Bronze Age II (reworked) . 12″t x 10″w x 5″d by Tammy Vitale, $200.00

This was going to be pictures of before and after but it seems I never took a “before” picture.  As it was originally made, this mask spent some time on consignment at Island Artworks in Ocracoke, but recently came home with me, along with 2 other masks.  Sometimes pieces just need a change of energy to make them work.  So here she is as she now looks.  I am reworking 2 other masks and hopefully I took original pictures of them.  But there was a time there where I wasn’t very good about keeping up with pictures (who am I kidding?  That time is now.  I made this mask and packed it up for the road almost immediately.  That happens a lot).

I just made about 12 new Fish! which I swore I wasn’t going to do anymore, but there they were on the table begging to become and so they did. 

I also designed to fish platters and cast them and am working on the clay platter part of them right now.  I think the smaller of the two may be fine but the big one may be too big to hold its shape.  More on those as they get ready for the kiln.

I reglazed Jade’s Dragon along her break lines (from shipping) and am going to refire her and see how she works out.

I broke up 2 old masks and will reuse the pieces either in totems, or in 1 instane, on one of the masks above.

All of this is in process so I don’t have good pictures, but I will share as soon as I can.

Have been playing with making photos into water color without having much luck (thanks to Ascender Rises Above and Leah of Creative Every Day for telling me where to find that function on my Adobe), then today just kept reapplying the filter again and again and all of a sudden it started to look like what I was after.  Here’s the first pieces I’m happy with – maybe because it’s really simple:  Beach, so titled because I don’t think anything makes me think more of the beach than blue and white.

I spent a lot of time walking around Ocracoke and taking “artsy” photos with the idea of coming back and doing this to them.  After about 3 hours of playing with different functions yesterday I was pretty discouraged as none of them worked as I had envisioned, so I made a bunch of regular photos to mat and sell at the upcoming Calvert Artists Guild show at the Solomons gazebo on the 19th.  Now, I may have some “watercolors” to sell too.

Here’s another of the photos that I like a lot – there are a lot of porches and rockers on Ocracoke!

thought for the day:  So if we believe that “life seeks order in a disorderly way,” then all the upheaval and messiness that surround us become a sign of productive busyness.  And if we can keep calm while “life uses processes we find hard to tolerate and hard to believe in – mess upon mess until someting workable emerges,” then we can let go of despair.  Despair interprets messiness as chaos, as the loss of an order-seeking universe.  Despair is a little box, way too small for the mind of Homo sapiens…enough of despair.  Despair dos not help.  Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our LIves through the Power and Practice of Story.