Bernie Berlin technique challenge using baby wipes as backgrounds.

Oh how I love a challenge.

altered tinnie for beach theme

&

button doll

happy with the results of these two challenges (MAMMA's ofcourse) and ready to explore more.

i just made a huge investment in paints and mediums from Dick Blick and can't wait to get the wooden canvases to paint some more.

on the side, working part-time for a big jean alteration shop in Sherman Oaks setting up their accounting, so its back to numbers and putting my organizational skills into practice. irnic that i should always be paid to work with numbers when my heart is in the arts.

also planning those three long awaited trips= to the Sierras at the end of april, to England during the summer and to the south of Chile again in november.

Bittersweet Days

The moving finger writes; and having writ
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure you back to cancel half a line
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Omar Khayyam

bittersweet days since Ron, husband of one of my favorite altered artists JoAnna Pierotti (better known as Mossie of Moss Hill Studio) has been diagnosed with brain cancer and she is enduring so much as it is. not only did she lose her mother last year but she had breast cancer herself and is now hopefully all better. so this new bucket of cold water seems a little too much for one family to endure. i have thought of her all day since i found out, feel impotent to help since she lives in Sutter Creek quite a drive away from my area but not impossible. i will wait for her to contact us if she needs help. in the meantime, for all of you who know JoAnna, Creative Souls has set up a chip in account for voluntary donations for Ron's surgery since they are without medical insurance and the surgery is very costly.

http://ronpierotti.chipin.com/ron-pierotti

my inner peace comes, ofcourse, from newfound artistic experiements. i am in the process of creating a fabric fat book and experimenting with more acrylic paintings, just playing for now, but really enjoying the results.

Newfound artist "Little Glimpses"

home is...original folk art sentiment
Originally uploaded by little*glimpses

Speaking of Art Spirit, Little Glimpses is my new discovered artist. Her spirit is so gentle, loving, but above all so unique.
This is how I see her spirit.

Excerpt from "The Art Spirit" by Robert Henri a propos of finding my own artistic voice.

"Art, when really understood, is the province of every human being.

It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.

The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it.

Museums of art will not make a country an art country. But where there is the art spirit there will be precious works to fill museums. Better still, there will be happiness that is in the making. Art tends towards balance, order, judgement of relative values, the laws of growth, the economy of living-very good things for anyone to be interested in.

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage or stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed somewhat you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life.

Cherish your own emotions and never undervalue them.

We are not here to do what has already been done.

I have little interest in teaching you what I know. I wish to stimulate you to tell me what YOU know. In my office toward you I am simply trying to improve my own environment.

Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do NOT fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them. and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. They can help you. All the past can help you.

An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future.

A work of art which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is the manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment the work was done.

It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation to himself.

For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation.

He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals itself to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made."

guess what MAMMA challenged us with this week.
T I M E

Flickr's Altered Art Challenge for April submission "HOUSE" Mixed Media on large cardboard mat MAMMA's weekly challenge 3 takes on required image to use

MAD April Challenge Button Doll

turn off my playlist first

two of the 8x10 canvas boards i finally committed to painting. just playing at this point with all the paints and pastels but hoping more will come. i feel much more relaxed painting than collaging which really is so hard on the ATCs which are quite small for all the messages one wants to send out.

my pincushions

"evelyn"

i have been missing from action since i had a bit of a scare the other night when my heart decided to go "thump in the night". major hyperventilation and hearthrobs at 95 a minute. i just took it easy for a couple of days, read a lot, rested and tried to re-think my routines; i have been working way into the night which is probably why my heart said "wait a minute" or rather "i need to go faster to catch up with your mind".

so there, 'tis true what Bette Davis said that "ageing is not for sissys". especially now that i have my life pretty much sorted out, have reached that much-awaited atability and the children have flown the coop. i can finally do all the things i couldn't do. murphy doesn't seem to think so, though does he.

very few things coming to fruition artwise but ok with it. thank goodness MAMMA keeps me stimulated and at least a few ATCs do get finished. what i really want to do though is dig into the paints and fabrics and start painting canvases so this week will order some modelling pastes and canvases from the blick and get to it.