non-obligatory blogging

. Not sure I even need to add anything to that title -- it applies in so many ways in life. Sometimes it doesn't even feel like there's any real improvement for a while but eventually even discipline can bring rewards. Surgery went well. At least I got by with the arthroscopic surgery instead of the full-blown, open up your knee kind. So now I'm healing from the surgery and I'm still healing from the injury but I can walk without crutches and I've started physical therapy and so despite the continued pain and discomfort, there is definite progress.

. My dwelling place has become our fairly good size living/dining/kitchen great room these days. Jimmy set up a daybed where the sofa used to be with a 2.5' x 4' table next to it where I can keep within arms reach just about anything I might need. (Anything except art supplies, that is) He did this because I am still unable to get in and out of our small bedroom safely and after two weeks on the couch I finally said I couldn't take that anymore. (It's was a month yesterday since the freaky weird dislocation.) Mostly I've been reading or messing with my wacom tablet or getting online or watching movies and such to keep myself occupied but I have had some hints of borderline insanity hit on long days here by myself. After going to the orthopedic specialist (O.S.) last week, and being put in a better brace that allows me to bend my knee a little bit, I was ready to do something other than spend all day, every day on the daybed. Actually, I was ready way before this but...

. (photo by Peter Hellebrand -- http://home.planet.nl/~helle004/ ) "All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Therefore, strengthen the hands that are weak and the knees that are feeble, and make straight paths for your feet, so that the limb which is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed." Hebrews 12:11-13 (NAS)

I know I should be living in the very present reality of Today but dang!, 2008 has been one hell of a ride and I'm sure hoping 2009 is a bit less dramatic. I can't go into all of it here but thinking about the six (or more) life altering or at the very least, life shaking events in my life or the lives of family members this year has caused me to think about the fact that no one ever really knows what other people are going through, even if they really open up and fill you in on the details. I can't even come close to revealing all the different stuff that happens let alone the many ways that circumstances might be affecting me. Besides the fact that I can't broadcast everything that touches my life because many of those situations involve other people who I want to protect or at least not expose to public scrutiny, the real underlying fact is that I don’t even comprehend how it all factors in and fits together or what I’m actually learning from it all. I talk openly ab...

I love this verse in Psalm 131... My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore. I believe I'll probably be learning this 'til the day I leave earth because of the fact that there will never cease to be some new area of thinking or new situation that I can apply it in. The need to understand what's happening in the grand scheme of things or just the basic need of trying to make sense of my own little world is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that to wrestle with those sorts of things to the point where it makes us uneasy or fretful isn't conducive to a peaceful life or enjoying good health and I just can...

I guess I'm under house arrest. MRI results are in and not sounding too encouraging but we still won't know for sure until after seeing a specialist at NM Orthopedics on Dec. 4. That's two more weeks on the couch before I find out whether they will have to do surgery or not. In the mean time I'm supposed to stay off my leg as much as possible apparently because whatever it is behind the kneecap that connects it all together is the major part of what's wrong with the knee (ie: "a complete tear of the medial patella retinacula predominantly involving the patella insertion at the apex") among a few other, a bit less scary sounding, technical gobbledigook. It's crazy. I'm trying to discover the meaning of life right here, right now but can't seem to stay quiet enough (even in this restricted condition) to hear. I'm starting to sort some things through though. Because I'm an only child and the only one of the two existing grandchildren in ou...

Wow. It’s sure been a long time since I posted. I’m not sure what happened but I wasn’t creative at all during that time. I guess I was sort of preoccupied. It all started because I found out last month that my cholesterol was way up so I immediately changed my diet and started walking almost every day. It is boring to walk on the treadmill so I decided to rig up a stand and my laptop computer so I could watch something while I was walking and found it very helpful to have something to take my mind off the 2 miles of going nowhere. My daughter had been telling me I should try the TV series “The Office” so since it was available for instant viewing on Netflix, I started watching it from the beginning – 4 season’s worth. For a while I just watched while I walked but very soon I was watching at every available moment (and this is the danger of watching a TV series on DVD or instantly online, it’s all too easy to end up watching it whenever you can). I’ll admit it, I have a bit of an addic...

