Wylde Women, 9" tall, hand-made, unique, collectible ceramic wall sculpture with beads and yarn by Tammy Vitale

Pre-posted.

Off into the wylde.  Back to Asheville in the day light to explore shops on a true artist’s date.  By myself.  Perhaps a pottery or two – there are many here.  Then on the road to find a place between Asheville and Charlottesville to stay the night.  I don’t know where I’m going to be laying my head down.  This is BIG stuff for me.  Jumping off the edge of the known world.  But it will give me time to stop and linger in Charlottesville tomorrow, to switch out work in Transient Crafters which is a 6 hour round trip from home.  I great end to a wonderful retreat.  A movement back into the "real" world of business and commerce.  A bridge day from Dreaming in abstract to dreaming in concrete.  Fitting.

thought for the day: Sculptor Sydney Reichman nestled into a slice of land between two steep Tennessee hills 24 years ago and built a house and studio. She designed the space and created almost everything in it, from the bathroom sink to the 11 hand-crafted doors.  Much of who she is grew out of her relationship to the land.

Reichman pushes her art to the boundaries.  Her life as an artists began as a result of what she was "not" – in this case, a good student.  "When I couldn’t make a nice, smooth handle for a clay pot, I made them into tree trunks or other irregular forms, "she says.  "Later I mastered the techniques, but my personal style had been created out of those earlier shapes.  when I couldn’t keep my pots perfectly centered on the wheel, my art pushed deeper into the boundaries of that irregularity.  My difficulties at school left me searching for the thing that would give me a place on the planet.  Art became the vehicle for that search.  Clay provided a strong physical connection _ I loved its earthy sensuousness and what I discovered evolved naturally out of me."  Reichman is an artists of many mediums; she sees them as extensions of the same impulse.  Mary Faulkner, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Women’s Spirituality