Seems it is time to step up to the plate and claim my heritage as a shop owner. Or rather take a step towards the idea, with my new switch plates- which are totally cool. It is not a new idea, just one I’ve had for too long, and just didn’t know how to map forward without pain and confusion. Little steps, that is all these are, and wicked awesome million dollar ideas. We have all had them. These are little ones that I have acted on. In little ways to bring just a little bit more art into yours and everyone else’s life. Enjoy.
Send word, and I will bring a garden
This time of year, it is easy to pull the summer visions into the depositories that hold us through the winter months.
The seasons have changed. By chance the summer solstice provided the point, the place, the turn to look again.
Walking with an overfilled canvas bag, I'm headed home to visit with my garden, see my children, and eat lunch before I continue to my next mural. It is a much-needed juxtaposition of beginnings and ends.
The spring show at Telander Gallery has come to a close. Being photographed for the last time a day ago, it is to be primed over by my hand this afternoon. At once a surprise, a performance, an equivocal space, the show will be gone.
In the morning I finished the mural drawing at the Bryant Street Barn, a VRBO here in Walla Walla. Slipping in between guests and events, I have visited the blank and glimmering pool reflection. I have scratched the lines to begin. The walls have grown a summer garden of transplants, and quiet strength.
Oh my dear ones, as you come off the Telander walls today, and before you caper off to your new homes to hang on new walls, please know the possibilities. Send word for a new garden to live within.
The flood's intention.
So. In the area of progress, the winter has brought distraction, and opportunities to reconfigure.
Work that resides inside me was shown in parallel, when driving with a winter full moon. By myself, I remembered: music still allows me to separate from the internal environment.
How could I have forgotten, from yesterday, when I danced in the kitchen?
Here, the work is done for me. Floods in. Fills. Moves past.
Floods hardly stay in one place. Never for a cup of for tea, rather at its own pace and desire. Oh, convince me to live otherwise, for I am not so easy to sway. If only for 3 and a half minutes or so.
This is the what.
Maira Kalman for Art Club
Why pick an artist? In my volunteer work with Picture Lab, I think a lot about choosing artists to enlighten a large community. Artists have messages to tell, or maybe I have a message to tell through an artist. You'll never know. I have the honor of attracting people's attention to those particular topics.
Given the construct of the women artist, by Art Club, I had a variety of ideas that were rising to the top, until I had a conversation pertaining to my own work. This past summer I had my first show in years at AMO in Waitsburg. Art has risen to the top of my priority list like sweet cream. The last few years as I settle into my back seat chair at Art Club, I have been experiencing, and exploring this reengagement. After what seems like a great hibernation, and a Quantum leap. I am artist again.
So, when it was asked whom I looked to for inspiration, three artists came up. Kiki Smith, (maybe a future talk). David Shrigley, a dark witty illustrations, and Maira Kalman, a designer first, or is it writer first? or is it painter first....? An avid producer of the illustrated "snapshot." She has flipped the viewers experience, through "narrative drawing and expressive illustrations." I had only been a viewer, and I needed to delve into what she considers, and the world behind the claim that she, Maira is a life-ist.
Carnegie Picture Lab
in community
Six years ago while working in my garden, I made the radical decision to give the next several years of my life to bring art to the schools. Taking privilege out of art, every child every class, making it accessible to all. All meaning children and their volunteers, in elementary schools, in Walla Walla.
Hardly a day goes by when the effort was not considered. How to make the program better, have the volunteers happier or how to best blow the minds of the young and unexposed. Oh and the possibilities are endless, what with partnerships and field trips and books? And then there is the structural work, how to invent a board, a non-profit or a working studio. With parents, many heavily educated adults who had given their attention solely to children, we pulled them out of their comfort zones. Reintroducing the idea of working for all the children, dishes and laundry can wait, we must volunteer for art.
All of these things have a life of their own now. My bullish ways have been replaced with people who talk politely, interact correctly, expect accordingly, and present outstandingly, all in the honor of art.
And now although my responsibilities continue, my lioness ways are directed at that which I would beseech others to do.
Can you believe this phoenix?
http://carnegiepicturelab.com
The way things are going to be
Art Walla Squared
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