An April Ramble

Yesterday I took off to explore. I headed out to Hampton to Queens Way. This shopping/restaurant area consists of small shops all in a row with brick sidewalks and housed in old buildings. Great ambience. I wish there were more stores to peruse because the ones that are there are great! I started off in a cottage store called Shabby Chic (47 E Queens Way). Wonderful paint flaked windows, sea glass, and all other sorts of old stuff. They have these wonderful mermaids cut from old wood then embellished with sea glass and sea shells. One of those would look so nice in my new bathroom!

At the back of the store you walk through an open area and up some stairs and find yourself in another store, Modernlux. Great retro stuff! Loved the kitschy zippered pouches and shopping bags. A bonus for the green me, they are made from 90% reclaimed materials. If you are lookinig for something mid-century this store is the place to hit. You can become a fan/friend on their Facebook page, Modernlux Hampton.

My next stop was Something Different (19 E Queens Way). Great combination of architectural elements, signs, and garden items interspersed with antiques. I saw several architectural elements I would have loved to hang in my studio. I'll be back for another visit once I get my studio reorganized and figure out what to do with my walls that aren't being used for storage!

Just walking through this area on a beautiful Spring day was a joy. I cut through to W. Queens Way, passing by one of the best tea rooms in the area, The Grey Goose. The menu offers a lot of variety. For those of you not vegetarian, this is one of the places you can get a bowl of Brunswick Stew and Virginia Ham biscuits...two VA treats. Not only great food, but they offer music and dinner theater events which they have dubbed Dinnertainment. One of my favorite director/actors Roxanne Whitmore Kohlman performs at the Grey Goose. By eating here you would also support 3/50 Projects "Eat down the street" initative! (More on this later.)

As I looped back around to my car I meandered through the Blue Skies Gallery. This art gallery contains work from many local artists all for sale. A couple of my favorite picks: The pottery by David Fletcher which is fired in an actual open flame fire instead of a kiln. The markings on the pieces are gorgeous. The assemblage art by Susan Bastinelli. I'm usually not an assemblage fan, due to the fact it often frightens me in a Sid Phillips tortured toys sort of way. However, the piece she has at the Blue Sky Galleries is great. Normal everyday objects and a clock casing used to create a quirky and fun face with a tuft of broom hair. And of course all of the jewelry! I love art jewelry and have gotten to the point where that's about all I wear anymore. I could have dropped big dollars on jewelry here but I was really trying to be good!

Speaking of spending money, if you aren't aware of the 3/50 project click on the link to the right on my blog and find out more. In a nutshell it's about spending your money locally to save the small privately owned business in your community. You pick three and spend a total of $50 dollars each month. Something you might not know is that for every $100 dollars spent at locally owned independent stores $68 stays in the community through taxes, wages and other expenditures. If you spend it at a national chain only $43 stays here. They have created another promotion on their site called "Eat down the street." It's the same kind of concept only it involves eating once a week at one of the local, privately owned restaurants instead of a big chain restaurants. One of my favorite locally owned restaurants is Papou George's. The food is great and the atmosphere is fun. If you go get the homemade potato chips! So, if you are planning to spend the day shopping and maybe stop for a bite to eat...support our local businesses!

Spring is Here!

Spring has arrived. She came to my studio just this week. Yes, I know Spring started on March 20th. But her representative, also named Spring, found me at Tuesday Morning and came home with me. She looks great with one of my background pieces behind her, doesn't she? She now resides on my desk and reminds me of all things spring-ish.

This is my favorite season. I love the weather and the feeling of new beginnings. It's like everything is in a refresh mode. Trees are greening, flowers are blooming, and everyone is sprucing up their homes. The only thing I don't like is the pollen. It's on everything, in my eyes and making my sinuses go crazy. It rises from the streets in plums as cars drive by.

I'm excited to say I have completed a piece for a friend who just moved into a new place. I was inspired by an article in Cloth, Paper, Scissors by Jenn Mason (she is also a CPS editor). So I went to work yesterday and completed it today. I'm happy to have my hands in the paint again. It's been a long dry spell with little creativity except for the theater sort. I was one of the chairwomen for the Dinner Theater production held by the Junior Women's Club of Hilton Village. So I got to reconnect with my theater background which was a lot of fun. But I really found I was missing my art and working in my studio to create. I have been so busy with all the other things in my life and have made little time for my art. But it's Spring Break and I found the time! Yay!

