Booklover

Rowan just loves to curl up with a good book. Who doesn't?

In the mail

Off it goes, my submission for Monica Magness' Pink Artist art doll project. What an amazing collaboration she has undertaken. It's a privilege to be even a small, two-inch square part of it! Thanks, Monica!! Breast cancer has impacted my life most directly in the loss of both my mother several years ago, and of my dearly loved friend, one of the sweetest-natured women who ever lived, Darlene Roberts, founder of Quilting Books Unlimited. So in their honor and memory, I'm sending off this little Zuni fetish bear, symbolizing the power, strength and courage shown by all who fight with and against this awful disease.

Storm at Sea

Vintage clear glass beads with antiqued sterling silver wire...I made these last night. Diamonds and rust. Now I just have to summon the courage to put them in my etsy shop. The pictures aren't great, because they were taken with the world's oldest, and probably heaviest, digital camera. I think digital camera years and dog years are about the same.

Kitchen corner

The plants are winning. The glass dangly things are winning. The books are winning. I used to think it would be so great to have a sunny corner like this that I could fill up with plants, but the thing with plants is that even if you semi-ignore them, they grow. They're like art supplies that way.

Tag, you are it

Obsessed with that gothic arch thing about tags, each one is a little shrine to me, and I can't stop making them. I could've painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for the amount of time -- and paint -- I lavish on each one, but each to his own obsession, I say. Houses, arches, nichos, shrines: places where the spiritual might abide for a moment in the material world, so bring it on. Little altars everywhere.

Lacks Focus.

This picture of my studio shrine to my two current favorite books and one all-time favorite color is a little out of focus, but that's probably how it should be. Following up on Ali Edwards' one little word challenge, my word for this year is gonna be "focus." That's my well-thumbed and slipcovered edition of Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. It's a tiny little chunky edition which doesn't fit well on a bookshelf and that's good, because if it's lying about on a table I'm more likely to snatch it up and read a few pages at random.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

The finished background canvas sat, stood, or hung around the studio for over a year before this lordly image of a Hindu deity appeared in the New York Times last spring. I didn't hook them up right away, but kept the page torn out of the paper, thinking I'd collage it into a separate work, not ruling out the possibility of just taping it to the wall as it was. When I re-organized the studio last summer, the general upheaval brought these two unrelated unfinished objects into close proximity with one another, and synchronicity kicked in. Note to self: save everything no matter what.

more ocean dreams last night.

Painting waves again. Must be this book I'm reading, The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch. An eccentric loner goes to live by the ocean after a busy life in the theatre. He thinks he will write, and he makes a good start of it, but pretty soon the wheels start to come off the bus. I'm reading this really slowly because a) I don't want it to end, and b) it is starting to scare the bejeezus out of me!

Tamsin Barraclough, waiting for spring

Between Two Worlds

Painted this a few weeks ago. I had stopped by our local Panera Bread, which is adjacent to a huge hospital complex, and was just so deeply touched to see this chemo patient in her housecoat in there, looking so haunted and far away, like she was literally existing between two worlds.

Chemo patient

Blue-greenness

Made a terrible mess in the studio this past weekend, sitting on the floor making collages around a specific color theme. I think I'm finally getting past my inner critic. Working with the most basic materials -- acrylic craft paint, rubber stamps, charcoal pencils, and last week's New York Times retrieved from my recycling bin -- seems to get me past the preciousness of working with "good" art materials and frees me up to just create without any assumption about the worth of the outcomes. These collages will get cut up and combined into other things, but I figured I'd scan them first before I started whacking them apart!

Annie Cappuccino loads the dishwasher