Thursday, September 30, 2010

Nature's Wisdom Art House Co-op Sketchbook Project Page

Got another page done in my Sketchbook Project moleskin.

Thousands of sketchbooks will be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way on tour across the country. After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view.
 To see my submission page on the Art House Co-op website or to learn more about The Sketchbook Project follow this link. (Please leave a comment on my page while you are there!) http://www.arthousecoop.com/submissions/30684-facing-forward-leaving-disability-illness-behind

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Sketchbook Project page "Natures Healing"

 
"Thousands of sketchbooks will be exhibited at galleries and museums as they make their way on tour across the country. After the tour, all sketchbooks will enter into the permanent collection of The Brooklyn Art Library, where they will be barcoded and available for the public to view." Art House Co-op Brooklyn N.Y.

My cast leg was too swollen for me to sit up and paint yesterday so I did a couple of sketches instead while lying with my leg elevated. Today I was able to sit up long enough to get one of the sketches painted with gouache.  This one is called "Natures Healing"


Monday, September 27, 2010

Sketchbook Project "Time Heals" Page


Yesterday I finished another page in my sketchbook. This one is called time heals. The sketchbook theme I was given was "Facing Forward" and since I am "Looking forward" to being able to walk again when I get this cast off my paintings for this project are mostly about healing.

The scans of the artwork are coming out really bad they are too harsh and contrasty, so I may try to go back a photograph some of the pages instead of scanning them.

Below are a couple of photos of my "Art-nest", everything is within reach so I can rest my casted leg.


Sunday, September 26, 2010

Page 6 Winged Woman Sketchbook Project


Yesterday I did another page in my Sketchbook project moleskin. I was able to do the sketching part with my casted leg elevated above my heart (to keep swelling down) but once I started painting with the gouache paint it was impossible to stay fully reclined so I had to sit up a bit more and I ended up getting my leg swollen.

I really enjoyed being immersed in the painting process, the crappy paper in the moleskin sketchbook proved to be more challenging that I thought it would be and some of the ink outlines bled through to the artwork on page 5. Luckily I think it kind of added to the page 5 art work and did not destroy it but I will have to be more careful in the future or start doing the paintings on other paper and then paste it into the moleskin. I started another sketch last night and plan to work on that today.

Friday, September 24, 2010

No Sketching Today, First Outing.......

 Don helped me get propped up in the car so that I could go to the Dr today. I was having really intense back and hip pain so he put a ton of pillows on the floor of the car so I could prop up my cast. Saw 2 of the practitioners at Sojourns and they were able to get the pain to ease up. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to do a page or two in my Sketchbook Project moleskin.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Creating Sketchbook Project Pages while Chair-bound

This page was created with scraps of my screen printed silk and pages torn from a paperback book

Well I have been sitting in this chair for just over a week since I broke my ankle and to keep myself from going insane I have been reading , watching videos, Facebooking and working on The Sketchbook Project moleskin that I received in the mail from Art House Co-op. I made a couple of trips into the studio with the wheelchair and grabbed whatever I could fit in my lap and brought it out to the recliner in the living room where I keep my leg elevated all day.
This page is a piece of my screen printed and hand painted silk duiponi

I had planned to do a bunch of screen printed silk for my sketchbook but since the accedent is liniting my mobility I am only able to work on it sitting and need to use what is within my reach and that included tearing up an old paperback book I had just finished reading.
This page was created with one of my hand carved block prints, pages torn from a paperback book and silver and black pens

You can follow the progress of my Sketchbook Project submissions at this link: Sketchbook Project Link

My sister said the area that I have created for myself in the living-room looks like a nest and it does! I have everything within arms reach while my ankle heals. 

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Zen Lessons from a Broken Ankle: Happy Anniversary

 
It's only been 7 days since I broke my ankle while vacationing in Maine and yet I feel like I have been stuck in this chair for weeks. I had so much work to do in the studio when I got back from vacation that I was stressing about work the whole time I was away. Two silk paintings needed to be mounted, then framed and shipped out immediately. I needed to complete 2 more silk paintings on a deadline. I had to make and mat a custom sized large print for a customer also on a deadline and I needed to make fall and winter prints for all my galleries in time for the seasonal change out.  I also had signed up for the The Sketchbook Project and had not even started working on my sketchbook since it arrived. And on and on it went, a long and overwhelming list that marched through my brain everyday like a maniacal mantra.

Then on the last day of vacation I broke my ankle while dashing across the street to catch the sunrise over the Atlantic ocean one more time. So now I can't do any work for a few months and all of that worrying about how will I ever get it all done when I get home was for naught!! I was far from "being present in the moment" that morning, I wasn't fully there with my husband enjoying his company and the magnificent ocean and  sunrise.