I was so busy I missed an issue of CPS! I can't believe it, I never do that! Also, in this current issue of CPS is a reader challenge called "Fly Your Creative Flag". I will definitely be participating in that challenge!

I'm also in the count down stage for Art and Soul which is May 20-24. I haven't even started making trades. I have some ideas and may have to scale back some in order to get them done. The theme this year is Wonderland so the trades will be fun I'm sure. I'm not taking as many classes, I wish I could take more. But the ones I'm taking sound so good.

I hope this re-birth of art in my life stays around for longer than just Spring!

There is art in everything...

I love glass ornaments. The old fashion, molded, hand painted kind. For awhile they were hard to find but now I see them everywhere. One of our Christmas traditions is to purchase a glass ornament that represents something about each person's life for that year. I still have all of mine from my childhood. My favorite is the lady with the violin. I got that one when I was 4 or 5 and was learning to play the violin. There is something about the shine, the delicacy of the glass, the sound they make when they brush against the needles of the tree, that just means Christmas like nothing else.

Last week I went through my mom's Chrismas decorations that had been left up in the attic. Something I wasn't ready to do, until this year. She has been physically gone for 17 years, but she lives on every day in my heart. I miss her so, especially at Christmas, which was her favorite holiday. Going through those boxes was more than I could handle, until this year. For some reason I felt ready this time...and what treasures I found! Lovely old glass ball ornaments and lots of felt! My mom was the queen of felt! She made her own tree skirt out of felt. She decorated the decoys all over our house with felt hats and scarves, they looked as if they belonged on a Charles Dickens pond! Our advent calendar...made out of felt of course. I had forgotten about the felt. So many memories. It also made me think about where I get my need to create, my ability to look at something and and see many uses for it, my eye for design...I definitely owe her my gratitude for showing me how to think outside of the box, that there is art in everything and that everything we do with a loving heart is art. She was never published, never had an art show with her name on it...but she was an artist in so many ways. She decorated our lives with drawings on lunch bags, dapper felt hats on geese, and daily laughter. I think I will include some felt in my next mixed media piece and my swan decoy is currently wearing her felt hat and scarf...it's good to carry on traditions!

It'a been too long

I'm actually embarrassed by the amount of time that has passed since my last post. Everyday life has taken over and there is little time for the creative pursuits. I continue to work on my soul journal when I have snipets of time, but I haven't worked on my else lately. A couple of weeks ago I did get up early on a Saturday and got a piece done an framed. That is the most I have accomplished. Now that soccer is done for the season I may be able to have some time to do some art!

Since I haven't had much time to go anywhere to experience any new art, I have been depending on the internet for my art fixes! This site it awesome, not only for drawing but for the sketches done by other artists. I really like one artist Julie in the Wild. She does some spectaclar drawings especially of birds. The site is really nice because you see how the artist drew the pictures from start to finish. For someone like me who doesn't have a lot of experience with drawing it's like a lesson in every piece! Check it out at http://sketch.odopod.com/.

This one is a lot of fun! It makes symmetrical lines for the ones you draw. Becareful it can be addictive! http://www.myoats.com. Check out some of the art work done by other people, it's truly incredible.

I was able to enroll in two classes this year at Art and Soul and I'm really looking forward to it! Hope to see some of you there!

The Exuburant Chaos of Art Journaling

Art and Soul has been awesome again this year. My classes have been wonderful. I'll have to write whole other post just to talk about them all! I just have to talk about the journal gathering hosted by the wonderful Diana Trout in this post.

Diana sent an email out several weeks before the retreat and invited anyone who journals to meet her to talk and share ideas about art journals. Maria the owner of collage, another wonderful person, offered the Make and Take space for meeting. I immediately wrote back and said I would be there. Now, I have to say this was not without trepidation. This would mean taking my art journal with me and showing it to other people! Scary!

So I sat down at a table of 12 strangers, with the exception of Takeabreak :), and began to talk and share ideas. Diana demonstrated a bubble blowing technique using ink and bubble liquid. Everyone got to share (except for the straws ;) and try the technique. We shared journals and looked for ideas within each others pages. Everyone was very supportive and complementary of my journal. But I have to say I was blown away by everyones journals! Diana even passed hers around for us to see. Wow, here were the original pages I had only seen pictured in publications! Very exciting!

