The River Mosaic

After going through all the stone I have in the studio I've picked out what I'm going to use for the next mosaic - Emperador Medium (of course when it's cut up into tiny cubes it won't look anything like that photo). I have a 5 sq. ft. slab of it that's 1.25" thick. I just need to cut a BUNCH of it up into 3-5mm cubes... Good thing I have some big hammers.

I know what glass I'm using. Dalle de Verre - in Blues & Greens. Tomorrow I'm ordering 4 or 5 slabs (and a Blenko hammer).

I'm thinking about also incorporating some stones from the river. Don't know for sure, though - I don't want to put too much in... Sometimes I cross the line between making something really interesting and going too far with the interesting bit...

I do have some absolutely perfect river stones though - lots of them, in fact.I wonder if I have any brown ones that would look good with the Emperador Medium...

If not, I could get enthusiastic about doing some beach combing. Haven't been to Hoc-Si-La Park in quite a while...

Encouraging an art-filled life

A friend asked me about art opportunities for her son (who spent his morning making masks)... and I said:

There are some venues around here that offer art opportunities. We can talk about them sometime. But I want to say that while it is grand to get kids together to make art, I think it's more important to make sure that the creative creature that lives inside of each of us has a chance. Parents are the best incubators for that creative creature.

I think that the critical thing is to encourage constant experimentation... making art is experimentation - pure, wonderful, exasperating, beautiful experimentation - it's giving in to the urge to "what if..." something, to take a bit of this and a bit of that and put them together to make a new thing. It doesn't have to be limited to traditional art activities - building a snow fort or baking a pie or making some contraption can be experimental - and if it is, you're feeding the creative creature.

The most important thing for raising a child (or an adult) to live an art-filled life - to be blessed with the indescribable lightness of being that art generates - is to be willing to totally wreck havoc in the name of experimentation, to be willing to put the journey and the finding out ahead of things like order and propriety and everything else that shuts down the creative mind, that forces us to be those cogs in the machine.

I was very lucky as a child - my parents did not have much, but they let us play with almost everything they had. The contraptions we made were applauded and treasured - even when they had to be scraped off the sidewalk, or painted over, or dismantled so that dinner could be put on the table, or, or, or...

I was "sewing" before I started school, "building" before I was out of grade school... I learned how to use tools, how to make stuff from bits of this and that, how to fix things, how to "see" what might be, how to be fearless in my experimentation - to know "I can do that..." whatever "that" was.

And all because I was taught that the creative creature was important, that it was the most important part of me - the part that made me alive - the creative creature was me. Life was all about the making and thinking and looking and finding... All those doings done, all those thoughts thought, they stayed with me throughout my life. Even in the times when I was too afraid to make art, when life demanded too much of me to be able to spare the energy, I still was art-filled.

And one day I came back to it.

So, would I like to make my living making art? Hell yes. I'd love to... and I am really stubborn, so maybe it will happen.

But it's ever so much more important to just be making the art.

Not a simple issue

Refused and Confused - New York Times, Oct 05, 2011 - Linda Greenhouse

Off the cuff I think that people who use their religion/other positions to refuse service to others should give up the employment that asks them to serve the public.

But do I think that way because the services being discussed in the article are ones I believe should be available... or because it is sound policy to require any legally available service to be provided no matter what the personal beliefs of the providing individual? I'm trying to think of services that I might find distasteful or morally wrong and see how I feel about this from the other side...

I need a philosopher to toss this around with. In lieu of one showing up at my door here's what I'm thinking...

The crux of the matter - either:

• employees are forced to provide services they abhor to the public at large, or to specific groups of people,

          OR

• employees get to pick and choose what services they will provide and/or to whom...

Does it violate a person's civil rights to force them to perform a service, or make a service available, if they feel it is a morally wrong thing to do?

Does it violate an individual's civil rights to have a government/agency employee deny them a legal service because the employee feels, a.) it is morally wrong that anyone receive the service (e.g. birth control, abortion), or b.) that the person is morally wrong for asking for the service (e.g. marriage licenses for same-sex couples, police protection for abortion doctors/clinics)?

Honestly, even if it is questionable (in regard to civil rights) to ask an employee to provide a service they feel is morally wrong, I cannot think of a situation where an individual's rights would trump the rights of a person seeking a legally provided service. But that might be a slippery slope of another sort...

