Martin Marcisovsky is a 36-year old Slovakian photographer and artist currently based in Dublin, Ireland.

Martin’s photography captures some interesting silhouettes fixed in equally engaging landscapes.

The person often seems out of place, but unquestioning of the environment they are in.

Marcisovsky’s images lead us into a fairy tale, catch us within a blink of an eye or take us on a journey to our inner ego.

The surreal imagery leads one to believe that these worlds are perhaps within the minds of each subject.

Perhaps his images are nothing more than a reflection of our own center of creativity.

More of Martin Marcisovsky’s creations can be found at http://www.marcisovsky.com/.

Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.

~Hans Christian Anderson

Sometimes it’s the first influencer who is the true artist, not the artists who come later..Born in 1927 in Nashville, Tennessee, Margaret Keane has always loved to paint and draw since an early age. She first made her paintings famous in San Francisco’s North Beach in the 1950s.Margaret’s work drew little accolades from art critics but was loved and admired by the world.Margaret went on to become one of the most successful living artists in the early 60s to present day.Margaret’s art gained wide favor and started a big-eyed movement in the early 60s, influencing a large crop of big-eyed artists who may have become more familiar with the public.Originally recognized by their wistful and sad-eyed children, Keane’s works now feature happy children, animals, or both, all with her signature large-eyes, in delightful places and situations.“The eyes I draw on my children are an expression of my own deepest feelings. Eyes are windows of the soul,” explains Keane.More of Margaret Keane’s delightful work can be found at https://www.keane-eyes.com/.

It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.

~Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Often times, when I feel like actually writing my post, it comes off as a rant or a dejected viewpoint of myself or the world around me. As I age, be it not as gracefully as I’d like, I have learned not to hit “post” right away. As emotional as I may get at that moment, I’m trying to remember that was, indeed, only a moment.

And readers might not be interested in that “moment.”

I try not to blabber on the positive moments either, for one’s lemonade is surely someone else’s lemon. Even if there’s a little sugar sprinkled on top.

But when it comes to encouraging creativity I have a hard time not pushing the “publish” button. For I am living proof that if you want something bad enough, practice something long enough, good things, good emotions, happen.

I’ve been writing for most of my life, more actively the last 20 years. I’m not published, but that hasn’t stopped me from creating new worlds and poetry and an occasional novella. To me it’s therapy; the more it evolves, the more it’s like homework.

To do a really good job at writing something new you have to do your homework. You have to do research and maybe do an outline and dig into your characters. You have to give them a background and scars and highlights, even if those points will never see the light of day.

You have to see what makes them tick so they can tick around others.

I have written two novels about a middle-aged woman who time travels through time. Kinda like Outlander but not really. It is 3rd person, she did this she thought that, she wondered such and such. They were pretty straight forward, discovering those worlds from a modern point of view.

Now I’m attempting something new for me. I’m trying the third book in literary style. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog that it’s not easy for me to analyze feelings and write them; to dig into psychological conditioning and more “now” moments than generalizations to move the plot along.

Well,  the last couple of times I sat down to share the man’s version of the story, it was almost like I was channeling him. Very weird, very out-of-body.

I’ve heard other writers say their story took a life of its own, that their characters went somewhere the writer wasn’t expecting. I haven’t been moved quite like that, but the literary style, the long wrapped-around images and sentences, seemed to flow easily through me.

To say I was shocked is an understatement.

I found … still find …. myself saying, did I write that? Did I really write that?

We all have that ability to try something new. To experiment with what we know. To try…and sometimes fail…at a new color or point of view or emotion. We always downplay our potential, saying “I can’t do that” or “that’s not me.”

The point of this quicky blog is to tell you that all of that is you. We are all and we are everything. It’s just that life and time and others push down those parts of you that aren’t as popular or talented, pigeonholing you into who you are today.

You want to paint people instead of landscapes? Crochet a jacket instead of a scarf? Write a murder mystery instead of a poem?

Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t. Don’t let that little demon voice inside chuckle at your attempt.

As the shoe company says, Just Do It.

You just might find that your creative side expands ten times its size. Like Alice in Wonderland and her potions, you will be amazed at what you find.

It might not be literary fiction…it may not be good at all. But I’m having a great time impressing the hell out of myself…

“You must first understand,” said I, “where Fairyland is: it lies a little way farther than the farthest hill you can see. It lies, in fact, just beyond that hill. The frontiers of it are sometimes a little doubtful in any landscape, because the landscape is confused, but if on the extreme limits of the horizon you see a long line of hills bounding your view exactly, then you may be perfectly certain that on the other side of those hills is Fairyland. 

~Hilaire Belloc

The wall is silence, the grass is sleep,
Tall trees of peace their vigil keep,
And the Fairy of Dreams with moth-wings furled
Plays soft on her flute to the drowsy world.
~Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

Jamie Winn is the owner and operator of Ghost Light Gallery, specializing in paintings and amazing woodworks.

Winn’s  automated sculptures are both eerie and humorous, often reanimating deceased creatures and depicting nighttime animals.

Often using watercolor on wood and custom lighting, there’s also a vintage quality to much of the New Orleans artist’s work. 

There is always a moving part to Winn’s creations — something that always catches the eye.

Her works are unique, whimsical, and sometimes a touch eerie. 

Which is how she likes it.

More of Jamie Winn‘s magical works can be found at her website, http://www.ghostlightgallery.com/

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.
― H.P. Lovecraft

Come cuddle close in daddy’s coat
Beside the fire so bright,
And hear about the fairy folk
That wander in the night.
For when the stars are shining clear
And all the world is still,
They float across the silver moon
From hill to cloudy hill.

~Robert Bird

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a prolific yet perpetually troubled artist preoccupied with matters of human mortality such as chronic illness, sexual liberation, and religious aspiration.He expressed these obsessions through works of intense color, semi-abstraction, and mysterious subject matter.

Munch came of age in the first decade of the 20^th century, during the peak of the Art Nouveau movement and its characteristic focus on all things organic, evolutionary and mysteriously instinctual.

A majority of the works which Munch created, were referred to as the style known as symbolism, mainly because of the fact that the the paintings he made focused on the internal view of the objects, as opposed to the exterior, and what the eye could see.

Emotions such as love, terror, and loneliness were depicted by the contrasting lines, the darker colors, blocks of color, somber tones, and a concise and exaggerated form, which depicted the darker side of the art which he was designing.More of Edvard Munich‘s art can be found at https://www.edvardmunch.org/.

When you first look at Oleg Dou‘s  work, you may think…..no.

The monochromatic look, the androgynous style, is something strange and unusual.But take a moment and look closer.Dou transforms photographic images of human faces, manipulating them with computer software to produce stylized features and airbrushed skin.Dou is interested in producing images that are both alluring and unsettling.“I am looking for something bordering between the beautiful and the repulsive, living and dead,” he has said. “I want to attain the feeling of presence one can get when walking by a plastic manikin.”

More of Oleg Dou‘s beautiful artwork can be found at http://olegdou.com/.

This is the second day of my weather-imposed sabbatical. Yesterday the temperature was -16 (without wind chill figured in), this morning they are -26 without windchill. Not the weather for the faint of heart. My car won’t start so here am.

Of course, I was wrecked with guilt yesterday until I went out and bought some bird seed. I would be afraid those little guys would be feather pops unless I got them something to warm them from the inside.

I can see why the weather effects emotions so much. 

WoMan fights her/his whole life to be in control. In control of their life, their thoughts, their direction in life. And sometimes we half-way succeed. Then we get hit with something that keeps us from exerting that newly found control, and it’s frustrating. 

Hey! I just made plans to go to a museum by myself! I just bought new kicker shoes for work! I just got out of a bad relationship and I’m free!

