Saturday, March 29, 2008

Healing Art Works!


Just wanted to give these folks a plug. Found them on Cheap Joes website and it looks as if they do good work!
Healing Art Works
Healing Art Works, Inc., is a non-profit organization committed to providing works of original art for patient rooms at hospitals and medical centers in order to facilitate emotional and physical healing through art -one room at a time.

Friday, March 28, 2008

Earth Hour 2007

Have you signed up yet?
http://www9.earthhourus.org/

Thursday, March 27, 2008

A bit more

Sorry had to throw this in:

'There is not much wilderness left to destroy, and the nature in the mind is being logged and burned off. Industrial-urban society is not "evil" but there is no progress either ... A gas turbine or an electric motor is a finely-crafted flint knife in the hand. It is useful and full of wonder, but it is not our whole life... I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times'

-Gary Snyder quoted in David Kherdian, Six San Francisco Poets, Fresno, Calif., 1969

Prophetic!

Get OUT!

Gary Snyder was raised in Oregon and Washington state.....and I just sensed it! ha!

Poet Gary Snyder

I love it when I stumble upon a new poet to get into.
On Writer's Almanac a couple of weeks ago I heard this by Gary Snyder:

At Tower Peak

Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
Freeways are clogged all day
Academies packed with scholars writing papers
City people lean and dark
This land most real
As its western-tending golden slopes
And bird-entangled central valley swamps
Sea-lion, urchin coasts
Southerly salmon-probes
Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
Along a range of granite peaks
The names forgotten,
An eastward running river that ends out in desert
The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks
The gloss of glacier ghost on a slab
Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep
After a long day's walking
Packing burdens to the snow
Wake to the same old world of no names,
No things, new as ever, rock and water,
Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.
A day or two or million, breathing
A few steps back from what goes down
In the current realm.
A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys
Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it
Live in it, drive through it then
It melts away
For whatever sprouts
After the age of
Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock
And gusts on the summit,
Smoke from forest fires is white,
The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.
It's just one world, this spine of rock and streams
And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts
Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,
Twenty million human people, downstream, here below.

This poem is from No Nature: New and Selected Poems Some of its imagery reminded my of the Olympic Pennisula. Here's another great bit:

"How Poetry Comes to Me"

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light


Gorgeous!

Beautiful Quote


Found this on Neoterra Blog

"It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branches or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all of its blossoming."

-Bruce Lee

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Port Townsend!

In exactly one week, at this very hour, I will be in one of my favorite places in the world Port Townsend, Washington. I daydream of moving there. Robert and I head off to Artfest! A weekend wonderland of art developed by Teesha Moore. It's a blessed life I lead, indeed. This was where we stayed last year, in one of the officer's houses at Fort Warden.
Needless to say Robert would love living there. This is a photo of last years West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium there at Fort Warden.














I can't WAIT! The Olympic Mountains...Puget Sound we may get up to ORcas island this year if all goes well. I just love it there. And PT has lots of galleries and plenty of good brew pubs!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Archetypes


So.... I am involved in a collaborative art project right now. I was invited to join 12 women who are all movers and shakers in the collage world, to do a collage/assemblage round robin. I am extremely flattered to be invited! We mail our container with 12 "pages" in it to the next person on the list. Each month we work on a different Archetype, the Teacher, the Healer, the Crone, the Muse, the Empress... you get the idea. Its going to be really, really cool. I just got the first box! Its full of beautiful small decorative canvases to work on. I will work this month on The Teacher. Prophetic as I head off to Artfest to teach again this year.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Rolling right along

So, my camera bit the dust in the wet exit last month and I am realizing now how much I used it. I can't photograph the work I am making for Artfest, or Meredith's first short haircut! I couldn't snap shots of the SlotMachines in our recent appearance at SNAG in Savannah GA. I can't photograph work I did for an archetypes round robin project, heck! I can't photograph anything!!
So you'll just have to hear about it all.... okay so Meredith has her first short haircut-smashing! I went to Savannah. I am frantically making bits for Arfest08, and working in a round robin for the first time in years. Life is just rolling right along at a fantastic clip. I haven;t relaxed, read a book took a nap or been leisurely in any way. Although I did catch a performance of "Turning the Wheel-Nearly Invisible" tonight.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Jesus Shaves-David Sedaris

I am gasping for air. This one always gets me....
gotta love David.

Neko Case

Driving back from Savannah Neko Case music over and over.... dreaming of the spanish moss....wet bricks.... the Lucas theater's lights glinting off the wet oak leaves. GOD can she sing!

Eilen Jewell - Rich Man's World

YEAH! Some of my new favorite music! Listened to Eilen Jewel and Neko Case all the way home from Savannah today! "Rambler girls...watch your step babe, watch what crowd you end up in....."

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Check it out!

http://theslotmachines.blogspot.com/

Monday, March 3, 2008

Coffee -ART- Talk!


Later this month IAC will host the beginning of potentially ongoing coffee klatschs.
I call it Coffee ART Talk. The basic idea is we host an open house coffee social hour for creative types. We found those of us that are there in the afternoon head down the street for coffee sometimes together. So we thought, hey! why not stay here and invite others for networking, laughter and shop talk? Stay tuned for the dates and times.

SNAG!


Well its that time! SNAG! Off to Savannah for an earlier conference this year with the Society of North American Goldsmiths. I will be assisting Sharon Massey, co ordinating the Silent Auction again this year, our last and fourth year. Should be rockin', a bunch of crazy metalsmiths all converging on a town for a week to talk shop, watch demos, party and buy tools. Woo hoo! Back next week!