When this kind of news story appears I end up feeling that too many people brandish their beliefs at the rest of us without actually living according to them. If you believe that same-sex marriage is morally wrong, it's not living your beliefs to deny a marriage license to a same-sex couple. Living your beliefs - following your moral code - would be quitting your job if it required you to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

That's how it plays out inside my head anyway.

The Beelandia Mosaic

Is mostly finished. All I have to do is add the hardware for hanging it out on the fence. It probably won't go out until next spring, so there's no rush.

Beelandia Apiary, 12" x 24", stained glass, smalti, glass rod.

There's a bit of reflection on the left half... It is actually very evenly colored and the right half is more representational of the colors.

The Wall - Waiting for the Extraordinary Things

I made a small mosaic the other day for a friend. It was her 60th birthday.

At the party someone asked me about soul-mates... inferring that I had said at a previous party that I believe in them. This is an old topic at the parties, and for some strange reason, a bit controversial...

So, rather than get back into the topic (it was too early in the evening and not enough alcohol had been consumed to make the discussion interesting - consumed by others since I don't do alcohol - a whole 'nother story there...) I simply said "I believe that just about anything is possible." "Wise answer," my questioner replied. Luckily, before she could keep on about soul-mates, one of the others at the party quoted Alicia from the movie A Beautiful Mind - "I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible."

The birthday friend, who is very much concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said, "Extraordinary things are not possible..." She can't see how a peaceful resolution can happen.

I admit that my response to her comment and the situation is more emotional than informed - which is often the case for me; the feelings get in the way of the thinking sometimes. And even when I try to think critically about the issues I often feel like many of the world's problems are insurmountable (and so why should any of us try?)...

But I've decided that I'm not going to quit thinking about them and talking about them and trying to learn about them.

And I'm not about to stop making art about them...

It was strange because when I made this mosaic I had no idea why I made it like it is.

The Wall, 4" x 8", marble, recycled glass.

I loved the materials when I placed them side-by-side on the worktable. The cream-colored marble has a slight orange veining in it and somehow feels both smooth and gritty at the same time. The background is Rain Forest Green marble (because of how it looks, not that it comes from a rain forest). And the red is a recycled, tumbled, landscape glass that I've cut into sharp slivers. They looked beautiful together - until I started cementing them down... then they made me a bit uncomfortable.

Once I finished the white line I realized that it was "the wall." And the red represents the bloodshed on both sides.

It could be any wall, any division between people that results in bloodshed and tragedy.

For my friend this was about the Middle-east conflict. I think she (like me) loves this piece but finds it hard to look at/think about.

And the extraordinary things - I do believe that they are possible, but we don't get to pick and choose which extraordinary thing is going to happen. We cannot force things to turn out according to what we think is best, how we would fix the problems. We have to learn to recognize when something extraordinary is looking us right in the face. We have to learn to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, or even in the tragic - the transcendent moments in our mundane lives.

They say it's your birthday...

You know, sometimes the down-and-dirty part of life really gets to me... the stupid allergies and the limits they impose on me, the bad shoulder, the bad hip, the whole getting older thing.

And then there are the days when, even though I still feel all those things, I also feel luminous - all brand new and shiny and full of potential.

Family and friends and making art are things that help me feel luminous. Last night it was Wes and Jude and Tinee and the sunset and the moonrise and the change-bringing wind up on Garvin Heights. This morning it was waking up, thinking about my birth 54 years ago (I'm the oldest, my mother was scared - who wouldn't be - and it was a Friday, she really wanted to wait one more day...) and thinking about the births of my kids. Right now it's the early morning bicycle ride euphoria and the flock of geese that greeted me with honks and hisses and much ruckus as I passed by on my way to work that's got me buoyed and calm.

I'm thinking about beauty today.

Mosaic Doodles

Did some mosaic doodling... quick, small mosaics. Exploring ideas...

Onyx, Smalti & Marble                                   Onyx & Marble

More to ponder as the school year begins...

A friend of mine sent me a link in response to my last posting. 

Like Lilly Like Wilson by Taylor Mali

Thanks Dirk. The poem made me smile. I loved the story it told.

Something to ponder as the school year begins

Overheard as I passed a classroom last semester:

"God, I hate this. This class is so stupid..."

