I just got home from spending the weekend in Port Aransas, Texas with old friends. Taking time away from the studio had me concerned, but it was a good trip, very relaxing. Here is a very short video I took yesterday morning just after sunrise and just before my walk.

The beach was almost completely deserted except for the gulls and pipers. There was reddish seaweed everywhere that had been scraped into long piles along the water’s edge, but apparently the birds loved it because they were digging in it finding whelks and mussels.

Our group went back down together a couple of hours later and there were people and tents and canopies all over the place, so this was a very lovely time to be there by myself.

I wish there were a way to capture the color of that peach-y gray sky. Maybe the next kimono I fold will have those colors as an inspiration.

My son gave me a card one Mother’s day that had a Chinese character on it meaning “To Revive an Old Dream.” Going back to creating mixed-media kimonos is definitely a revival of sorts. I just finished this piece and am not sure how I feel about it other than that it is artistically satisfying. But my style has changed enough that I don’t do these on art-autopilot like I used to, which is probably good. At any rate, this one is finished and I plan to do at least one more kimono for the show. We’ll see how they are received.

Amazing burst of energy today. I finished another piece based on what I had learned with the previous work. It may be one of my favorites, titled (right now, anyway) “Noh Festival. Unfortunately, I was so excited about it that I framed it before taking a photo, so this photo is shot through Plexiglas! I will probably take it apart and re-take later, but right now I’m happy to just relax. I’d hoped to get six paintings done over spring break – this makes four. Remind self – it’s quality, not quantity that counts. Er, right…?

I worked all day Friday on an Asian-themed collage that just did not work – I had the mat cut and was ready to just go ahead and frame it, but it felt so NOT-RIGHT. Scrapped it, worried about why I couldn’t get it to work, and started over with a result that I really like and gave me a zillion new ideas. One of those is scanning and printing fragments of previous work onto rice paper – it’s amazing how different those images look from the original collages.
Here’s the new piece, titled “Not for the Cat.” It has lots of little areas that I want to incorporate in the next piece.
Here’s the piece that didn’t work (below) – let me count the ways why – too cluttered, no story, no unity, just matchy-matchy images stuck on without enough thought to relationships and values. It’s valuable because it’s a lesson. Sometimes it’s so frustrating to keep adding things , thinking it might get fixed, but that’s a mistake.
Look at the difference that a fresh start and clear artistic purpose makes!
I do so love telling stories with images, paint and paper.

I seriously don’t know how working artists who blog get any studio work done – obviously my good intentions to blog often about my work have been sunk by the work itself. Arg. But here are two new pieces. I had hoped to finish six over spring break, but that’s rapidly evaporating.
Titles for paintings are always a challenge. On of these collages is titled “The Laying” – it’s a semi-serious allusion to laying of hands, laying eggs – healing. The other new one is titled “Alberta’s Dream” because it features peaches (!?). And some other things, of course :).
OK, off the computer and back to the studio.

I use spray adhesive, the 3M kind that’s extra strong, when I’m first constructing my Kindle covers to make sure the delicate rice paper adheres to the archival matboard without tearing or wrinkling. Even though I spray briefly, everything around the aerosol can gets sticky – so I made a “tent” out of watercolor paper that is mounted on the inside of the door of the cabinet where I keep glues and drills and such. It folds out when the door is open, and folds back in like a book when I close the door. It isn’t perfect, but it helps a lot to contain the adhesive. Just sharing!

Finished a new cover this morning that really pleased me. I noticed as I was finishing it that the front cover was a bit narrower than the back. I thought that I might have to rebuild it, but then put a strip along the inside of the front cover that looks really good, design wise-and function-wise! Necessitity is sometimes the mother of artistic invention.

Finished a new piece today – I worked with a square canvas to see how it felt. It was a bit difficult to work with the symmetry, but once I divided it up into a grid, it was more comfortable. There are parts of it that I like very much and other parts I wish I’d done differently – well, what else it new?
“Encanto” means a charm or a spell – the lady in the gourd did it, of course.

I went back to put the new paper away, but Max has already claimed it: