Pysanky

My very first attempt at Pysanky using one color.
My dear friend Julia and her lovely daughters gave me the Pysanky kit last year
as a gift and I hadn't tried it yet. Using the the kystka to draw is tricky!
But i will continue to practice and make a few more before Easter.

Spoon Oil

I gave my spoons some much needed love and affection
with Stephanie's wonderful spoon oil recipe.
Just sitting there early in the morning polishing wooden spoons
was incredibly relaxing and almost therapeutic, I highly recommend it :)

Allan Kaprow on installation and performance

Now, I think those two words, installation and performance, mark accurately the shift in attitude toward a rejection or sense of abandonment of an experimental, modernist, position which had prevailed up to about, lets be generous, up to about 1968-1969, and began gradually becoming less and less energized. So, I think what you’re getting there is the flavor of modernist exhaustion and incidently a return to earlier prototypes, or models, of what constitutes art. And it’s no accident that the majority of most performance nowadays, there’s not much installation anymore, by the way, the majority of those performances tend to be of an entertainment, show biz, song and dance, in which the focus is on the individual as skilled presenter of something that tends to have a kind of self-aggrandizing, or at least self-focusing, purpose. It is artist as performer, much like somebody is an entertainer in a nightclub. And they’re interesting. Some of them are very good. I think Laurie Anderson is very good. She’s got all the skills that are needed in theater, which is what this is. Many others who jump on the bandwagon, coming from the visual arts, have no theatrical skills, and know zilch about the timing, about the voic about positioning, about transitions, about juxtapositions, those moment by moment occurrences in theater that would make it work. But it’s another animal, whether good or bad, from what we were doing, and I think, in general, even the good ones are a conservatizing movement.

- Allan Kaprow, 1988 (full interview is here)

Noche en la Casa Azul

A little tour at night from the outside peeking in :)
*The bird on the glass back-splash of my stove is a waterslide decal
I printed on my inkjet printer. The brand I used is Lazertran.

April Desktop Image

For you :) Click here for the full size downloadable image. Enjoy!

Big Bird

Largest one I've painted yet. Watercolor on 640 grs. Aquarelle Arches paper.
22" x 32" One of the most luxurious papers I've ever used. Largest one I've painted yet. Watercolor on 640 grs. Aquarelle Arches paper. 22" x 32" One of the most luxurious papers I've ever used. The company has been around for over 500 years!
I can't believe I had never used it before.

Horsies

My best friend Mariana hired me to make this set as a present for her little niece's birthday. Today's her party, hope she likes them :)

On My Way Out The Door

My husband and I are on our way to get my father, who lives in Pennsylvania, and bring him to live here in TX near us in an assisted living facility. He doesn't want to come, he doesn't even think there's anything wrong with him, but he's being compliant and I, like a dutiful daughter, have been dismantling his old life and trying to rebuild a new one for him here. It's a dreadful task that no one should ever have to undertake, telling your parent that it's time to let you have the reins of their life.

Art is getting made, though, in almost a frenzy of anger and exhaustion. Here are two Stacked Journaling pieces I will be taking to my childhood best friend in Pennsylvania. She's terribly ill with Diabetes and could use a little brightness in her home. These small canvases in her favorite colors- green and blue- contain stacked messages of love, healing and sisterhood.

And another stacked letter to my father I'm working through in my journal before translating it to a stretched canvas.

(Dear Dad: Confusion)

Hope your weekend is happy and creative.

Crafting for Courage

Margie and a small group of friends organized Crafting for Courage so I made these little ornaments to join this effort to raise money for Save the Children and their work with the littlest ones in the devastated areas of northeastern Japan.
They will be available for purchase at my Big Cartel shop tomorrow morning.
100% of the proceeds will be donated to Save the Children.
Find out other ways to help with this effort at this link.

Aqua

Trying out new papers. I really liked this dark gray one,
specially when combined with aqua.

Desert Rose

Look who's finally blooming after 15 months!
It's my lovely Adenium Arabicum.

Etsy Shop Update

Moth Cat is now available as a print at my Etsy shop.

My amazingly talented 13 year old son Daniel is now offering custom pet portraits
at my Etsy shop :) The pretty kitty above is Margie's Arwen next to her custom portrait.
Ain't she pretty with her hankie?

Dalmation portrait Daniel made from a photo in the book "Dogs" by Lewis Blackwell.
Wishing all of you in the Northern Hemisphere a very happy Spring
& my friends down south a very happy Autumn!