. I meant to do this before now but take a look at my daughter Nicole's recent art project. A couple months ago she was asked to participate in an upcoming Habitat for Humanity fund raising project. I think the event is scheduled for late October or early November but they will be auctioning off bird houses that have been created by Durango area artists. The quote above the birds is from the song Volare (volare means 'to fly' in Italian, just in case you didn't already know that) and says, "No wonder my happy heart sings, your love has given me wings." I helped a tiny bit (with the image transfers) but I think she did a great job and just had to let everyone get a glimpse of her creativity.

This is the coolest thing. Maybe I'm slow but I just discovered Wordle . You paste in some text and then it generates a "word cloud". You can change fonts and colors and redo the design over and over 'til you get something you like. It will make words (that are repeated more than others in the text) bigger than others so you can force it to emphasize some words more than others. So cool. And they say you can use the "clouds" that you create in any way you want to -- you can even make money with them by printing on t-shirts or using in designs you sell in different ways. Here's another one using the text from my blog post about my dog Duke a few weeks ago.

. Jimmy (my cutie husband) told me Sunday (after the book-making ladies left) that he wished he had joined us Sunday in making little books. He had to take today off of work to take care of some business stuff and so this afternoon he had me show him how to make little books. His is the one on the left with the spider and the one on the right is one I did for my granddaughter, Haevyn, who saw the ones we did Sunday and said, "I want a little book too Llama." She has a new, pinkish-red Betta fish so that's why the Betta on the cover of the pink one. Didn't Jimmy do a great job on his? He was so meticulous about the way he went about putting it together, even adding a 'half-hitch' knot when he was tying the signatures of the pages together so they'd stay together better!

. Not much time to post this morning but I thought I'd show the little books Yvonne, Kellilynn and I worked on yesterday. They are ATC size, using playing cards for the light cardboard in the covers. We did some image transfers on some paper from Nepal and coated it lightly with acrylic medium. It ended up looking a lot like leather. Lots of fun!

. Hey, check out The Altered Page postings from yesterday and today -- Studio Shots 1 and 2 showing tons of artists' studios with pics and comments by each one. I love it! Seth Apter has organized "the third edition of The Pulse: an artist survey" and began posting the results on August 18, 2008 with 95 artists participating. Very interesting and inspiring to read. Actually, check it all out.

. I found out last week that I sold one of my prints that had been in the VLA ( Very Large Array ) gift shop. It had been there for about 8 months at least. Jimmy always says that art just needs to wait for the right person to come along -- the one who's just gotta have it. He told me last week that the lady who runs the gift shop told him that some guy who was with a film crew out at the VLA site recently had bought it and it was going to his office in New York. Cool, I thought and Yay, the print finally sold. Found out today that apparently (or so I was told) it was David Muir with ABC News and he's hosting an ABC Primetime special about UFOs that aired tonight. (Honestly, I've never heard of him before this but I still thought it was kinda cool news. Apparently, he's pretty hot stuff in the news world. He sure looks like a hottie in his pictures anyway ;) Now I'm wishing I had framed it more professionally and included a certificate of authenticity (standard p...

Cloth Paper Scissors is publishing a special issue about studios . It will hit the news stands early in October. There's a lovely photo on the cover of some artist's very nicely appointed, clean, well kept art space. It will also have, " 85 ways to find, sort and store your stash " and " 11 best organizing tips from an expert " and " BIG solutions for small spaces ". I need to read all of these articles, I'm sure and I'm really looking forward to getting a copy so I can be inspired and encouraged by all those organized artists. Or possibly not. Usually, I just feel depressed when I see the large, clean, orderly work spaces that other artists work in. Anyway, just knowing this special issue was coming out has made me think about what condition my art condition is in. Here's mine... Sorta pathetic. Actually, I try to be organized. I really make an attempt at being organized but I don't love to organize or the discipline that it takes ...

