A Successful Big Mess*

Hoo boy! You can tell we've been busy because the house is a mess and look at the deplorable state of my (home) studio! I was working so hard to get ready for City Wide Open Studios that I wasn't putting things away and was simply tossing fabric and stuffings and trimmings in heaps and piles.
The happy ending to the above disaster is that I sold a bunch of those "WTF" sculptures (yeah, yeah, they're pillows...) and tee shirts and patches. I was... SUCCESSFUL!!
And people came looking for me, which was no easy feat as the building that Open Studios was in this year was a vacant labyrinthian corporate office building with three floors of rabbit run cubicles. I assure you that absolutely no one saw all the artists... over 230 of them. I sprinted away from my space a few times to quickly scope out a few friends and recommended artists, but I missed 85% of what was on display. That's the one downfall to showing and not being a visitor.
But when people found me, they exclaimed, "Oh! You're the WTF woman!" Word traveled. It was gratifying, after poking holes in digits and wearing my poor fingers to the bone, to have so many people enjoying my work. All who came and spent time commiserated with me about the sorry state of affairs... and they spread the word of WTF by buying (and wearing in some cases) my work. I even got special orders- one for an Xmas gift. How thoughtful!

I am exhausted today, as I know everyone else is, too. We were there for three days and had to take our work down and clean up the space the last night. Bob had also showed two sculptures so by the time everything was loaded and transported back home, we were seriously tired. And that's in addition to all the energy expended after three days of talking to visitors and explaining the work and the process. We're hoarse!
At work today, I was less than my usual energetic self, but I carried on and photographed a million statutes of Little Red Riding Hood (don't ask!) and a few Hermes scarves and some bad art and a couple of weird modern lamps. And I made it home. But now I'm going to bed. This is how tired I am: Bob and I were watching last night's Last Night with John Oliver on the computer and I admitted to Bob that while staring at John Oliver discussing Attorneys General, I thought, "After this, we'll have to watch John Oliver". So I confess that my brain has shut down and I'm going to bed.

* And I had a funny title for this posting (while at work) but promptly forgot it once I sat down to right** this. That how tired I am!

**Yes, I actually spelled "write" as "right". Now I know I was tired!!!

History Repeats Itself (Maybe)

It's a long story why I couldn't take a new picture so you'll suffer along with an OLD picture while I tell my story- a story involving parallel universes and time travel and yes, history (possibly) repeating itself(although the image is pertinent.)
I am hard at work constructing things that look like pillows, but are actually sculptures. (Yes, they can be used as pillows and if you come to City Wide Open Studios in New Haven on the last weekend of the month, you'll be informed of all the many uses...) These (admittedly soft) sculptures all bear the now iconic WTF motif. I am making a brilliant pile of these sculptures so as to function as an irresistible heap of jewel-toned eye candy. We'll see how well this works. I have warned Bob that we will no doubt become the permanent custodians of many "sculptures" and lucky friends and family members know what they will be getting for Xmas this year.
Which leads to my historic sad-sack pillow story. When I was 14 or 15 years old, I made a quilted pillow in an art class. As my mother (aka Mommy) was a seamstress, we had boxes and boxes of fabric remnants in our attic and I thought to fashion several more pillows from these scraps. A bit later, I thought to be enterprising, and I produced a slew of these laboriously hand made quilted pillows to try and sell at our local fair. My sister Beatrice and her partner John made stained glass objects and we decided to share a table. Beatrice and John cleaned up: they sold tons of their lovely stained glass pieces and bought a large color television with their profits. Guess how much I made? How about nada? I didn't even sell one (at a bargain $20 each!!!!). People looked at them and complimented me but couldn't even pony up a lousy $20 to help a kid see that her hard work and gumption paid off.  *1. Great lesson learned! WTF!!!!

And this story gets even worse as I further attempted to find an outlet for all that entrepreneurial energy and talent. I had Mommy drive me to a store in Guilford that had specialty items and one of a kind hand made niceties and I presented my pillows to the owner. This man dismissively commented that "they had pillows for sale made by blind people".*2. Well, that put the kabosh on my early efforts to "follow my bliss"; so much for "do what you love and the money will follow". Hahahaha.
So here we are, almost 48 years later, and I have a sudden sense of deja vu all over again. Didn't I already go that pillow route? Am I being set up by fate? That's where I come to the time travel part. I want to go back in time and help that young artist (ME!) rewrite her her-story and sell ALL the pillows- now "sculptures" (as art is obviously more expensive). I want a parallel universe to provide an entirely different outcome: I want success and to be rewarded for all my sweat-shop emulating, bloody finger-tip inducing, third world mimicking hard (American!) labor to pay off. Please, please just let me sell even one...*3.

