Just how connected are my heart and my hands? Because my hands have been cold all this week. Numb fingers, crying out for pockets to hibernate in. My heart feels achingly similar. Some sub-zero cloud of concern and fear has hunkered down around my core. I feel worried about all things career and financial. Weirdly this comes just as I’ve experienced a remarkably fruitful few months. Worrying does me no good at all, I realize. I need to generate my own high pressure system, blow this cold dark funk out of here.
forgery vs. forging new ground
Last friday I took the train to Portland for my group show at Guardino Gallery. I visited several other businesses along Alberta St. in the hour before my opening. Throughout the evening I saw multiple pieces of art that excited and inspired me. As is always the case when I see work I admire I begin to imagine how I might integrate those desirable aspects into my own process. This always feels like thin ice. No artist wants to be a copy cat, a forger...
On the other hand art galleries are potential hot spots for non verbal communication. Its thrilling when some person I’ve never met reaches out through their artwork and sends a little shock wave of understanding through me, the viewer. Of course I want to pass that message on. I want to touch someone else without them ever meeting me. The challenge, the magic is taking the message I received and making it my own before passing it along.
If you are in Portland...
assembled from random parts
This distinguished gentleman was created by five middle schoolers in one of my current art classes. They each selected a body part to build and then collectively enhanced their sculpture with fetching details like the pipe and the bow tie.
Some part of me really relates to and sympathizes with these ramshackle characters when they emerge. Some mornings I wake up and rather painfully attempt to sort out the many assembled random parts of myself: the mother who’s immediate duties are preparing lunches and breakfast, the teacher who needs to fire the clay work sitting in the shed, the artist who has a show approaching and work to be finished, the daughter who probably should call her mother, the homemaker who’s toilet is overdue for a scrubbing, the musician who would love to sit and play the uke all day....
Our many assembled parts give us character and dimension. I wouldn’t get rid of any of them, but there are days when I am baffled at how to get them all functioning together smoothly.
yarn bombing
My mother in law took this photo somewhere in Prague. I love the idea of yarn bombing (makes me wish I knitted) and this bike has the particularly intriguing scannable knit element. I’ve seen a few yarned poles and benches around Eugene but this bike got me curious about what people have done. I looked up yarn bombing, WOW! Bridges, buses, fire hydrants, trees, entire buildings, turtles, statues, army tanks, and more...
I think of the patient people doing this simple repetitious act to show the rest of us a softer, more multicolored and whimsical version of reality. Now that’s a bomb I can get behind!
on death and laughter
Since I so recently wrote about my grandparents in this blog, it seems important to share the news of my grandfather’s recent passing. He died October 31st, 2013. My sister and I flew to Montana and sang (along with our cousins Bethany and Mary) at the funeral service. If you read my October 3rd entry, you know how appropriate it felt to honor his life with song.
What struck me most about our time in Montana was how laced with laughter it was. The 20 plus of us assembled family members ate together and laughed, told stories about my grandpa and laughed, watched his old home movies and laughed, looked at old photographs and laughed (by the way the above photo is of my grandpa scraping mud off my grandma’s shoe with a license plate), there were even a few practical jokes carried out, to much laughter. My grandpa would have loved it all.
sew fun!
Forgive the sub par punning, but I am completely enjoying making these new painted, stitched earrings. I am building up an inventory of them for our Nov 1 & 2 Art Chics sale. There is relief and satisfaction in doing such small scale work. I love dreaming up the images, painting in tiny brush strokes, sewing in the little detail work, cutting them out. I can’t stop making them. Let’s hope they sell!