this is what happens to me after midnight when i can't sleep, i hold a vigil

& lift my eyes to the stars

artwork by Miniature Rhino en Etsy

aren't they something?
&

then that little mustard seed from Ruth Rae

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthrae/

La Nuit

Si je t’oublie pendant le jour
Je passe mes nuits à te maudire
Et quand la lune se retire,
J’ai l’âme vide et le cœur lourd
La nuit tu m’apparais immense
Je tends les bras pour te saisir
Mais tu prends un malin plaisir
A te jouer de mes avances
La nuit, je deviens fou, je deviens fou
Et puis ton rire fend le noir
Et je ne sais plus où chercher
Quand tout se tait revient l’espoir
Et je me reprends à t’aimer
Tantôt tu me reviens fugace
Et tu m’appelles pour me narguer
Et chaque fois mon sang se glace
Ton rire vient tout effacer
La nuit, je deviens fou, je deviens fou
Le jour dissipe ton image
Et tu repars je ne sais où
Vers celui qui te tient en cage
Celui qui va me rendre fou
La nuit je deviens fou, je deviens fou

Gemma Taccogna

a curious thing happened to me yesterday which, once again, re-affirms my intuition about the people behind the art i like and collect. for years i have collected paper mache pincushions with the most darling hand painted faces. i spotted the first at a swap meet in Carpinteria many years ago and had to have her. as the years went by, i kept looking for more to no avail. then i found a couple more en e-bay and soon i had four. i also collect collage paper and had saved a black and white photograph of a similar face never realizing it was the same artist. i never knew the artists name since there was no mention anywhere on the bottoms and the papers that had originally been there with the author's info were gone.

well, yesterday, i went browsing on e-bay for maybe another and found one at an exhorbitant price. it had the artists name and an unmet Reserve Price. i was so happy to at last know who the artist behind those faces was and did a thorough search on the net about her. sigh after sigh after sigh, reading about her and arriving too late to write to her to thank her for the joy she has brought into my sewing room; she passed away not too long ago and lived right in my back yard in Palos Verdes.

May i introduce her to you? GEMMA TACCOGNA

it's happened to me a couple of times, one more recent example being that i was the first one to spot Cathy Cullis on etsy when she listed her first poetry bird and one of her first buyers. i knew NOTHING about her, she was only just starting out, and i was able, through her work, to perceive the spirit behind the work. it just seems such a gift. and now it all comes together and my pincushions have suddenly become priceless. i could never part with then after knowing the artist who created them. her spirit reigns with me in my home.

well i know it's kind of late, hope i didn't wake you but there's something that i've just got to say


my heart, HIS heart and the striving

don't let evil into your heart, it will make a home there

Aquellas Pequenas Cosas

today i feel like the ultimate

Made with http://www.mycoolsigns.net/">My Cool Signs.Net

Thank you Jan for this cool link, loved playing with the letters.

WIP Altered Art couture Fabric Purse
Originally uploaded by peregrine blue

Some days are better than others in spite of two breakdowns in my car in less than a week,. I guess it's true that bad luck comes in threes. Nothing but bad things happening to my car: 1st it was the running over a can of white paint on the freeway which left my tires and spare in shambles, Then it was the red alert, smog censors going kaput all of a sudden and the 90,000 mile maintenance people forgetting the essential spark plugs. Yesterday it was the starter, Money pouring out faster than I can make it. So what else can I do but surrender and create a thing of beauty, at least to me since I am so mis-understood.

Yes, I love old movies in black and white, yes, I cherish the bygone eras of class and propriety. Must I say that all seems vulgar and so un-subtle these days. That's why I think so many Altered Artists live in a world of make believe where all is as Home Sweet Home as can Be. Let us keep pretending. Let us re-create Life as it should be although outside our doors the boogey man lurks dangerously ready to destroy our dreams.

at last a makeshift sewing area where I can play with all my fabrics and findings.

i felt so lost without being able
to make things daily. things have taken off unexpectedly, almost as if the fabrics were speaking for themselves, as in free writing in school

i love mixing the different hues of a same color together with the added textures and then arranging them so that they make a harmonious whole.

i have also found myself moving away from art for arts sake and being more realistic about its use and purpose so trying to make art that is also utilitarian. something is gradually changing within me. today i had the chance to go to the bookstore and wanted to pick up all the latest Somerset magazines. i bought not one, my vow to not buy is working and i get inspiration just by enjoying having them in my hands for a while and then letting them go.

