happy holiday

Standing in the driveway at midnight with no manual is not the time to learn about taking pictures of the moon.Still, we point, shoot, fiddle with dials in the dark and hope. If the clear skies hold, I'll try the tripod tonight. This weekend? Family, Sleep, Reading, Music, Baseball, cooking, swimming, art and I won't be leaving the property! 

ps. I keep trying to forget that a box of Art Sparks should be delivered today. I have no idea what's in it. Something new and wonderful from St. Anne's best Emissary!

travel for the non-traveler

 On reflection about being webless, one of the things I missed was "traveling".  My life is quite circumscribed by my daily duties - the 13 mile drive to work is fraught with  tedium. I allow an hour to get there in the afternoon because of the lunacy of the local traffic,  but the homebound trip spins by in twenty minutes 'round midnight when I get off and where the big excitement will be watching or participating in a police stop.
Ah, the blue lights!


Often, I'll get home on a friday night and my car won't stir until monday afternoon.  I travel by mouse, far and wide. I know it's not the same but it will have to do.
Here are some regular stamps on my imaginary passport:

Dartmoor, UK ,
Edinburgh, Scotland and
Dartmoor, UK (again I've just discovered)
Australia
Spain among many others.

in touch locally

So what did we do with no internet, no landline and no cable TV since last week sometime?

More of many things that have been neglected for too much instant and effortless gratification! Big
revisions about all of this for me.

We piddled about in the studio rescuing many tiny scraps bound for oblivion. They are in the process of "Becoming" to quote Hannibal Lechter but I get the distinct impression that Sweetie has a low opinion of the whole exercise.

The painting on this one has resumed thanks to two consecutive days of glorious weather.  I hope you have all had the experience of resuming work on an old piece that fell short and found a way to make the thing come alive in wonderful and unexpected ways.

After I finish with this one I'm going to take up painting murals on airport runways driving a striping truck!

I was recently captivated by a rebroadcast of an old documentary on PBS about the making of the Cirque du Soleil show LOVE.  I never had a craving to visit Las Vegas - too much desperation in the air - but I'd go just to see this show.
Do you think the colors seeped into my psyche? Nah, they've always been there.

orientation

I'm real happy with the way this one is wrapping up. The machine stitching is just what it was wanting but now I'm torn about the final orientation of the piece. This happens to me a lot. Is it arrogant to think that if a piece is successful, design-wise that it should be as good no matter what the final orientation is?

On the left is where I started. I only named this non representational  piece "Demon" because that piece of black damask was a pure pill to nail down and maintain it's originally intended shape.

Now look..there's a serpent under a tree full of fireflies.

photographing black

Black damask  and black cats are impossible to photograph an get what the eye sees. Today I got lucky twice!

Lucky to even get close enough to Jake's cat Juicy who is extremely wary and elusive (he lives inside a couch downstairs).






He's been venturing  upstairs in the morning to meet our cats but he's never been outdoors so has to be kept from the cat door. I'm sure he's part, if not all, Maine Coon cat. Those are six inch tiles on the floor to give some scale.