little black journal

I’ve been spending a lot of time flipping through furniture catalogs lately, tempting myself with plenty of stuff that we really don’t need.  So rather than buy the items on those dog-eared pages…Voila.

chair (2010.05.12):

sofa (2010.05.16):

table (2010.05.22):

I’m taking a break from the weekly sketches for the next few weeks, but only so that I can focus on some other art projects.  So stay tuned!

After spending a year on the waiting list, Shane and I found out on Thursday night that a plot had opened up for us in our neighborhood’s P-Patch.  We debated for a moment over whether or not we wanted the added responsibility of another garden, but after thinking about the pros and cons, and then realizing that several of the cons were actually pros (having to take a 10-minute walk out to the garden a few nights a week to water it is in fact a very good thing for us), we snatched it up.  And so 80 square feet of fertile soil was ours, for a ridiculously small annual fee and the simple commitment to ‘actively garden’ our plot (in other words, make a reasonable effort to grow something other than weeds).  Today was planting day, and after a trip to Lowe’s and our favorite local nursery, we were ready to roll.  In the space of a couple of hours, we dropped in tomatoes, strawberries, snap peas, lemon cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash, three kinds of salad greens, cilantro, and a row of carrot and beet seeds, left over from our April backyard planting.  When the weather warms up just a little more, we’ll plant a couple of different peppers.  I am thrilled by the possibilities of fresh salads and homemade salsas, so I’m hoping we’ll start off Farm Schnell with a banner crop.  We’ll see…  If nothing else, this will be a great opportunity for us to get outside together in the evenings and connect with our neighbors who are growing their own gardens right next to ours.  Alright – that’s not completely the truth – the promise of quality time isn’t quite enough:  GROW, little plants, GROW!!!

Been playing around with stuff that’s a little more abstract, messier, free-er, looser.  This style is not my forte, but it’s been fun.  And it’s nice to switch out my pen for a paintbrush now and then…

meteor (2010.03.28) – torn paper, watercolor, and thread:

hexy (2010.04.11) – acrylic paint over lace stencil, cut paper:

flip side (2010.04.12) – cut paper, acrylic paint, thread:

featherweight (2010.05.05) – torn paper, acrylic paint, and ink:

There could not exist a more perfect book to read while on vacation.  Funny and light, hard to put down, full of witty little passages that I enjoyed reading aloud to Shane.  I have fond memories of the day I spent camped out on the beach with David Sedaris in one hand and a margarita in the other.  Seriously, though, this is funny stuff.  From the tales his rural upbringing in North Carolina to his days spent theater-hopping in Paris, he is able to infuse his life experiences with a humor that is one part sarcasm, one part cynicism, and two parts total light-heartedness.  I especially loved the stories that dealt with his struggle to learn the French language and could relate to several of his experiences.  This passage is classic:

“There are, I have noticed, two basic types of French spoken by Americans vacationing in Paris; the Hard Kind and the Easy Kind.  The Hard Kind involves the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various other words in order to form such sentences as “I go him say good afternoon” and “No, not to him I no go it him say now.”  The second, less complicated form of French amounts to screaming English at the top of your lungs, much the same way you’d shout at a deaf person or the dog you thought you could train to say off the sofa.”

I’m looking forward to picking up more of his stuff – the true test will come when I find out whether he is just as funny on a rainy day in Seattle as he is on a sunny beach in Mexico…  I’ll let you know.

Three or four months ago, I started thinking about a blog redesign – Little Black Journal is now over two years old, and has been in need of a little refresh for awhile now.  For any of you readers that follow me via Google Reader and haven’t been to the site in awhile, this is LBJ, circa yesterday:

As I was laid up on the couch last night with a mild case of the cold flu, motivation took the place of procrastination, and I spent several hours tracking down a decent template, tweaking the heck out of the one that came closest to my ideal, redesigning my header, and testing it all out on the beta site that my uber-techy husband set up for me.  And now…Voila!  I’m pretty happy with the direction I’m moving in – the new site seems cleaner, fresher, and allows for larger photos than my old layout could support.  The header is also a great place for me to ‘showcase’ some of latest artwork and will be updated periodically.  Also, FYI, I have started linking my photos to my Flickr page, so if you want a larger-format photo, just click on the image in the body of my blog.

I’m still fiddling around with a couple of minor things – fonts, text color, margins, etc., but I’m gettin’ there.  Don’t hesitate to leave me a comment if something seems funky – I am by no means a web designer or graphic guru, so feedback is always welcome (I just spent a couple minutes opening my blog on 5 different web browsers and it looks different on every single one – I feel your pain, J!).

