Spring Show

Pretty, shiny things.

Artella is featuring a Mother's Day Shoppe and I was asked to come up with some items for it...yay! An excuse to play! So I fashioned some new baubles and things and am quite pleased with the result. Look for them in my Shoppe in the coming days!

Blog Awards

This was a new one on me...blog awards...I had no idea there were such things, but apparently I have been generously given a "Thinking Blogger" award by Judie! I am humbled and flattered and most of all excited because I now get to bestow it on someone else I admire for their Think Quotient!



I will happily designate my friend Chrysti as aThinking Blogger award recipient. If she has not been given one prior to now, surely the world is running backward. I cannot in words accurately convey the respect and affection I have for this artist. She goes beyond thinking...she creates, innovates, envisions, develops, manifests, conjures and astounds. She sparkles like a gem with a thousands facets, and I am so proud to count her as a friend, mentor and art supply source!

Love you, Chrysti!



I have to say there are far too many of you out there I admire. Far too many I would like to meet in person and laugh with and make art with and just be alive with. Over a year ago I created a traveling journal, an art journal, that went to a handful of friends before coming home. It is sadly underfilled, and my deepest wish is to have it bursting with pages, doodles, collages, etc by all the artists I hold in esteem. So I am putting out the wish here, that anyone who would like to send a postcard-sized piece of their heart-art for my special "artograph" book, I would be tickled and thrilled and grateful. This is my little wish for the day... Email me if you are feeling like a wish-granter today!

Transformation Technology

Please, tell me I am not the last one on the block to discover the fabulous fun to be had with the "liquify" tool in Photoshop? This is my Warrior Soul Card, reinvented...as The Warrior Tree!

An Eggs-Hibition

What does fame feel like?

If it felt like how I feel when I look at this, I could learn to like it. Seeing my work cleverly made to look monumental and gallery-worthy is sort of heartstopping. A moment of wow...can you just imagine????
And for just a brief second, I almost can...



Your turn, now. Go on. Imagine really being seen, or being heard. Scary-good-thrilling-awful-unbelievable-right-bizarre-surreal-joyous....heartstopping...

What a trip!

Never Stop Learning

There's the kind of learning that happens unintentionally. Things like, an unattended vegetarian chicken patty left alone cooking in a toaster oven for too long will fill the upstairs of your home with a eerie smoke that simply won't leave. Or perhaps, that fact that two cats and a ziplock baggie full of catnip, when left in a room together, will transform your living room into some kind of freaky feline crackhouse, with kitties rolling in ecstacy on the floor and making meepmeep noises.

(Mmm. Seems both these bits of learning resulted from leaving things unattended. Short attention span, anyone?)

Anyway...
There's the kind of learning that is intentional. I don't know that I have that kind too often, where I actively persue new knowledge. Did years of school and college just sour my inner scholar to the whole idea of "studying" something?

Today, however, my wonderful friend Melissa answered my request of her to teach me something new and totally different...soldering. I really had to commit to this lesson, and bought a soldering iron, some flux and (annoyingly) the wrong sort of solder. (Mm. Another unintentional lesson: There are different kids of solder.)

I have to confess I was nervous because it involves a very hot soldering gun and a lot of patience...but man, I am hooked! I just love love love what I can make with it.

Here are my first 3 (not quite complete) pieces. The long pendant and small square will have some charms and beads added to the jump rings.

I learned something new! ON PURPOSE! Yay me!

Vroomm, vroomm!

Is it art?

The fine art of the Pinewood Derby Car has once again become a pursuit in our house. Spring brings the Pinewood Derby for our wee Cub Scouts, and this marks cars #7 and #8 that I have helped the boys build. (Not Dad's strongest area, though no doubt he could do it, somehow it has become my specialty) I give you now this years entries:

Ian's " I Gotta Catch Up"

and Noah's " Road Rally":

Mother Nature

Don't mess with her.
I think I jinxed the entire East Coast by smugly crowing over the easy winter, and how Spring was upon us at last.
Mother Nature sprung something on us alright.
Brrrrr! Sorry, everyone. My bad.

Ancestor art

Teeny tiny portrait...huge wall...what is a girl to do?
I had this wonderful photo of my grandfather, the youngest of three boys, that I wanted to feature in my living room. I also had this fantastic wooden portfolio he stored his art is that he had made for himself in his youth, and had stained a vivid cherry red. Inside were sheet of aging white paper, some at least 50 years old. I also had all these nifty old wooden curly tracing tools from his drafting days (French Curves! Thank you, Judi!). Somehow I brought all these elements together to create a 2' x 4' piece for my living room...with that little 4x6" photo as the focal point. The background painting is watercolor, gesso and graphite on artboard, with a dash of embossing powders.

Painting? What's that?

Been a long time, it seems, since I picked up a brush with the intention to create an Actual Finished Painting. Yet, somehow this week, I made one. And am heavily into a second one that I think is closing in on finished.

The best part is the "framed canvases" are actually ugly Target type artprints I got at Goodwill for $2 each and painted over. Instant framed substrate. Woot!

