in Germany is to rent/purchase the plot for X number of years, then pay to do it again when the time is up on the space. The coffins are then moved to a "common grave" in the cemetery, without markers. So the two families involved here must still reside in the area and be able to pay the rental/purchase fee for all these years. We will visit this graveyard, and the church from which the family celebrated the Catholic services.

Above is a photo from the web of St. John's Church in Biflingen taken in 2017. We will definitely visit this small church and offer prayers of thanksgiving for all of our ancestors!