new blog site

I've moved my blog over to Wordpress. Blogger is just, well, Blogger. See me here:

http://eyecandyindustries.wordpress.com/

the pink elephant of divine inspiration

Not having internet for a few days makes me feel out of touch-- and I don't know how I feel about that. It does, however, give me more time to do the stuff I should be working on. And that, I have.

(I could always walk down to Sweetbay Coffee shop, but it has been colder than a witch's tit out there!)

I got a new canvas and have the initial figure mostly blocked out to my general liking... tonight I get to start rendering it:

I also finally got around to having some photography printed, and tomorrow I will be taking it to the copy shop to have transparencies made of the prints. Then the fun of altering and layering begins! 

The other thing I have been working on is taking the Art Goddess Workshop that I taught last year and turning it into a workshop-in-a-box sort of thing. Right now I am writing the workbook that will accompany the kit. I'm really getting excited about this project because without the time constraint of a two hour workshop I can really expand it. Ideally the kit is going to be sold through Etsy, galleries and any place I can teach some classes. I am going to need people to "test" my product, so stay tuned. 

I'll post those recipes I promised in the last post soon.

R.I.P. Salinger, you old man

I was just rifling through Mr. Martini's bookshelf and stumbled upon a few things of special interest to me. 

First is a slightly yellowed copy of Franny and Zooey by Salinger. I adored that family when I was 15. Today, being the day of his death, finding it on the shelf was a bit touching. I flipped through it and found a passage I thought I would share:

"In Zooey, be assured early, we are dealing with the complex, the overlapping, the cloven, and at least two dossier-like paragraphs ought to be got in right here. To start with, he was a small young man, and extremely slight of body. From the rear--particularly where his vertebrae were visible--he might almost have passed for one of those needy metropolitan children who are sent out every summer to endowed camps to be fattened and sunned. Close up, either full-face or in profile, he was surpassingly handsome, even spectacularly so. His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo." A more general and surely less parochial view was that his face had been just barely saved from too-handsomeness, not to say gorgeousness, by virtue of one ear's protruding slightly more than the other. I myself hold a very different opinion from either of these. I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces--a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast--could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second. But what was undiminishable, and, as already so flatly suggested, a joy of a kind forever, was an authentic esprit superimposed over his entire face--especially at the eyes, where it was often as arresting as a Harlequin mask, and, on occasion, much more confounding."

The other book that caught my eye is One Hundred Year's of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is actually MY copy of the book, despite what Mr. Martini may claim. Anyway...Ooh, ooh, this book makes me swoon. You know, I never found President Clinton the slightest bit sexy until I found out that he lists One Hundred Years of Solitude as his favorite book. A man that can appreciate a story that is such a lusty romp through life, well, maybe he's just might have it going on. This book has one of my all time favorite opening lines: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

So life is nice. I've been painting a lot. Mostly feeling like I am wasting paint, but I am trying to be forgiving to myself. I've been using paper instead of canvas because then I don't mind playing around and throwing it away, if needed for my ego. I've been staying in Van Buren at Mr. Martini's quite a bit, so I've been dragging around my large sketch pad, wooden table-top easel and my picnic basket, which I use as a paint box. I feel like I am packing for an expedition every time I come over here.

Tonight I am working in my art journal and waiting to see if  we're looking at an ice storm. I think a pot of coffee is in order.

Next post: Cookin With Caleb

passion//slave

Still doing the little spontaneous collages:

Great advice for the art chicks I know!

Living an Artful Life

Blogger ate the looong post I was working on. I've been edited!

Found some free e-courses at Expressive Art Workshops. I decided to try the 'Deepening Creativity' course.
From the description:
"This mini course involves meditating on a small, torn paper spontaneous collage each day for ten days. All you need is two or three torn or cut out images and a word."
Every other day, Shelley, the creator, sends you an e-mail with encouragement and ideas. So far it doesn't seem like a bad way to spend five minutes while drinking my morning coffee. I would recommend this to anyone that is in a slump and needs to start small to get back in the groove. 
I am using index cards to glue my collages to, and then I think I will punch holes in them and keep them together with a binder ring. I used the blank backs to do some free association about the images and word.

regular ole Tuesday

Today was so warm I was walking around town in a tank top and flip flops. I'd say this is weird weather--but it really isn't for Arkansas. And I'm not complaining one bit.

Tonight I am making some art journals. One for Mr. Martini's future sister-in-law (above) and one for my old high school chum, Heather. While I worked on journals, I made a big pot of delicious chicken and dumplings, which always makes me think of my grandma. If she knew I was coming over she usually made a pot.

I'm working up some ideas for new classes and playing around with the idea of doing some sort of mail order classes, too. Well, the mail order thing wouldn't so much be a class, but a package that contains journaling materials and prompts revolving around a particular theme. This would probably be something that I sell on Etsy.

It is just hard to focus on creative work when taking care of the day to day stuff is such a struggle. Surely I will find employment soon! I keep telling myself something has to give soon. It does, right??

heartless

Picture I painted a few weeks ago.

It is hard not to get a lot of glare after varnishing.

a poem, i suppose

these are thing that hurt:

when you call the other girls
pet names
i thought were reserved for me.

it shocks my ears,
and tears at my heart.

but that is not all.

when you look bored and impatient
with my chatter
that i can't stop
because i am manic
when i am with you.

also:

when you call me names.

when i call you names.

when you show up late.

or worse, not at all.

when you forget
that i'm a girl
and girls
like to go out on dates.

when you hold my past against me.

when we fight all night.

when you tilt your phone away
so that i can't see the screen.

but nothing hurts worse

than never knowing any of these.