Winter in Victoria

I made this guy last night during our snow storm...which continued on into the night and left us with about a foot of snow. The city is nearly at a stand-still...they just aren't prepared for this much snow at once.

something new I am trying out...

I bought this great book last year about artists journals and sketchbooks and I fell in love with the slide frame altering ideas. I made a slide frame deco but unfortunately it got lost in the mail and never made it back to me. BOO HOO!!! I decided to get back into it this month and I made this little 8x10 canvas. What do you think?
Thanks- Wendy

Still working on coming home...

In order to be here now I need to do something with being there then. So I re-work the collage from yesterday, adding plant life and candles, a little altar of sorrow for all that have seen.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense."

Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi - 13th century

Quick and Dirty ATC Swap: Miss Fish, Nici, and Penny

Below are the cards received for the quick and dirty ATC swap so far.

Hopefully this will entice a couple more of you to join the swap. How could you not want a shot at receiving one of these beauties?


Top row: Penny
Middle row: Miss Fish
Bottom row: Nici

Little Paintings

I was recently asked to help decorate a friend's 30th birthday party with some of my art. I got into a creative mode and came up with two different sets of paintings:



Two Little Birds - I can't resist birds. I had fun trying out paint blending for the background. I traced bird templates onto patterned paper and used ink and walnut ink to alter them.



Two Portraits - I liked how these turned out, but it took me forever to come up with the right combination for the collage! I used some vintage buttons and an old typewriter key to add a few final touches.

Baubles

In the interest of getting something new into my Artella Shoppe, I branched out a bit and tried my hand at jewelry crafting. Some traditional bead stuff and some assemblage stuff. These will be posted for sale soon, though I am sorry to part with them! In addition I made a bunch of ornaments I am so excited about; they can be seen on my blog. I made them our of those tiny tins used for bead storage!

Mini magnets

Someone sent me these tiny dominoes so I made mini-magnets to sell at the craft show this month. They are 1 inch wide by 1/2 inch tall.

Dragonfly ATC

My doodling technique. :)

the final 4

Of the 90 ATCS I generated in October. I was participating in an ARt by the Card challenge (like Zhenia) through one of my Yahoo groups, and actually reached my goal of 90 cards. I think it is the only goal I have set and reached all month! Here are the last 4 I made:

A Manifesto I Can Love

I am simultaneously repulsed and attracted to manifestoes.

The minuses of manifestoes include:

• the yelling (oh, the yelling)
• the either/or attitude
• the dogmatism

The pluses of manifestoes include:

• the yelling (oh, the yelling)
• the either/or attitude
• the dogmatism

Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto has been around since 1998. I read it for the first time in 2001. A friend inside the computer posted a link to it today and I find it just as inspiring today as I found it five years ago.

My highlights:

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.
...
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
...
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
...
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
...
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

I realized that while culling the "highlights" of the manifesto, I really wanted to post all of it here. I hope that you'll read the entire thing.

Is there anything in the "Incomplete Manifesto" that speaks to you? Do you have your own manifesto? If so, what is it?