Torso:  Eternity, hand and slab built, ceramic wall sculpture, 20.5"t x 10.5"w x 3.5" deep, finished with stain and metallic, by Tammy Vitale, $425.00

Ladies and Gentlemen:  Woohoo!

I am getting organized.  All it took was one ten minute chat with Alyson Stanfield, and my A Student kicked in.  Now this is a great place for the A Student to do her stuff.  Why that particular head voice tends toward the destructive instead of the constructive is beyond me, but here’s a place she can shine.  So I’ve turned over "teacher (Alyson) said…" to her and she’s lined up her ducks and is knocking them down.

Customer list made:  check.  Ok – only 38 names because all of my old lists seemed to have erased themselves.  Husband noted I may have them saved on discs somewhere, which I would never have thought of, so I’m going to be checking old discs and also my file cabinet because at one point I know that I wasn’t throwing originating information away.  I am now, simply because you can only gather up so much stuff before you clear out (A Student thinks perhaps Self is a bit of a pack rat and can unpack and toss quite a few things).  But the point here is that I’ve started my list. 

And as I type I’m backing up all of my most important files:  read art raw photo data.

And this morning I ordered what looks to be the absolute answer to my photo shoot problems (thank you very much Judy for the referral to the website).

And I ordered postcards (thank you very much Karen for the referral to the website).

And this morning I read Leah’s Creative Every Day blog and she called me lovely.  =].  And it made me smile.  And she’s doing a whole series of Subway Art and I bought the original one because I have loved it every since she posted it last November’s Art Every Day.  And if I were independently wealthy I would own every single piece (all would be mine! mine! mine!) and I would have a Leah Piken wall of art.  But since I’m not yet independently wealthy, all of you all have an opportunity to go buy it before I become so – better act fast.

And Alyson Stanfield, Art Biz Coach, liked my post the other day so much she referenced it on her blog and posted one of my art pictures.

And HealingMagicHands is sending me redwood driftwood to use with my masks.  And the lovely story behind that redwood driftwood is that her mother-in-law originally collected it on the beaches of our West Coast and her husband, upon seeing my work, was willing to let her share some of it with me.

And I got an order to make a torso like (key word because each is  individually hand made and so can’t be exact, especially with patina like this one) Autumn, which sold over a year ago, by way of someone looking for blue herons and coming across my blog.  Now regular readers know that I love the bird, but the blue heron art in Southern Maryland is ubiquitous, and I make fun of it (and have, nonetheless made several paintings of blue herons which, of course, sold).  So it’s funny that the order came in that way.  And very cool. 

I ask you:  Is there any community anywhere any better than this one here in cyberspace? 

thought for the day:  Finding a work to which we can dedicate ourselves always calls for some kind of courage, some form of heartfelt participation…[a] frontier encounter, the cliff edge.  This cliff edge is a frontier where passion, belonging, and need call for our presence, our powers and our absolute commitment…To wake the giant inside ourselves, we have to be faithful to our own eccentric nature, and bring it out into conversation with world…we come to an understanding of ourselves in our work according to where we have established our edge.  David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea:  Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity