done!

four hours on sunday and an hour or so on saturday and i finished the beady*.

finally. also, yay!

 i am looking forward to some other pastimes that do not leave my eyes, shoulders and back sore and exhausted. but overall, putting myself through that (for the second time...heh) was worth it, and since you're probably wondering why i would bother with such a weird project, now might be a good time to provide some answers:

1) it is shiny. i love shiny things.

2) as an artist, i am fascinated by the relationship between order and chaos. a lot of my work features imagery that seems chaotic from a distance, but is actually extremely (obsessively?) and, i hope, elegantly organized and controlled when viewed close up. some work conveys that back-and-forth relationship multiple times: orderly when viewed close up, then chaotic from a slight distance, and then orderly again from a greater distance. in this case, the patterns of the beads seem pretty chaotic, but each bead had to be individually sewn onto the canvas, which takes a lot of meticulous, patient work. in my own life (specifically during my high school years), i have experienced ordeals that seemed completely out of (my) control, but i know that god has everything under control; now that some time has passed, god has been showing me just how in control of those circumstances he was. i find that beautiful.

3) i find interactions and relationships between people fascinating as well. having moved around as a child, i am thrilled when i meet people with a connection to a place i have lived. this became especially important after moving three thousand miles across the country to go to college, and i reflected this in my art with abstract imagery that suggested interconnectedness- weaving together, working together, or branching apart. the beady is full of shapes that are connected to other shapes, whether linked together by color or line, or by variations in pattern. while at school, meeting people from moscow (idaho), or towns near potsdam (new york) instilled the "small world" perspective in me, and by extension, though it's been beaten to death, the idea that we are all connected. and god has a beautiful plan for it all, which is another reason i strive for beauty in my work.

and there you have it. :)

*if anyone can think of a more elegant term, i would be much obliged.

beadi and sushi

hi there! 

so last weekend was our first anniversary- hooray! we ate a lot of sushi and ice cream and pie went to the beach :) here's a bad picture of the sushi we made, and below that is what we had last night for dinner- "scattered" sushi, or basically "lazy-man's" sushi. just throw it all in a bowl and dive in...YUM. the neon orange stuff is smelt eggs, which are amazing flavor bursts; think of eating mildly sweet and tangy tiny bubble wrap. we found it at a market in little tokyo, a very convenient ride on the gold line away. also, scallops are amazing- somehow i'd never realized this before last week.

and then we have updates on the progress of the beady...it's grooowwwing! i am getting pretty close to being done- so maybe 6-8 more hours. :)

 

 

we found two lovely white table lamps next to our dumpster last week and i am working on making a lampshade for one of them- i have some really nice paper to use (and this is why i will never stop being a pack-rat: it's the paper that someone used to wrap one of our wedding presents!). because i care about things like this, i will probably post a picture when it's completed (hey- i have the same birthday as martha stewart, so i'm bound to get excited about home decor now and then).

happy friday!

beadquence?

here i am, finally beginning the documentation process for a project after i'm already half-way through with it. this is a beady thing that i'm working on pretty much just for fun- the glass beads are beautiful and shiny, and i like making free-form, spontaneous patterns with them. i sew them onto light-weight canvas attached to an 8-inch hoop. you can see pencil lines on the cloth- that's from a project i started earlier and then ripped out. i was going to try to create one giant snowflake-type form with radial symmetry, but it was too complicated. the circles and lines were to help me keep the proportions right as i got further and further out. anyway, the additions you see in these pictures represent about a day's-worth of work (anywhere from one to three hours per day). the last one, from yesterday, has a lot of additions. b was gone aaaalll day (3:45 am - after 10pm) and i was bored and missed him; therefore, i beaded. 

more to come :)

 

 

shifting focus?

i think i'm going to try focusing on art-related things in this blog. i'm getting tired of writing lists of things i/we do, and i haven't had many thoughts to share (not any that i want to share on a blog, anyway).

that said, i just got back from a 6.5 mi walk/jog. to be honest, i felt like i had walked/jogged to the end of the world and back, so i was surprised (and a tiny bit disappointed) when i got home and realized i'd only been out for less than an hour and a half. i really want to get back into running, buuut...i just don't enjoy running by myself. or rather, i do...but i don't. you know? i guess what i'm trying to say is that i already get a lot of alone time, and while walking and jogging alone can be very nice, it's also sort of like concentrated alone time, which can be a bit over-whelming. but then...not very many people are available to go jogging during the day. maybe i'll just have to invest in more gorrillaz, genesis and belle & sebastian- music can be a good companion, though i don't think it's necessarily good to resort to that all the time.

so i'm working on four artsy projects (um, "commissions" might be a better word). i can't really post about any of them yet, beyond the fact that they exist. there's not really a point to, because they're all in the planning stages still. once they are finalized and i can get to the fun part, i may write about them.

i'm also working on another fun artsy thing in my spare time, and i've been taking pictures of it as i make progress. maybe i'll post them later today.

hmmm...i like thursdays.

updatey

hi! things have been good and busy around here.

1) i started january with one commissioned project, and it looks like i'll be ending it with four, plus i'm able to keep on working in claremont once a week. this is definitely an answer to prayer.

2) we put pictures on the walls last weekend! this makes me ridiculously happy. from left to right: collage by a family friend, three pictures (old photograph, image of an eyvind earle painting that i cut from a magazine, photo-collage birthday card from alida), two photobooth photos framing a wedding picture (awwww... :) ) and a panel from my squares project from sophomore year at scripps. (remember that?) when we visited new york for christmas, i threw a lot of the panels away, but only after my mother's brilliant suggestion that i keep a few and frame one or two.

3) b and i got to go on an almost-all-expenses-paid two-day mini vacation a couple weeks ago to big sur, monterey bay, and visalia. b had to do some work in big sur and visalia, and since i didn't have to be anywhere those days, i went along, too! we stopped at monterey for the night, because it is awesome there. there was extremely thick fog on the ocean as we drove up the 1, resulting in the feeling that we were driving on some incredibly high mountain pass above the clouds. it was exciting. :) big sur and monterey are beautiful, too, as is the drive to visalia. visalia itself, or at least the part we were in, was rather boring.  

4) blogger is a huge pain! either i need to learn something about css and javascript and whatnot, or find a new blog provider. seriously. creating posts for my art history class is a major weekly frustration- the new editor is an improvement over the older one, but even that's not saying much. does anyone else feel this way?

5) anyhoo...happy friday!

 

alrighty!

i have had an extremely productive day, and i thought to myself, why not make it even better by posting something on ye olde blog, like you've been meaning to do? righto!

ok. so. my last post was about a month ago. here are some highlights from that time:

12/12: day-long holiday bazaar in a huge warehouse at an art charter school in LA. it poured rain, not many people showed up to shop. i sold two things (but gave out almost all of my business cards) and did some serious brainstorming with my handsome and intrepid husband (who is not afraid of sitting at a table with his wife for eight hours with hardly anything to eat and very little activity going on around us). this fair was kind of my last-ditch effort at the etsy-type method for selling work. for 2010, i am going to focus on the so-called fine arts- creating large pieces that are time-consuming and take months and months to complete. i want to pour my creative energies into something, well, worthy of my time- moreso than cards, journals, little drawings and beadings. also, pursuing a series of commissions based on a specific idea, upon which i may perhaps elaborate in the coming weeks.

12/13: christmas party hosted by b's company. the band was good, the food was good, the photobooth that i had been looking forward to since last year was there again this year. (good thing! any mention of the christmas party over the past year unfailingly resulted in me prancing around and singing "photobooth! photobooth!")

12/17-12/31 (actually, 1/01): we spent christmas in NY! one week spent with my pa and stepmom in syracuse, one week spent with my mom and stepdad in potsdam, along with brother and associated stepsiblings (it's complicated), dog and cats. thoroughly enjoyed my (our) family, the country and the violent mood swings of the weather (such a nice change from the lazy, perpetually sunny days of socal- trust me, it gets old). also sorted through all my things in my old room and the basement. threw away probably fifty pounds of wonderful, dear treas...*eyes tearing up*....no no no, it was trash- old (nostalgic, yes) crap. but i kept plenty of it, too, and am in the process of shipping it across the country. lord knows where we'll stuff it all- we'll at least need another book case. anyhoo, it was all wonderful and very sad to leave. then we spent new year's in chicago because of bungled plane flights. beware united air, that's the moral of the story. worst. flights (etc.). ever.

so now that we're all caught up, i would like to say....see you later!

the dumbest thing you can say on a blog...

i promise* to update soon! i've been trying (with only a little success) to think of things to write about that aren't merely streams of consciousness or lists of random things. writing a blogpost should take some thought and have some purpose at least some of the time, and i think my posts have been pretty thought-less in recent months. anyhoo, stay tuned, i guess?


*ok, ok. i admit that this may be too strong a word. "would like" might fit better, or (sigh), be more truthful.