Little Fish attends the Heritage Festival

Little Fish is an interactive puppet show, showcasing the effects nitrogen pollution has on aquatic life. Little Fish addressed the community on the impacts of nitrogen pollution at the Heritage Festival, held at Smithtown Historical Society. Using puppetry, face painting, and puppet making to begin a dialogue on the changes affecting Smithtown and all of Long Island.

-Awareness is the First Step-

What is Nitrogen Pollution?

Nitrogen pollution is one of America’s most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems, and is caused by excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the air and water. Too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle. www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/problem

https://www.nature.org/en-us/

Heritage Festival

Little Fish performance addresses the community on the harmful impacts of nitrogen pollution that affects the cultural life on Long Island. The narrative is through the eyes of the fish suffering from nitrogen pollution. The puppets offer the audience a new way of understanding.

The interactive puppet performance provides a fun experience to bring the community together and reflect on vital issues and improve peoples' perception. Through edification, Little Fish performance is providing a new understanding on nitrogen pollution and solutions. Thus, offering a new consensus for the audience to take with them and inspire people “to target nitrogen pollution sources with effective solutions”.

All puppets created and constructed by Susan Buroker.

© Susan Buroker, 2018

Organic Sketchbook; The Visual Unfolding Meetup

This has been a fun experience to share my knowledge with many artists. Here is our first meetup of Organic Sketchbook; The Visual Unfolding at Smithtown Historical Society.

Artists exploring the fun outdoor area and intensely studying while drawing at meetup group.

Meetup artists inside Brush Barn at Smithtown Historical Society drawing the "English Country Dance" performed by Long Island Traditional Music Association.

Click the picture above for more information on how to join our meetup!

Figure Drawing

As an artist I believe figure drawing is the foundation for all art. And I regularly draw the figure. It’s exhilarating for me to stand in front of a model with a blank piece of paper. I rub my hand across my paper to feel the texture and own the paper through my caress. The practice of my craft is essential to me as an artist. My passion is the hunger that feeds my practice. The intimate experience I have during studio figurative drawing is the personal exploration of my journey. These drawings become my quest of study; a method of discovery and exploration. It is with this fervor I attended the Dalvero Academy workshop this January.

Walking into the studio amongst a group of passionate, creative, hungry, talented, intelligent, mind blowing artist raises your adrenaline, swirling in this energy you feel empowered. There is no feeling like it in the world . The books start coming out… every artist you can imagine is opened on the floor as each one of us sets up drawing paper, ink, charcoal whatever we are going to use for the day.

The model jumps on the model stand, the music rises, Abba, bee gees, Clapton, Janis Joplin, an array of various music. The paper is burned up with this energy. The conversation weaves in and out. One quote that surfaced many times, “Drawing is unrelated to anatomical fact, but is totally related to organic function”  LeBrun.

Drawings are shrewd everywhere as the day ends and the task of cleanup is at hand. What drawing does one keep ? With the new technology I often take quick photos of many drawings and discard most. However with this method I have often gone back to look at drawings and did not keep them or the iphone photos I took were done in such haste I chopped the head off. This post is dedicated to all the discarded chopped up drawings and the ones left behind. The following drawings are drawings I did in the Dalvero workshop and my studio. Here’s to the next drawings on my journey.

Winter

Pastel drawing of ice hockey being played on Millers Pond after it froze over.

Figure Drawing in my Studio