thoughts on art and creative living

Looks like I’m on a 2 week schedule for posting these days, but I’m not into feeling guilty about it, since I’m a very busy gal. Besides, I get really annoyed by blogs that start out apologizing. The way I look at it, if you’ve got enough time to blog every day, you probably don’t have a lot going on in your life.

So, here I am once again, trying to catch up with recent thoughts and news, in case anyone is interested. I realize that the subheading of my blog, “an artist in conversation with herself and the world” might seem a bit pretentious… as if the whole world cares about what goes on in this little brain of mine. I’m not totally serious about it, though… so I hope it might make a few people chuckle.

A lot of my time these days is spent on trying to figure out how to enlarge the audience of my work. I’ve been doing a lot of artisan fairs, just trying it out. Once I’m into it, it gets sorta addicting. For one thing, I’ve already made an investment on the canopy tent, grid-walls, and supplies for all my prints, magnets, cards, and pendants. Then I’ve invested loads of time into creating my products. Then I have a good day where I meet so many people enthralled over my work that I just gotta keep doin’ it. Then I have a bad day and wonder if I’m not undervaluing the true worth of my art…. like why am I doing silly craft shows when I ought to be in upscale galleries? I was feeling that way a couple of evenings ago, while I was slaving over creating more pendants for a fair the following morning. Since I create web designs throughout most of the week, I generally wait til the last moment to hop to it, and by then my eyes are too bleary to focus on what I’m doing. My attitude gets a little down on the whole idea, feeling the inevitable “my work is too good to slave over trinkets”. The next day, however, I sold an original piece, lots of small stuff, and met someone who may want to buy a large painting. Not bad for a crafts show, I’d say. And I really like meeting the people who are interested in my work. It keeps me buzzing in the high waves for the next couple of days, at least.

The original piece that I sold this time was “The Universal Child”, which is a small painting on glass. I wasn’t particularly attached to it anymore, so I was especially pleased that the woman who bought it is the founder of the Alma Midwifery Center, where she plans to display it. How perfect is that? It was waiting for her (actually, I hadn’t even been showing it before this particular day, so some unknown force was at play when I quickly packed up my stuff yesterday morning).

This is definitely one of the more iconic images I’ve created in my creative career. While I’m not wanting to continue in the vein of creating art that might be considered “religious”, I do want my work to have a spiritual implication. I like to mix things up a bit, though. The hands of St. Francis (the one who talks to birds) seems to visually “hold up” the floating child, who would normally (in an art historical sense) be the image of the Christ child. Instead, I substitute an Asian child to make the point that birth itself is sacred, and all children, from all races are a gift to the world.

Without trying too hard to achieve this specific goal, I would like my art to be a mouthpiece for a spiritual way of understanding things. I don’t want to be lumped in with all of the “New Age” artists whose works purport to have this purpose, but end up being overly sweet and (in my opinion) a bit hoakey. Ever since undergrad school, I’ve had a fear of hoakiness. Maybe I am that, though… and ought to simply embrace it!

I never know if anyone is following this blog or not since the only comments I get are from cheap pharmaceutical companies selling viagra. If anyone IS out there, you may have noticed that I’ve fallen off of my posting habit for a couple of weeks.

So what have I been up to? I’ve been so busy that it’s hard to remember. There’s the continual supply of website updates to be done (my own as well as those of my clients). On top of this, I’ve been crazy mad preparing for artisan markets. It’s hard to know whether such ventures will ever pay off since one has to invest money to even have a chance of re-cooping one’s expenses for the cost of materials and presentation stuff. And then there’s the countless hours of slaving away, reproducing myself in the format of affordable products. Fortunately, I had a really good weekend… sold an original painting and lots of smaller stuff (prints, magnets, and pendants), so now I’m encouraged to do more! The added benefit is that I’m getting out of the house and meeting people. One of the downfalls of doing web design is that I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer. I feel so much more energized by getting my work out of my space. I have a contact high from all of the great compliments on my work.

Here’s my most recent completed painting:

Now that I have a handful of new paintings, I’ve updated them to my gallery, but I think it’s interesting to see the unfolding of imagery. The background of this painting originally belonged to another that I started (a lotus image, in an earlier post), but I felt that the background was in competition with the main image, so I started something new with it. I carved the tree images into the background, then gilded the recessed carvings with gold leaf. The patterned “wind drifts” and foliage are on the same layer as the bird (a paint-altered collage), which floats above the background. I decided to call it “Wind Song”.

Bird imagery has been a recurrent theme for many years. The painting I just sold was the first of such images, based on an actual dream of birds walking around each other in water. My beloved “Aquabird Dream”:

I’ve always found it interesting that though it was one of my first “serious” (i.e. original) paintings, it is the one that probably gets the MOST attention, even when shown with my more recent (more dimensional) artworks. I always wonder if it isn’t because I had a certain quality of naiveite when I created that painting (before I was fully infected by my art education), and was creating out of a truly personal vision. The painting was a steal considering how well-loved it was, but I’ve had it in my possession for 16 years. It was time to let it go. I was also glad that it went to another creative person (an author named Michael Hoeye. He gave me a copy of one of his books, “Time Waits for No Mouse”).

Here’s another thing I’m excited about. Spurred by the desire to make affordable art that people are likely to purchase at the artisan markets, I’ve started my own line of art pendant necklaces. They are reproductions of my artwork, cut in a circle, with a glass gem mounted on top. They are encased in baked polymer clay, and hang on a silver memory wire choker.