Mayhem Mojo

These are my guard frogs. Other people have guard dogs. Or noble lions. Perhaps even a bear. Not me!---I'm all about buggy eyes and funny feet. I'm crazy about frogs and about this time of year they start to appear, singing their strange songs of love into the night. The irrigation pond at my parent's house typically rings with a cacophony of little froggy voices and if you're lucky, you can see them chillin' on the rocks along the rim. They have the right idea---hanging with buddies by the pool!

Speaking of chillin' with buddies, albiet not around a pool, but around a pool-sized kiln...Mayhem 2008 was a blast! This annual mudfest is a shameless drench in all things ceramic, splashed with lots laughter and food. Lots and lots of food. We revert to our own inner Emile, dang straight! It's food for the soul, too. Truly, when Joanie, Lesli and Lynn are together, I hear happy cosmic harmonics that rattle my neurons in pleasant ways. Yet like every year, it all came and went in a blink of a buggy eye, and the house is left so quiet and still. There's a tangible feeling my house seems to have after each Mayhem that speaks, "What the heck was that?!"

Same with my brain! Wow...my mind is still spinning from everything I've learned. There's no substitute for hands-on doings and picking the brains of experts to really jump-start the learning curve and the inspiration to tackle it. Also casting from an unprecedented nineteen piece plaster mold (Stormwatch) does a lot to whittle away any sense of timidity! I think I've finally conquered my trepidation with underglaze, too, since the two pieces I worked on came out so much nicer than I expected, and pretty much what I'd aimed to create, which is new. I suspect because I underglazed them boldly, with total abandon, with no sense of worry or anxiety that typified my earlier attempts. I had nothing to lose. It's alarming how a sense of caution can impede a creative attempt, and there's rarely a less forgiving media than ceramics, which only heightens a deep sense of artistic existential agony! Yet if you're gonna learn to swim in the glaze, you just gotta jump in! There's something to be said about uninhibited chaos in the studio. So my big breakthrough this Mayhem was experiencing the difference between freedom and fretting when working with ceramics, which was the key I needed to unlock my resistance. As anyone who knows me will tell you---I'm impulsive. I'm not a "plan ahead" kinda gal. I thrive in an "eraser situation." Yet ceramics demand a very regimented way of thinking because you have to see each step in perfect clarity, all the way to the shiny end. This is very hard for me to do, which had brilliantly impaired my ability, and desire, to even venture forth. Things are very different now. The ability not to care has unshackled my ceramic mind! So, thank you Mayhem for...well...the new creative mayhem in my mind!

Which brings me to new mayhem with cold-painting. Besides going bonkers with ceramic techniques, I'm also playing with a new cold-painting method for my dapple greys, using charcoal pencils, in white and black. I've been searching for that method that duplicates the graininess of a dapple grey accurately, while also providing absolute control so those dapples look right...and I think I finally found it....after 20+ years! I'm applying this technique in earnest on a wonderful Fraley Bram'll Blue Boy and I'm pleased as punch with how he's turning out! Here's the "before":

Then using a tortillion, I smudge strategic parts and areas to soften it:

Then I spray with Testors Dullcote, and start again, building up layers and effects. Shown here is only the first layer, so you can see I have a ways to go. I also plan to use an airbrush and hand painting to accentuate certain things. The great thing about this approach, what actually sold me on it from the get-go, is that the graininess remains in scale. I'm a big stickler for painting effects to be fastidiously in scale, which becomes increasingly important the smaller the sculpture. Honestly, there are few things more effective to erasing the "believeability" of a paintjob than having its key aspects out of scale to the pattern or the sculpture. So me thinks an article on this method for The Boat is in order!

I'm a believer in sharing information. I like a jumbled sticky sweet mess of fresh ideas heaped in a big communal bowl, tantalizing our artistic senses. Some may think this is confusing, perhaps intimidating, or even foolish, but I think it's enlightening! Exciting! To my mind, the whole point of discovering new artistic methods and concepts isn't to horde them and let them stagnate, but to douse the world with them and watch them grow. The more brains that puzzle on a technique, the more possibilities are revealed! This is why those minds that show a predilection for creative exploration and those spirits that show a fondness for sharing the lessons learned tend to garner my deepest admiration. It creates such good juju. Dessert for the mind and soul. So thank you, Joan, Lesli and Lynn for another year's serving of enriching soul food!

"Anyone who isn't confused here doesn't really understand what's going on." -- Anonymous.

Mayhem Mojo

Rites of Spring: Harleys and Surf Guitar

My goodness. It’s been an abysmally long time since my last post! It’s uncanny how quickly time cooks away when your fire is roasting too many irons, snapping and sizzling with sounds of the future and enticing possibilities. The Year of the Rat has lived up to its promise of new beginnings and change for us, and it’s not even half over! Good beginnings and good change, though. Sometimes the things that appear most wrenching and catastrophic really are the most cathartic and rejuvenating. So it’s fitting this blog entry comes during spring, a time of rebirth and renewal blooming from the desolation of winter.

In Idaho, spring isn’t heralded just by the Canadian geese and the gluttonous rush of the Snake River, but by the rumble of Harleys! Idaho has a large and very active HOG community, one that longingly waits in hibernation during the Idaho winter. Yet the nanosecond the weather warms in spring, these impressive machines are coaxed into gleaming glory by loving polishing hands and ignited awake from their winter slumber, to thunder out in eager hordes as if to chase away the winter solstice. Each day blessed with glorious spring weather will cause the roads to be generously seeded with these two-wheeled harbingers of summer, as social bonds are re-affirmed and new adventures are mapped out and planned.

