TEN DAYS BUT WHO'S COUNTING?

Yet another older journal piece

As I write this it is the start of the ten-day countdown to the end of the 
2019 Sawdust Art Festival season. After 20 years I have many mixed feelings about taking leave.... I am both excited and a feeling a bit nostalgic at loss at the same moment.

What will be behind the next door? At this time I have no idea at all, but look forward to the adventure of not knowing.

For now, ten...nine....

CAN I CALL THIS READY?

Laurel's booth

Well, I had the best intentions. Daughter Jenna and I got almost all the art hung in my booth today. My intention was to take a picture on completion. However...exhausted, we simply packed up and left. 

There are still some things to be done before I can call "ready," but it's real close. We pushed to complete today in order to go see my mother before the show previews on Tuesday night. (Sometimes life just throws you curves.)

Looking forward to this fabulous final summer. Hope to see all of you there.

(I will try to get a picture of MY booth for the next post :))

TA-DA~!!!!

Forty!

As I ready work for the upcoming Sawdust Art Festival here in Laguna Beach, I am thrilled to have completed these forty small mixed media pieces--just a bit of the large amount of work that needs to be ready to hang by Preview Night (June 26.)
I have had an enormous amount of joy in creating these little pieces. They will become a part of year two of the Celebration of Women series. I hope the people who visit this summer will share some of the good feeling that I have had in the creation of these and all the other pieces.
Moving on to a couple more larger pieces now!

SEPTEMBER SONG

Gone today

September is waning and there has been so much going on.The first workshop is tomorrow, is full, and I am really looking forward to both the teaching and the doing.  
Thanks to friend Laurel I was able this summer to have reproductions on wood of many of my celebrated women. They have been very well received. This lovely lady to the left is a 16x16 reproduction of a portion of a large piece that sold this summer. A fun guy came in on the last weekend and asked if I would take the "Sold" sign off the original. I laughed, but it opened the possibility and so today he picked up his slightly canted version of the original. 
So forward...what will show up tomorrow? I have birds on the brain right now...maybe.

AND THEN THERE'S LIFE

Left hand but still much used--normally

Went into the doctor with a painful pimple-sized growth I thought just might be yet another of the skin anomalies. Biopsy said I was correct--squamous cell. No messing around. Sawdust Art Festival or not it was coming off. This made the final week of the show a bit cumbersome, but no more so than the darned humidity and heat!
In so many ways this seemed like another long summer and yet it went by quickly too. It was a good summer all told and I am happy to be rid of the squamous cell dude--stitches out next week and I get to go back to the gym tomorrow and return to creative work next week along with a bit of PT.
Life just gets right in the path of our plans some days, but we adapt, eh?

LET THE CELEBRATION BEGIN!

The very first of so many

A CELEBRATION OF WOMEN: the series

The presidential election of 2016, while divisive on many levels, seems to have catapulted women into joining together in action on many fronts. Following in the footsteps of many honored women before them--and creating some paths of their own--these women are marching...speaking up...speaking out...standing together...demanding many long-needed changes...showing unquestionable courage, strength and determination.

This series, showing at the Sawdust Art Festival from June 30 thru September 3, is in honor of all of those women and the many others who still have no voice or who have been silenced.

Change is in the wind...Watch out!

RUT OR SERIES??

"Resist"

Friend Catharine had a birthday recently. Here is the piece I made for her then.  It was so much fun to create something specifically for a person I know. 
There will be a lot of these pieces this summer at the Sawdust Art Festival. I had been asking myself the question was this a series or a rut until I did this one.  Not a rut, but sure a level of creating that I love.
Hope you will all come to see the entire collection/series this summer. 

CLANG, CLANG...

...went the trolley as it came to a stop.  What a treat these neighborhood trolleys have been so far this summer.  I am finding more and more ways to use them to ease traffic congestion, parking issues, and any other summer driving issues you might think of. Riding the trolley to the Sawdust Art Festival for my shifts, I get off at the depot and walk the rest of the way.  To round out the day, walking from the festival grounds to the library gives me a great chance to unwind.  Such a treat and a blessing! I arrive everywhere refreshed and ready to teach, to sell, and to enjoy meeting new friends and visitors to our great community.

DREAM...DREAM...DREAM

I'm beginning to think that the drifting and dreaming while driving to and from Santa Barbara placed me in a mesmerized state from which I have not yet freed myself. The piece posted here that I am currently at work on even has me thinking of sitting under trees and daydreaming the hours away.  Not sure what this is all about--the gray days, the overwhelming amount of work yet to do to mount the summer's art festival, sheer laziness, spring fever, what???
Onward I drift...readying for a workshop on the 12th (Is it already June?) and then on to summer!Life could certainly be much worse, right?