It’s an improvement, though, no?

My encaustic workshop wrapped up on Monday, and I’m just getting around to taking photos of my work and processing my thoughts on the whole experience.  I had some anxiety about being able to make it through four straight eight-hour days of art-making, but once I got into the swing of things, I caught myself checking the clock regularly in hopes of actually slowing down time.   I was totally bummed when Monday evening rolled around, and my short-lived experience as a full-time artist was over.  But my bummed-ness was offset by the fact that I was walking away with a pretty cool collection of work and a renewed passion for art-making.  Below are a few of the highlights…

This is one of my favorite pieces, made with wax, thread, and tissue paper printed with one of my images of Paris:

This pattern was woven with thread, then cast in a mixture of clear and white wax.  As the class progressed, I became known as the girl with all the white wax – a lot of my work was fairly muted, and I was one of the few that allowed the color of the wood panel underneath to really show through.  I loved the color and grain of the birch veneer, and so I figured, why hide it?

More white and clear, set over a tissue transfer of one of my sketches:

I brought a couple of the ‘seed pod’ sketches that I used for my food art back out for these two pieces:

One of the things I liked most about the class was the opportunity to experiment with different media.  My instructors brought all kinds of new ideas on how to achieve unusual effects with every-day materials.  This is what happens when wax is coated with shellac, then heated with a torch – lovely:

And this is shellac sprayed with India ink.  This charred effect comes from some kind of chemical reaction between the two elements – no fire necessary.  I love it – I never knew painting could feel so much like a chemistry class!:

I am vowing not to let this new-found interest fizzle like so many of my other artistic intrigues, so hopefully I’ll be posting more encaustic work in the future.  Aaaaagh!  So many possibilities, so little time…

I am now in the midst of a four-day intensive encaustic workshop at a local art school.  Eight hours a day of slopping wax on pieces of plywood, melting it with my new blow torch, layering on sheets of tissue paper, coatings of shellac, or whatever other random materials my experimental instructors have on hand, and generally just making a lovely mess of things.  It’s all a bit overwhelming, and my inability to really control this new medium can be frustrating, but I love it.  It’s been awhile since I’ve really been immersed in an art project, and it feels good.  Here’s a small sneak peak of things…

A few more pretty little drawing/collages, and now I’m ready to move on to something else.  These have been fun, and it’s nice to have a group of pieces that comprise a sort of ‘series’, but they’re feeling a little cute-sy (case in point: see butterfly below), so for the next few sketches, look for something messier, free-er, and more abstract – might be time to time to pull out the fat sticks of charcoal and crack open my globby tubes of paint.

dragonfly (2010.03.04):

pomegranate (2010.03.07):

papillon (2010.03.09):

cardoon (2010.03.12):

This book was one of those ‘should-reads’ I’ve had sitting on my shelf for a few years – a significant, widely-known piece of literature that I somehow missed in the course of all my high school and college English classes.  And so I set aside Anne of Green Gables (yes, I picked these old classics up during a nostalgic impulse), assumed my most literary attitude, and gave 1984 a go.  The fact that I was reading out of some kind of self-imposed obligation, rather than desire, made me fear that I might not enjoy the book all that much.  But it was actually quite fascinating.  A little slow at times, and certainly darker than what I usually read, but I found the characters and the underlying commentary on socialism/communism/totalitarianism and the role of government really, really interesting.  The book, which was published in 1949, takes place in the then-future year of 1984, a time when the government (the ‘Party’) knows all and rules all, via constant surveillance of all its members, incessant broadcasting of Party propaganda, and relentless fear mongering used to justify never-ending wars.  People are constantly warned that ‘Big Brother is Watching You.’  Creepy.  But – wait…  Fast-forward to 2010, and do we not now live in a nation where a large percentage of the population carries GPS-linked phones and laptops?  Add to that the constant onslaught of advertising and filtered news that we face every day in the form of radio, TV, the Internet, and poster-plastered buses, and the premise of 1984 is not so unimaginable.  I’m certainly not leading a revolution, and I’m thankful for the freedoms that I often take for granted, but the parallels here between the fiction and reality are certainly interesting.  Food for thought…

A few pretty little collage/drawings, inspired by nature-y stuff…  I like the garlic one.

leaf (2010.02.01):

garlic (2010.02.01):

ginkgos (2010.02.05):

citrus (2010.02.10):