Torso – Amethyst, 22 inches tall, hand and slab built clay ceramic goddess wall scupture by Tammy Vitale.  $500 until Jan 1 2008, then $750.00

Thanks for all who sent emails asking about my absence.  I somehow fell out of blogging this week, unplanned sabbatical you could call it, and instead of beating myself up for not doing it I decided to just go with it until I was ready to blog again.

I can’t stay away too long.  I miss you!  and our conversations here and off-board.

The "no apologies" comes from something I wrote while journaling this week:  Take back your life – no apologies. 

Travel along with me here:  You may remember I named November as "moving around" month, that is, trying out different rhythms.  I moved blogging to evening, yoga from morning to afternoon (and then it disappeared), moved in journaling, worked on Art Every Day Month – AEM (such fun!), worked with Alyson Stanfield’s on-line art-marketing workshop, worked with One Coach’s year long workshop, started reworking all the on-line art/self workshops I’ve done over the past few years, loaded up my IPod with the audios that I mostly hadn’t listened to because I was then teathered to the computer, listened to those downloads (mostly in the car driving), attended Solomon’s Island Business Association, Calvert County Chamber of Commerce gatherings and this week did an overnight in Tyson’s Corner Virginia so that I’d be there early enough to set up a table for EWomen‘s holiday gathering.  I actually completed artwork (including Amethyst) other than AEM, unloaded from one of my smaller venues that doesn’t fit my new description,  loaded in yesterday and again today with Heron’s Way Gallery which now has 2 sites (though March or April 2008), and started cleaning and rearranging my studio.  I spent time with my husband, had a delightful holiday with my daughter and grandson, raked my yard and the yard at our cottage and played with the dogs.  I volunteered with the Calvert Therapeutic Riding Center and groomed a horse for the first time in years and years.  And for one day there, my blog post disappeared and then it came back.  Who knows?  Not me.  Then, for the past week I have been beating myself up because I still haven’t managed to do everything I wanted to get done.  Hence the journaling and the "no apologies" quote.

It occurs to me that I have very high expectations for myself, and that if I want to have a balanced life then I can’t do everything every day.  And I don’t need to apologize to myself or be hard on myself about it.  I don’t need to worry about what will happen if I don’t do it all every day ( here’s the current head story:  O.M.G., you will have to go back to being a secretary and work until you die at something you hate.  Probably not quite true, the secretary part.  Until I die – yeah, maybe that, since working for non-profits and hopping around among them does not lead to having a retirement fund – that was my choice.  No one said I had to work at things that mattered to me.)

The rant (no, the above was not the rant, it was the "no apologies" part):  this morning I was reading through my newly-subscribed toEc 07 Art in America Magazine (trying to expand my art education) and come upon "Through Austrian Eyes" by Sarah S. King on installation artist Hans Schabus reflecting on the American West past and present in a show at SITE in Santa Fe.  One piece of this is "100 tons of dirt in a 42-by-42-foot room."  King writes:  "Rejecting the utopian traditions of modernism and the by-now ubiquitous rectilinear imprint of Bauhaus architecture, Schabus frequently deals with the dehumanizing impact of mass housing on agricultural and pastoral environments in and around his native land…In this raw and haunting series of site-specific installations, Schabus examines idealized notions of the Western frontier…Avoiding overtly political and didactic approaches to his subject, Schabus conveyed his findins through heightened sensory interplays between constructed geometries and the unruly organic elements of the desert landscape." (i.e., 100 tons of dirt in the 42 x 42 foot room).  Adn the rest of the magazine is filled with this, um, stuff.  And people get paid for this, um stuff. 

Husband notes there’s a line from a Fugazi song (he has a line from a song to fit any purpose) that goes something like this:  It isn’t what they’re selling, it’s what we’re buying.

So this next week I’m going to decide what I’m willing to buy – and Schabus’ installation is definitely not among the things I will choose to "buy" as an idea that I will keep and work with.

thought for the day:  Art lacks a satisfactory definition.  It is easier to describe it as the way seomthing is done – "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" (Britannica Online) — rather than what it is.

The idea of an object being a ‘work of art’ emerges, together with the concept of the Artist, in the 15th and 16th centrueis in Italy.

During the Renaissance, the word Art emerges as a colletive term encompassing Painting, Scultpure, and Architectures..expanded to include Music and Poetry which became known in the 18th centurey as the ‘Fine Arts."…an irreducible nucleus from which have been generally excluded the ‘decorative arts’ and ‘crafts’ such as pottery, weaving, metalworking, and furniture making, all of which have utility as an end…Ub tge earkt 20th centure all traditional notions of the identity of the artists and of art were thrown into disarray by Marcel Duchamp and his Dada association.  Sweet Briar College, Department of Art History