Some pretty cool PR

Last Friday I met with a reporter from the Prince George's Gazette for an interview about my studio work. She's done nice pieces about several of the other artists in residence over the last year. We had a very nice chat and the hour just flew by. I suppose those are the kind of interviews that one should be worried about. If the conversation was that easy, who knows what I said?

Well you've got to click the link below to see what I found in the paper at the end of the driveway this evening after work.

http://www.gazette.net/stories/04292010/hyatnew185958_32574.php

It's a nice article and a good picture (It takes a lot for me to say that!). It's also really good PR for the arts program at the community center. I admit to smiling and blushing when I read the nice quotes from other people. I needed a little ego boost.

Website outage

Not that you're all beating a path to my website, but just in case you try to reach it in the next few days, I just want to let you know what I'm changing my DNS registrar as part of an overall simplification and rearrangement of my web "stuff". The site (www.russlittlefiberartist.net) might not be reachable at times over the next several days.

As I write this, I'm on hold with GoDaddy tech support listening to big band music. Considering some of the really terrible stuff that you sometimes hear on hold, this isn't too bad.

Want to hear some great news?

Last week I had my first post-op echocardiogram. Today I went to see my cardiologist for a follow up. It's so much better than I even dared to hope. He said that the echo looked so good that if you didn't look closely and didn't know that I'd just had valve replacement (not to mention most of my ascending aorta) you would think I had a TOTALLY NORMAL HEART. It was all I could do not to say, "You're F$#@ing kidding, right?" The blood flow is perfect. Best of all, my heart has shrunk to within normal range. That means that the surgery is now completely and officially a success. The new valve and proper hemodynamic action have allowed the dilation of my heart to reduce, meaning that there's no longterm damage to the muscle.

I know that this adventure will continue for the rest of my life, but for now I don't have to see the cardiologist for another year. I've been on a 3-6 month schedule for a long time. It's hard to get used to being healthy enough to be on my own for a whole year.

I've been smiling so much today that my face is tired.

Truly amazing. Thank you God. Thank you indeed.

Not so recent work

The blog seems technically back on its feet and I'm working on a portfolio page. (I'm still thinking that my blog page might replace my website--much easier to maintain).

So, now that things are back in working order perhaps it would be good to talk about art a little bit. Here's a piece called "Vessel" that I finished a while back. It was accepted into the 41st Annual Laurel Art Guild Open Exhibition, which was hung for the month of March.

I'm very happy with the result from a color perspective. It seems to get good reactions from people who see it in person. My concern is that is yet another piece in a series of one-offs. How does this relate to anything else that I've done? Although...now that I look at it, it seems to have a stained glass quality (not necessarily a good thing), which relates to some liturgical work that I did a few years back.

In other, completely unrelated news, I've signed up for Carol Soderlund's workshop "Color Mixing for Dyers: Part II" at the Crow Barn in early May. This will be my 2nd class with Carol, my 3rd visit to the Barn, and a week of very hard work. I'm looking forward to both. One of the big focuses of this workshop is controlling value (light/dark) in thickened dye. I've got a good handle on hue from Part I, and I've been working successfully with thickened dye, but I don't have the predictive control over value that I would like to have. If Part II is anything like Part I, I'll be back in my studio by the end of May doing some really great stuff.

Digital simplicity: is it possible?

The blog is on the mend. In the process of repairing the damage that I did yesterday with the click of a button I discovered some nice new Blogger features. For example, you can create up to 10 standalone pages and link them to a menu. Nice. I'm starting to wonder if I could give up my hosted website and move my domain here. I'm just starting to feel like I've got too much technical stuff to maintain. Let's see, there's a blog, a website, and a Facebook page. Add to that all of the back end tasks of personal and studio accounting as well as studio promotion and it becomes a whole lot of computer time.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no Luddite. I think technology is great. I just seem to have too much lately. When I get overloaded I back away from all of it, ignoring the good and useful (my website) along with the questionably useful (Facebook).

Well Cr@p!

I just "broke" my blog. Ironically, while considering a redesign (I know, I should consider actually writing instead of redecorating), I thought to myself, "I should really backup this site design before I mess it up." Instead of creating a backup I changed the template, thus irrevocably deleting all color, font, etc. changes that I had made. I'm not happy. Where's the undo button?

