The Mother Road

It's hard to believe, but for the first time in my life I took a road trip alone. Just myself and the open highway, plus about 4000 big rig trucks give or take a few. I was on my way to a national art quilters conference in Santa Fe and Glenn couldn't get away from classes to come along so he advised me to take the interstate route instead of our usual path through Clovis and Fort Sumner just in case there was a car problem and I needed cell phone coverage and assistance. This meant driving I-27 north to Amarillo and then turning onto I-40 west, the original Route 66, known as the Mother Road, that stretches from Chicago to L.A.

 At first the scenery is just a hum of highway, horizon, and sky, the panhandle in all its minimalism, then right before Tucumcari the earth begins to roll and sway and then chisel itself into beige, scrubbed raw mesas. I love these wild vistas of New Mexico. Not as dramatic as the Rockies, but calmer, a little more mysterious. The ghosts of mingled cultures filling the earth and sky.
 The beauty of traveling alone is that you can stop where you please, and on the Mother Road you head for the truck stops in all their bright lit extravagance. Russell's offered a Fifties vibe, with the restrooms designated for Elvises and Marilyns. Coffee please.

On to Santa Rosa and then up to Clines Corners, another craptacular truck stop. And here I left I-40 and turned up the two lane road to Santa Fe where the familiar 45 minute drive to the mountains seemed to whiz by thanks to my audio book (something about spies).

I checked into Garrett's Desert Inn, conveniently located, as they proudly claim, between the Square and Canyon Road. The vibe there is distinctly vintage motel (little pink bathroom tiles!) but it's cheap and clean and accessible. I then drove up to the Lodge at Santa Fe, up St. Francis St. and on the way to the opera house, to check in at the conference. (I've been here so many times I can pretty much drive like a local.) I knew not a soul there but I have never met a friendlier, more open and relaxed group of people. Everyone was inclusive and willing to share ideas, techniques, tips, venues, and resources. I shared business cards with other artists and attended some helpful sessions on marketing artwork (it's all done online now, so even this blog is considered one of my resources, for all six of you reading it, but supposedly I am supposed to have a link to my Etsy site and my Facebook page. Plus I'm supposed to Twitter and check in on Linkedin, but, whew, I'd never get any art done). I also attended a session on colour theory, and heard life stories of successful members actually making a career out of their work.
Of course the best part of being in Santa Fe was being in Santa Fe. Art, food, scenery, shops, history, atmosphere....what's not to love? Even as it grows and changes (and gets pricier) there is always a familiarity, a reassuring sameness to being back there and finding the same favorite spots.
The first night, since it was my birthday, I sat alone in the bar at the La Fonda Hotel and toasted myself with a Cosmo. That sounds slightly pitiful but I was as happy as I could be in my splendid solitary state.

 I did mingle with the other conference goers in sessions and at the silent auction social/fundraiser but I ate dinner alone the next night at The Pink Adobe, again feeling the romance of being unmoored and unfettered.
On Saturday, my friend Toni, and her husband, Gordon, drove in from Albuquerque and took me to lunch at Tomasita's, joined by the mayor of Santa Fe and his wife, who happen to be their good friends. The mayor is well-liked, and numerous people came by our table to say hello to him. After that we went to the International Folk Art Museum, a charming place to wander through, where they were having a special exhibit of Amish quilts.

With the conference over I drove over to Albuquerque and spent the night at Toni's for a nice evening chat over wine and guacamole, before heading home the next day.
Here are a few images from Santa Fe, the city different:

Aviary

I've been enjoying my feathered friends at our pond lately (apart from the mess they make on my patio furniture!). We have a large flowering Bradford pear tree, that snuggles up to a Cedar tree just the other side of the fence, so both are havens for all sorts of birds, including Grackles, Cardinals, Finches, Doves, Blue Jays, Mockingbirds, and Sparrows. Occasionally a Cooper's Hawk will pass through but they prefer to sit high atop the elm tree and look for prey.

 I've been enjoying doing some loose, spontaneous illustrations using watered down acrylic paint, rich acrylic inks, and then using drawing pens as accents.

I sold my first Grackle on Etsy, so I did another, slightly different one, and then a couple of Sparrows. I look forward to doing more. Especially with that Noodler's Eel Blue Ink as seen in the first painting and a little in the second. That stuff is dazzling!

Five by Five (by Five by Five)

Start small. Repeat until it multiplies like Tribbles. That's my motto. I challenged myself to make some mini 5"x5" art quilts. I feel happy with that size. It finishes quickly and forces me to keep it simple.

And then my brain gets grandiose. I start thinking: what if I make 25 of these and mount them on little 5"x5" canvases, then hang them on the wall in a 5x5 grid? In fact hang them so they can be shuffled every day in a different order and each canvas rotated in a different direction so the overall design is always changing.
So I've started:

I'll have to stitch these down onto the canvases and paint each canvas to match its little quilt. This won't be viewed until my show in August at the Buddy Holly Center (shameless plug) but here are some more of the little five by fives. All of the embroidery work and embellishing is my own,even that butterfly, which I did about 25 years ago.

I have about seven more to make before the grid is complete. Can't wait to play with the layout.

One down, about 25 to go

This is a finished work now. One long stitch at a time. Cross that off the list.

