We all flow from one fountain.
~ John Muir

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tali Weinberg (b.1982) is an American artist based in Champaign, Illinois.Weinberg graduated from both New York University and California College of the Arts.Using sculpture, drawing, and textiles, Weinberg translates climate data into abstracted landscapes and waterscapes.Weinberg combines plant-derived fibers and dyes, petrochemical-derived medical materials, climate data, and abstracted landscape imagery to explore the inextricability of ecological and human health.With series’ names such as Heat Waves, Drainage Studies, Fault Lines, and Fractures and Fissures, Weinberg’s works draw out connections between extraction, rising temperatures, species loss, and the buildup of plastics in our bodies and ecosystems.

Her most recent research focuses on relationships between people and plants and the interconnections between circulatory systems inside and outside the human body—from lungs and arteries to forests and watersheds.

“I employ textile strategies to turn expired plastic medical waste into sculptures that allude to the more-than-human world…and I transform photos I took of trees in a fire-scarred landscape into woven, plant-plastic forms that allude to human anatomy,” the artist shares.“Together, these works trace relationships between extraction and illness, between personal and communal loss, and between corporeal and ecological bodies.”

More of Tali Weinberg’s thought provoking and creative textiles can be found at https://www.taliweinberg.com/.

 

 

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

~ Five Man Electrical Band

no….

Born under a bad sign
Been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck
You know, I wouldn’t have no luck at all

~Albert King

nope….

Suspicious signs
Within your mind
Will make this jinx complete
And now you find
The end of times
When the black cat crossed your feet

~ Paraskavedekatriaphobia (Friday The 13th)”, Fozzy

who???

Had a strange experience the other day with my alarm clock. Thought maybe some of the above music lyrics would make sense of it all.

But they really don’t.

Going to bed the other night, my hubby looked at our little square alarm clock (that everyone has owned from the beginning of time) and said “Am I drunk? Look at the clock!” Since we both just had chocolate milk, I doubted that was the case. I turned around and looked at the clock on my headboard and it said:

18:88.

We hadn’t had a power outage lately, so I figured it was just stuck. Plugged into the wall, so it wasn’t dying batteries either.

Pushed the clock button. 18:88. Pushed more buttons. 999. Okay. A different button. 666. “Isn’t that the devil’s number?” I asked. No response. My last attempt produced a 999 backwards.

I unplugged the clock  and tossed it in the garbage.

Now. Wackier minds than mine might take those numbers as a “sign.” From whom I haven’t a clue.

But just as there is supposedly signs from the Goddess and God everywhere you look, signs are hard to interpret. Since all interpretation is in your head, it’s easy to make a sign say anything you want.

18:88 interpreted by the Five Man Electrical Band would tilt to the hippy version; long haired hippy freaks dancing to a psychedelic number in the sky. To Albert King, 18:88 is just another depressing number in a long line of depressing numbers. Paraskavedekatriaphobia (the fear of Friday the 13th) as sung by Fozzy (whomever he is) could lead to frozen moments of jinxes and black cats.

Signs can — and are — interpreted by everyone differently. If finding an upside down pineapple on your walk through through the woods means the end of the world to you, you might need to start preparing for it. If your find four peas in a two-pea pod, something big might be in your future. If you find a cardinal feather by your bird feeder your deceased friend may have  been by and left you a note.

You can also choose to see things as they are.

An upside down pineapple.

Four peas in a two-pea pod,

A Cardinal feather.

Don’t spend your life looking for signs to guide you. Note such anomalies, marvel at them, take what you can from them, and keep moving. The world doesn’t slow down just because you’re trying to interpret it’s quirks and droppings.

Sometimes weird numbers on a clock are just that. Weird numbers on a clock.

 

 

 

Getting ready for another running-around weekend — soccer, trap shooting, putting in an alarm system. I will never be one who says retirement is boring.