The Folk Opera

Nothing has ever made me feel cooler than having my artwork on an LP album :)
Thanks Annie!

Iron-On

I made the little field bag with re-purposed linen from an old apron I never used
and printed one of my watercolor moths & a butterfly onto iron-on inkjet transfer sheets made by Strathmore, trimmed the shapes and ironed them on to the front flap of the bag as directed. To finish it off I embroidered a few details on top.
A surprise gift for a friend in a land far, far away.

日本 Japan on my Mind

-I had a custom stone hanko seal made with the symbol for "bird" in Japanese
a few years ago and never got around to sharing it with you.
It came in that beautiful fabric covered box
with a porcelain ink plate with a blue dragon on the lid.

-I won the beautiful letterpress card with one of Margie's crochet stones in a giveaway she hosted a while back at her blog.

-The pretty kraft envelope with the stamped letter C and beautiful green stamp is from Cecilia Afonso Estevez, she's an incredibly talented artist/illustrator from Argentina whose gorgeous carved rubber stamps inspired me to start carving my own many years ago. I recommend you visit her lovely blog Flor de Papel.

Work in Progress

Something I'm doing just for fun to take a breather from all the work stuff going on :)

Coloration Inspiration

Nothing inspires me more than to carefully observe God's Handiwork.
This beautiful country is so full of color and warmth...

My thoughts & prayers go out to all of the people of Japan.
Sending you all a big sunshiny hug from Mexico.

Black Square: Malevich and The World That Wouldn't Die

Here it is: the end of the world.
I am standing in front of it, and it looks like shit.
It is Kasimir Malevich's "Black Square", it hangs at the New Tretyakov national gallery in Moscow, and it is dirty, tired, bleak, so unimpressive it is embarrassing to see.
And yet, that is the end.
This can well be seen as the point where art enters the other world zone, leaving our poor miserable world of bodies behind. This art is spiritual, declares Malevich, and I am ready to believe him, not on faith, but because at this point faith is the only thing that can carry me as a viewer. To appreciate it - I think while standing in front of the painting - I need to believe that what my mind brings me when looking at this painting, it brings thanks to the painting. (And that it's worth the trip). Any thought, then, is a belief.
The painting is all cracked, it seems like it lived through terror, two wars and a revolution (it did).

For a while, I wonder what disturbs me in all this. I take Malevich's painting as an ever-returning challenge. We are challenged to accept this or go beyond this. We are challenged to deal with the out-of-this-worldliness of aesthetic creation. Supreme it is.

I thought all this quite disappointing, a concept I would have rather kept as a concept, a story, rather than seeing it translated into a poor somewhat-black square. But what about the painting? Doesn't it have anything to say? The cracks are most probably the result of the artist being in a hurry (it seems he put the black layer over the white one before the latter dried out). The strokes, we can clearly see, are uneven, quick, there is nothing uniform about this, and even the outside lines of the square are uneven (he is said to have painted it free hand, and very free it was). It is not a good square. Or, no: it is not the square we are told it is. It is a square that tells the history of its creation, the story of the tension, the energy, the impatience. It is a clear window into something that happened, into a performance of painting and a moment of life. In that sense, the painting appears better than we ever could have dreamed. It goes back to this world. The painting outdoes the painter - through unveiling something more than what he had planned.
Inside of the cracks, if we watch carefuly, we see another color, it is not black or white, and at moments it seems like it's not grey either. It varies from spot to spot, it is reddish, brownish, somewhere close to the color of flesh. It is the color of revenge. The revenge of the painting.

Wearable Art

I found these gorgeous alpaca silver brooches in a shop in San Miguel yesterday.
This morning I woke up eager to make tiny watercolor original paintings
to go inside them. They'll be available at my Big Cartel shop tomorrow morning.

Dear Dad

Two paintings out of three (so far) in an ongoing series dealing with my fear and uncertainty surrounding my father's recently diagnosed Alzheimer's.

("Dear Dad: Regret", 11" x 14", acrylics, India ink, Stacked Journaling on stretched canvas)

("Dear Dad: Anger", 14" x 18", acrylics, India ink, Stacked Journaling on stretched canvas)

And finally, a piece (not part of the series shown above) that refuses to resolve itself and as punishment is being forced to show itself to the world in this blog post.

(24" x 30", deconstructed screen printed fabric, hand-dyed fabric, pastels, colored pencils on stretched canvas)