For the last few months I have been entertaining a growing desire to create a really large scale piece of art. I’m talking BIG! Like install it with a ladder, rent a truck to move it, build it in multiple sections, BIG. I made this four panel piece, “Holding on to the Past”, in an attempt to scratch my BIG itch. It has only fed the fire.
the message at the bottom of my cup
I do love coffee. I love the smell. I love the hot mug in my morning hands. I love the way the coffee fades from rich wet-earth brown to caramel color as I add milk to it. I love the ZAP it gives me.
bee says hello to blueberry
It took me twenty patient minutes to convince this bee to pose for me. All weekend our blueberry bushes literally hummed with flitting pollinators, each far to busy for a camera shoot. I am going to stitch this bee’s portrait, maybe even leave it for him at the base of the blueberry bush, a token of my gratitude. Thank you bee, for all the good work you do!
How did she come up with that?
This is a Lichen I found up at Odell Lake. I think it is Letharia vulpina. I read that Lichen’s peculiar biology (part fungus part algae), make it especially challenging to identify. Regardless of it’s name Lichen is astoundingly, oddly, delicately beautiful. When I picked this one up off the frozen ground and peered at it, for a moment I was stunned and breathless to see the rippled little brown cups with their electric green fringe, like something from a magical realm or a bizarre science fiction scenario.
This is what keeps me making images of plants, fungus, lichens... When I really look at mother nature’s work I am always caught off guard, awed, confused, and excited. Hands down, she is my favorite artist!
a beaded kitchen
This is a photograph of an actual kitchen that the artist Liza Lou covered completely in glass seed beads. Every surface; from the newspaper on the table, to the dishes in the sink, is beaded. It took her over 5 years to complete her beaded kitchen. When I am growing impatient with laying down the little half inch fabric squares I often work with I will think of Liza and her beaded kitchen.
What if?
I am applying to a “one percent for art” to be installed in the Kodiak Island ADF&G (Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife) headquarters. There is an odd sort of cosmic poetry humming at my edges as I sit here refining my resume, typing up my letter of intent, and selecting my images. I spent a significant portion of my childhood afternoons in the ADF&G offices in Nome Alaska, drawing pictures at my father’s desk; crayon and pencil drawings of charging Caribou, fuzzy Muskox, hook lipped Salmon, and prehistoric looking King Crab. My father would scotch tape my masterpieces to his cluttered office walls, and on the florescent lit walls of the staff room. The possibility that my art could once again hang (though with something more substantial than scotch tape) amongst that breed of wildlife biologist, who’s work really genuinely shaped my artistic world, feels significant, a path I am traveling that has circled back to meet itself.
on the gardener’s reputation
I blame Beatrice Potter and perhaps even Henry David Thoreau, for our current cultural misconceptions of what it is to be a gardener. Beatrice especially, cultivated the image of “puttering about in one’s garden”, as if gardening consisted of small aimless actions and senseless wanderings amongst the lettuces. Anyone engaged in actual gardening knows it is strenuous labor and emotional risk. The gardener is digging, pulling weeds, hauling manure, building support systems, all the while recognizing the multiplicity of risks involved. Will the tiny seeds germinate? Will the starts be devoured by garden pests? Will there be rain? Will there be sun, or freezing temperatures? It is time to dispel our unrealistic image of the dozing, grass chewing, straw hat wearing, loitering gardener and replace it with a more truthful image. Manure stained knees, sweating brow, bulging biceps, and that anxious, expectant expression of one waiting, hoping, praying that despite the overwhelming odds those tiny seeds will eventually become a bountiful harvest.