Inspired by my Guardian Angel
Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

L.Cohen

Morris & Sebastian Fellow

It all began in England, I suppose, since the memory of my baby years is blurred by the loss of my Father and waiting for things to happen in my Mother's life. I do vaguely remember our living on a cobblestoned street in the older section of Santiago, close to Parque Forestal where my Grandfather (Pochi) used to take us for walks and buy us biscuits out of large lidded glass containers. A few other memories of going for rides on a Vespa with a family friend and going to see a Charlie Chaplin film, my Nana Raquelita and a few falshbacks of school come to me if I really try. I was very sickly as a child and began having ear infections which lasted until I was 20. I spent a great deal of time bedridden, once even having to have a blood transfusion. I remember my mother being so very very beautiful yet fragile in an unresolved way. There were always parties and visitors coming and going and it was always an interesting background. My parents were very social. The times were idealistic and there were still new frontiers.  So ofcourse my parents joined the elite intelectuals of the times in trying to fix the world. I was a born observer so all these visions were thrilling to my (unbeknownst at the time) artistic temperament.
However, my true living years began in London after my mother re-married. We sailed to England on one of the last trans-atlantics via Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, celebrating the crossing of the Equator Carnival-style sitting on eggswith lots of heat, humidity and a feeling that there was a way opening. We stayed in Madrid for a few months with my grandmother Edith: more blurred memories of half dark rooms with open windows, churros and chocolate, the elevator employees smiling at us and the subtle hints that my grandmother was having an affair with a painter by the name of Eduardo. I so miss a portrait he painted of her looking out a window, one of the many losses in the endless moves we have made trans-continentally.
London speaks to you as soon as you arrive. Tio Daddy, as we called our new Father, rented a flat on Elsworthy Terrace and immediately set out to complete the family with an Alsatian dog we appropriately named "Sebastian Fellow of Elsworthy".

He was a brother to us for 14 years, as human as an animal can get. Living next to Primrose Hill with the old lampposts, walking to school every day passing all the tiny British shops with candied apples, sweet shops lining the streets of the borough, my Girl Guides Headquarters there too, were all ingrained in my mind by walking with my senses constantly being "given".London was six years of sensory ecstasy as my parents exposed us to as much of London and its surroundings as they could possibly cram into weekends. Tio Daddy was a busy intellectual, working on his PhD

Tio Daddy

and working for Chatham House in International Affairs. It was the '60s, the Cold War was at its heat, so we rarely saw him during the week. But he went all out for us on Saturdays and Sundays. In our racing green Morris Minor off we went to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, daytrips to the country, picnics, visiting the Cutty Sark, looking for antiques in Portobello Market, country living with Lords and Barons. And then there were the long holidays in Cadgwith, Cornwall, Burrington and Longleat where we rented picturesque cottages and played archeologist digging in the backyards for shards of broken pottery we believed to be Medieval. We took long walks across hills and villages, mailing postcards to friends from the tiny local post offices. Oh and I mustn't forget all those appointments for Brass Rubbings, Sir Robert de Trumpet and my italic pens and my famous penmanship put to the test in a rubbings log. Once in a while the crossing of the English Channel with Old Morris in tow where Sebastian always had the seat of honor ( I mean the window seat), driving across the South of France, camping in St. Tropez and Nice, learning to swim in Monaco.

me in Monaco

Or waking up to the sound of cowbells and yogourt camping by a river on the Swiss Alps.We grew up without television, a strict rule imposed by my father until he couldn't resist the BBC's production of David Copperfield. We would rush home in the Morris before 5 to all sit and watch these precursors to Masterpiece Theatre. Slowly, he allowed us to watch Blue Peter during the week then Noddy

and our television days slowly began. Not having television was a blessing. Instead, we were given coloured pencils, books, Mekanos and plasticine a.k.a playdough so from a very young age my imagination was triggered into making things from a few random tools laid in front of me. The flat was small so we would all gather in the sunlit living room, my Mother Paula knitting, my Father Claudio writing (he went on to become a renown Sociologist), my brother Martin de-constructing something or other and then pulling his hair out unable to put them back together. Myself, always a dreamer, making matchbox chests of drawers for my miniature dolls who lived on the windowsill with a view all their own overlooking the park. I read and read and read all the Ladybird books and Enid Blyton, went to see plays like The Wind in the Willows and Treasure Island where the stage was circular. More fruits for my imagination. Ofcourse there was Sebastian Fellow, lying at our feet, wagging his tail as he looked up at us gathered in family bliss and old Morris parked on the street.
Sebastian at 14

Everyone in the family had their own creative inclinations after the rituals of weekly life. Mummy took some ceramic and jewelry making classes and then decided to self teach herself to become a cook using one sole book that she swears by Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World and the Larousse Gastronomique.

 I believe her first culinary gift to us were scones. She is now (and I'm not exaggerating) the BEST cook I have ever met. Martin started building go carts and towers of metal and then went on to paint and become a finish carpenter. Daddy, of course now famous with more than a dozen books published, a University Title and a world speaker in Conversazione.Without dispelling the importance of my mother, it was Tio Daddy, my father who was my greatest influence. He is full of curiosity, an endless seeker, who taught me that Art is everywhere and in everything; a face, a tree, the color green on Primrose Hill, the red post box on the corner, the painted front doors of London with their mail slats, the thin cotton black tie (Daddy's staple to this day), Sebastian's elegant ears, the way my mother set the table.

....to be continued