Here's a few more that have come out in the last few days!

One World, One HeART

EIGHTY THREE COMMENTS! Never could I have foreseen this! More people in one week than since this blog began! THank you to all of you lovelies and for your kind words; it has been a sheer delight to visit all your pages and come together for this sepcial event.

And now...drumroll please...randomizer.org has declared the winner to be...MICHELLE!

I am honored to send these jewels to Michelle, who I have come to know a bit about via her blog. Being a mom takes so much spirit and love and compassion...mothering an exceptional child can take repeated leaps of faith, and the ability to find light and joy where others might fear the dark.
Please visit her blog HERE, and be inspired all the things that make her an exceptional mom.

Click on the LINK to get details on this wonderful project

Soul Collage

So, I am trying my hand at SoulCollage. You can read more about the concept at http://www.soulcollage.com/home/index.php, Just wanted to share my second one:

I Am One Who is the Storyteller.
I Am One Who Traces Her History.
I am One Who Remembers.

Son of my heart

I wrote these words to some friends and realized how well they went with these pictures I took of Noah and I the following day:


I met with Noah's caseworker, this really wonderful dynamo of a woman named Beth, who is helping us get all kinds of services for him. We talked about how the public school is just not meeting his needs, though their intentions and hearts are set in the right place, their training and facilities are inadequate.

We talked about what is happening to my bright, fizzy, loving, driven, creative, charming, passionate baby boy (ok, he's just turned 6...but he's my BABY!); everyday he comes home crushed on some level. I don't know many 6 yr olds who hit themselves in the head, who call themselves dumb and stupid, who cry and say that want to die. I still reel when these things come from my child's mouth.

His mind is a dazzling and complex landscape where brilliant sunshine and raging storms plow through erratically, alternately blinding him with manic giddiness or sucking him up in a twister of rage. Sometimes both at once! And here he is, this tiny new soul, still trying to understand the world, and people, and though everyone who guides him tries hard to encourage him, the messages he hears and internalizes every single day are...
not good enough
unnacceptable
innappropriate
try harder
stop fussing
you're overreacting
get a grip
you're ruining everything
get away from me
you're scary
you're mean
you're bad

...and he is starting to believe it. We need to get him OUT of the mainstream educational system before it destroys him. He is an octagonal peg and they are jamming him into a round hole by whittling down his self esteem, his sense of self, his hope. I cannot stand by and watch my child be strangled by red tape while the almighty dollar holds sway over his future.

The suicide rate for boys with this disorder is terrifyingly high. I am in a fight for not just the quality of his life, but his life! His LIFE! And some days I get a glimpse of how very small I am on the battlefield, with the rusty little bugle I am trying to muster up a "charge!" with, and a shitty broken musket. And maybe a pack of smokes. Ha!

Anyway, sorry, it is something I can rant about for days. He is a fire in my heart all the time.

The upshot of this meeting was we are going to seek out of district placement for him. A special school that the town will have to pay for. This is going to be a HARD FIGHT. These things often involve lawyers, appeals, and general misery. The school we are aiming for has a $46 K annual tuition rate. We will have a fight on our hands.

So the person who really needs the glory love and prayers is Noah, whose spirit and mind are under fire everyday, and whose childhood is an emotional battlefield being slowly littered with memories of bad days. And prayers, too that the hearts and minds of those with the power to make a change for him are moved to do so, to make a call that changes the course of his entire future. So much for our family will ride on this. Everything, in fact.
Read more about what Noah is dealing with HERE.
Here is my baby boy:

Ready, set...create!

2007...I am starting the year with a clean studio and lots of projects lined up. Fingers crossed I can keep all the chainsaws I am juggling under control while making it look easy. People, its not easy. Let's face it, there's no way I could make it look easy. But I can try to make it look pretty!

Forest Mini Journal

Ornamentation

A friend of mine was ebaying some of these lovely storage tins, and reminded me I had a lot of them stashed away in a box and was not using them. They seemed to lend themselves to little shadowbox vignettes, so I turned some into ornaments to put in the Holiday Shoppe at Artella. They were great fun to make!

Card Attack

Working hard to meet their goal, my two Jr. Sharpie Scouts spent time in the studio with me today! Here is some of their work!

Homers

Decos that come home are like little mail miracles, are they not? To me they seem as rare as a message in a bottle, sent adrfit...and they wash up on shore after shore...and somehow drift home. Of the over 100 decos I have sent into the world over a 3 year period, 8 have come home. In fact, the eighth arrived in yesterdays mail, and had been traveling since May of 2005. Hope Clinchot created this Visions of Africa deco, and its pages were filled by artists from around the US and as far away as New Zealand. Thank you to all you contributed, and to Kathleen for sending it home!
Here it sits in a place of honor in the "gallery" of my studio.

9.11

Remember by mail art

From Fumes to Final Product

Here is a page from my Art Journal.Remember that box for of Sharpie Products I was sent by Sanford Co for being such a loyal fan (and having an inside connection)? If not, scroll down, you'll see it.
Lookee how preety...I love the colorrrsssss...