October Days

Today I was back into action! Mostly.
I went to the studio this afternoon and stayed for figure drawing. I was working on some earrings, I left for dinner and stopped by this cemetery that I haven't been to yet. Such a treat.

Cemeteries and power cuts are two of my favorite places, and this is two in one!

I assembled these from AR 15 shells. I am a spent shell junkie and I love working them into things. My sweet uncles smuggled these to me from the Farm this dove season.

At figure drawing, I was the only one working in the medium of Crayola! I had to edit the color out for this to show up, but it was a beautiful blue. I actually really enjoyed working in crayon. No mess, nice texture, cheap, colorful. I think I'm treating myself to a box of 64 next week!

I am tired and sore and looking forward to falling asleep with an icepack, but damn I loved it!
Tomorrow I get to bake my niece's 14th birthday cake and I have a masterpiece in the works! All she knows is it will be part pumpkin poundcake, and the rest is top secret. I'm pretty excited about it...

Happy Birthday Dad!

Happy birthday to my awesome Daddy!
Where to begin...
So many things I got from him, my love for the beauty of highways & infrastructure.

He taught me how to draw, fostered and encouraged drawing and all forms of art since before I can even remember.

He taught me to shoot, first recurve bows, then air rifles, from a young age. Here is my nephew Danny, learning from the master at about the same age I was when I started.

He taught me how to use a chisel for the first time when I was in second grade and my bunny "Jeff" died. In one fell swoop he started a lifelong love of woodworking and mourning rituals and monuments when he taught me to make a lap joint wooden cross in the basement (ah, the magical realm of Dad) to put at Jeff's grave.

He also learned me on picking up roadkill and then skin it when we ran across a beautiful red fox when we found one while driving home to The Farm one afternoon. When I picked this one up last spring and brought it home to skin it, it was Dad who's sage tutelage I hearkened back to during the entire process.

I truly feel ill equipped to do justice to the subject of my Dad in writing. If you know me, you're well aware of my deep love and respect for him. He has been so amazing, loving and supportive my whole life, now just as much as when I was little.

Smokejumper, artist, writer, philosopher, outdoorsman, entrepreneur, renaissance man, animal lover, independent thinker, masterful story teller, musician and general bad ass, he is a better Dad than anyone could ever ask for.

There are few things in the world sweeter to me than sharing a tear inducing belly laugh, or a deeply philosophical discussion on spirituality and cosmology with him; either flows just as easily between us as the other.

You know how people always say girls grow up to marry their Dads? Well somebody point me to an equivalent to Dennis Pearson-you can't-they don't makee 'em like that anymore!

Often imitated, never duplicated, my Dad is one of a kind and there aren't enough words to explain why.

Maybe for his birthday next year I will have improved in my writing ability enough to take another crack at it but for now, happy birthday Dad, I love you!

Hip-Hip-Hooray!

Yesterday makes two weeks since my hip surgery. I had to have a total hip replacement, right one first, left one will be on an as yet undetermined date in thr near future. I'm 35...an MS relapse four years ago meant an insane course of Solumedrol for fifteen days in a row (an ordeal which I barely escaped from with my sanity!), which causeed AVN. AVN is a condition where bone dies due to loss of blood supply, in my case brought on by sterroid use. Ugh, I can never find a short enough explanation to suit me!
I revile that person who "overshares" about their "Special Medical Problem". Deliver me.
And with that disclaimer, allow me to tell you about my own, special, medical problem.

The night before I engged in a silly ritual with a Sharpie, giving my sense of humor a say in the matter. You know how you hear those stories of people getting their wrong arm amputated or some such nightmare? This was for my right hip, "not my left one."

Feast your eyes on this magnificent incision. It will heal into a lovely six and one half inch scar, the perfect addition to my four and one half inch elbow scar and my five and one half inch abdomen scar. "Collect all three!"

The surgery was reported to have gone well, with a little trouble stabilizing me in recover that gratefully, I don't remember much of. As usual, general anaesthesia was the worst part of the whole thing and after having been informed of the "new way" of administering some sort of nerve root block to the spine along with a sleep inducing sedative, and all the merits of this much more palatable method, I was roundly dismissed as a candidate for this miraculous new technique due to having MS. The spines of MS havers are not to be disturbed under any but the most dire of circumstances, lest a flare up in symptoms be triggered.
All in all, I spent thirty five and one half hours in the hospital for a total hip replacement before being discharged and set free. Oh how I loved seing the blue sky as I waited for my carriage to pull around!

Oh the trials and tribulations of having your femur cut off and fitted with a cyborg part! Here I was thinking it had been three weeks and then found out it has only been two! Hot damn, I'm doin' alright!
I plan to be back in action as soon as two more weeks. We shall see...Keep your fingers crossed!

The Mothman Cometh

Point Pleasant, West-by-God-Virginia is home to the elusive, catastrophe predicting harbinger of doom...The Mothman! And though I did not personally set eyes on him this weekend during my day in Point Pleasant for The Mothman Festival, I did set my sights on many a visual delight...

Here is the town's official Mothman statue.

I wandered all over, not straying too far from the festivities lest I have a run-in with the creature himself. It was a gorgeous sunny September day and I spent most of my time consumed with greedily snapping up as many pictures as my camera phone would take between battery charges in the car.

I wandered over to the the rail road tracks (always my favorite) to preserve the moment in pictures. This was just one of many things I could not get enough of; I could have shot this structure for hours. 

 And this, this old State Theater was a stunner! I could have spent a couple of hours on it too. There was not enough time in the day to get my fill.

