I recently started creating these new bowls. I love making them! I hand build the forms and then paint the patterns onto the bone dry unfired clay. Something about painting onto that absorbent dusty surface feels deliciously primitive and ancient. Clay itself is a time machine of sorts. When I hold a cool damp chunk of it in my hands and form it into something, anything, a bowl, a figure, a cup, an ornament, I am repeating the actions and intentions of the earliest of human artists. While I sit in my swivel chair at my canvas covered work table, my brain is firing the same commands to my clay dusted hands that some ancient human’s brain fired at their own dusty working hands whilst squatting near a fire in some prehistoric cave, some 15,000 years ago.
for the treasure hunter in us all...
I can’t really call myself a mushroom hunter. I’ve only gone a handful of times. I still feel dependent on the expert eyes of a bona fide fungus identifier. But, living in the great northwest, I only have to glance around a room on any given chilly november day, and I will see the familiar signs on at least a few. The twinkling expectant eyes, the secretive in-the-know facial ticks, the spongy stain marks on their canvas bags, the damp rubber boots, the hushed voices, the moss in their hair, the fir needles stuck to their backsides. These are hunters. Their pray may be small and stationery but the rewards are numerous and delicious!
a medical question
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!