*1. And here's another peculiar detail... I still have most of the pillows. No kidding! Our living room chairs sport many fine example of my childish sewing efforts. I guess they wore well... and were worth the measly $20 price!

*2. I admit the irony of me having damaged my left eye so that I now have limited sight and probably could get away with marketing my work as "having been made by blind people".

*3. The weirdest thing is that even if I bring all of the sculptures and tee shirts (yes! I'm doing tee shirts, too!) home with me, it can be said of me "she persisted". Let's face it: artists just don't give up and admit defeat easily.

Terrible Week! But Good Harvest

Grapes! Tons of grapes! 84 squash! (count 'em... Bob did!) Lots of green (and yellow) beans in the freezer! Quite the bountiful harvest. And all of Nature's goodness offsets some of the cosmic shit swirling around. Sometimes it helps to just stop and count the squash...
I don't even want to dwell on or dive into why this week (past couple of weeks, actually) were so atrocious but I guess it starts with discovering a co-worker doing weird- and potentially dangerous- "research" on a work computer and the management not dealing with this in any way at all. Or my not getting a raise... and then we all get our hours cut. So work sucked!!
I guess I am dwelling on why things have been awful. And we get politics; yes, it all seems to devolve back to The Orange Menace and his evil agenda. A bit of lying and bragging to the UN and (more) insulting our allies. Supreme Court picks that are less than Supreme... triggering more than just a little PTSD in yours truly. Let's talk vegetables, please!

Well here's a bright spot. My sister Cathy gave us an exciting Day of the Dead decoration that, for all of it's being a dead person, looks pretty happy. Probably because it's not following the news. I do seem to be incapable of not listening to the horror story that is our current predicament.
Here's a happier note: I've been working my butt off in preparation for being included in a couple of shows and I'm receiving good feedback on my work.  For City Wide Open Studios this year, I'm pushing my "WTF" theme which has become a series and will be featured in my "WTF Emporium". Many colorful WTF items will be for sale and I just recently had a curator call me and rave about my work and wonder if  they could cluster a stack of my WTF pillows in a window. (They can't as I'm still making them!) But it was nice to know someone is thinking of me and my work!

Here's a small one I finished. My work was also put up on Instagram (in a promotional posting for a anti-gun show I'm included in) and called "quirky" which I think is just fine. I myself have been known to be "quirky" so I guess it's a good catch-all.
Today was a better day all around. Not only did I get good art input, I seemed to cross paths with better people who semi-restored a tiny bit of my (lack of) faith in humanity. If there are so many good/nice/reasonable people out there, why do all the bad/evil/insane people get into politics!??!

The Three Pillows of Wisdom

You may well remember my "Small Golden Pillow of the Resistance". It languished at Open Studios, despite my pricing it attractively. Several months after Open Studios, an astute collector (and friend- Hello Antony!) inquired as to whether it was still available. He was smart enough to snatch it up.
Then he approached me with the tantalizing question as to whether I ever do commissions. Of course I do! So he requested that I do two more pillows... one that reads "Bite Me".

And one that reads "Eat Me". As you see in the photos, "Bite Me" is complete and really a lovely thing to behold. "Eat Me" is still in process... I worked really carefully and consciously to make all the colors harmonize and to make the "fonts" that the words are written in different, yet complimentary. I think I was successful.

I actually wanted to photograph this and post it here to see if "Eat Me" read as clearly, or whether it requires tweaking and clarification. It looks pretty good although it's harder to see that the back ground fabric (under the gold) is really a very pale pink and it will be cut jaggedly to echo the star burst pattern. And then it's being mounted on a medium brown (kind of (milk) chocolate-y) pillow. But Bob just looked at it- unprovoked- and exclaimed that it was perfectly easy to read. That made me feel more confident, although I am still debating a narrow border of dark brown (bitter-sweet chocolate) beads around the interior of "Eat Me". Maybe not; maybe it's just gilding the lily!
I am very happy with how they're turning out. Sometimes someone else's idea is a good jumping off point. I have just completed 12 large scale pieces for my show in NYC and these pillows are a cosy way to sidle back into new studio preoccupations.