"What makes you say it's stupid?"

"It just is!"

"I've found that people often say a class -- or anything else, for that matter -- is stupid when in fact they are simply uncomfortable with the ideas being examined.

My job here -- the entire purpose of higher education -- is to challenge your comfortable life. To get you to think about the uncomfortable things in the world. And perhaps most important of all, to help you develop a mind that is open to all the conceivable possibilities. Because if you're not open to all the possibilities, you'll never understand the questions, let alone find the answers."

Dedicated with deepest respect, love and appreciation to every teacher, every professor, that made me think about the uncomfortable things.

Setting prices for artwork

Recently there was a post in a forum asking for advice on setting a price for artwork:

“I need some pricing help! How do you guys price your art to sell? … I don’t want to become another artist who charges a fortune and no one buys anything. HELP! How do you guys charge for your art?!?!”

Of course I have an opinion… which goes something like this:

First and foremost, you need to be fair to yourself. You need to be setting a price that pays you a living wage… no one should ask you to work for less. Some artists price emotionally instead of using a good business model which is unfortunate because it causes other artists a lot of grief (and explaining) and really confuses art buyers, especially new or casual buyers. Artists who price emotionally also run the highest risk of either drastically underpricing their work, or becoming one of the ones you mention who cannot sell their work because they’ve way overpriced it — and both of these experiences can defeat an artist who is just getting started in the market.

So how do you determine the right prices, how do you hit that sweet-spot between undervaluing your work and pricing yourself out of the market? And what exactly is your market?

First I want to address the idea of “market”…In the past your market was pretty much defined by your geographic region, the area you were willing to drive or ship your work to. These days your market can be wherever and whoever you conceive it to be. With the various online tools available to us now, location is no longer the limiting factor to determining your market. That said, it is even more important than ever to carefully consider your portfolio. Don’t put every single piece you’ve ever done on a website, Facebook, or Linked-In. Put only your very best work out there. If you cannot decide which pieces best represent you, poll your friends and family (try really hard not to be put off by their comments and suggestions). And if you feel like you absolutely must put that piece you did ten years ago (when you were first learning your trade), be aware that it probably doesn’t represent your current abilities and strengths, and it will affect how buyers evaluate the worth of your work.

The formula for determining price is really quite simple (however it is really hard to get comfortable with). You need to take into account your time, materials and supplies (and their associated costs), and overhead (a portion of your household expenses if you work in your home or all of your studio costs if you maintain a separate studio). Materials, and to some extent, overhead are relatively easy to determine. Time can be a real bugaboo… especially if you haven’t been paying attention to how long it takes you to do a piece. You will need to initially make your best guess, and then become obsessive about keeping track. You’ll need to decide if you’re comfortable including planning and deliberating within your billable hours, along with the time it takes to learn a new skill or process… In general I usually weigh that decision based on the exclusivity clause: am I going to be able to apply this planning/deliberation/learning to future projects or is it only applicable to this one project or this one commission? Once I have that figured out I can decide how much of it — if any — should be built into the price of an art work…

The other conundrum you need to think about is the wholesale / retail price issue. If you EVER intend to sell in galleries or shops, you must be selling to individuals at a price that would be comparable to what a retailer would price your work at for a significant period of time before you begin to move your work through a retail establishment. No gallery will pay you the same amount you have been selling at — they cannot, they also need to make a living wage. They are going to expect to purchase your work at 40 to 60% of what you are currently selling it for, so be sure to add that markup into your calculations when selling to individuals. If you get into a gallery or shop, and they learn that you are underselling them, you will loose the gallery and probably not find another soon.

There is often quite a bit of guilt and a whole lot of uncertainty for most artists when they are pricing for individual sales. What you need to remember is that you deserve that extra compensation BECAUSE you are acting as your own retail agent… which is taking up your valuable creative time. You are out on the streets looking for customers; you are enduring arts fairs and festivals; you are searching for commissions. That is ALL work that you need to pay yourself for doing.

So, easy as pie, right? You can do this with your eyes closed and both hands tied behind your back, right? Excellent… but there is something else you need to also be thinking about… Worth.

Perhaps the most difficult area regarding pricing work that an artist needs to consider is determining worth. Worth trumps the pricing formula every single time — it’s the monster under the bed that makes us all doubt and second-guess our art and our art practices.

