Help A Classroom Out
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On our 2 year anniversary party RSVP Eventbrite invitation we asked generous party attendees to contribute money to East Austin Schools. We are thrilled to have raised $85 via this casual request for donations. To top it off some, Conjunctured is going to pitch in an additional $25 to the cause. What is the cause exactly?
Mr. K.’s mathematics class at “Austin Can! Academy” a school for at-risk students, located 5 minutes away from Conjunctured, needs color and black ink cartridges for their classroom printouts. We’ve donated the $110 in donations we raised from the party and want you to take this project on home.
If you have not already donated or would like to donate more, please go to Donors Choose right now and donate a small amount of money to this cause. If money is tight, please use their social media links on the page to promote the cause.
Thanks again to everyone who came out to celebrate our 2 year anniversary and very special thanks to everyone who donated!
read onFeatured Artist, Lavanna Martin - Austin Guerilla Coffee Shop Portrait Artist
This is a guest post from new featured artist on display at Conjunctured, Lavanna Martin, who was featured in the Austin American Statesman, Artist devoted to ‘guerrilla’ coffee shop portraits.
I started painting “live” in coffee houses in Austin in the spring of 2008. I had thought about doing it for years, and had always drawn people with my mind’s eye in public.
After almost a year of terrible stagnation in the studio, I began formulating my first attempts at “live” painting. I chose the coffee houses because I knew that the bohemian “anything goes” attitude would afford me the comfort and cover that I required. (I had worked at the legendary, original coffeehouse, Les Amis, profiled in the movie, “Slacker”).
The first day, I set out for Epoch Coffee, the 24-hour hipster hang-out closest to my house, and painted until time to pick up my daughter from school. I went back that evening. I was hooked. The first day, I did 9 paintings. I was in my element.
By August, I ran into another former Les Amis waitress at the Spider House. She got a kick out of what I was doing, and told me to start a blog. I didn’t know the difference between a blog and a website, and didn’t have a clue how to begin. While researching places to practice my “guerrilla painting” (a moniker given to me by local graffiti artists that thought I was their age), I found out about Cafe Caffeine, and the “jelly”, originally started by the Conjunctured boys. Well, I went there, hoping that they could hep me start a blog. From there, I followed the trail over to their new location on East 7th.
David Walker helped me set up my blog “I Stare At People” on Wordpress, . Since that time, the blog has grown “organically” to a Page 4 ranking - pretty shocking for just a local art blog.
I’m still doing it - painting live. I keep a record of everything that I paint. At first, by journal entries pasted on the backs of the paintings, and now, my blog serves this purpose. I even record my color palette for every painting.
The paintings are all live, with no touch-up or re-dos in the studio.
I would really like to branch out of the coffee house to do “guerrilla painting” anywhere.
In the past, I have refused to sell them, or give them away. I’m rethinking that.
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If you’d like to come view Lavanna’s artwork at Conjunctured, swing on by 1309 E. 7th Street M-F 9a-6pm.