Another messenger of Spring for me is surf music. I have long been enamored of this eclectic and idiosyncratic form of music, one that’s unencumbered by vocals and so allows room for the instruments, especially the guitar, to “talk” and the mind to wander into curious places. There’s something about the energy, the airiness and the peculiarity of this style of music that speaks to me of shedding the grimy cloaks of winter’s chill to bask in the new glow of whimsy and unconventional wisdom. My husband and I were lucky to catch Dick Dale’s last tour back in 2006, as it kicked off here in little ol’ Boise. What a great concert, by such a grand old school musician! My signed poster (above left) beams like a beacon in my office during winter's grey gloom, promising Spring just around the next sunrise.

I love Spring. From the deep hole of Winter, this season allows us to open up our house to let its freshness in, filling the house with sounds, smells and sensations almost forgotten during the oppression of snow. What was that?---a bird! Ahhhh---a warm breeze blowing through the living room! I smell a BBQ somewhere---in the office! Beautiful weather allows us to bring the outside inside, reacquainting us with Nature and arousing our senses once again to the tingly life of The World Outside.

Spring also is a joyous time for the Green Thumb, a thing I enviously am not. All of my houseplants are very good plants. Very strong, determined plants. They survive on sheer will power. I think I have very little to do with their continued survival, and I suspect they’d like to keep it that way. Yet those friends and family sanctified with that blessed shade of digit are now speaking of planting, potting and matters to do with dirt and seeds and clippings. I shall rejoice in their new shoots and buds, and daydream of luxurious gardens full of secret places, inner moments and the buzz of tended Nature flourishing unabashedly.

So I sit here, typing this blog entry listening to The Ventures with all the windows open, and gazing at my tulips popping up in my flowerbed as my husband polishes the chrome on his Fatboy. I hope your thaw is as restoring and invigorating this year, too! Welcome, Spring!

"I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face. " --Langston Hughes

Rites of Spring: Harleys and Surf Guitar

My Last Nerve is a Fighter

Hello again--but this time from the critical unit of Systemic Software Necrosis! In other words, I'd like to kill my Microsoft Word program. At least bit-slap it silly. So I apologize for not posting earlier, but nearly all my attention has been focused on a current writing project with an ominous deadline--next month! GAH! Every time I look at the calendar, my eyeballs pop out on stalks and my hair looks like something inspired by an experiment on MythBusters. So if I seem a bit hard to get a hold of these next few weeks, it's because this little Shetland is scrambling in the salt mines to get this project published on time.

Published? What published? Well, starting January 1, I became the new editor for the RESS newsletter, The Boat, which is now a biannual ezine published as a full color PDF for members. I'm rather passionate about this organization that has helped so many of my fellow equine artists grow, and I've poured that level of enthusiasm into this new version of the publication. For months I worked on it. 200+ pages. Totally formatted. In Word. I was so puffed up, thinking how efficient and competent I had been by starting so early!

But like most little conceits, it all blew up in my face like Acme Dynamite.

About three months ago, Word decided it simply didn't want to open it anymore. Harumphf! It even had the audacity to decide to crash every time I tried to coax-beg-cajole-shriek at it to please open the file! What gall! Now usually I have "Techno Joy" (in the words of Eddie Izzard) when it comes to writing, word processing and publication lay-out, but this euphoria turned to "Techno Fear" in one heart beat.

After a barrage of trouble-shooting, I was at wit's end. Ultimately, I figured I'd just have to pay a professional to rip it open and salvage what I could. But on a whim, I tried one last ditch effort on my part--my little iPages word processing program that came with my new iMac.

Open-Winter08-*click*-"Here ya go!"

Wham!--there it was! That funny little program ripped it right open, images and all, though all the formatting was lost. Small price, though, since I was ecstatic to have salvaged everything, even in raw form. Now since I thought I didn't have time to learn a new program and play eight months worth of catch-up, I re-started The Boat in Word again, thinking the document had developed a corruption that I would just avoid (somehow) in the future.

I desperately need to develop the skill of slapping myself at strategic moments in life.

Word crashed again!--After six weeks of work of feverishly reconstructing the publication. And with no indication as to the bee in its bonnet! I had it with Word. A program I had depended on for 10+ years was now simply unreliable for this publication, so I promptly bought AppleWorks. I would just have to bite the bullet and learn a brand new program on the fly as I re-did The Boat for a third time, while also wrapping things up to meet the publication deadline. But you know, it's ironic how things pan out to work for the best--here I thought my forced leave from the studio was a disaster, but if it wasn't for that, The Boat would be months late, or perhaps not published at all as a Winter issue! So hooray!--I guess?

And so far, so good, but keep your fingers and footsies crossed that AppleWorks doesn't develop a neurosis, too. But I gotta say--this little program is a lot better for my goals with this ezine, so in that sense things worked out for the best, too. Crazy. You just never know which disasters will actually turn out to be blessings!

Now one might wonder--"Why the heck would a self-employed artist spend all this time writing for and working on this publication?", and that's a good question. But the truth is that it comes back to me, in very positive ways that improve my work and advance my artistic goals. Really, it's not a selfless endeavor! I don't know about you, but I've never believed that "those who can't do--teach". BAH! What nonsense! Obviously someone with a goodly bit of insecurity and bitterness coined that phrase. In contrast, I believe "those who do well, teach" because teaching is one of the best ways to learn! I also believe teaching helps to elevate the art form by helping more artists achieve goals they never thought possible, creating a more cohesive and energized community for all of us. Accomplishment is a good and potent drug. So that's why my last nerve is doggedly fighting to get this puppy published, and on time! And as a teaser, I've included a small peek at a couple of illustrations in the Winter 08 issue.

So, until next time: "Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." --John Cotton Dana

My Last Nerve is a Fighter