We shared sources for supplies, ideas for how to journal with time constraints, we each journaled a page using a prompt we picked out of a basket, and talked about making space in our homes for a studio. Diana gave us some quotes to use with our journals. People who were in classes stopped by to visit and share. A gentleman shared with us a site his fiance, Sarah Whitmore, has called Soul Journaling. At one point someone asked if anyone had trades and everyone started pulling out trades and started swapping. It was loud, chaotic and so much fun! It reminded me of a Thanksgiving dinner with family all around the table passing stuff back and forth, everyone talking and having a good time.

Before I knew it everyone was packing up to leave. The table of 12 strangers had become a table of 12 new friends and I hated for the evening to end. I felt energized and full of new ideas for journaling. Once again I had taken a chance to step to the edge of my comfort zone with positive results. I hope that I will be able to stay in touch with these new friends because the connections with other artists are so important to me.

I saw Diana at Vendor Night and thanked her again for a wonderful evening. I asked her to please do another gathering next year! So just 360 some days to go until the next Art and Soul!

The Salvage Trip

How great is it to have a friend who loves architectural salvage as much as I do and is willing to load up the water bottles and wet ones, hit the road and find some salvage? It's pretty awesome! So this past Thursday we took off for Richmond with directions in hand to seek out and find Caravati's Salvage warehouse http://www.caravatis.com/index.html. After some circling around and misturns we finally found it!

We couldn't believe how huge it was and how much really awesome stuff we found. We love to walk around and come up with stuff that things could be used for in our homes or just in general. I love looking at the old doors and windows but my favorite is usually the ironworks. There were no disappointments in any of these areas at this place...wow! This is the window section, or at least part of it.

I was just blown away by the sheer size of the place and the amount of salvage. I went in search of some cabinet doors for a class I'm taking at Art and Soul at the end of the month. I found a few that were the right size and type that I was looking for and set them aside. Then rounded a corner and found a dream come true wooden three section cabinet. I had glass front barrister doors in three sections a the top with three drawers at the bottom. It was painted this aged out lavender color that was almost gray. It was a weak moment for me...when my brain starting vacillating back and forth between college tuition or cabinet...of course my childs education comes first but boy it was hard to walk away. It was priced at $2400, but they could give it to me for $2000 since it had been there awhile. So then I wanted to know if it stayed there for another 6 months would they consider $1000? The guy chuckled...but I'll be calling to check! I opened one of the drawers and found all sorts of Miller and Roads papers. The cabinet had come from the Miller and Roads in downtown Richmond! A huge part of my childhood, with the annual trip to Richmond at Christmas to see the "real" Santa. So not only a great cabinet but one with childhood memories attached, hard to resist. It was really one of those pieces I dream of having in a studio some day. Ah well.

We also walked out in the courtyard area and I took some pictures of some of the salvage out there. I love the way the paint peels and crackles when left outside. House facades, carriage doors, a great claw foot tub with a spectacular rust spot...I'm weird about this stuff!

We ended up making a side trip to an awesome art warehouse called Art Works. It's a renovated warehouse where artists live and work. The front portion is working studio and gallery spaces that you can roam through and check out the artists working and see the art work they have for sale. Great find. I would like to go back again, and since it's just a couple blocks over from Caravati's I could go visit my cabinet!

Kathy and I took one other side trip to the biggest Habitat Restore I've ever seen. We found some more cabinet doors here, success! We had a great time exploring parts of Richmond I had never seen. I will definitely make this trip again...I always wonder why I don't go more often since it's only an hour away!

On Creativity

This may seem like a strange post. But as an educator I have seen some changes in our educational system that really worry me. High stakes testing the biggest among them. I think these tests have created a system where thinking for yourself and thinking outside the box is not seen as important. Put these two things together and we will end up with a nation of adults who can't think their way OUT of a box! Scary. Creativity should be honored, prized, encouraged and "taught" in every classroom in America. Sadly, in many school systems (thankfully not my own) the classes that teach the arts (commonly known as resource classes) are often the first to go when budgets are cut. How sad this makes me feel. I love this video of Sir Ken Robinson, not only is it funny, but profound and thought provoking. Because creativity has always been a big part of my life and education is the way I pay the bills, I have always made connections between the two. So that is why, strange and out of place as it may seem, I wanted to include this video clip on my blog. And by the way, go to the TED site and watch other videos that interest you, the greatest minds in our society speak at TED...it truly is amazing!