Torso:  Light the Light, handmade, unique, clay/ceramic, goddess wall sculpture by Tammy Vitale $400.00

While in Asheville at a Christine Kane retreat earlier this year, I visited Highwater Clay there on the suggestion of a friend who plays in the mud like I do.  I found a tool for writing in clay – something I have wanted for a very long time (and didn’t know existed).  Brought it home and promptly forgot it until my last session in the studio when there it was sitting there waiting for me to use it.  So I did.

(Need something to do?  Revisit my video from Christine Kane’s retreat on YouTube here. And another one here.)  (and my YouTube on Asheville here)

Torso:  Light the Light says (over the left breast), "Remember."    The top section of the detail above says, "There is no door, there is no key" and the bottom section says:  "light the light we have fumbled too long in the dark."  Those are lines from two poems I wrote back in the day when I was being a poet instead of an artist.  Well, I guess a poet is an artist.    Here’s another picture of Light the Light so you can see the other side better.  As you can see, in addition to playing with writing in clay (and oh this works so much better than anything else I’ve tried:  chopsticks, swizzle sticks, the end of a paint brush, etc, all of which leave ridges and undercuts and unclear writing), I was also playing with texture.  And a two piece torso (actually 3 if you count the sash).  And glaze.

This weekend I am off again to North Carolina, dogs in tow, to check out houses in the Elizabeth City and Edenton areas (just south of the Virginia line our Route 17).   Looking for simpler, smaller….and yes, cheaper.  Thinking about downsizing (because downsizing there is not quite as small as downsizing here).  Want to see what’s around – there are 4 art shops/galleries and day spas, which have proved to be a good outlet for my work.  Maye it’s actually just the summer and I don’t want to stay home and we don’t have any real vacation planned yet (of course, the last year we didn’t have a vacation planned we wound up for a week in Arizona and that was pretty spectacular so sometimes it pays to play it by ear).  I am meeting up with a realtor on Monday to go look at houses that looked interesting.  I have put the cottage up on Craig’s list but without photos so this afternoon I am going down to take some good photos to post there.

And no, I have not actually made it into the studio to make anything new.  I have been busy filling orders that have come in on-line (all of a sudden!  very cool!), and creating shipments and doing admin for shops that have sold and need to be restocked, and switching work in and out of various places that need new work.  So I guess I have been productive but my head thinks only making new work is productive studio time. 

Meanwhile, I have read the book, Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr and thoroughly enjoyed it.  If you are into books on otherworlds here on earth, you will enjoy this well written tale.  And oh how I wish I had had heroine’s like Ash to read about when I was a teenager.  All things bloom in their own time, and I guess I chose my time for a reason, but books like this could almost make me want a do over (almost, not quite.  The teen years were never my favorites).  And while I actually already had this book on my list of think about buying, the real reason I bought it just now was because Ms. Marr bought one of my torsos (those of you who read this blog regularly already know that, but I’ll repeat it for new readers) because, as she emailed back to me on myspace, she just had to have it.  Well, Torso: Earth, Air, Fire, Water has found her true home and I have found a new author.  Not a bad trade.

thought for the day:  Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention.  Friendship is always an act of recognition.  This metaphor of friendship can be grounded in the clay nature of the human body.  When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together.  It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, your lover’s clay and your clay lay side by side.  John O’Donohue, Anam Cara:  A Book of Celtic Wisdom  [note:  this is why I love clay so much – it is so human]