My studio is in the bottom floor and the top is the part i'm renting out. It's a really great house, beautiful, private, quiet, yet right in the middle of Athens and convenient to Baxter and Broad.
Why in the midst of deep spring i decided to obsess on snow crystals is a mystery to me. Here is a link to Kenneth G. Libbrecht's (Caltech) web site where i got this illustration.
Here are pictures of a birdhouse that Chris Purcell built and i painted that we have donated to an auction to be held this Saturday, May 2 at 7pm at The Lyndon House Arts Center here in Athens. The auction benefits Athens Montessori and the Lyndon House. All the birdhouses are on view for free starting this Thursday, April 30 from 5-9pm, then on Friday and Saturday from 9-5pm. The event starts at 5:30 Saturday, tickets are $10. Visit the Montessori web site for information about where to purchase them.
(Update: Our birdhouse was purchased by my friend Jay Nackashi, an accomplished musician, designer and builder who also contributed a birdhouse to the auction.)
These cut-outs are a collaboration with fellow clip-art collector Chris Purcell, and we have a blog with all the images. The show will be up through late May.
Side and back view of the mailbox i painted for Chris'new house. This is one of my favorite patterns to paint (all curves) and the colors are positively electric.
It really snowed here! LOTS of snow! although i was sick as a dog, i got to take some pictures from my back porch. Here's one of my micro-house (ok, it's a shack) and circular garden under construction.
i spent quite a lot of time at home during the holidays, working on some sign jobs and listening to 69 Love Songs Volume 1 by The Magnetic Fields over and over. i like to listen to music that way. So in the spirit of that CD and the post-Christmas/mid-winter doldrums, here is Pantone Blue 292, my gift to you, dear reader.
Jeff is a genius.
i love everything he does.
this is the super-rad poster he designed for the Flicker Xmas Festival next Saturday.
For your 2008 gift wrapping pleasure.
Handcrafted Industries is sponsoring the annual holiday crafts sale at the Flicker Bar in Athens this year. Saturday Dec. 20th from 11am to 5pm. If you're an athens artist or craftista and want to be in the market, contact me at loukregel(at)yahoo(dot)com and i'll sign you up.
The poster above is formatted to fit on an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. Click on it and even though it will look huge, it should print just fine.
I like the lettering on this church sign in Murphy,NC. It's part gothic, part pirate...not really churchy at all. Maybe they'd done the Christian thing and hired an out of work reformed pirate sign painter to make it for them. If anyone can decipher the last 2 lines, please let me know.
My Grandmother or Grandfather Kregel used to make these. Sweet gum balls, wood glue, toohpicks. These are half-stars...the toothpicks were broken in half so the stars are smaller than usual.
i am now a member of Handcrafted Industries, a group of Athenian craftistas who are promoting our handmade wares online. This is our new logo !
image copyright Lou Kregel 2008
In a nutshell, my computer crashed. This summer i lost hundreds of art files and photographs, some works in progress for this blog that will take a while to recreate. Mostly i'm sad that i lost pictures of my dogs. I'm sure most of you know the feeling of losing your data, so i'm not going to dwell. In the spirit of forward movement from this fall's election, here is a photo of my homemade sign of HOPE, nestled between some rosemary,a phone pole and my 5-gallon driveway garden. A nod of thanks to Shepard Fairey who designed that ubiquitous Obama poster that rallied us the disillusioned into voting. Thanks everybody!! We did something awesome!
"54 Threes" is a new series of paintings hanging at the Flicker Theater and Bar in Athens through September.
The Warm Tones
"Red and Brown" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500.(Sold)
"Ochres" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500.(Sold)
The Greens
"Blue and Green Threes" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500(Sold)
"Minty Threes" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500(Sold)
Mono- and Poly-chrome Threes 
"Mono-chromatic For the People" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500.(Sold)
"Poly-chromatic For the People" 32" X 32", acrylic on wood board. $500.
Last week i broke my glasses while i was in the mountains and had to use scotch tape to keep one of the lenses from falling out. Today i was supposed to superglue them back together, but since that means not having my glasses on for an hour or so, i have procrastinated. Instead i spent the afternoon spelunking on the internet and reading about things like why colorblindness is more prevalent among men and how the eye sees color. 
Illustration: Santiago Ramón y Cajal ca. 1900,
Instituto Cajal, CSIC, Madrid
These were hanging in the 5 Star Day Cafe in downtown Athens during May and June.
Sublime landscape images by Michael Oliveri at the Lamar Dodd School of Art's main gallery. 
These must be experienced in person, so if you live in Athens, please don't miss this show. They are huge (about 10' long) micrographs, digitally stitched together from multiple (FEI)field emission gun scans (more commonly known as (SEM)Scanning Electron Microscope scans). Close-up views of nano forms that so resemble landscapes or moonscapes, you'll expect to see the tail fins of a lunar lander in the corner. Michael is head of digital media at UGA, a designer with ADD (Athens Design Development) and is emerging as an important American artist in the field of digital media.
image copyright Lou Kregel 2007
