Archive for August, 2007

I’m 32 flavors and then some

I’m in love and I want to share it with you:

Lately, I’m in love with lots of color. For example this picture I added to my favorites on flickr, I’m in love with color.

Whether your falling in or out, love makes you feel really alive, and so I’m in love with talking and hearing about it. So when I downloaded this weeks free episode of This American Life, I was so happy to listen to it. Even though it is about break-ups, it is still an aspect of love.

I’m in love with making. I’m rereading Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland, a great book I recommend to all artists. Whenever I pick this book up, I always find certain things that really hit home for whatever particular struggles I may be facing. Anyway, I wanted to share one such passage: “Designer Charles Eames, arguably the quintessential Renaissance Man of the twentieth century, used to complain good-naturedly that he devoted only about one percent of his energy to conceiving a design - and the remaining ninety-nine percent to holding onto it as a project ran its course. Small surprise. After all, your imagination is free to race a hundred works ahead, conceiving pieces you could and perhaps should and maybe one day will execute - but not today, not in the piece at hand. All you can work on today is directly in front of you. Your job is to develop an imagination of the possible.” This quote really spoke to me, because I am obsessed with inspiration and making, but that obsession quickly fades while new ideas and new inspiration hit. I need to be more like Eames and finish what jobs I have at hand and then move onto the next. It’s just that often, I fear that I will lose or forget that next possible piece if I don’t drop what I am working on now and start in on the new.

I’m in love with Fall and the end of summer. We have been blessed with the most absolutely beautiful days recently, and it is supposed to last through the holiday weekend. I must go outside now and take advantage while it lasts.

found art envelope

found art envelope, originally uploaded by robayre.

This weeks “Found Art Tuesday” was themed envelope. I have a stack of these beautiful blue long envelopes that I picked up at last years Paper Source rummage sale. I never knew what to do with them, but after Rosa announced the theme I spotted one and now I’ve already created a couple found art pieces to use for the following weeks.

This particular one is pretty chaotic. I tried to not think too much and just “go” …and this is what you end up with.

I took it out to the alley again and put it on the same tree as last time. Part of it was run through the sewing machine so it wasn’t very functional, but I was able to put a tiny note and these three buttons inside. Actually one is a magnet. I just did some abstract, non objective watercolor and ran them through the button maker.
They were real fun to make, super small-so they were real quick, but the paper was too thick and so the plastic cover split on two of them. I realized a little too late that if I don’t press the machine so hard the plastic wouldn’t rip. I’ll probably buy some thinner water color paper to make more.

cornfest

Matt and I just got back from Cornfest. Rode the ferris wheel, ate giant corndogs and had funnel cake. I’m good for another year.

high water

I was watching the news at the gym yesterday morning and they were talking about all the places around us that are flooded and I thought to myself “it has never flooded here, we must be on real high ground”. . . then in the afternoon it starts raining, pouring actually and by today we had major flooding. I had also just started watching “The Secret” on dvd and so now matt is telling me I willed it to flood here. lol. Anyway, here is a picture of the park down my street.

Also, Rosa just announced that next weeks Found Art Tuesday is inspired by my found art piece from earlier this summer and themed “envelope”. You know what this means? I must participate now. Not that I don’t intend on participating every tuesday, it’s just hard to execute when I have guilt from piles of things I should be doing other than having fun releasing art into the world.

Flickr

This is a test post from flickr, a fancy photo sharing thing.

theo painting

Acrylic painting on canvas of Theo. 6″x6″. I made it to put up on my etsy shop.

fall, i luff u

I know it was an absolute fluke, but yesterday was downright frigid outside. I went over to my parents house to mow their lawn and as I passed under the walnut trees, yellow leaves fell around me. Then last night I found this leaf on my brothers front porch. Fall is coming, yay!

rootbeer float cupcakes

Picture by Matt.

Oh yeah, and I made these delicious rootbeer float cuppiecakes, via ljcfyi. Yeah, it tasted as good as it looked and that is why I had to take all the leftovers to work today and get them out of my house. They were all huge too, it was like eating a mini-cake. I have no cupcake tins, only miniature muffin and large muffin tins.

Look What I Can Dooooo!

Here is a meez that I made of myself, you can make one too

Events

Did anyone hear about the “MONSTER TRUCK MASSACRE”? Yeah, well that was here in my city. DeKalb made Nationwide news Thursday when a brilliant city must have given permits to Napa Auto to close off this little bitty one way street to do some MONSTER TRUCK maneuvers. I happened to drive by the scene before it occurred thursday, on my lunch break, and thought to myself “Why on earth have they closed off a street so that people can view this monster truck…that is as wide as the street they closed off?” I honestly just thought they had it there for people to look at. And yes, you got it right, the monster truck was as wide as the street that they had it driving over cars. Brilliant. After one particular trip over the cars the driver lost control and then continued right into the crowd. Unfortunately, several people were injured, and a mother and child had to be flown to the next largest city for more serious medical attention and I pray that they are okay. Now DeKalb can add “Monster Truck Mayhem” right up there with Home of Barbed Wire and Cindy Crawford.

In more DeKalb news:

There is going to be a benefit show for Nikki, at Otto’s on September 14th. Nikki’s boyfriend Tom, one of our closest friends. is putting it together. The money raised at this show will be donated to Nikki to help her cover the medical costs. There will be 7 bands and of course New Time Romans will be playing and also Dacia (whoop, whoop). Very exciting. There will be a $2 donation requested but not required. Spread the word. There is now an official event page here and the benefit is called “Rockout to Knock Cancer Out”.

ALSO, inspired by my friend Jenny’s benefit show at Martyrs, I’m going to try and organize a write-in auction of sorts that will be held at the benefit. So please, if you have anything you would like to donate to a good cause, please contact me. Things I think will be great items for this auction: original artwork (photography, prints, drawings, paintings, ceramics, sculptures, you name it), handmade items (knits, signs, shirts, birdhouses, you name it), new/slightly used cool items, gift certificates, bikes, diamond rings, you get the picture. And just a word about this, if you have something that you think might work, please don’t hesitate, just donate it. I held back at Jenny’s benefit thinking my stuff wouldn’t be “good enough” but anything goes, and I was disappointed afterward. People are going to be coming and wanting to donate money, so they might as well get something in exchange? It will be fun.