two kitties/small city

Studio.

If you'd have told me I'd still be going through the stuff that came from storage - a year on - I'd have told you that was crazy talk. I started here, last Spring. My stuff was still on a moving truck and I only had what fit in the car. My sewing stuff was a divorce essential, apparently.

Now, it looks a little better than this - but not much. There was a horrible in-between phase (that lasted about a year), but all of those photos are on another computer.

I'm trying to cut down on the hoard. This week, I'm focused on sorting books - I collected so many books in Montana! Many have amazing collage potential - but just have to go.

 

 

Glittery gold trees and stuffed animals - have to go.

GoodWill shrine egg has to go.

And they can go because there will be more. There is always more. And the more I shed, the more I work in the space, so it must be a good thing. I see the first photos of the studio - before the junk came home - and I long for that quiet, clean space. That's what I'm working toward.

Treehouse.

I always wanted to build something like this on the Montana property. A secret garden room that would be the escape the big house escape was meant to be. The place I could sit and read books and big issue THINK without having to worry about anything but my own happiness. It never happened. Perhaps it would have, someday, if I could have stuck it out a little longer.

On leaving, I was still waiting for water to the art studio. It's strange to think of that now - I can wash my brushes in the bathroom sink and the bathroom needs so much work I really don't care what happens to it at this point. There's a lot of freedom in that. Is it wrong to think that if I'd lived there with J. that he'd have piped the water in to the studio before he started working on anything else? Or is it that he'd rather see me in the art studio than keep a perfect sink?

I would say, in any other situation, that whether or not you built a treehouse was up to you - no one else. If you want something, figure out how to do it, then get it done. I'd have built it from old windows and decking that had come off of the big house. Or I would have bought a ReadyMade blueprint for a pre-fab summer cabin and tucked it into the woods.

But I couldn't have done that, not there. It was a great pleasure to me to remodel the downstairs bathroom entirely from luxury fixtures found at Habitat for Humanity's ReStore. We tiled the entire walk-in shower for $5. It looks awesome. It was fun to do together.

I find myself having to balance, now, against the standard I have in my own mind for tarting up this house with the experience of the people living in it. To me, it sometimes seems slow. To J....he told me the other night that there wasn't a single stick of furniture left in the house that had been there when I arrived a year ago. Not entirely true, but almost.

I have to remember to let him sit and enjoy it. And though I know I can pull off a second bathroom remodel - my plans for this one even fancier - I have to wonder if I'd be better off making it utilitarian. Muji meets garage. Because at the end of the day, the question is not really about what you want the house to look like - but what kind of life you want to live in it. Do you want to spend your time protecting the granite or do you want to do your best not to ruin it, all the while making really, really interesting stuff?

Japhan de Villiers

Fragment Memoire, by sculptor Japhan de Villiers.  You have to wonder, as I am, what's inside.

Agnes Richter: Agnes's Jacket

Agnes Richter was a seamstress before she was committed to an Austrian mental institution. She spent her days embroidering secret messages into the linen of her uniform. The coping mechanisms of the insane is the topic of a new book by Gail Hornstein, PhD, called Agnes's Jacket.

St. Kevin and The Blackbird - Seamus Heaney

Leo Higgins, St. Kevin's Bird

 

 

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

by Seamus Heaney

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and Lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in Love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

 

Clive Hicks Jenkins, St. Kevin and the Blackbird

 

I see it differently. The poem. I think of it as form of survival, inside a cell. Imagining that you must cradle something so fragile and rare. That there is a reason for being there in that lonely place that is bigger than anything you've ever encountered before.

Christina Bothwell:: Obsolete

I came across Christina Bothwell's work via Pinterest. Sometimes I think Pinterest replaces the style of my old blog. "You don't need me anymore. You can find your own interesting stuff."

And then other times, I think, "You'll never see this unless I share it on Two Kitties/Small City."

Centaur, 2011, cast glass, raku clay, oil paints, found objects, 21" x 21" x 11" (CB112)  

 

Kundalini, 2011, cast glass, window glass, raku clay, found objects, oil paints, 11" x 5" x 4" (CB114)  

Gerard Cambon: Prototypes

Love the orange-peel umbrellas.

More of Gerard Cambon's work here.

A Manifesto for the Next Ten Years.

Source: brainpickings.org via Elena on Pinterest

Guerrilla Art.

It's been a long time since I've made any art. That's what it feels like, anyway. I know I've had dry spells much longer than this one. Just this weekend, it occurred to me (not for the first time) that I spend most of my waking hours promoting other people's creative work and by the weekend, I'm much too tired to do any art or writing of my own.

I decided that this weekend, no matter what, I would finish something. I wanted it to be simple. Something I could complete in an afternoon. I wanted it to be guerrilla. An anonymous note to some random person in my town. Keri Smith has good info and good ideas about how-to-guerilla-art-'round your town. I have her book but I confess I did not look at it before beginning my project. I think she's probably ok with that.

I gilded plastic animals with my handy Martha Stewart Gold Leaf paint.

Then, I made a series of uber-simple shadow boxes. I used some pearls and some book pages I had around.

Some had layers.This is the bottom:

This is the top:

I packed them in leftover plastic cartons and zipper bags I had on hand. With a note.

I tried not to over-think how "finished" they were. I did what I could in an afternoon and then called them done.

Glue bubbles and all.

I liked doing it. I set up a Tumblr account hoping to get some photos of the "tiny horses" in their new space(s).

I'm surprised how risky it feels to share guerilla art. Maybe more risk involved when you think the finder will dismiss what you've done as trash. Maybe I spent too much time justifying myself in the note.

Interesting, regardless, to see what happens. Sorry about the crummy pictures. I'm wondering if my foot-dragging on the blog is because my camera is kind of crummy? Why is it crummy? Seems like I just got it.

 

 

 

Kate Chopin: The Awakening

I've been looking for quotes or poems about the sea - thinking I would like to finish off these silly boards with some gilt text. It has been much harder than I thought to find something I like. Then, I thought of Kate Chopin's book, The Awakening. 

"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clearing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." 

 The famous story. She is married to someone who drains her spirit; she has an affair; she swims out to sea at the end of the book (sorry to ruin it...) and never returns. A suicide in the deep. But I want to say I remember her sense of freedom in that - so...could I use the quotes and look at them as positive? Or would it be depressing?

“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.” 

There is simple passion there, too. 

“The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have been turned upside down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether.” 

I read it ten years ago. I'm thinking of reading it again. Not quite related - I met someone once who had a mother with a history of depression. One day, her mother filled her pockets with rocks and walked out into the sea. She did live.