Public Art Project

Today, I was in my studio for the first time in over 3 months! Boy, it's been a crazy time in my life. But after picking up some of the holiday present mess I left, after dusting things off, and after putting away some treasures I've purchased in these last few months, I was raring to go!

I'm really pleased to share that I drafted the design for my public art project I'm going to reveal in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

I've had this idea for a while to do a public art project. My concept was to create small pieces of art that I would distribute in a geographic area. I wanted to surprise people when they realized that they just found a piece of art. As a double surprise, I wanted it to contain an inspiring message, almost like a great fortune cookie. My idea is that someone randomly would find one of my pieces, be inspired, and take it home. Or give it away.

I'm going to Seattle for business in just a few days now, and I had begun to think I wasn't going to have time to do this project. But getting a prototype drafted is a huge step. Perhaps I won't have as many finished I was hoping, but I do believe I will be taking some with me to Seattle.

I decided this afternoon to skip the anonymous part of my idea. I'm going to put a website and a serial number on each piece of art, and have the web address take people to a specific post on this blog. I hope they will add a comment to the blog post including their art piece number, and a little bit of their story. I'm very excited to get a chance to hear back from people about this project. I had thought about launching a whole website, keeping it anonymous, but I just don't have the time to handle all of that right now. Maybe in the future.

So it's part art project, part sociology experiment, and a whole lot of fun for me. I hope you stick around to see what happens, too.

Thinking About Art

Events in my professional life (my writer life) created a need for a professional portrait. That's another story that I'll tell another time. I know several photographers in Phoenix, and when I knew I needed a portrait, I also knew which one I wanted for this job.

Tyson Crosbie is a photographer, but he's an artist who works in the medium of photography. The other photographers I consider to be commercial photographers. They all do very nice work, and I'm sure each of them would have captured great images for me to use. But I didn't want a standard corporate PR headshot kind of portrait, or even a pretty portrait or a creative/clever portrait. I wanted something unconventional, something real, something honest. I haven't always wanted that. Maybe it's my age, maybe it's the natural arc of my personal journey--I don't know.

I'm still in the process of selecting my final image, and when that is done, I'll write about the experience here. But in the meantime, I want to introduce you to my friend, the artist Tyson Crosbie, through his video blog (vlog). I especially like this post. Check him out, and watch his other posts.

A Few of My Favorite Things

I went shopping Saturday afternoon in Chandler, and ended up spending a lot more money than I expected. So much more that I had to put my purchase on a credit card. It was a business expense and it was a great opportunity, but I usually don't buy things unless I can pay cash. I made an exception, and I drove home with the back of my truck loaded with my goodies.

On the way home, I was in one of those zones where the sky is bluer than normal, and the air smells sweeter, and the light seems brighter. And then I pulled up behind this Mini Cooper on Warner and Dobson, and lightening stuck my heart. Life is good. It was exactly what I was thinking as I pulled up to stop.

That was Saturday.

I've had a really rough day. I feel like my heart has been through the blender along with the spinach, celery and other ingredients in my morning green drink. It aches and I can't seem to stop crying. I'm only telling you this because I want to talk about how I'm dealing with it.

Apparently, I haven't done a great job today in resolving my feelings, because once my heart was broken, everything I have touched, everything I have tried to do, has somehow gone wrong. The worst of these collateral damages came through a project I volunteered to help. I offered to write a press release for an upcoming event and send it out the media in Phoenix. I always have an editor for my things because I'm rather anal about everything being perfect. So my favorite editor volunteered her time today to review the press release. I sent it out to 40 locations, and at the end of the day, I found more than one error in it. I was embarrassed for myself. I felt horrible for the project because I didn't want to do something that reflected poorly on the event. I was just a little angry with my editor. I also felt any sense of control slip like sand through my clenched fists because this happened in spite of my efforts to turn out perfect work.

I've been looking forward to going to sleep all day, knowing it would put an end to my day and give me the hope of a fresh start tomorrow. Only it is tomorrow, and sleep evades me. So I realized I had this opportunity tonight to really dig in, not to my problem, but to work with myself to both acknowledge exactly how I feel and also refocus on what I want in my life (post-broken heart). My life has taught me that the way I react to a challenge doesn't change the present moment reality, but it does change what happens next. This is about changing what happens next for me.

I decided to work with my strengths. I have crow eyes. I don't mean that my eyes have those wonderfully named wrinkles, crows feet. (Not yet, anyway.) I mean that my eyes go to the sparkly and bright colored things in the environment. My home is filled with them. I have lots of pictures of them. So I decided to do a little digital art project to cheer myself up, to indulge my crow eye, and see if I can't turn this heart thing around before morning, even if I don't sleep.