Worth is different than price — worth is determined by the quality of your work and its future value. Quality is a moving target that is most clearly demonstrated by your attention to detail, your technical skill, and your devotion to artistic growth. It requires a reflexive, often ruthless, self-evaluation that is honest and informed.

Luckily, if you pay the utmost attention to quality, future value will likely take care of itself.

Mosaic of Mary

Lend Us Your Strength is now hanging  at SMU.

At first I didn't really know what to think of the location that was chosen for it. It is hanging in the hall between Heffron Hall and Skemp Hall - just around the corner from the executive suite, in the seating area at the entrance of Skemp, a women's residence hall.

Initially I was disappointed that it wasn't going to be in a more public space... but the space it is in is a very nice, contemplative space - and that's good.There used to be vending machines in this hallway. They were moved because they were visible from the entrance of the executive suite which was less than ideal. I'm sure that the president and others who passed by often probably thought that the eye arresting vending machines distracted from the quiet atmosphere and the classical architecture of  Heffron Hall.

The only problem for hanging the mosaic in the space is the lighting. Glass mosaics generally do best with lots of diffused natural light, or if that's not available, with soft, indirect lighting as the  second-best option. This area has large windows at either end of the space, and a single dim fluorescent fixture on the 12-foot ceiling. The windows have the top panels covered, but they still bring in a lot of light. At this point, the light coming in the window nearest the mosaic casts a glare on the glass unless you are pretty much directly in front of the mosaic (angle of incidence equals angle of reflection) and the top of the mosaic is in a darker spot...

But, if you're sitting in any of the very comfortable chairs in the area, the view of the mosaic is perfect.

Lend Us Your Strength, 2011.
Glass mosaic, 3' x 4' excluding frame.

Beelandia Mosaic Apiary Sign

I've been working on the Beelandia sign for Abelisto's apiary. The migraine last week slowed everything down for me this past week, and along with a number of the "must-do" things that often get in the way of making art kept me out of the studio most of the week.

Today I escaped from all that and worked on it for a few hours. I got much of the background done. I think a couple more evenings and I'll have this one done.

Beelandia Apiary sign 1 week ago - the bees are done and I started the background.

Beelandia Apiary sign when I started on it today.

Beelandia Apiary sign when I stopped working on it tonight.

Beelandia Mosaic

Finished the bees' wings tonight. I'll be working on their bodies next.
Should be able to get a lot of this done this weekend.

Beelandia sign - 12" x 24"

I need to get some of the tamper-proof hanging hardware since this is going to be hung on the apiary fence.

Current Mosaic Project

While I'm waiting for the orders of supplies for the other mosaic project I'm working on I decided to make Wes' sign for the apiary, Beelandia. He's been wanting one ever since the apiary became public knowledge last summer (with the infamous article in the Winona Daily News regarding the bee ordinance and the various responses to it ).

The sign is 12" x 24". The letters and the bees are in smalti and the background is stained glass, and the differences in the thickness will make the sign have a little bit of a third dimension. I'm going to put a thin strip of copper around the piece to serve as a frame.

I'm doing the bees in tiny pieces of smalti. I wanted to make their striped bodies with narrow, slightly curved slices of glass so that they would obviously be bees. I then decided to also make the wings out of random tiny slivers and wedges of smalti so that they'd be more interesting and give the bees more character than using just a few larger pieces. This will be a grouted piece and the grout will make the bees -- bodies and wings -- cohesive elements while accenting the green background pieces, making them stand out as distinct blades of grass. There will be enough contrast between the letters and the background that there won't be any problem seeing the letters as letters.

Close-up of bees, letters and grass (background)

Blackberry Gluten-free Scones

I don't usually post about food since others do that much better than I ever could, but these gluten-free blackberry scones are (well, were...) worth a few words...

I used to make everything from scratch (strange phrase) -- no mixes, no ready-to-eat, no processed foodstuffs (except Kraft macaroni & cheese), no shortcuts... But between being gluten sensitive, working full-time, and trying to develop my artistic practice I've sort of let go of the food purism.

I have a plethora of alternative flours but gluten-free baking seems to be very hit-and-miss for me -- probably because I don't really have time to do the experimentation that I need to do to figure out how much of which kind of flour and whether to add xantham gum or guar gum or whatever... so I bought Bob's Red Mill gluten-free baking mix (think organic, healthy Bisquick). The scones turned out perfectly...