So to bring you into your own wild weekend, here are 10 cosmic questions for you to ponder at your leisure:

 

1.  Is what we perceive reality, or is it a construct of our imaginations?
2. Where does matter come from?
3. Are bad people important for the balance of the universe?
4. Why do feet stink and noses run?
5. Why do we call them buildings if buildings are already built?
6. Isn’t the word “queue” just the letter Q followed by four silent letters?
7. Who was the first teacher’s teacher?
8. Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
9. If you had fun while you were wasting time, does it still count as time wasted?

And the biggest, hardest question for last —

10.  Which came first, the fruit called “orange” or the color?

 

Have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Faeries are seen through the heart, not through the eyes. Remember that faeries inhabit the interior of the earth and the interior of all things, so look, in the first place, in the interior of yourself.
~ Brian Froud

 

 

 

I have to have a talk with Mother Nature. Her timing is atrocious.

Rain, threats of rain, and talk of rain did affect my craft show up north. It’s not the first time that I’ve taken on Mama and come out in second place. But to be honest it was nice being outside (be it under a canopy) for the day, making small talk to friendly craft show wanderers,  breaking even money-wise for my time.

It’s just that Mother Nature has bad timing.

Rain that day, sunny the next. Yesterday it rained all day, cancelling an 8-year-old’s baseball practice, today it’s sunny and cool and beautiful.

Her timing seems to reflect mine most of the time. I’m ready one day, out of sync the next. It’s like I’ve found energy too early or too late to really connect to the world.

The days I have a lot planned inside there’s plans being made for me outside. The days I really want to sleep in I have to get up early,  and the lazy mornings I could catch a few extra Zzzzs I’m wide awake. I have shown up for events on the wrong day and missed others by not checking the calendar.

I think as you get older your inner clock gets more and more out of sync.

How many times a day do you get sidetracked, waylaid, and misdirected without intention? I have to laugh — for me it’s more than I care to admit.

I might have to schedule a conversation with Mother Nature in the future to talk about our timing. Try and get on the same page. After all, she is beautiful and magnificent and not always in control, either.

I don’t really feel like talking to Time — he can stay in the future as long as possible.

He moves too fast, anyway.

 

 

 

 

Never was so much owed by so many to so few.

~ Winston Churchill

 

 

 

Kimika Hara is an Embroidery artist and illustrator from Kyoto, Japan.Hara’s style of needlework highlights the culture of Kawaii, a style that celebrates all things adorable and embraces fictional characters as the embodiment of positivity.The artist uses fabric, thread, acrylic paint, and beads to create colorful, free-stitch embroideries.Her designs embrace subjects such as dogs, flowers, and even insects, her color choices bringing light and depth to her Kawaiian figures.Her technique includes combining loose satin stitching embroidery with painted, appliqued, patched and corded pieces.A lot of work goes into each one of Hara’s embroideries, which can be seen on closer inspection.The themes are fun, cute, and something that makes you feel a little happy when you look at it.

You can find more of Kimika Hara’s delightful embroideries at  https://www.kimikahara.com// and https://kimikahara.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

 

 

 

“A spider lives inside my head
Who weaves a strange and wondrous web
Of silken threads and silver strings
To catch all sorts of flying things,
Like crumbs of thoughts and bits of smiles
And specks of dried-up tears,
And dust of dreams that catch and cling
For years and years and years…”

― Shel Silverstein, Every Thing on It

 

 

 

To all the mothers of all shapes and sizes and relationships — YOU ROCK!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time you read this I (hopefully) will be camping with some friends in the great state of Tennessee. I love “philosophical” discussions… ones that seem to come from my ever wandering brain. So here is a repost from  Dec 2, 2020. (we were such babies back then!)

 

Burning Philosophical Questions

Every now and then my mind tries to tackle the bigger questions in life. Questions that don’t have exact answers. Some are humorous, some are disturbing. How I get off on these tangents I’ll never know. But did you ever wonder ….

The Great Pyramid took about 20 years to build. A study calculated how many men would be needed daily to deliver “340 stones each day” and determined there were likely 1,200 people in the quarry and 2,000 transporting the stones, while others must have cut stones and set them into place. There were also cooks, cleaners, and caretakers for the equipment. Assuming one bowel movement per day, where did all of these people go to the bathroom every day?