One of the songs that cheers my heart eternally is Diamond Road by Sheryl Crow. The second verse is the one that gets me every time:

Little bird, what's troubling you?
You know what you have to do.
What is yours you'll never lose
And what's ahead may shine.
Underneath the promise of blue skies
With broken wings, you'll learn to fly.
Pull yourself out of the tide
And begin the dream again.

So without further explanation, here's my digital art gallery.


I see this starfish box sitting on the glass mosaic tile box every morning in my bathroom. It reminds me of my drive up the Pacific coast about ten years ago, nearly three glorious weeks of beaches, redwoods, and mountains. I camped every night except for the three I spent in Seattle. I spent one afternoon on a small sliver of beach in northern California flying my kite and finding starfish and anemones along the water's edge. It was a magical afternoon.


The word "dream" captures the essence of what I do to visualize the things I want and focus on the things most wonderful in my reality. It is inspired in part by the emphasis on dreamtime in the shamanic traditions. But it also is inspired by the dream work I did so diligently when I spent my time with Liz in Yellow Springs. It was a time of deep personal growth and understanding about myself and life. I treasure my memories of time spent with her.

I see this little dreams with wings image every day many times. I try to always see it and not look past it because I've grown used to it. It reminds me to give my heart wings.


I found this little embroidered bag in a shop off the plaza in Santa Fe. When I saw it in the store, my heart stopped. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen in a long while. When I bought it, I had no idea how I was going to use it, but I knew I wanted to use it every day.

I returned to the plaza, kicked off my shoes and wiggled my toes in the grass. I pulled out my camera to capture the joy of the hour. I suddenly realized that I had purchased a camera bag. Since then, I carry it everywhere with me.

Santa Fe Highlights - Day 4 (Wrapup)

The last day of my vacation was the drive home to Phoenix. I had planned to get an early start so I could arrive in Albuquerque at a shop called Papers! when they opened at 9 am. However, things didn't go exactly as planned and I got a later start.

The drive to Albuquerque takes about an hour. I stopped to refill the gas tank and my cooler (filled with healthy snacks for the road) and then arrived at the shop at 10:25. Imagine my total surprise when the shop was closed, and the sign said that they open at 10:30 on Saturday! Talk about great timing.

The shop is very nice. They have the large sheets of paper like The Paper Studio, and lots of paper related items like postcards, notecards, and other items that appear to younger shoppers. (They are located next to the University of New Mexico.) I was the first person in the shop, but within minutes, it was FULL.


The trip home was uneventful. I didn't stop along the way to take pictures, even though I had wanted to get some in Holbook. It just seemed like a good idea to get home at that point. The drive is really lovely, as you can see from these pictures snapped while driving. I've mastered the art of pointing the camera and shooting through the windshield without framing the shot. Some turn out good, others, not so good, but it's the best I can do while traveling alone.



The travel journal worked out so much better than I even expected. I love the new forms I created. At the start of each trip segment, I pulled out the forms for the places I wanted to visit and placed them in the clipboard on the front. That way, they were ready for me to glance through as I was deciding my itinerary on the go. It also made it super easy to fill in the forms for the places I visited. I was seen in more than one restaurant and other locations filling in the forms on my travel journal. It made deciding where to go a lot of fun, and gives me a record of things I definitely want to do again (and those that I will skip). Each night, I would re-read the completed forms, and I must admit, I had already forgotten some of the details I recorded in the moment. Maybe it's my age, or maybe it's just a good idea to take notes as I go. My next trip will be much better because of these forms.

The journal took a lot of use and abuse, and held up very well. I did find that the front cover needs to be reglued (the side at the honeycomb). Otherwise, it survived the trip without incident.

I took over 450 pictures with my new camera, and about 50 pictures with my cell phone. Many of the cell phone pictures went straight to Flickr. I'm working at editing the camera pictures and getting them posted as well. It may take another week to get through them all. The good news is that my camera's memory card holds about 1,000 pictures based on how full it got on this trip. That's a lot to cull down to add to the travel journal, eh?

With all of this writing, I haven't started to talk about the inner journey of my trip, the things I found on my mind, the dream images that haunted me, or the new ideas for who I want to be and what kind of work I want to do. Perhaps those thoughts will flow out later.

Depth of Experience

On Friday, I once again treated myself to a wonderful Carol Wingert class at Scrapbooks, Etc. This time, we made Carol's Dos-a-dos travel journal, a project she has taught a couple other times this summer. It's a fun red and black multiple part book. The front is an envelope/honeycomb book assembled with envelopes between the front and back covers. And the back is a another book, one with a sewn signature that opens from the back. When you look down from the top, the two books (joined at the back) make a Z shape.