. I bought some HammerMill Color Copy Gloss paper this weekend at Office Depot. I had never seen it before and I keep trying to find a paper that gives me a really nice, consistent transfer without a whole lot of effort. (besides that I'm just a paper junkie.) Anyway here's a couple of samples of what happened. (remember this is just an experiment, I'm not going for art yet.) In the first photo (above) the images are transferred to MDF that has a light coating of dried white gesso. I applied a layer of Golden Polymer Medium (gloss) and then burnished the images face down with a brayer -- the back of the paper covered with plastic to prevent gel medium from going everywhere. The daisy on the right was printed on a color laser printer and the one on the left was printed on an epson c88+ with durabrite ultra inks. This next one (below) is transferred to some untreated matboard -- again the laser on the right and the inkjet on the left. Of course, the laser print is the more vi...

. Two o’clock this morning I was awake and afraid to go out of my bedroom because of not knowing whether my dog, Duke, would still be breathing or not. Jimmy was sleeping on the couch in the living room to be near him, just in case. He’s been in and out of the dog hospital the past couple weeks while they tried to figure out what was going on with him and they decided on Monday that a cancerous tumor on his spleen was causing his declining health. Actually, he was in pretty serious condition when he went back to the vet’s office this past Saturday. I’ve been grieving since then and I guess I’m weary of the pain. The pain of grief is odd – it seems to rise to the surface and be multiplied by each loss that is experienced. I think partly because it is simply a reminder of other losses but also each loss has some regrets associated with it and each loss permanently removes a blessing and a joy of some kind from our lives that we must learn to do without. And then once you’ve experienced...

. This poly-litho print was first a composite of photographed items in my neighborhood. My son Josh and I took about 20 minutes when he was here for the weekend recently and shot photos on our property and next door. The US Forest Service has been doing some thinning in my front yard (I'm 15 ft. from the forest boundary) and the eight stump is probably about 40 yards from my front door on the Cibola National Forest. It was a fun find. That's it for the 8x8x8. I had more ideas but ran out of time. I think I'll be glad to be able to think about art in a different format than 8"x8" and maybe my obsession with "eight" is finally over.

. My first attempt at a mosaic (sort of) with Glass Graveyard and Kelly (ghost town near Magdalena) dump finds along with some other odds and ends. Even some crash glass swept up from the road near my grandmother's house in Socorro. The images behind the two bigger glass glob thingees are of the rings from a blue ringed octopus . One more to post for the 8x8x8.

. The scans of these clocks have 'photoshopped' hands in these images but they are now real clocks. The one on the left is one of those typical mixed media, never could be duplicated sorta pieces. All the texture was accidental, a result of an attempt to deviate from the recommended components of a crackle technique. The one on the right turned out a bit more like it was supposed to except that the background (which was the residue of a failed photo transfer) added a yellow cast that I don't love. Someone who saw it recently said that they loved the "quinacridone gold" color of it so I guess it is all in the eye of the beholder. :) The show isn't until this Friday and I've already sold the one on the left (have the check and everything -- thanks Josh and Stacy) and possibly the other clock as well. woo-hoo!

. Decided to go ahead with this one, just cause it was fun and I didn't have to think about it. I've probably over-thought most of them. I keep trying to get over that. Oh well. .

. I just scanned this piece to replace the photo on the 8x8x8 blog so I thought I'd post it here as well. As usual, photos just don't do any favors for artwork. It's better in person. All the red squares are high gloss and then the prints on the black squares are matte. I like it. I don't want to sell it. :( I might just mark it sold and keep it.

. This was already posted a while back on the 8 x 8 x 8 blog but I thought I ought to put it over here as well. It was intended as more of an experiment instead of a final version but since I haven't made much progress yet, it's probably going to end up in the final eight. It's a poly-litho print on an acrylic painted panel. This one is all about the eights. For those of you not familiar with the project check out the 8 x 8 x 8 blog .

. . I've decided this one looks a lot more like a decorative tile than real art but it was fun experimenting with the dimensional acrylic in the vines and then trying to figure out how to get the image on there. This is actually the second one I've done. On the first one I used the gel medium image transfer technique and was not quite happy with the depth of color on the pomegranate and tried to fix it by applying a second transfer on top of the first one. I should know better. My fixes are more often disasters than successes. Anyway, the image on this one was printed onto tissue paper and then basically decoupaged onto the panel with acrylic gel medium. I made a carrier sheet using card stock sprayed with 3m adhesive spray (that I blotted to remove some of the stickiness) and then stuck on and trimmed the tissue paper to 8.5"x11" before printing on my Epson C88+ that uses durabrite inks.

