Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together

A Liz Printz Necklace Kind of Day

  This is a Liz Printz necklace.  I have loved her work for the 15 years I have lived and seen it in Southern Maryland.  To my great delight, I discovered last year that she liked my work too, and we bartered:  she got a mask and a Dancing Woman and I got this.  Pretty awesome, yes?

So you can imagine how excited I was to learn that she was giving a class at AnnMarie Garden.  I signed up as fast as I could.  Yesterday was the class.

Let me say that not only is she an amazing beadmaker, but she is also a wonderful teacher - and she brings along bags and bags of all sorts of beads just in case one's own beads are lacking.

Mine were - who knew you needed so many sizes to fill in the blank spaces on these?

I am pleased to share my own creation  - it took about 5 hours and is a very meditative practice.  I found that my past years working with embroidery and quilting made the sewing techniques absolutely 2nd nature/intuitive.  And I am beyond delighted with my own necklace (which I happen to be wearing as I type this - it makes me smile.)   

Here are some other happy links to share.  Sue at Artful Adventures shows off the goddess bead I sent her.  And Heather at Heather Bartlett Art talks about her finished torso, and has some magnificent close up photos of it.

And below is a photo of Heather and Connie holding their finished torsos.  They look as happy as I feel about my necklace!

thought for the day:  But the way we learn is never as clear as a neat, guided walk through a California nature preserve.  In fact, the idea of a path, getting from one place to another, is probably an illusion.  Mostly there is a process of unfolding.  At the end a spiritual person turns around and sees the design of her life and calls it a path.  This most likely can also be said for [an artist's] life.  There isn't any clear passage.  Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightening

After Artomatic

Ceramic Blue Heron by Tammy Vitale, located in front of Heron's Way Gallery in Leonardtown, MD.  $650.00

ArtOmatic has come to and end.  It finished up on Father's Day and all that's left now is to de-install, collect the picture we bought by Brian Hamill (both tomorrow, hopefully), deliver the work I sold and move onward.

Interestingly enough, a fascinating show (especially for Southern Maryland) has opened and is running at Heron's Way Gallery in Leonardtown, which also represents some of my work, called the Jewelry and Jazzy Junque show.

Artist friend Candy Cummings is the main artist in the "jazzy junque" arena making use of tv tubes and other electronica inherited from her dad's many years in the tv repair business.  Because her work would have been a stand out at ArtOMatic, I decided to run pictures of some of her display, as well as a few other folks, here today.  All pieces are available from Heron's Way who will happily get you any information you might like.

 

Flash Bulbs (upper left) $300

Fully Wired (right) $125.00

Triple Spheres, $150.00 is one of my favorites.  I like the movement of the piece and the silver tips of the tubes.  It seems to be it would look great on a porch or filling a niche in a hallway - like on a decorative wood accent or something like that. 

There are others, but I'll stop there today and share some other photos from inside the gallery.

The next two are walls (where you can see more of Candy's work) along with my Shadow Womyn on the lower left in the first one, and the 5 ft totems I made especially for this show, one each in the next two.

This is a short post because I am gallery sitting at Heron's, using a computer I'm not used to and afraid that, as usual something will go wrong and I'll lose the whole post and I don't want to do that.  So I'll just let it go at this.

thought for the day:  With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to leanr [even typepad].  Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.  Charlotte Joko Beck quoted in book listed below.

The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.  However, it's not so easy to take a straight look at what we do.  Seeing ourselves clearly is initially uncomfortable and embarrassing.  As we train in clarity and steadfastness, we see things we'd prefer to deny - judemnetalness, pettiness, arrogance.  These are not sins but temporary ad workable habits of mind.  The more we get to know them, the more they lose their power.  This is how we come to trust that our basic nature is utterly sijple, free of struggle between good and bad.  A warrios begins to take responsibility for the direction of her life.  Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You:  A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times