On a more sobering note, the Battle of Cannae (where Hannibal crushed the Romans) in 216 BC, the battle cost the lives of almost all of the Romans involved – nearly 90,000 — in one day. Even if the numbers are skewered a bit, what did that battlefield look like in the end? What happened to the bodies?

Did toddler Jesus throw tantrums and curl up in a ball or scream for 10 minutes when he didn’t get his way? Did he write on Mary’s walls with mud or play fetch with a dog or yell at Joseph “Weave me awone!” ?

The world now has an idea of the construction of Stonehenge:  the first phase around 3000 BC was little more than a circular bank and ditch with the main structure built of wood;  the second phase began about 2150 BC and continued for 150 years (when the first of the bluestones were moved into place);  then the early Bronze Age, between 2100 to 1500 BC, which brought the outer circle and trilithons (the ruins we see today). Fine. But how did they lay those humongous lintels (cross stones) across the tops of those pillars?

The first person in history whose name we know is Kushim, an accountant from Mesopotamia from around 3200 BC, 33 centuries before Christ, who chiseled his name on a tablet. Who gave him his name? Did they have a name?

And a few still unanswered questions from my Cosmic Questions quest back in February of 2016:

It is a fact that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down. So isn’t a moot point to drive faster, when you actually arrive at your destination later?

and ….

If infinity is infinite, and we can see no end to it, how do we know it’s even there?

Whew! I feel so much better that I got all these questions out of my head ….

 

 

Jesse Lane an American artist who works of hyper-realistic portraits with colored pencils on bristol boards, and is known as one of the world’s finest colored-pencil artists.Lane is a graduate of Texas A&M University, and studied art in Italy. He also has a teaching credential from Sam Houston University.Lane discovered colored pencils while struggling in school with the challenges of dyslexia.“Growing up, I often felt alone,” the artist says. “I desperately wanted to find a place in life where I didn’t feel inferior. For years, I bottled up my feelings.“Then I realized they could be a source of inspiration. I began creating images of personal struggle and intimate emotion.”Each of his rich, detailed portraits takes 300 to 1,000 hours to complete.

“The theme of my work is our common odyssey of personal struggle. This struggle is universal, but unique to each of us.“Every image I create has a story.”

You can see more of  Jesse Lane’s amazing drawings at https://www.jesselaneart.com/. You can also check into his online video courses available at https://jesse-lane-art.teachable.com/.

 

 

 

 

 

The Eyes are the window to your soul.

~ William Shakespeare

 

 

 

First off, this is not a self-depreciating blog. I’m not cutting myself down, nor living in the coulda/woulda world.

But the other evening my mind drifted off into wondering what I would have done with my life if I were just a little smarter. Had a little bit more memory control.  It’s not a coulda/woulda _______ (loved more, communicated more) overly emotional yadda yadda offering.

If I were a bit smarter I would have:

• Learned to play piano
• Started honing my writing career earlier
• Watched Star Wars first on a theater screen
• Gone to college
• Taken a part time (or full time) job while running the bed and breakfast
• Kept my ticket stub from seeing the Beatles at White Sox Park
• Worked harder to get my books published
• Practiced better hygiene when I was in middle school
• Learned the names of classical composers and their music

I wouldn’t want to change my choices in life — those are what they are. And, knowing me, I would have chosen the same path. But it’s the extra-curricular thoughts that I wonder about. If these things would have added anything to my life.

What about you? Any bullet points in your life you wish you could have added to your life? Even one?

Have fun and don’t be hard on yourself!

 

 

 

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

~George A. Moore

 

 

 

 

Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego  (1935 – 2022) was a Portuguese-British visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks.Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.Her style has evolved from abstract towards representational, and she has favored pastels over oils for much of her career.Having grown up in Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist dictatorship, Rego was fascinated by fairytales, and her political paintings span themes of power, possession, childhood and sexual transgression.Her work often reflects stories colored by folk-themes from her native Portugal.Rego challenges traditional female depictions by illustrating women in their natural state of strength and power, showing the reality of womanhood rather than trying to satisfy the gaze of the viewer.Her paintings are strong and emotional, addressing human experiences that were powerful in their own way.Rego successfully addressed human experiences through her art that were often unrepresented: abortion and depression.More of Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego‘s work can be found at https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rego-paula and https://www.wikiart.org/en/paula-rego/.

