Jewelry:  geode focal with jasper beads.  N-161.  $57 by Tammy Vitale

Am gearing up for ArtOMatic and have been browsing the catalog starting with "Z" and working backwards (because most don’t, and because I’m a "V" – just because we’re at the end doesn’t mean people should get tired and stop looking!).  I made it through "R" and picked the following for you to go see a sampling of what’s coming:

Gwen Zaberer

Chengxi Ye

Brenda Sylvia (whose landscapes I love and I’m so not a landscape person – but everything has its exception and her work is exceptional) and

Kim Reyes (who also does clay and jewelry and who once wound up looking at a house waaaaay up in Pennsylvania that Husband and I went to look at – not known to either of us…how’s that for paths crossing in the night?  That was before we’d actually met.  I’ve been drooling over her jewelry every since I first saw it at my very first ArtOMatic way back in ’04).

There are, of course, way more than this, but I’m being picky.  And lots don’t have their own website or pictures up on their catalog page (which is too bad…hopefully I’ll see them at the show and bring pictures – but it sure points up the importance of having all your information readily available in case anyone wants to blog about you.)

Found this in the latest (May) issue of Art in America (you know, the magazine I love to hate and no I won’t renew because what passes for art and art criticism is thinly veiled snobbery and I’m not interested, but they redeemed themselves somewhat by actually writing an accessible article on DC art and this small blurb on AutOMatic, which, as these things go with the professional critics, is generous and kind):

…Artomatic, established in 1999, is fluid in every respect.  It is an annual – sometimes semiannual – resolutely non-curated exhibition of Washington-area artists, a pay-for-space proposition open to anyone at all who wants to show something they have made.  It takes place anywhere large enough to accommodate the deluge of art that comes in, making exhibition spaces out of anything from a former children’s museum to two floors of an office building to an enormous empty laundry complex.  The presence of so much amateur work is overwhelming, prompting the Washington Post’s chief art critic, Blake Gopnik [ed note:  we all love to hate him, but you have to feel sorry for him – with a name like that what else could he do but make fun of other folk’s life work?] to compare visiting Artomatic to an extended dental appointment.  But the beauty of Artomatic’s esthetic [sic] anarchy is in its abundant innocence, not in any obviously savvy consideration of contemporary art issues.  And, critically viewed, some surprisingly serious, innovative work crops up in unusual places, just around some unlikely corner of the show. (J. W. Mahoney, "To A Different Drum" pg 96).

We’re on a count down.  Opening is Friday a week!

thought for the day:   To make art is to sing with the human voice.  To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have.  Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art & fear.  sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms.  You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind.  Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light….What veteran artists share in common is that they have learned how to get on with their work. David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & fear:  Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking