Catching Up With the Dog and Pony Show (Perfection and Jail Time)

Inexplicably at Christmas dinner, my sister Beatrice turns to me and remarks, "Jules! He is the PERFECT dog!" I agree wholeheartedly as he is my dog and I am seriously biased but coming from Beatrice? Before I could remind her of Jules delightful penchant for jumping up enthusiastically on visitors to our house or his charming urge to occasionally shove his nose deep into people's crotches, Beatrice and her partner John wax eloquent about how cute he is and how smart and how he loves to chase balls in the backyard... and did they neglect to say he's perfect? Well, there's the little dickens above. I was attempting to procure a "handsome" photo to  illustrate canine perfection, but instead I got the crazy, snarling "let's chew on the photographers leg" doggie that I know so well. (But he is perfect.)
And Maggie? I haven't posted about our Dog and Pony Show for quite a while as I've been preoccupied with the lord's work (that would be self promotion in regards to show in NYC and other seasonal sundries...) But Maggie, far from being perfect is temporarily in prison.

Looks guilty, doesn't she? Last Friday, the very day after Christmas when I was trying to finish baking yet another batch of cookies to take to a good friend's annual Boxing Day celebration, I spied a large dark shape over by our neighbor's driveway. As I didn't have my contact lens in, I could detect that it was moving and while the shape was somehow familiar, it was in an unfamiliar location so it took several seconds for me to process, "Hello! It's the horse!" I sprinted outside, despite having cookies abake in the oven, calculating that a burned batch of cookies was less dangerous than a large hoofed mammal on the loose. Maggie seemed pleased to see me and followed without any ado back to her confines, me all the while thinking how we'd probably have to repair some major break in the fence. But what I see is that Maggie has simply pushed her way through the small gate (as I neglected to pull the extra latch down), made a stop at the hay barn to break open a fresh bale of hay and then proceeded onto the neighbor's yard. I guess she was sampling the new batch of bales we had picked up early that morning and then decided to take a stroll. Funny how they figure things out!

T'was the Night Before Xmas

Aren't these delightful gingerbread men? Emphasis on men as they come equipped to deliver holiday joy. And they tasted great, too! Thanks to a good friend for providing seasonal fun. We did have a fine and silly time last night.
And boy did I need it! Everything in preparation for my show in New York at Odetta Gallery has been going really well, except that for some truly incomprehensible reason, I have not been able to get good photos of several of my pieces. My good friend Ellen (who runs Odetta) even remarked. "Isn't this what you do for a living?" I suffered an extreme lapse of confidence on that and even went to work on Monday and Tuesday certain that I'd be unable to take a decent picture ever again and lose my job. So, chalk it up to my not simply making paintings, but working in peculiar mixtures of plastic, fabric, chains, and everything that has different textures and reflectiveness. Yeeesh. What a friggin' nightmare! I work in the middle of the night, thinking how I'd never become a famous and respected artist because I couldn't get a decent picture. My images had gone from bad to worse, with wonky color discrepancies and uneven lighting. Fortunately, another good friend is coming over to assist in the documentation department on Sunday...

I got so crazy the other night when I was having to try and photograph (for the 6oth time!) along with baking two batches of cookies for our Holiday Cookie Swap (otherwise known as the grease and sugar exchange) at work, that I started hallucinating. I even saw a face on the lemon I was zesting for sugar cookies. It looks sort of like the Man in the Moon.
Anyway, Bob and I have decided to purchase a new bed in lieu of giving each other Christmas presents. At least we'll enter the New Year with better prospects for sleep!

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

OOps! That's not the tree, but a thoroughly goofy present from a good friend from several years back... but they do get us in the mood for Xmas and all things Xmas-ian...
Like the fabled tree. We do all remember that for the past several years I have been drumming into people's minds (with the infernal Little Drummer Boy beating accompaniment) that the two things necessary for celebrating Christmas are 1.) the Tree and #2.) Cookies.
Here's the first:

All ready to go! Purchased at Home Depot just two nights ago with an accommodating Home Depot employee tearing a tag off a lower priced tree and slapping it on a higher priced tree for us after Bob accused the guy of not wanting to help us out. Way to go, Bob! Always saying that the squeaky wheel gets the grease... Looks great all trimmed and lit. (I always remember the year that a certain relative never decorated their tree and the nude tree just sat in one corner of the room for a couple of weeks. You know who you are!) Kind of like this before photo:

Nothing wrong with this, but it does look naked! Here's the table before the clutter was cleared and the decorations were carefully hung:

That's a fun sort of mess. But we had to clear a path for Bob and I to address Christmas cards. We made a ton of them the other night and now have to say clever things and lick envelopes. You'd think that Jules the Dog would be good at that, but he seems indifferent, despite wearing a respectable amount of glitter on his head. I like these activities. They serve to offset the dark and cold of this time of year. Next, I hit the kitchen to make cookies, and eat too much dough.