I made a few changes to the covers. Carol used the same two papers on each front cover, and I used one paper on one cover and the other paper on the other cover. Inspired by classmate Marissa, I overstamped both papers with the assortment of travel stamps Carol provided. I love the way this adds another layer of interest to the covers. Oh, and don't miss the fun clipboard on the front cover (see Carol's picture).


In this picture of the back book cover, the paper background is tan and it has a swirling floral pattern. The word "travel" in the upper right corner (under the bird) is stamped, so are the names of the days of the week below that.

I nearly finished the embellishments in the class, and I'm working on this today because I am taking it with me next week to Santa Fe. I've decided that I need a change of scenery and since I visited the ocean in February, I'm heading for the high desert. I've been to Santa Fe more than a dozen times before, but it's been at least 10 years since my last trip. I'm very excited to visit all of my old favorites and discover some new ones.

I've actually had some difficulty deciding to take this trip. As I figured up the cost, I realized the fun things I could buy with the money and stay home. I have always been that practical about money, but in the past, I found it very easy to justify buying experiences over objects. It's only been the last 10 years or so that I've been more focused on having something to show for my expenditures. I'm not sure where that came from, but now that I see it clearly, I recognize it is a weed in my garden and I know it has been choking my growth a bit.

From my youth, I've been a person who wanted to experience as much of the world and as many different ways of living as I could fit into my life. I have always valued quality over quantity, and so I've avoided having the same experiences over and over (quantity). I've also chosen to avoid the path of the crowd, so I'm not a fan of shopping malls and I don't see all of the popular movies and listen to the hit radio stations. I seek out other things, art house and independent movies, world music, small import shops over big box retail, and documentaries on TV rather than prime-time series. I feel this gives me a richer life, and more texture in my thoughts than what is available through the mass consciousness. I haven't seen a single Seinfeld episode (and hence miss the references to that experience in the collective consciousness), but I know more than a little bit about art history and I've seen landscapes from most of the countries of the world (through photographs). I've experienced the prayer practices of several faiths, and love to chat with people from other places about their homelands.

It's not the life that most people want, but for me, it feeds my thinking and feeling, and nurtures my writing and my art.

Life Collage in Progress

The last few weeks have been more challenging that I would have guessed. My day job has been quite unpredictable, with a couple of large, rush projects turning off and on like a strobe light. Now, it seems that I have an unplanned vacation between now and the first week of August. What to do with myself?

I've decided to rework my home office. It's time for a thorough cleaning and reorganization of all of my business materials and paperwork. There are more fun things I can think to do with my time, but no project that will provide so much benefit to my life. I work from my home, and have been a self-employed writer for just over 13 years. By reworking my office, I lay a foundation so my working life runs smoothly, and I facilitate my writing muse. Since writing pays the bills, this will make everything in my life easier.

I love my daily life, and I work hard to keep it that way. I'm always trying new things, tools, techniques, strategies, fresh ideas, and anything I can imagine to tweak my life. I've lived with the mantra "How can I improve my quality of life and spend less?" for almost two decades. The latest improvements to my daily life have been: taking at least one art class a month, scheduling time in the studio, Twitter, and spending time with the new people I've encountered. This week, I'm getting ready to interview a housekeeper, someone who can help me keep things running smoother in two visits a month. It's an idea I'm willing to try, and I'm hoping it will accomplish two things: 1. A tidier house will shift the energy of my house which will free my mind up to explore new ideas and projects, and 2. I will spend less time cleaning and more time making art.

Those of you following my blog see me exploring the memory art/mixed media world, but what I've not shared are my short term goals for this exploration. I have a few ideas for items I'd like to make and sell locally. In years past and in another medium, I sold items in a local gallery and that was great fun. It was the first time in my life I felt like an artist (instead of just as a writer). My new project ideas actually combine words and images and memory art and I'm working at building the foundational skills I need to make the prototypes. I'm experimenting with paper strength, adhesives, embellishments, and layouts. But I'm also working to find a balance between me telling a story and providing a platform for someone else to tell their story. I've been looking for companies to make make customized stamps for me, and visualizing production lines for photo images and custom paper for book pages.

It's all been great fun. Now, I'm watching the pieces of the puzzle manifest in my studio (and life) and loving the anticipation of watching them come together. I hope that in 6 months, the projects I'm just making references about now will be full-blown items on my worktable ready to be delivered to the marketplace. One day I will be able to post pictures and announce how my dreams and desire have bloomed into reality around me. Until then, I'm very happy to keep dreaming my dream, trying new ideas, watching my progress, and loving the anticipation of reaching my dream.