So, the blog is going to go through a bit more renovation than anticipated. Maybe I'll write about it. Your never know. Stranger things have happened. :)

Distraction

It's starting to feel like a great time to be alive (war, suffering, and natural disasters, aside). I've got more energy than I've had in months. I think I'm finally getting to that point where I'm starting to feel so good that I'm realizing just how bad things had gotten before the surgery (not to mention immediately thereafter).

Now I feel as though I've got a year's worth of pent-up creating that's trying to get out and I finally have the energy to do something about it. And yet, there are the distractions. Work is busy--very busy. But, that makes the days go quickly. Home is busy. I'm still amazed by how much laundry there is to do for two adults. I don't even want to imagine a household with kids' clothes to clean. Shopping, cooking, blah, blah, blah. It's the same litany that every one lives with. I expect I should be grateful that I have clothes to clean and food to eat.

So, despite all of the distractions, I'm working on finishing a piece to submit for a local art show. As soon as that's finished, photographed, and submitted I need to start quilting a piece that I'm submitting next month for a national SAQA show. I've gotten to local and regional shows, but never a national show. It would be nice to reach that goal with this particular piece. Sorry, no photos today, but soon. Promise.

No more anonymous posts and hopefully less spam

I've switched the setting on my blog (largely inactive though it might be) to not allow anonymous commenting. I regret having to do this, but recently I've been getting a number of off-topic anonymous comments that are phishing or just plain weird. For example, I posted a while back about going through a "dry spell." I was referring to a lull in my blogging. Apparently someone (more likely some bot) interpreted that as a bedroom reference and I ended up with several postings related to--how shall I put this--men's pharmaceuticals. I suppose it's funny, but I'm not laughing.

I hope this doesn't exclude anyone who wants to post because I enjoy and value your feedback. You can still post if you have a Google/Blogger account or via an OpenID user name (i.e., Yahoo, etc.) and you can reach me directly through email.

A new year

In "The Artist's Way," Julia Cameron recommends (requires) that you write one page every day. It's intended to be a way to unblock the stifled creative voice. The daily discipline is even more important than what you write. According to Cameron it's OK to write something like, "I don't know what to write" over and over again.

I sort of feel that way.

I'm sinking into the winter blahs. Too much snow, wind, rain, clouds, and cold. I need sun, warmth, and the smell of green things coming back to life. And that's months away. Pooh.

Dan and I have been off work since Christmas Eve. We visited family in NJ, stopped in Wilmington on the way home for an overnight at the Hotel DuPont and dinner in the Green Room for his birthday. Since then it's been puttering around the house, catching up on chores, and a couple of movies. Yesterday I was moping around so much that he sent me to the studio. Good thing. It was just what I needed. Too much vacation.

I had a fantastic December in the studio from a retail perspective. I sold oodles of scarves and grossed enough to cover more than 6 months of rent! It was a great feeling. I got to work hard and make pretty things and lots of my work when out into the world--I hope to the surprise and delight of the recipients.

Today we're off to have dinner with my parents, with a quick shopping expedition along the way. Tomorrow it's open studio (Greenbelt Community Center, 1-4pm if you're in the area). Monday it's back to work. Returning to the "routine" won't be such a bad thing.

Venturing out for the sake of art

I haven't had too many excursions out into the real world since surgery. It's been mostly trips to see doctors. Yesterday was a milestone. I drove (white knuckle) to the studio with Dan to see the "My Island" exhibit that's up in the gallery. It's the annual exhibit by the resident artists. I've got 2 pieces in the show and I was delighted to see how well the show has been hung. It really looks great. If you happen to be close by or find yourself in Greenbelt between now and mid-September stop by.

So, here are my pieces. "Island Meditation" is a journal quilt. The text has a lot to do with fear and its sources, about letting go of fear, and about connecting with others rather than being isolated (i.e., islands). I was delighted to find it hanging on a column by itself, with nothing close by. It really shows the piece quite well.

Here's Dan standing in front of "Island of Misfit Stitches," which began with me fiddling with some torn fabric strips and turned into a wild crocheted "thing" stitched down to a piece of canvas onto which I painted and stitched and appliqued bits of cloth. I don't know that I'll be doing another one of these soon, but you never know. Idle hands...

Here's a detailed view of the piece shot in the gallery.