 

 

Caroline Dewison is an artist from  Warrington, England,  whose love of nature has culminated into a world of small miniatures.In the realm of craft and design, Dewison pushes boundaries and create extraordinary pieces that captivate the imagination.For several years, the Warrington-based artist experimented with beads and clay to make small sculptures, but she was never quite satisfied.Inspired by the woodlands around her home and holiday walks through the Lake District,Dewison began to recreate mystical scenes of streams, shorelines, and hills in miniature.Using Jesmonite — a mixture of gypsum and water-based acrylic resin — to fashion frames, plus a lightweight MDF for the backgrounds, Dewison sources a range of small boxes, model-making supplies, and acrylic paints to create each intricate scene.For landscapes, she particularly enjoys using a type of clay that melds the malleability of clay with the strength of epoxy, plus a favorite 3D-printing pen.Dewison brings imagination, reality, and a certain finesse to her miniatures,“I didn’t really set out with the intention of making miniatures,” the artist shares.“They just turned out that way.”More of Caroline Dewison‘s magical miniatures can be found at https://www.ahouseofwonders.co.uk/.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am running around like a BoHo madwoman trying to get ready for vacation next week, so my conversations with you will be limited to  “Lei parla inglese?” or “Parles-tu anglais?” So I thought it would be fun to share some weirdly wild (and wonderful) past Galleries. 

You’ve got time to visit a few Galleries, don’t you?

 

Stairways to Nowhere  

 

 

Giant Heads

 

Earrings

 

Mihai Criste

 

Hair

 

Nightmare Food

 

Chairs

Hope you had fun!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glass Insulators were used for telegraph and telephone lines to aid communication between states and prevent wires from touching wooden poles.Insulators are non-electrical conducting objects, usually made of glass or porcelain, intended to insulate the current running in a wire from grounding out, especially in fog or rain. In conjunction with the expansion of rural electrification in the early 20th century, there was a major boom in the manufacturing of insulators, with production peaking from the 1920s through the 1940s.The rarest glass insulators are generally either the oldest types or the ones with the fewest remaining examples.Ramshorn, block, and other early threadless types are all considered rare, with some insulator collections being focused solely on these initial renditions.Among the more common threaded styles, rarity can be based off style, manufacturer, color—really any of the aspects that determine an insulator’s value.

Commonly made from glass, in a dazzling array of shapes and colors, antique insulators are prized for their rarity and physical beauty.Use of porcelain and ceramic insulators spread during the late 19th century alongside higher-voltage electrical wires, like those required for home power lines, because the protective properties of porcelain proved superior to glass.

So whether you are a historical buff or glass collector, glass insulators certainly are their own form of art!

 

 

Dariusz Zawadzki is a surrealistic painter from Szczecin in the northwest of Poland.He excels as a painter of often disturbing dramatic dark fantasy and surreal art.Since childhood, Zawadzki has built surreal worlds; his imagination, dreams and visions the source for his inspiration.Growing up,  Zawadzki wanted to attend an artistic secondary school, but was told his eyesight was too poor. Refusing to let others stymie his artistic development, the artist taught himself the ins and outs of painting, and developed his own techniques.As a result, his paintings are known for their classical facture, incredible detail, and intense color palette,  using an oil technique on fiberboard.His paintings make me think of survival in its most basic and elaborate forms.“I never use a sketchbook, because I don’t want to force myself to paint something I’ve already drawn on paper.” Zawadzki explains.“My favorite moment is when I stand before a white, blank board. Then I simultaneously know and wonder what will emerge from this blankness.

More of  Dariusz Zawadzki‘s  remarkable art can be found at https://zawadzkiart.pl/ and https://morpheusgallery.com/Dariusz+Zawadzki/#cnt.

 

Do not forget that true love sets no conditions; it does not calculate or complain, but simply loves.

~ Pope John Paul II