Was that thunder?

Yes, it was. Again.

Time to climb off this pile of lovely hand dyed cloth where I was grooming my nethers and find a place to hide until the storm passes.

(Dear cloth customers - that's my cloth under Sweetie's butt. Your cloth is all ironed and folded behind her.)

big doings

I have been scrounging about trying to find an appropriate setting to photograph all the new work.


Nothing was better than the space where I had my solo  show last year so, on a whim, I called the owner at Phoenix & Dragon  and asked if it would be  possible to squeeze in a couple of hours of wall time for a photo shoot when they were between exhibits. Turns out she did have some time, like AUGUST and would be pleased to have me back.  Two weeks to put together a solo show..you betcha I will. More to come.

In the same morning I made a commitment to advertising my work for rent or sale in the Georgia Film & Television Sourcebook, both online and in print. I don't know about you but sometimes the art I see on the walls in a movie or on TV is more interesting than what may be happening between the actors . I'm always googling "who painted that painting in the scene...." with little success.  "Meet Joe Black" is a great example of Art being a star, if you can focus on a scene that does not have Brad Pitt in it.

You may have read about Atlanta becoming the Hollywood of the South.  What with Screen Gems already here and London's Pinewood Studios coming soon, there will be lots of opportunities for all manner of craft and support vendors and I plan on getting my darlings up onto the silver screen. If any Georgia based artists want to know more, send me an email and I'll hook you up.

Now I really, really have to update my website!!

blessed hump day off

I love my day off.
The morning was given over to studio business - no art making but two Big Deals that I will write about as soon as there is more information.

I met my future daughter-in-law for lunch and handed over my contact list for the wedding. We only had a scant hour so I came prepared with a list of questions..check, check and check.
Missy is super organized which has to help minimize the stress. I've been tasked with making a set of garters in teal and black! I think I can handle it.



Home in time to enjoy the pool before the skies clouded over in preparation for the afternoon/evening weather event.

We beat it out the door for the trivia joint just ahead of a wicked thunderstorm. Pulled a few answers out of our hats (what the heck is a pollux) and came in second.



While I was looking for something else, this image popped into my brain. Dyepainted at my last session at EB's studio, I took a picture but forgot to set the colors with soda ash. When it came out of the washing machine, it was gone.  I may take a shot or two at recreating it when I have the next dyefest.

 

taking drastic measures, gleefully

The weather will drive you crazy if you let it. The sun is blazing down one minute and the next thunder rolls and smart people get out of the pool. 

Yesterday I tackled a mountain of hand dyes that had been heaped on the ironing table and after everything was folded and sorted I found an excess of INSIPID so  I took  a bunch of the worst offenders out to the dyedeck, doused them with vibrance and forgot about it all until this morning when I hatched these out. 

I've also been thinking about how to go about deepening the background of the Firmament now that it's scattered with stars and other heavenly bodies. Paint? Not. What I may wind up doing is treating each of the embroidered stars with hot soy wax and the submerge the entire piece in a deeper blue/violet dye bath.

That drastic step got me thinking about taking a similar approach  with one or two of my oldest pieces back when I was doing whole cloth screaming; treating a finished piece as if it was only half way there.

Bold? Blasphemous?  Time will tell...

It's not that I don't love you baby.
Let's just say you got a lot of untapped potential...

"Clubbin'"
2007

peer into the past

My scanner is back in service and I've tackled the job of scanning a small clutch of family photos from the late 30's and early 40's.

My mother left them with me on her last visit about ten years ago. The thing is, I have no clue as to who most of the people are. I suspect, by descriptions, the woman on the right is my maternal grandmother, Antonina Catalano Mercurio.  I never met her. No clue about the other two folks. I met the grandpa once when I was about 8 and do not remember his face.

Any RI or MA cousins who may have a clue (and they are legion) get in touch and I will link you to the archive of photos.

Some of the pictures are lovely










and a few will provoke nightmares!

some Saturday eyecandy

Some Saturday Eyecandy...first Clara Fialho...I love her work.

Australian painter, Tim Maguire

Joseph Bellacera

unwelcome guest

baby copperhead

After a week of daily thunderstorms the sun broke through midday and I was able to get in a swim which was mostly pool cleaning.

Just as I reached up onto  the deck for my float I noticed this little bugger hunkered down under it.

I knew him for the dangerous character he was immediately but, at only a foot long, no great threat if respected.

 With Colin's help I caught him in the pool net and we let him go over the fence into the woods where he should conduct his snakely business down by the creek.

on the fiber front

Isn't this just wonderful? It makes me want to put up Christmas lights in the crape myrtles.

Now that I have passed out of  yesterdays  aggravation, I've gone back to hanging stars on my firmament again. That Chandelier tree has me thinking some fireflies would work here too.  My Goddess complex is full blown. Writing fiction will do that for you too.

I'm not long on exotic or task-specific tools; I've rolled a perfectly good pie crust with the bottle of Canadian Club I had just poured from for the filling -why dirty up my maple rolling pin?

But a friend recently thought of me while she was at a tag sale and snagged a set of Gingher shears and snips with the guards and gifted them to me -what a treat! We are rife with deadly weapons!

 I have the same attitude with computer software. Free is good and if it does what I need it to do, why shop around or upgrade, but today I bit the bullet and downloaded Scrivener  for my writing projects. I kept reading good things about it and I don't even have a fully functional copy of Word anymore, not that there is any comparison. The best tools are the ones that get out of the way and just let you do the work.

Thanks again, Kara!

just because you can doesn't mean you should

Out of the corner of my eye and lurking on the pile just under the main design wall is this. Sixty-five square inches of "WTF was she thinking?"

Well, she wasn't thinking anything beyond how satisfying it is to needleturn and appliqué chunks of hastily hacked out  hand dyed damask to an equally delicious vintage damage tablecloth. It's a good thing I don't take this attitude with raw cookie dough.

How many hours evaporated and what was learned? Too many and nothing.
Not only are these pieces invisibly stitched ever 3/8th inch or less but each element was revisited with a tiny hem stitch just inside the border to forestall any fraying. I must have been in some kind of mental lockdown. I don't even want to revisit the time. My task for the evening, flip it over, clip all the stitches and get back to reality...I need another personal blankie like I need my own fleas.

flood water finished

I'm going to make a few prints from this tomorrow and then put it away.

The story is still looking for legs and this piece is not helping.
Turns out that visual art (at least my visual art) is not  a great prompter of murder and mayhem. Settings and atmosphere, maybe, but not action.

new practice

7.6.13 rising waters

I think I've found a way to integrate the stitching and the writing. Like a lot of people, I used to stitch while something else was going on - TV, music, anything else that occupied the other available sensory input modes. Working this way was a good way to not think, a meditation and a comfort.

Now I've turned off the distractions and while working on these small pieces, find myself thinking my way through the writing; settings, atmosphere, history, characters, even action.

Here I was thinking about what it would be like when a community is deliberately flooded and the long time land holders and residents are forced to leave.  Some don't leave. Some can't.


I'm not going to focus on finishing (overworking?) these- they are rough drafts too. - Just stopping when the thought spins out, dating them and giving them a name appropriate to the storyline and then boarding the next train of thought.

Meanwhile life spins on through the summer. Sweetie is pissed with me cause I just dosed the back of her neck with a stinky herbal concoction  to help repel the fleas that seem to find tiger cats tastier than any other. She's also been literally under my feet due to her constant anxiety over thunder and fireworks. Is there Xanax for cats?

A sketch created with this online tool