Hang Time

My life has been consumed lately by my work, and now by my need to rest between big deadlines. I don't really have the time to rest, but my entire being seems to mutiny every time I even think about walking into the office. Yesterday, I realized that I have to give into this, and I ended up playing hookey most of the day. I had so much fun and felt so much better that I've decided to do the same thing again today.

Part of making art is being aware of my life. I have nothing deep to offer my art right now. Art without depth is not what my heart craves. I need my art to express the deepest parts of me, to share things that mean something to me, to offer a glimpse of my soul. To express what my words can't reach in a way words can't express.

I love this quote from William Blake. It tells me that hindsight understands my life with clarity, the moments that are confusing and misty in the present moment will later have form and make sense. That gives me comfort as I move through the misty world, dreaming dreams of my future and myself.

Life's cycles can be explained as breathing. There is a time for expansion, a time for growth and expression and creativity. But it follows a time of contraction, of instrospection and solitude and just hanging with what is. That's where I am now. Just hanging with myself until I'm rested and ready to begin all over again.

A New View

Thursday night, I had an amazing dream. I interpret my dreams based on the work of Carl Jung because I have found his approach to really help me understand my dreams in terms of personal growth. My dream was about a shift in my work life and my perspective on my work life. How appropriate for someone who is working to make art part of her working life (instead of remaining an escape from work)!

I attended a class on Friday taught by Carol Wingert at Scrapbooks, Etc. It was fabulous. We made an easel project that included three different metal techniques using copper. The largest copper piece we dipped in liver of sulfur, stamped with black ink, and then embossed the design. The next piece we also dipped in liver of sulfur after we stamped it (so the image was the only part that wasn't patined by the liver of sulfur. The third piece was copper mesh which we used heat to patina and then stamped. When I get my piece finished, I'll include pictures of it here. The class was so much fun, and Carol is great. She is teaching a series of classes now at Scrapbooks, Etc. for those of you in the Phoenix metro area.

I'm working again through the weekend on my other occupation (I'm a technical writer), working to meet a huge deadline in early June. As I ponder the life/work changes I'm making on the back burner, I'm excited and happy about the changes. And at the same time, there are other feelings and other thoughts that surface and sometimes surprise me. I understand that change is the blood of life, and I'm entering into this change willingly, but I know that every time we gain something, we let something go. I'm willing to embrace the change, accept the new, and release the old.

Here's to happy art for everyone!

Welcome to my Studio

I'm a long time blogger, but this entry is a big deal for me. This is the first entry in my art blog. I realized last night that the renewed focus on my art in my life is taking me places I didn't expect. One of those places is here. I realized that I need an art journal, a place where I can write about my art, keep notes about what I'm learning, and review my progress. I love the idea of a handwritten journal, but I'm a realist. If I can type, I can get more said quickly, and the easier it is to write, the more successful my journal will be. So here I sit at Blogger, home to my 6 other blogs, starting a new one.

I don't know if anyone will find this blog. I don't even know if I want anyone to find this blog. I'm really writing this just for myself.

Since January, I've coverted my junk room into a studio. Inspired by photos of someone else's studio last November, I created a wonderful workspace for myself. Just clearing out the junk (which resulted in a garage sale in April) gave me such a lift that I felt inspired to begin work. I've done a rough sort of my supplies, with most of them in cubbies in the room, and some of the larger supplies in the newly painted and organized closet. I still want to build in shelves to give me more closet organization. I removed the closet sliding doors and replaced them with curtains to match the window curtains with grommet tops so they slide open so easily. I love sitting in there working.

Since January, I've taken several art classes, and I'm currently scheduled for two more in May. I don't find classes on interesting techniques or projects very often, but when I find a teacher who has something for me, I don't hesitate to sign up.

I've got a whole slew of potential projects that I'm itching to get started. Just last night, I sent a round of pictures to Walgreens that will make up a project. I've got photos already printed for at least two more. I'm so excited. I need this journal to give myself a place to keep track of my projects, review my results, and critique my efforts.

In future posts, I want to cover the following: each art class I've taken, my project list, my finished projects, progress in creating a working studio, how my life is changing from exploring art again, and my efforts to begin supporting myself through my art.

If you are reading this, I promise that you will find my honest opinions here, not something I'm saying because I think I have an audience. I'll let you see what is going on inside my heart and head as I begin this new phase of my art journey. It might be raw and rough, but it will always be real.

In the few minutes I have been typing this, I have again that sense of profound awareness that I had last night when I realized I must start a blog. The reality of my journey is so solid and so real since I've started writing. I am a person who responds to journaling. I'm having a journaling response now. By starting this blog, I've changed the course of my journey, I can feel that. Just like I changed my life when I cleared out the junk room, when I created the studio, and when I started signing up for classes.

Art is back, baby. Big time.