Hoarder Junior

I was reading a story in the most recent New Yorker about how hoarding is now officially considered a disorder. There was a picture of Little Edie (from "Grey Gardens" fame) and I paused for a moment, reflecting that the piles surrounding her looked, well, sort of familiar. I realized that my studio annex, a work in progress!, could have fit right in to their decorating scheme!
Here's athe view in the opposite direction, walking from my studio back into the house:

Even the sliding piles of effluvium rivals Little Edies! I don't think of myself as a hoarder... just an artist with a penchant for collecting stuff that might be someday made into wonderful and profound artwork. And in my own defense, I have been so busy making art that I simply haven't had the time to move all my studio furniture (like ugly dressers full of materials and tall shelving units) in to the space so as to permit me to better organize. Give an artist a break!

And here's what I did the other morning: emptied a whole wall unit onto the dining table. Then, of course, I realized that the table was now full of my stuff* and I had no place to work while waiting for my studio to warm up. So I spent the next half hour trundling the above collection down the hall and into the studio. I got quite warm doing all that schleppping!
I know I will receive no sympathy on this argument. I can hear the voices clucking and tsking about mental disorders and crazy behaviors. (And hey! Come to think of it, I just admitted to hearing voices! Never a good sign!) So the Studio Annex is a mess but the work for my New York show is looking really great. Big messes and hoarding proclivities be damned!

*And the above table top assortment featured important stuff like pre-chewed gum, several air line barf bags (not used), old band aids, about a hundred of those little white plastic stoppers that come in the top of milk container spouts... I guess you get the idea. Art supplies!

New Computer...

And it's about time! I bet all the philistines among you thought I had simply abandoned blogging as so many before me. But no! I am not that easy to get rid of. Almost a month ago now, our computer gave up the ghost. Bob went to turn it on and was greeted by a stony faced black screen. The timing was, of course, the absolute worst in history. I was just finishing installing my work "Better Guns and Gardens" at Artspace and there were images to send and artists statements to email for that show and my upcoming inclusion at Odetta Gallery. I was frantically uploading and sending off requested info from friend's computers during dinner parties and from work. A nightmare!(I am not even going to hint at how much unbacked up stuff we have sealed in that hard drive; we are going to have to pay for date transfer...) The good news is that we have a delightful new computer that has oodles of giga everything and we don't even seem to be upset with Windows 8. Yes, there are swirly, squirrely screens that flicker past at light speed and all manner of needless shopping apps but it's not THAT bad! I was worried.
And above, testimony to all the hard work I've been doing in preparation for that NEXT show at Odetta Gallery in Brooklyn. The studio is warm, wonderful and workable thanks to:

Remember "Yodel"? Yes, Yodel the Woodstove is now installed, thanks to Bob and our good friend Joe. They Saws-alled a hole in the studio roof and put in the new pipe. It works great and just in time; as I was finishing my book project, the weather started to get cold and I had begun to work in the living room (old studio) for a time. The studio heats up in no time and I couldn't be happier- or toastier!
But here's the pain side of all this work:

Kind of gross, all the splits and needle stabs I'm enduring. I jabbed a needle like 1/2" into this awful open bleeding thumb crevasse and then danced a mighty jig to stop from screaming. That really hurt. I guess that the down side to having a show in which all the pieces are sewn. But the work looks great and I plunge on wards, fighting through that old agony and ecstasy...
One more picture for good measure as I'm pleased as proverbial punch to be up and blogging again:

Dead flowers! A fitting last bouquet, plucked just before the cold weather began in earnest. Lovely perennial chrysanthemums from friend Bob. Well, they were lovely before they dried out, but they persist in our bathroom as a remembrance of this recently departed last gardening season. Only funny thing here is that I didn't take  picture of the new computer. Maybe next posting.