Happy Holy and Holly Days!

As this year ends, my 91-year old dad and my 89-year old mom are completing the move to their “retirement” home, the home of my baby sister, Karen. I've spent the year running (okay, driving) back and forth to DeRidder to help in all the preparations, and now can see the address change at the end of the tunnel! I know they will enjoy living at their youngest daughter's home and being under her care!

So now it is time to re-turn my attention to classes and workshops in my home studio. I want to begin in January, the best beginning for a new, good year. Those of you who have been champing at the bit to take classes this last year (you know who you are), and those of you who have given up thinking you would be able to study with me (you know who YOU are), LET'S GO!

This year we'll be opening our minds and hands to papers and techniques beyond magazines and cutting and pasting (yea, we'll still do that, but MUCH MORE). Just glancing at this upcoming new year, we see some of the following techniques and projects: altering papers with burning, layering and stamping; making our own stamps; making a palette of favorite colors and color combinations; working with gesso (white, black and clear) and resists; and making handmade papers of all sorts. We'll discuss end-of-month workshop projects during class, so the workshops can use our new skills and further us along our individual creative paths.

Please see my "2013 teaching schedule" for information you will need to participate. 

My hardiest wishes for a creative and productive new year!

Blogging OR Arting...that is the question.

Okay, so I want to be creating art more than I want to be typing on a blog...and I can't seem to make my hands or my head do both. I have posted some new stuff, especially the pendants and the dream homes, but found this site and thought you might want to go there and look around, get inspired, get ready and get going! More later, and as usual, wishing you inspiration and realization.

Art outside the box

We are blessed to have the internet and so many artists who are willing to share ideas with us, such as how-to's and ways-to-recycle-these-and-those. And we are cursed with this same vast network of resources as well, as I discovered after developing an idea for a new and unexplored focus on collage yesterday. I even took notes: what are the parameters of this focus, how can I share this idea in a new class next year here at Studio 745, what is the best way to present the finished collages. It seemed to me to be art outside the box.

Then, for some unknown reason, I googled the name I had given the collage focus: haiku collage. And yep, it's been done. The name is there. And yes, perhaps everything we can think of has already been 'thunk of'. So now the project grows a bit: how to think outside the box someone has already been drawing inside of.

I'm both sorry I looked at what others have called haiku collage, and encouraged by it. The development of  haiku collages I have in mind differs somewhat from what the two or three other people online have done. But it's more difficult to not think of the color green after someone has said the word than to "think up" what the color green just might look like. I won't look again at their versions of haiku collages. It was somehow the opposite of "inspirational" for me.

Wishing you inspiration and realization in your art.

ABCs (Artists, their Blogs and Creativity)

Image by Georgie Sharp via Flickr

There seems to be, always, something new to learn. Artists are eager for their electronic muse(s)' input on unfamiliar techniques, materials and permission to play outside their comfortable past achievements in creating new pieces of art. A search for mixed media techniques takes me from YouTube to links on artist bloggers' sites to other artist bloggers. I could easily become a couch potato, eyes on the screen WATCHING other people MAKE art.There soon comes for me not enough hours in the day...it's a good thing I'm "retired" or I wouldn't have time for all the new things in my life (like painting on water....check this one out below!).

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• Mixed Media Artist (slideshare.net)
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Who says blogging isn't creative?

Looking for Dotee Dolls on google, I found a blog site that included the words "create a blog" and I followed the lead. Setting up a blog site it easy...blogging itself is not something you are born with, like sight (or second sight) or hunger. After CCC was named and in place, I was asked if I wanted to "manage" my blogs, and that's when I found out this was not my first blog site on blogger but my third: first was "Tea & Poetry" with no entries (I write poetry), then "The Buzz" with no entries (I am a beekeeper). So the blog site stops here. If I can't contribute to a blog (if I create them, will "they" come to read them?) of my own making, then why set them up. So being said, here is first attempt at keeping up at blogging.

Having read some really fine blogs, I have a tendency to want to be as great as they were (don't remember their names, however). That's what happens when I try to journal...it has to be worthy of saying before I say it. Except that's not what keeping a journal is all about.

That reminds me of the last level I got to in Toastmasters...the one where you are to put away your notes and give the "speech" from the comfort of the speech that's in you getting out. I objected. The words I wrote were each and every one (or so it seemed to me) important, chosen for the best word to use, selected for literary value, weighted for just the right impact. I couldn't possibly give my speech "from memory" or from letting go and letting it out. So ended the toastmasters phase of my life.

At 66, a lot of phases of my life have ended, or at least seem less important than whatever is going on at the present time in my life. Like waiting for Ann so that we can go do the bees. I think that's her now.