"End of Season"- 24"x36". Fiber arts. Please rotate head right. Photo is not co-operating.

Here was an early stage:

 And here are some close-ups:

Why is it finished? Because it has to be. I had a deadline. It was accepted into our local Arts Festival and needs to be delivered in early April. But then there are all those other projects just lying about in various stages of completion or my indifference. Welllll.....I do have another deadline coming up for a show in August. Oh but that's so far away. la la la, lets go check Facebook and see what's up on Pinterest.

And here's a shameless plug for my new Etsy account: www.Etsy.com/shop/artbyValya

The Business of Art

I'm taking a bold step for me and setting up an Etsy account to sell my art. Let me just say I'm the absolute worst at selling things, especially my own things. (the Girl Scouts would have literally kicked me out). I give a lot of things away. Oh you like that? Here take it. It's Christmas? Here, have some art. (friends, I do it gladly) And then every year at tax time I add up all the money I spent on art supplies, and framing, and entry fees to shows, and then add up my profits and.....hey, wait a minute! And do you know how many organizations ask you to donate art for fundraisers.....and then charge you to come to the fundraiser event?

One of my yearly horrors while teaching high school was, of course, the dreaded fund raiser. You would think that a school that was all about the arts would......oh but I digress into bitterness. Don't get me started about sports and pom squads. Needless to say I had about 200 teenagers in dance classes issued giant cartons of assorted candy bars and told to sell them. What could possibly go wrong? Surely they wouldn't leave them in the trunk of a car in the hot sun. Surely their ravenous relatives wouldn't eat them all and thank them for the freebies. Surely they wouldn't leave them in a classroom only to come back and discover them gone. Surely they wouldn't lock them in a locker and then just forget about them. And surely they would happily reimburse you for any candy lost, eaten, destroyed, unsold, or stolen. I was lucky just to break even with the candy company let alone raise that projected $1000.00, to split between 200 kids to purchase costumes for a dance concert. Let's see, two hundred goes into 1000........oh, $5.00 per student, eh? That'll buy a nice headband. OK, let's all bring a T-shirt kids, and we'll dye them and cut fringe at the bottom. It'll be cute. Trust me.

So....Etsy. Now for a catchy name for my online shop. Valya? Taken. Valeria? Taken. Valerina? Taken. Artemesia? Taken. Krasivaya? (Russian for Beautiful) Taken. Valociraptor's Art Attack? Surprisingly, not taken, but still.......maybe I'll just stick with my temporary name artbyValya.

 Oh God, I'll have to handle transactions. I'll have to mail people things and hope they're pleased. I'll have to market myself. Oh God.....did I mention dealing with people? I need a business manager. I need a website specialist. Where's my business manager? My webmaster? Oh that's right. She moved to San Francisco.

Extreme close-up

You know the old saying: God is in the details. And you know the old saying: The Devil is in the details. It depends on the day. It depends on the deadline, on the level of patience, on the moments of Zen, on the weather, on the project, on the level of ADD, on the caffeine.
Usually I'm a big picture person. I see the forest, the wholeness of treeness, the ocean of waveness, our tiny atom of a planet in the cosmos, but sometimes the macro is too much and the micro assures me that every Who down in Whoville is unique and cared for.
That's just a totally misleading build up to the fact that I'm posting little pieces of bigger projects today. I am reveling in the details because every stitch has its place in the whole.

 This lotus below took me a LONG time. At first I cut around the linen square I had embroidered it on and sewed it on a skirt, then I stopped wearing the skirt so now I am integrating it into a larger wall hanging. Whenever I have done this kind of intensive handwork I usually look at it a few years later and wonder who the crazy person was that had that much patience. But then those ladies who did the Bayeux Tapestry are mocking me from their graves.

Eventually the big pictures of these projects will reveal themselves. Eventually.

Still life in the ol' Still Life

When I was little I thought still lifes were boring. My drawings were full of people in action, often riding horses or climbing trees, and sometimes fleeing from villains in grand adventures. My teen drawings were full of angsty sad faces looking poetic and mysterious as they gazed into a dreamy distance. Later in college, I still thought still lifes were boring in art classes when the teacher would pile some random objects on a table and have us draw them. Over and over. From all angles. Again and again. I understand why, of course. It was the equivalent of eating your vegetables before you get dessert. It was good for you. It taught you to look closely at shapes, at shadow and light, at form defined by light, at textures, at perspective and scale and all those other aspects of design important to an artist. So I've surprised myself lately by giving myself a painting-a-day project just to stay in practice, to stay loose and flexible, to turn off my analytical, judging brain and just play. And Voila! Most of my splashing and doodling has turned into still lifes.(Media: acrylic paint, acrylic ink, brush pen and India ink, and a section of a Lego castle floor brushed with paint to print some fun dot patterns.)
Most of the examples below were done from my head, no actual still life models in sight. Although I did bring in a lemon to look at. I do like lemons. And I am sorry the lemons are sideways. I have tried every technique to make them upright and they won't respond. The original image is upright so I don't know why my blog image uploader is fighting me.

Oh well, bombs away, lemons!

I did this little piece a number of months ago. Now it belongs to a friend in Florida who really wanted it. I love it when my art finds a good home.