And here we sit frozen into the house. All this positive pumped-up energy bouncing around our living room walls.

Of course, you could spend your freeze days and rainy days inside, cleaning, organizing, reading that book you bought two months ago. You could waste your time watching TV or not waste your time making cookies. 

There is a universe inside your universe that works for you every day, too. 

You don’t need to slay dragons every day. 

You can take assurance that there are bigger and more powerful forces around you that own you plain and simple. And your job is to work with them to continue moving forward.

So on this frozen Thursday morning I bow to the power of the Freeze and think I’ll go through my WordPress reader and read some fellow writers. I’ll make some cookies today and make sure the bird feeder is full.

And I shall charge up my turbo spaceship to the stars and try again tomorrow.

This is the forest primeval.
The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Frank Stella i(1936-) is an American artist best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in creating both paintings and sculptures.

Arguably one of the most influential living American artists, Stella’s works utilize the formal properties of shape, color, and composition to explore non-literary narratives.

For those of us trying to get a grip on modernism, Stella’s paintings  expand the initial monochrome palette to bright colors….

….and later brings his paintings into the the third dimension through the incorporating other non-painterly elements onto the canvas.

He ultimately creates large-scale freestanding sculptures, architectural structures, and the most complex work ever realized in the medium of printmaking.

Stella’s virtually relentless experimentation has made him a key figure in American modernism.More of Frank Stella’s modernism paintings can be found across the Internet.

I have purposely avoided writing blogs lately, as I feel I don’t really have much to contribute to the universe.

Do you ever feel that way?

Do you ever feel that, no matter what you have endured, what you have experienced, it just doesn’t matter in the long run?

I don’t know if you believe in an afterlife. A reward for everything you’ve been through. An ending to your sacrifices and bliss. I don’t know what I believe, but I do know that I want to make the world, life, the future, easier than I had it.

How do I do that?

Again, I don’t have many answers. I try to listen to what my family, my friends, say. What they are going through. And find a way to bring them to a peaceful place. 

I do the same online. 

I don’t know if anyone online has ever benefited from my experiences, from my point of view.

But I always hope that someone gets the gist of what I’m saying and starts to believe in themselves. That they realize that not everything is their fault. That the world goes on as it will, smashing and crushing and sprinkling its darkness to whomever is in the way.

We all get hit by adversity.

What makes humans magical is that we have the ability to rise above all the shit and make the world ours. Bend it to our desires, to our needs. 

I guess we all have an intention of where our blog goes. Your thoughts and projections are different than mine, than your friends, than the person who has a blog that sounds just like yours.

You need to claim your stance and make it your own.

Whether you have 15 followers or 10,000 followers, it doesn’t matter. Be yourself the whole time. Whether your expertise is music or poetry or pottery. It doesn’t matter.

You will find friends everywhere. People who “get” you.

Write when you want. Share what you can. If you change one single life, you are better off than when you started.

That means everything in this world.

And that’s why we’re friends.

Art comes in all forms, in all materials.

It all comes down to whatever pleases the eye.

New Jersey-based Adam Hillman is often referred to as a “master organizer.”

He pushes his precisely organized patterns of everyday objects into increasingly more complicated designs.

His tightly controlled symmetrical layouts take hours to measure, cut, and arrange.

The New Jersey-based visual artist sifts through multitudes of colorful everyday objects and foods which he organizes into zen-like patterns, towers, and gradients.

He has lifted everyday objects into patterns of beauty and mathematics.

More of Adam Hillman‘s amazing arrangements can be found on his Instagram account.

~Lewis Carroll~

It’s New Year’s Eve. Time for reflecting on the past year, and, for many, make resolutions for the new one. I’ve started reading other blogger’s year-end pieces, inspiring me to write my own.

My biggest discovery was that I have hyperthyroidism. It is a relief that most of the weird symptoms I’ve been going through have had a reason behind it besides me getting old. I am getting better, thank you, but it is good I get a yearly checkup. You should too.

