Mask:  Mystery, 7.75"t x 6"w, ceramic wall sculpture, hand made, one of a kind, by Tammy Vitale $110

Before I start, I want to remember Katrina and her survivors and all the brave folks who have returned to rebuild their lives and their communities (and those who haven’t/can’t), with less than a little help from our government – supposedly the most rich and powerful on the face of the earth – which cannot seem to take care of its own (I’m sure we can all come up with some reasons for that).    Read a personal and profound piece, 2 Years Later, on Plaquemines, and more at casa de Charlotte della luna, a new favorite blog acquaintance.

Have been working, with the help of the full moon energy, on my art as a business.  Unloaded a full kiln load this morning, from whence came Mystery, still hot enough I needed mitts.  New glaze:  Amoco Old Pewter.  Pretty awesome!

Finally got the photo setup set up.  I used the small cube to photograph Mystery.  You can see the large cube on my bed – I first set up Mystery in that but it was really too big, more the size for my torsos, so I used the 12" cube and am really happy with it.

You can see that the light is so bright that even using a flash doesn’t fill in the surround area around the 12" cube with Mystery set up for her portrait.  I’m using a Fujifilm FinePix digital camera that’s 2 or 3 years old (gift from Husband) set on automatic exposure, and I know next to nothing about photography, but I’m really happy with this portrait and think it will make better pictures for CDs and slides (for those still using them) both of which I need soon for show dates coming up.  So all of this happened just in time!

I played with the position of the lamps.  The final picture above was done with the boom lamp doing back lighting.  These following pictures are done with side and overhead lighting (the positions you see in the picture above), the one on the left with an automatic adjust in photoshop and the one on the right left as it came out of the camera except for size adjustment.  You can see each little thing really makes a difference.

I entered about 50 more names into my customer data bank last night.  I’m thinking I probably won’t list the ones that are over 4 or 5 years old.  And worked on the Executive Summary portion of my business plan – this is the easy part, the narrative about who I am, what this business is, what is does, where we’re going.  I do need a bit of research on the competition – who else is doing what I’m doing (why no one!  I think.  But then that’s what original art is all about, right?)

I have to use my non-part-time job days to their fullest!

thought for the day:  It was Nietzsche, that solitary visionary and destroyer of false values, who noted that much of what we take for knowledge – even in science – is actually a projection of our psychology onto the world.  our thinking tends to circle around established conventions whose basis is forgotten or obscure.  Nietzsche proposed that the attainment of knowledge requires a "solid, granite foundation of ignorance" for its unfolding…."  Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012 The Return of Quetzalcoatl