Yikes

     There's that old expression "Works expands to fill the time." I am starting also to understand that work expands to fill the space too. When I left for my art and design tour of Helsinki, I pretty much just left my studio a holy mess, which meant I have come back to...a holy mess! As they say, yikes. It makes it hard to work.

My artist self actually prefers to have a lot of things and images readily available or tacked on the walls. In my case, it often means lots of plant materials, many of which dry up and get very, very interesting. So I have to save them. You can't see them in this shot (taken by iPhone and stitched together) as they around the corner, but there are trays and bags of them, well sorted and awaiting another shining moment under the lights. What you are looking at here is the production table where I do drawing, framing, and encaustic work. You can see a couple of pieces I am in the process of producing by affixing blown up crops of two different poppy images onto birch grounds then covering with encaustic medium. My heat gun holder is an antique shoe tree.
I am working on a number of images right now, and at the stage where I am deep into Photoshop mode. Once I have captured my images as fodder, then I'll spend days or weeks working them out to be more than just photographs. I am going for more of an illustrative approach, making it my own style and more satisfying work and, I hope, more compelling as art.


Here's one I haven't shown at the gallery yet, but finished just in time for Mother's Day. I titled it "Listening" in honor of my own mom, who is the best Listener on the planet, for which many of us love her. I can really feel how the roses and rhododendrons vibrate with each other in the garden. It's in the air.