Meet Melinda Hoffman, Artist in Residence July 31-Aug 6

Melinda Hoffman loves mobiles…she also paints! We are so fortunate to have her visit “The Shores” to spend some time together creating magical mobiles.

Here’s what Melinda has to say!

…We are going to explore small books…I prefer Golden Books and we will be making them into mobiles. So to the upcoming campers, who will be at Searsport the first week of August…bring a favorite Golden Book. I will also ship in a stack of books that I pick up cheap. Now I am coming from South Carolina…just to be with you and the beautiful coast of Maine.

If you want a current subject mobile…Golden has Star Wars Golden Books…that do make into great mobiles…but you’ll pay top dollar ($4) for one…resale nonprofits can be a good source. (Read further for more books you might want to bring)

Now, if you’re really coming prepared…bring some trinkets…little light things to add to the mobile…I love the tops of Pez candies…even Walgreens has a display of the candies…and I found the best Star War figure heads. If you are thinking that this sounds a little like homework…let me say, as artists…we do our homework, we plan for our installations…

We will also fold books…simple…yea right. My 100 year old mother, folded the tissue pages of the New Testament…reading as she went. Took her weeks but what a lovely mobile we made out of it.  So, get to a resale shop that has books and think…lots of pages…the thinner the paper the better, in my opinion.

We will do some basic folding of books from one piece of paper. I will attach some pictures of a book competition we did here in Greenville, SC. We modeled it after a European project and you will add this to your arsenal of book making. This is a wonderful journaling, scouting, personal space concept that you will enjoy.