Melissa L. recently acquired four of my mandala paper cuttings. She was kind enough to send me these pics of them hanging in her home. She also owns 4 of my other paper cuttings, including my favorites “Ties That Bind” and “Midnight Garden”.
I spent parts of Friday evening and Sunday afternoon taking refuge in my local record shop, The Love Garden. I picked up a few records, including Mighty Sparrow, John Fahey, Bob Desper, and Bill Monroe, among others; an array of musical styles. This one takes me back to my Brooklyn days where I assimilated into the Caribbean community.. quite an unforgettable learning experience for a small-town Kansas girl, and some of the best food I’ve eaten (and learned to cook and still cook regularly!). Mighty Sparrow was a constant, as were lots of other Calypsonians. It’s been almost 4 years since I left, but so much has happened since then that it seems like a whole other life already.
I’ve put the donkey on hold while I finish up the backside to the record cover for band Maria the Mexican. Hoping to put the final touches on it tomorrow evening.
Tomorrow I’ll be visiting the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. I’ve never been there before and it seems like a good time to go. I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 days a bit down and out while nursing a cold (I get one cold a year.. of course on the week winter transitions to spring), so it’s time to get out and do something mentally stimulating now that it’s on the out and out.
The exhibit for the Lawrence Arts Center Annual Art Auction is hung (my piece “Budding Moon” is in it), so go check it out. And… one of my favorite paper cuttings, Ursa Major, has found a permanent home after I take my exhibit down from the Douglas County Law Library Gallery at the end of the month. If you haven’t been over to see it, it’ll be up until Mar. 31. Til next time…
I’ve got lots of strange little trinkets and such that I’ve found here and there, and some of them make their way into my paper cuttings.. I was sitting on my couch staring at a large stuffed donkey statue (can statues be plush?) that I bought at an antique store half a block from my house.. At least, the owner told me it was a donkey, or in his words ‘a burro, an old one, handmade in a small village in Mexico’ — he said he had picked it up at a museum that was selling it’s inventory and gave it to me for $20 (after I didn’t want to buy it for $30).. Turns out it’s not a donkey at all. It’s some sort of oxen likely made in India (that guy had a story about every object in there. Entertaining at least!). The more I look at it, it probably came from World Market and got dirty and worn in somebody’s storage. But I still like it, and I still like to think of it as a donkey, and while I was looking at it, I thought I should make a paper cutting of a donkey.. and then I realized it would only be complete with birds in 10 gallon hats riding on its back. Finished paper cutting to come.
5 x 7 inch paper cutting.
Each bird measures 2.5 x 4 inches and is matted and framed to 5 x 7 inches.
Highway in Colorado, 2012.
I’m looking down the road (and skipping ahead of all the prep work I’ve gotta do beforehand) and getting excited about hitting the highway again for my distant shows. I love going places, seeing new things, staying in hotels (the good and the bad — and I’ve stayed in some pretty gnarly ones.. Nashville 2011, cough, cough…), seeing my friends I’ve made along the way… A little bird told me today that she didn’t want to just stay in one place — that she wanted to explore the world. And I’m with her on that.
I’m confirmed for Denver, Omaha, Des Moines, and the local yokel shows so far.. Awaiting word on Nashville & St. Louis and a couple new locations I’ve applied to: Madison (Wisconsin) and Minneapolis. Any way I go, I’ll be putting some good mileage en el coche. Slowly expanding my reach from the bulls-eye that is Northeast Kansas. I’ll be keeping my calendar to the right on this page updated, so check back as I’ll be adding a bunch of upcoming shows over the next couple months.
I called in sick to work today.. haha.. sort of. As Jorma Kaukonen said in his blog, when you’re self-employed, there are no days off. True.. although it’s easy to push things aside, they’re always right there in my head letting me know they’re waiting to get done, and they don’t relent until I git’em done. There’s probably treatment for that. Anyway, winter cold’s got me down, but an hour extra of evening sunshine, spring temps on the horizon, my Beachwood Sparks record on repeat (makes me think of summer), and a pot of rice pudding on the stove has got my engine revving a little..
Progress shot of the record cover I made last week.. trying to figure out the layout for the backside so I can finish it up this week.
“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”
? C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (currently reading – here’s my Goodreads.com profile: http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/16130295-angie)