Abstract awaiting finishing. Am not sure exactly where this is going as I didn't plan hangers…adventure…which is the whole point of doing something different anyways, right?!

Here comes ArtOMatic and this year I'm planning all new work, which means I'm pretty focused in the studio.  I am preparing clay (see the abstract here) and glass (see the photos below).  I am hoping the glass goes as well as it has previously.  I have made new armatures for the glass torsos: smaller and more detailed than my first torso, which was done the same size as my clay torsos.  But necessity is the mother of invention, and glass is much more expensive than clay, and if I make the armatures myself, then they are truly original and cannot be copied.  The clay torsos definitely have my imprint on them, but using mannequins, I can teach anyone to make a clay torso and have it turn out really well (5 years of experimentation on my part means classes get everything I've learned). 

By the way, any two people can come take a torso class with me, so let me know if you're interested.

Am having a good art sales week, starting with Heron's Way Gallery this weekend, a necklace today, a wall piece tomorrow and a torso Thursday (meeting dates already set up).  If I could do this every week the business would support me!  I have dropped prices (getting real in this economy) and people are responding.  I won't get rich but I will cover costs and time (at less than I'd like to make an hour, but hey, these days, work is work).

ArtOMatic info:  will be at Half Street's 55 M Street, SE in the Capitol Riverfront neighborhood (close to the stadium which, belatedly, I discovered will bring it's own set of difficulties.  Who pays attention to sports and days the stadium will have games?  Certainly not me…thus I seem to have signed up for volunteer shifts on at least one game day.  Can anyone say $30 for parking?!  Oh well.)

Dates:  May 29 to July 5.  Always free!

600 visual artists signed up, almost all of them in the first 24 hours, with many of us who've done this before crashing the site which was supposed to open at 12 and finally got on its feet around 2:30.  This is becoming one popular show!  I'm wondering how much of a pain it will be in the future.  But if you want to see art in all its glorious variations, this is the place to see it.  And the last two I've done well on sales.  This year I'm thinking about taking smaller, less expensive work, along with the new work (i.e., some of my tiles) and see if folks buy any.  Need to pay parking, after all!  And I need to go have a session and make some masks, which seem always to sell well there.

So here's where I am, in order of photos:  workbench with new armatures for glass primed and ready to go on the left, a new 4-piece wall hanging being worked on the right, and two small masks (1 mine, 1 grandson's) waiting to be finished;  next is several hours of piecing (I still break glass…I haven't learned how to manipulate it carefully enough yet) for fusing (today) for the glass torsos.  Used my ring saw.  It is AWESOME; finally, a beadwork piece I'm working on.  I love these things!  They are so meditative.  However, I am supposed to also be working on a quilt for new bebe (June they say, I'm not so sure), and beadwork is taking its place.  So perhaps bebe will have to wait a month or so for quilt (the top is pieced already from back in the day, but I need to make a backing and then I hand quilt…or at least I have in the past.  I am truely thinking of sending this out this time).

The glassbeads on the beadwork piece are beads that did not work so I slumped them in my bead kiln.  I am so set up right now with equipment.  Who knew equipment could be so awesome?!  The next piece coming in is a rock tumbler.  You can put glass beads in a tumbler and they come out with this lovely matt satin finish.  That's on it's way from Amazon.

In addition to all of this, the weather is finally clearing up (although rainy yesterday which was good because it made me stay inside), and the outdoors is beckoning hard.  I have so much yardwork Iwant to do!

Don't you just love this time of year?!

thought for the day:  Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.  The salt sea and the islands, molding and molding, row upon rolling row, don't quit, nor do winds end nor skies cease from spreading in curves.  The actual percentage of land mass to sea in the Sound equals that of the rest of the planet:  we have less time than we knew.  Time is eternity's pale interlinear, as the islands are the sea's.  We have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, and missile, and wild.   Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm