Cat's Meow

I got the cat beads in Taylorsville, Ca at the Solar Cook off. I think they are ivory or bone.

Art versus Craft

I'm back at my day job, so it's harder to squeeze in art making, but yesterday I did make this necklace and earrings as a gift. It's creative, but not sure it qualifies as art. Anyone out there have any thoughts on art versus craft?

Racoons

They shrieked first...like cats. We heard them from the hot tub, but when one scaled the fence, we saw its outline against the night...that long ringed tail and fur rimmed neck. It watched us a while before scaling the skeleton tree hanging over the deck.

Virginia City, Nevada's St Mary's Art Center

The catalog arrived today. A full color brochure listing the new classload. For artists, it's a wonderful retreat tucked into historic Virginia City. It's in an old hospital...complete with ghosts, that's been rennovated as a place where artists can create. I've taken three wonderful printmaking workshops at this site: Nolan Preece (intaligio), Stephen Lewinter (Solar Printmaking), and Candace Nicols (gelatin prints).

Teddy Roosevelt said...

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."


Sometimes, for me, stilling the inner critic is even more difficult.

Art Piece Number Three

The female galaxy is a gelatin print that I did this summer. Today I went in with a brush and acrylic paint and added more color. A gelatin print is made from jello. I made a collograph from file folders, inked them and pressed them into the jello. The fork I found flattened on the road outside my house. I inked it up first, pressed it into the jello and then put the collograph on top of that.

Art Piece Number Two

A dream about red dots...nostolgia for my South Dakota roots...remembering Sitting Bull's vision of hundreds of soldiers falling all around him. The US calvary button I found in the desert a few years back sticks to General Custer's foot. It's much larger than Piece Number One. This one is 16 x 20

Art Piece Number One

This solar print collage is dedicated to teacher Stephen LeWinter. I learned solar printmaking from him at St. Mary's Art Center in Virginia City. He was a wonderful teacher who succumbed to cancer, but whose memory lives on in the lives of his students. The piece began with one of the prints completed the summer of 2005. Originally, the piece was 5 x 7 inches, but I'm submitting it into a show called Nevada Wide Open that requires the pieces be 2.5 x 3, so the piece was modified by tearing and adding the torn pieces to create the collage. The green is colored pencil and the bit of brown silk ribbon came from a 2007 Christmas package.

Creation

So I read an article lately about an 80 year old woman who started doing art at 67. After 13 years her art was featured in this major art magazine...and I was impressed...and inspired. So inspired that when I sat down with a friend to create my list of New Year's visualizations (my friend and I have been doing this together once a year for over a decade) I decided that in honor of my 50th birthday I would create 50 works of art. I hope to post them on this blog.