2 1/2 cups Bob's Red Mill Gluten-free baking mix
add 1/2 cup of organic raw sugar, cut in 1/2 cup of organic butter
add 1 cup of vanilla almond milk (was out of the plain variety) stir until all is moist
gently fold in 1 1/2 cups of organic frozen blackberries
press out onto a baking stone, score into 8 scones, sprinkle with more sugar if you want
bake at 375 until browned and flaky
eat while they are so hot you can barely stand it

It's been a gradual relaxation of a set of unspoken food rules I had for myself. I realized I had fallen from food grace when, late one recent supperless evening I found myself standing in front of the frozen food section of Target (egad) eyeballing the frozen veggies (not so bad), and the frozen pre-cooked chicken strips (argh!) and frozen ready-to-heat-and-eat brown rice (bizarre and shameful)... I caved -- mostly because I was starving and it was almost 9pm and I couldn't face going home and either cooking a full meal, or eating a peanut butter sandwich. Got home, dumped it all in the wok with some broth, some shopped garlic and ginger and a bunch of tamari sauce... food in 20 minutes, not delicious, but edible...

When I was a make-it-from-scratch purist I was a stay-at-home mom with 5 - 9 kids in the house and food was my main creative outlet. I made 2-4 loaves of bread every day, baked a dessert twice a week, raised and processed my own meat (lamb and chicken and the occasional deer), gardened and preserved the veggies, made my own jams and jellies and butters...

I guess I could still be a purist if all I wanted to do was work and do foods. But now my life is about more than that, and until someone wants to move into the empty bedrooms and take this task on... well, some convenience foods once in a while won't kill us.

Visitor to Beelandia

Sometimes a very simple thing can make your day...

This Swallowtail came to dine in Beelandia.

I hope she returns and brings her friends...

The "I Can't" Attitude

I am always amazed (and not in a good way) at the abundance of people whose first response to any challenge is "I can't..."

To paraphrase my mother, "If you start out with 'I can't' you certainly can't." [She actually used to say "Cain't never did nothing," - she grew up in the deep south...]

As kids we weren't allowed to say I can't until we had given it our best attempt, at least a couple times. It's not that my parents were task-drivers, or harsh; they were very caring and supportive. They just would not tolerate a defeatist mindset. And the result of that was that all of us kids – and most of our kids – are very well equipped to take on the challenges the world throws at us.

I think all the "I can'ts" would benefit from living with my mother in their formative years.

Rotator Cuff Issue

Learned today that I won't be having rotator cuff surgery. No tears, no calcification - just overuse tendinitis or possibly inpingement tendinitis. Good thing, since it's my right shoulder and I'm predominantly right-handed.

Physical therapy for 6-8 weeks and I'll be as good as new...

It's been bothering me for a while but I realized I had to get it checked out when I discovered that using a handsaw and sanding a piece of wood was really painful. And getting comfortable enough to sleep was getting hard to do.

I should have asked for a copy of my x-rays.

Mosaic Art

While I wait for the payment for the commission (which should arrive in my bank account sometime in the next 24 hours) I'm thinking of ideas for the next mosaic(s). At this point, unless I get another commission soon I will be doing a couple different pieces for myself - just because...

One of them is going to have to be a river/water/place piece... that's what's pressing right now; that's what seems to be spinning around in my head. I think it will be another stone & glass piece...

In the meanwhile, I'm cutting up marble - for fun and practice and for future work - I can work on my hammer and hardie skills while my mind thinks about what's next.

This is what I cut in about 20 minutes tonight:

 
I'm getting better at this... better cuts (shapes and sizes that I want to make, as opposed to however they come out), and much, much less waste.

And here's the scraps:

That's all that I wasted.

Mary Mosaic

I finished the mosaic for Saint Mary's this weekend... well, the mosaic was done a while ago but the frame was giving me fits. I learned some things with this one. It's good to be learning things - as long as they're new things and not the same stuff you learned before but forgot...

This is not the best photograph - it's way too dark. The previous one was way to light...
I'll take another tomorrow in natural light.

Lend Us Your Strength, 49 x 38 (including frame)

Now I'm looking for another commission...