Yes, that's me, cast out of kinkos for attempting to feed inappropriate materials into the copy machines.
I’ve recently started experimenting with integrating photographs into my work surfaces. I like this idea of extrapolating what may lie beyond the edges of the photographs. So, I am looking for ways to print images onto cotton. I messed around with adhering cloth to sheets of paper and running them through an ink jet printer. That worked great, for the most part (thanks and sorry, to my husband for his help in that experiment). I was hoping to do the same thing at kinkos. Unfortunately I was intercepted, reprimanded, and ejected from the building.
I am desperately seeking methods for transferring photos to cloth. If anyone out there has any good ideas, that won’t get me banned from Eugene’s copy stores, I’d love to hear them.
a role I’m not good at...
After a week of working full time in the infirmary, nursing my 8 year old through a wicked winter flu, I am so happy to be sitting in my studio and stitching. I love being a mother but I am not a gifted nurse. I do far to much wringing of hands, touching forehead, concocting kitchen get well cures and forcing them on my patient, rearranging bedding, staring into the patient’s flushed face seeking unknowable answers... I am the harried nurse, constantly glancing at my get well watch, and second third fourth guessing my decision to call or not call a doctor. When my daughter awoke bright eyed and energetic after 6 days of illness, I literally felt my whole being unclench. I suppose I should be asking myself just why I struggle in that role, but for now I am just happy to strap on my artist wings and fly a while.
a carcass
Some bright hot long day last summer we stuffed a dryer sized cardboard box with old carpet padding, painted a bull’s eye on the side of it, and dragged the whole unruly beast out into the far back yard. My oldest daughter, a succession of neighbor kids, and curious dads shot arrows into that docile, grazing, cardboard bovine (or was it a hungry, stalking, angry, cardboard predator?). Hundreds, maybe thousands of arrow holes riddle the thing. The recent winter rains finally destroyed the creature. I looked out across the wet yard while pouring my morning coffee and saw the blue green padding guts exploded outward, the sagging skin slumped into a melting brown heap. The sight of it somehow made me sad. That melancholy one sometimes feels upon encountering a memory. Like coming across a seal carcass on a long beach walk, a sadness for what’s lost and beautiful and temporary.
My daughter, like most self respecting 12 year old explorers, has moved on from her dreams of feeding her family with her bow hunting prowess. Now its illustrating graphic novels, playing in a rock band. Next season it will likely be something else. What ever it is, I am ready to stuff the metaphorical carpet padding into the metaphorical cardboard box, and help in any way I can, to turn a dream into a reality.
same old same old
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.