Embroidery Art

Making Jewelry: Beadie Things

Rock and Roll Guitar Swap

 

Guitar heroes inspired me to make a few commemorative ATCs to honor Jimi Hendrix, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Jimmy Page and Mississippi John Hurt. All eclectic different guitar styles. All who gave/give us intense pleasure with their music.

Celtic Roots

One of the hosts for Artist Trading Cards at ATCs for All regularly organizes swaps built around the major Celtic festivals and I have now participated in four of these: Lammas, Mabon, Samhain, Ostara, and Beltane. It has been a lot of fun to use the goal of finishing cards for these swaps to learn about some of my ancestral traditions, and I'm well aware of how primal these festivals are. The imagery is very earth-rooted: fire, flame, animals, plants. Each set of cards has been the result of very different inspirations and I am not sure I am seeing a pattern in them yet. I did not set out to copy a style from one batch to the next, although if I go through the year again doing these swaps, I may choose to do just that. Lammas is a Summer Holiday, arriving at August 1st; Mabon is an Autumn Equinox festival, and acorns are sometimes associated with it; Samhain is a harvest festival celebrated at the end of October: sacrificial animals are depicted; Ostara is celebrated at the Spring equinox and a lot of the imagery we get around Easter has deeper roots in this Northern European celebration of new life and regeneration; and, Beltane is associated with May Day and is celebrated with bonfires.

Ostara

   

    Cards created for the Lammas Swap

Losing and Gaining Momentum

I thought I had lost steam on making and sending Artist Trading Cards, and truthfully, I have. I've missed several deadlines and lost interest to some degree. But then a theme comes along, like revamping Grant Wood's famous painting "American Gothic," and I couldn't resist. I lost myself in making new versions of mom and pop American farmer, sending them to exotic locales (Hawaii, Chitchen Itza, Mesa Verde, the Monterey Aquarium) and designing new "paper doll" outfits to wear over their traditional calico and coveralls.

If it's not the art of the tragic, it must be the art of humor that draws me. And, so these quirky little creations are among the most recent things I've done.

Over the holidays, I switched from drawing and collaging to sewing and made a number of friends tea cozies. I had once fancied I could make tea cozies to earn an extra few bucks, but calculated that I'd have to charge upwards of $65 per cozy to make any kind of money for the time and materials that went into my cutomized cozies. Such is art.

No one really wants to pay the genuine price for something, whether it be organic vegetables or oil; is this peculiarly American? Unemployed for a year now, it is evident to me we have an economy that values very little about human beings. With the protestations surrounding health care reform (which is really health insurance reform), it is clear too that many of us are dispensable superfluities in the capitalist system.