Don and I were on vacation celebrating our anniversary a week early. We had gone to the spot where we spent our honeymoon 19 years earlier.  My mind was racing with millions of stressful thoughts of things I wanted to do before we left, what needed to be done to pack up the RV, what I needed to launch into as soon as I got home and so on. We were briskly walking towards the beach and the sun had already risen in a cloudless sky so the light was blinding. I turned to say something to Don and down I went, having never even seen the step down from the curb. I laid in the road for a while dazed and then got up and promptly fainted and fell to the ground again.

For the first 3 days after I got my cast, walker and wheelchair I was filled with regret and remorse over that fated step.  Feelings of overwhelming sadness would wash over me and I cried a lot....over everything.  I had to cancel orders, postpone deliveries,and notify galleries that I was basically shut down for the busiest 2 seasons of the year; Fall Foliage and the Winter Holiday season. As the days pressed on  was also discovering that recovering from the broken ankle is further complicated by my Lyme disease and autoimmune disease issues.

The first few days I was battling the wheel chair and walker. At one point I even flung the walker across the room in a fit of rage. Other times I have gotten my self stuck in the wheelchair in the narrow hallway between the bathroom, dinning room and studio doorways having to make dozens of micro-movements to get myself free from my hallway prison. For a person who has never been accused of being patient this was a crash course in slowing down and letting go.


Today  is the actual date of our 19th anniversary, I am stuck in a recliner during the day and sleeping on a bed in the dinning room downstairs at night. Don is off at work today and will be sleeping in our bed upstairs tonight  but that hardly matters as long as we have each other and as long as we both have our health. He has been calling down to me every night before he goes to sleep and every morning when he wakes up and I have been answering back......."I love you too sweetheart".  None of the other stuff matters.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

I Will Write Peace on Your Wings

“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”
~ Sadako Sasaki
 
I have been having trouble sleeping at night so I have taken to curating Etsy Treasury's. What this means is that I search through tons of Etsy shops choosing artwork to match a theme that I have come up with. The first one I did was called "Isn't it Romantic" and you can view it here:
Isn't it Romantic I hope you will leave a comment ;~)

Last night after Don went up to bed I started another Treasury. I called this one "I will Write Peace on Your Wings". This Treasury is based on a your Japaneses girl named Sadako Sasaki.

Sadako was only two years old when the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. At the the time her family did not know the catastrophic damage that had been done in her young body but by the age of 11, she was diagnosed with Leukemia, or the "Atomic Bomb Disease."

There is a Japanese belief that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will be granted a wish.  Sadako then began trying to fold 1,000 cranes in order to get her wish to live. Of her cranes she said,
“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”. Unfortunately, she only made it to 644 before she died. Following her death in 1955 at the young age of 12, Sadako's friends finished the remainder of the 1,000 cranes and Sadako has become a symbol of Peace throughout the World.

Here is the Etsy Treasury that I created in honor of Sadako Sasaki: 
I Will Write Peace on Your Wings

Thursday, September 2, 2010

TAFA (Textile & Fiber Arts List) Featured in Hand Eye

There is a great feature on TAFA (Textile and Fiber Art List) done by  Hand Eye Magazine this month. 

Hand Eye's Rebeca Schiller writes:
"There's a new kid --well, actually a resource -- on the block. It's called The Textile and Fiber Arts List (www.tafalist.com), and since its inception, it’s been weaving a tight, and intimate community among textile, fiber artists, suppliers, and galleries.
Rachel Biel, TAFA List's founder, started the directory primarily out of her own personal frustrations with selling handicrafts online. Pioneer online sellers, like Biel, who used eBay as their storefront vehicle had a strong following with a supportive niche who bought from her and others. However, as the market expanded with the Internet becoming more accessible in remote places of the world, American artisans discovered that they were competing with their Tibetan, Uzbek, Bolivian and other international counterparts who sold their work at much lower prices."

To read the rest of the article click the link below:


http://handeyemagazine.com/content/making-list

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Curated my very first showcase "Isn't it Romantic"

Photo by Lucy Snowe Photography

I just curated my very first treasury gallery on Etsy!!!! I called it "Isn't it Romantic" and I searched out the most wonderfully romantic items for your viewing pleasure. Please check it out and leave a comment so it gets high ratings! http://www.etsy.com/treasury/4c7f049233778eefb5b79a9b/isnt-it-romantic?index=0

Artists Need a Left Brained Twin


After we got back from vacation on Sunday I was swamped with paperwork, emails, matting and shrink-wrapping orders for galleries, marketing, shipping Etsy orders, an inventory count, ordering supplies and all that other stuff that is not painting. I get so impatient when I get bogged down by these chores because I want to get back to the "creating" part of my job. I have always joked that all artists should be born with a left brained twin who just loved digging into all of this non-creative but very necessary stuff that comes with a career in art. Alas this is not the case with me so today I am packing up the print order I shrink-wrapped yesterday, paying bills, mounting the last 2 silk paintings I did and then photographing them so that I can make prints.