I took this pilgrimage with a good friend of mine who, unlike me is not an amateur photographer but is none the less agreeable to everything and an excellent road trip buddy. We just walked around all day, in and out of crowds, loving the many splendored people watching and general Americana observing.
We watched a train pass overhead and basked in the shade along the stunning Ohio River, which I dipped my bare feet into! Sadly, that part was during a phone charging break, so no pics to document my Southern feet willingly soaking in Yankee waters. But I'll admit, the water was clear and beautiful and if I had but been with my sister I would have gone all the way in for a swim!

We wandered and watched and studied our toes.

 Stopped in for a beer to escape the mid afternoon heat.

Ate funnel cake in an alley. Correction: he ate funnel cake while I consumed my calories in liquid form, Coca Cola style!

 Mothman pancakes looked pretty tempting at first, but I settled on just taking pictures. On the T shirt it says "Mmm! I sure do make a tasty pancake". Evidently any food or drink can be Mothman-ized with the addition of two (or sometimes just one) maraschino cherries which represent his glowing red eyes.

 Point Pleasant is on the banks of the Ohio River, on the West Virginia side, for a long way they have a big brick wall with murals depicting the town's history. There was a live band and all manner of kid entrapping devices like this enticing colorful slide! Don't you just want to hop right on?

Here is one of the bridges connecting Ohio to West Virginia. The Mothman rose to infamy in 1967 when he predicted the collapse of the Silver Bridge, resulting in the death of about 60 people. Yes, that really happened.
And on a more relevant note, the fact that West Virginia touches Ohio proves their Yankee status. No self respecting Southern state would dare touch Ohio. But for all my trash talking, I really do love it up there; it's very beautiful country with a geological and sociological charm all its own.

  I think we still have one of these in Charlotte at Park Road shopping center, but just in case we don't...

 Some time after I first shot this theater I came back by and the sky was just right. I have a whole series of variations on this, with the sky repeated in the window. Amazing!

I'll admit to having had mixed emotions about taking this trip; the festival was exactly on my Mom's birthday and I'm scheduled for hip surgery four days after, I had a lot of "nesting" to do to prepare for that. I am so glad I went, to show that bone one more good time before it gets cut out and meets a lonely hot death in the medical waste incinerator! Can you believe they won't let me keep it because it's biohazerdous or something to that effect? What a gyp.

But we had one last hoorah. It was a beautiful, perfect, memorable September weekend I won't forget, the pilgrimage to the Mothman festival!
So in closing, let me just say when given a choice between staying, preparing, saving, waiting, dreading and getting the Hell outta Dodge for the weekend, take the second option every time.

Trips

I have grown up making pilgrimages to Mississippi from North Carolina, several times a year, (give or take) my whole life. I find that car travel offers the solitary driver an opportunity for meditation & deep thinking, and when a passenger or two are thrown in it's a great time to philosophise and for story telling. It also makes for multiple photo ops!
This is a factory along the John Belk in Charlotte that I've been attracted to since riding the school bus past it on my way to high school every day. I've always wanted to photograph it, and only just last weekend got a quick shot, cruising by.

I remember people always saying how "travel is good for you" and on & on in a rather Jack Kerouac sort of way; I thought it was all much ado about people with nothing more productive to do with their money.

I stand corrected. It's a time for reflection; putting physical distance between me and my home turf gives me a fresh perspective on everything in life. It's not really a revelation, but something that bubbled up to the surface of my conscious while commuting to Atlanta's Scott's Antique Market with my sister a few years ago. Oh, the ideas we would collaborate on during that monthly gypsy caravan of art pilgrimage!

I do love the open road. I'm grateful that after high school I worked in New Mexico a few summers and had the opportunity to drive from here to the Grand Canyon and back with only an atlas and a car! To sound perfectly old timey about it, travel was different before cell phones and navigation technology, more of an adventure and I'm so glad I got to experience it.

I'm traveling again this weekend for a fast & furious Friday through Sunday adventure, trying to get my fill before my hip surgery next week. And as you might suspect, I've asked if I may keep the bone they saw out. That hip has seen a lot of action and I'd like to have it back!
Cross your fingers that "they" will agree to my request. If so, I'll have pictures!

Mississippi Road Trip

I ran down to Mississippi for the weekend to attend a memorial service for a relative.
Mom and Dad were in the front, and I was in the back, taking pictures. The drive down was particularly gorgeous, with my favorite kind of overcast skies.

We saw the coolest bunch of bikers in Georgia. I took a million pictures of this crew, they were possibly the coolest thing I saw between here & Mississippi!

My Dad's love of  highways, Mississippi ones in particular was definitely cultivated in me as part of my upbringing. We are going to paint from pics I took with my camera phone! How cool is that? I can't wait to see what we do.

Back to Basics

My studio is a fabulous place. We have started a figure drawing group every Thursday night in the gallery space; I think it's the most exciting thing that has happened there all year! It is $10 each for 3 hours of drawing, painting or sculpting from a live model!
I've been drawing since I can remember, it was just something you did in my family. In recent years, I've drawn primarily to sketch out loose plans for what I want to build, or to show a proposal to a client but it has been far too long since I've done any figure drawing. The first night I didn't exactly know what to expect from myself. This is from the first week:

These pictures are all gyppy camera phone pics shot on the gallery floor before cleaning up.

I've just been using newsprint and charcoal. There's something very liberating about using newsprint; it's not precious. On the fourth week I got stuck in a rut and broke into my sister's pastels, what fun!

I can not say enough how much I'm enjoying this, wish we had started it months ago. It makes my brain feel good, and how can one really claim to be an artist who does not draw? It is the foundation of everything.
I'm looking forward to imrpoving and sharpening my skills as well as broadening my mediums.

In short, let me just encourage you to get out there & draw!
Here's a little inspiration. Remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arTBmh89iOw&feature=related