What does that have to do with my year-end resolutions?

I think my creativity is going to take a slightly different direction  in 2019.

I have done this blog since 2011, each post an evolution upon itself. I have loved writing and sharing my opinions and thoughts on a myriad of subjects. I’ve toted my creativity through words, then the Sunday Evening Art Gallery.

And now?

I’ve decided to talk in my blog less and share the visual more. I want to share more artists, more magic, more images and less “advice.” You don’t need to hear what you’ve heard in other circles. You are smart enough to go for it yourself 

What passions are you bringing to the forefront in  2019?

I send all of you magic and faeries and the power to make dreams come true this upcoming year!

Bored this Friday night? You know you can’t read a book or go dancing every night…..

This is just a reminder that if you liked the short version of my Sunday Evening Art Gallery blog in here, you can find even more of their work at the actual art gallery, Sunday Evening Art Gallery. At last count there are 202 galleries…something for everyone!

Maybe you’d like to see….

More of Charles Joseph Hullmandel’s alphabet?    

More graphic art wonders of Davide Bonazzi?

More jewels from Cartier?

More dogs from Dean Russo?

More landscapes from Kurt Wenner?

There’s so much more over at the gallery! Stop by, follow, and check out the amazing art that has been collected for 202 galleries!

Well, the Big Day is over. Friends and family have gone home, presents stuffed in beat-up bags. The turkey and ham and hors d’oeuvres have been scarfed, bottles of wine and cartons of egg nog emptied, toys played with and abandoned. Parents can finally get some sleep, grandparents can once again start putting money into their savings accounts for next year’s presents, and the dog is still looking for leftovers dropped on the floor.

I still have my Christmas lights up — do you? If I had my way I’d take down the tree and leave the lights around the window and across the arch up until at least July. The Santas can go, except for the clear ones that look like wizards. The tree has wonderful memories on it, including my 34-year-old’s “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament. But those can get packed away, too.

So what do we do now?

The Christmas vibration still lingers in the air between it and New Years, but it’s growing faint as we speak. Football games are getting ready to take the place of Hallmark Christmas Movies, and those mini hot dogs and smokie links aren’t on sale anymore.

It’s also the time that reality starts clicking its castanets on the outskirts of our hearing. The warm fuzzies of the holiday season can only last until New Years. The 12 Days of Christmas and all of that. Once the tree is down and the lights packed away, people are free to start being jerks again. Politics will raise its obnoxious head, snow will cause major traffic jams and road rage, and it still will be dark when you wake up and dark when you come home from work.

Has this holiday season been for nothing after all?

A couple of blogs ago I said I’m not that much into Christmas, because I celebrate Christmas every day. Obvious baby Jesus isn’t born every day, and the three wise men don’t visit every day, but the spirit can last all year long. 

Before you make your New Years resolutions to lose weight, visit the Vatican, or find a new job, grab a hold of that spirit that the season has left behind and make it your own. Use that positive point of light and make something of it.

Be a nicer person. Forgive those who are idiots. It’s not up to you to show them the light. Mean people, bossy people, all have nothing to do with you. Their hangups have nothing to do with you. Feel sorry for them, then move on.

Give five dollars to a local food pantry or animal rescue shelter. Just because. Help an elderly shopper with their groceries. Someone slips and falls, stop and pick them up. Little movements of kindness expand exponentially back to you, surpassing your original gesture. 

If you hold on tightly to that little spirit of the season that is fading behind us, you will see that the world is all right. In all it’s monstrous, ungrateful, banal existence, there is a part that still shines with the Christmas spirit.

That part is in you.

Even if it’s hidden behind all those Christmas cookies.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. ~John Muir

Kathy Kills Thunder (her legal name) was born in 1947 in Seattle, WA. Her father, Ben Kills Thunder, was a Sioux Indian from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in NE Montana.

 Kathy grew up shuttling back and forth between Seattle and the Colville Indian Reservation in NE Washington.

Kathy has been painting and beading since she was six.

She uses a bright color palette and prodigious imagination in creating her painted and beaded work.

The softness of her paintings brings out the true soul of the Sioux world.

More of Kathy Kills Thunder‘s amazing artwork can be found across the Internet.

Driving home today I sang along with the song on the radio, Rock the Casbah. Yet my version went, “She really a likes it, Rock the cat box; rock the cat box!” It was a fun reference to the first time I heard the song and what I “thought” I heard. The real version is a little different: “Shariah don’t like it. Rock the Casbah. Rock the Casbah.”

How many songs have you messed up the lyrics to?

My mistaken assumptions about song lyrics started when I was in middle school, high school.  There was that “dirty” song Louie Louie  everyone talked about. We could never understand their slurring words, so my friends and my version was, “At night, I lay her, I lay her again. A fu&ckin’ girl. ahhh right away,  (blah blah, blah blah, something I couldn’t understand),  I felt my roll, in her hair…”

The Kingsmen actually said, “Three nights and days I sailed the sea; Me think of girl constantly; On the ship, I dream she there; I smell the rose in her hair.”

Where did my version come from?

Back in the day, my hubby and I liked to sing Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit  song to my kids, singing, “And we all love, mashed potatoes” instead of “Here we are now, entertain us.”

How about the Police and Don’t Stand Too Close to Me? I assumed they sang about the book by Neville Cross. But it was more like Nabokov, who wrote Lolita. (I just looked that up last week!)

And the Duran Duran song nobody understands, Blinded by the Light. I sing, “Wrapped up like a douche you know you’re rollin’ in the night.” Actual lyric: “Revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night.”

Where do we get these versions?

Most songs are clear and melodious, and it’s easy to sing along with the band. But sometimes you think you hear one thing and it’s really another. You trip over one word and your common sense follows that crack in the sidewalk, and you never know the difference.

I always thought Jimi Hendrix on All Along the Watchtower said “Plow man, dig my herb” (like he was getting high or something). Instead he said “Plowman, dig my earth.” (Can you dig it?). Or Don’t Bring Me Down by ELO: “Don’t bring me down, Bruce!” instead of “Don’t bring me down, groose!” (What is a groose?)

All in all, the words may be wrong, but the intentions are real. And so is the fun.

What songs do you mess up?

Si Scott’s love of music inspires the flowing nature of his hand-drawn designs, beautifully and precisely executed.

He resists limitations in his own work, constantly exploring new techniques.

These explorations have led to his development as a paper-cut and tattoo artist, skills which complement his already established talents as a proficient draughtsman.

Si’s multi-faceted approach has led him to work across a wide spectrum of projects, from advertising campaigns to branding, publishing to editorial, and interior design to album covers.

More of Si Scott‘s drawings can be found at https://www.siscottstudio.com/.

Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody
I got some money ’cause i just got paid
How I wish I had someone to talk to
I’m in an awful way

~Sam Cooke

Indeed it’s another Saturday night.

I’m alone, my other half is working. So I have the whole evening to myself.

So what should I do?

What do YOU do when you get 5-6 hours to yourself?

I often start with big plans that eventually fade out to vegging out watching TV. What a waste of a Saturday night.

So what I”m really going to do tonight is write. A new story, or maybe on an in-progress one. I’ve got a little scary movie going on in the background, not loud enough to have to pay attention, but more background noise cuz I’m all alone.

A good friend of mine suggested I write a story based on my last blog about “healing hands.” I might do that, although I have no idea on how it will end.

But more importantly, I’d love to know what YOU are doing tonight. On a Saturday night. On a night you get to yourself.

I don’t always get a lot of responses to my posts, but I love when my friends post back. This would be a fun time to hear your side of the story.

Tell me about your Saturday night….

Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody
Ain’t got no money so I can’t go play
Guess I’ll write about  travelin’ through ti-i-me
I’m in a happy way

~The Goddess