. A free copy of the new summer 2008 Somerset Studio Gallery arrived in the mail today. It feels a bit weird to see it finally in print but there it is. Not sure why they decided to only show the red hair from the beaded fairy that was attached to the house but it really doesn't matter. Maybe it didn't photograph well. I included a website in the short bio at the end of the article but I've never found the time to do anything with it. I wish there were time for all the art and blogging and websites I would like to be doing right now but at the moment, life (as my friend Leau often says) "is what it is."

. "Creativity is a lot like happiness. It shows up when you're thinking about something else." I saw this book in Michael's last week. I didn't buy it. Kinda wish I would've but I will later when I'm actually ready to move on to something besides what I'm doing now (which is just doodling basic shapes and simple drawings of everyday objects). Keys To Drawing With Imagination by Bert Dodson looked so interesting though that I finally googled it so I could read more about it and see some of the pages. Realread.com has the introduction pages which I'd recommend reading even if you have no desire to get the book or ever learn more about drawing. Below is one paragraph from the introduction... "Imagine you are sitting in a room with your sketchbook in hand. You have an urgent desire to create. Your pencil is poised. Your energy is focused. You are determined. But nothing happens. Why? Because wanting to be creative is all about you. It is a goal...

. (Readers consider yourselves forewarned...the following contains scriptural references.) Appreciating God's artistry and creativity and honoring Him is meaningful to me as an artist because I know that I enjoy being appreciated and honored for the things I create. I think it is amazing that The Source of all creativity has designed our day to begin and end in exactly the same way -- with spectacular beauty. (Represented in the above photo of today's sunrise in Denver, less spectacularly than I wish I were able to.) I find that encouraging somehow. I've always loved sunrises and sunsets and I've never ceased to be awestruck by their intensely colorful beauty and God's endless variety in their presentation. I'll have to admit, I've seen more of the sunset variety but nevertheless, they are equally beautiful to me. For me it means the day begins and ends with hope and with promise. In the morning we are greeted with the splendor and warmth of the sun and lig...

. I'll admit there are much prettier pictures that I could have posted from here in Colorado but this is from Jon and Nic's upper deck. I think if you have to live in the Denver area, the Golden foothills are not a bad place to be. I've lived through four of the six days that I get all by myself up here. What a luxury. I don't remember ever having six days all by myself, anywhere. Well, I'm not entirely alone. I'm dog sitting for my daughter and her husband while they travel to Jon's grandmother's funeral in Louisiana so my biggest responsibility is pottying dogs and making sure they don't tear up the house or run away. They are such pains but I find myself talking to them and liking them a bit better than ever before. That's what happens when you have no one else to talk to, I guess. I've been allowing them to sleep in the same room I'm in at night just so I know where they are and I'll admit, to feel a little more secure in a strang...

. I was planning on going to Albuquerque today for the ATC trade but couldn't get it together. I've been fighting a cold all week. It never has quite gotten me but every other day it feels like it is threatening again (sore throat, sniffles but not really sick, you know what I mean). Also, my granddaughter Haevyn is here for a few days (always fun) and so my productivity has been a bit hindered and that means only 3/4ths of the cards are actually ready to go. I finally gave up on the idea of making the two hour trip to Albuquerque this morning, 30 minutes past when I should've been leaving. I decided the stress wasn't going to help me conquer this cold once and for all. What's up with me and time these days. Well, maybe it's not just these days. Someone gave me a sign about 20 years ago that read, "This is the earliest I've ever been late" so I guess this really isn't a new thing. I just thought I'd be better by now since all our kids are r...

. Little houses made of gift cards, actually -- which is probably a lot like ticky-tacky. I submitted them for the "Le Chateau" challenge for Somerset Studio magazine but I found out just before Christmas that they'll be a technique article in the summer edition of their Gallery magazine. Yes, that was exciting news. Now all I have to do is write the article and get it sent off before February 1. I've had it on my to-do list all week but do you think I made time? I hate that one of my favorite sayings is, "if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done." Blah!