cobaltika

redWagon : kansas city missouri : february 2010

back from another winter weekend in the city. it was good. we were houseSitting this weekend, so i had a new neighborhood to explore a little. find some curious new details to capture. the house belongs to the former wife and still best friend of my poet. she is a sculptor and the house is filled with amazing arrangements and collections of natural things. i love making pictures there. but always feel i should not show the things without her permission and of course i am in awe of her and always too shy to ask. but that’s OK, i found lots of good things in the neighborhood, too. i might make a little set of them. birds came to a feeder in the window and i saw a woodpecker close! and we ate well, went to the movies (Lovely Bones - long story - but … after reading the book, i was sorely disappointed with the choices made for the film. i felt like i was in a My Little Pony commercial.), talked, wallowed about, ate more, watched some library films, ate chocolate, thrift-shopped and took a walk in the woods, despite the frigid weather. i am tired of feeling house-bound this winter and every time i force myself out, i feel SO MUCH better. my tailbone still hurts. laundry today. more snow. onward.

where i eat my words

perhaps you will remember a few months ago, a ranty post i made about figurative art and my lack of preference for it? in fact, i probably worded it much more strongly than that. well, i’m blushing now. i have both *purchased* and *hung* a piece of figurative art in MY HOME. YES.

a couple of weeks ago, just about the time i sent in my online tax refund thingie, i saw this piece on MizKatie’s journal. she jumped right out at me, her little story of wandering in the snow in her nightgown, her fey face, the SNOW, the housey in the background, her RED HAIR and pearls! i thought it was a portrait of my interior self, especially this winter. i had to have her!! and now i do. she lives in a fancy gilded frame in my studio, next to a lace-curtained window. maybe she will live in my nestRoom one day, but i can only hang one thing at a time in there and i am still fond of my altaristic crosses right now.

i have known Katie for a long time, online. she even lives in Kansas like me. maybe one day we will take our cameras out and wander around in some Kansas ghost towns. who knows? so i have to eat my words. i LOVE her figurative art. there is something about her people that is slightly melancholy, but hopeful, a little gritty, very very dear. and the texture of the paint - YUM. i strongly recommend that you go take a look for yourSelf. her new pieces are making me want a parade on my wall…

the garage on the poet’s street

finally i captured it in a pleasing (to me) way. then enhanced of course. i like to do that.
it was a good weekend in the city. indian food, macBook theatre, blueberryBuckwheat pancakes (oh i am getting so good at cooking on that hot plate), a long walk in a woods with 1 inch of sweet fresh snow, which allowed us to see the tracks of all the creatures who live there, new socks woolly and warm, groceries, plenty of wallowing about, a long walk in the city with sun, Broken Embraces. all good stuff.

especially good was a visit to Sherry Leedy Gallery, where i have always seen something wonderful. Saturday was no exception. this time work by my former painting teacher, Tanya Hartman, and work by Cindy Kane. both were text-based and AMAZING. i felt noodly through the rest of the day after seeing this work. it was very thrilling.

now back to reality. another gray day. some kind of jawAche (no more root canals! please!). laundry. the office tomorrow. all that stuff. onward…

off to The City for the weekend
what shall i see this time?

probably not so much snow.

but … i wouldn’t mind.

a happyAccident : precursor of images to come
(although i didn’t know at the time)

photoshop not included. really!

the tealHouse in the next block

has it already been a week since i last wrote here? so much for my good intentions of improved communications…unh. i should go back into the first page of my new journal for the year and scratch out half the shit i wrote there. my good intentions. so far, so bad! i haven’t even used it since then. that journal. yes. bad.

i am awake too early and in an odd mood. the wind is howling outside. i am glad to sit under my flannel duvet with fairy lights around me and write. first here. then in my tale - of which the first draft is almost finished. maybe i will finish it this morning. then there is much cleaning and glamorizing to be done (of the tale, not me). i have been consuming more fantastic and fairy-ish books lately, instead of my traditional diet of lady detective mysteries, etc. that could account for some of the oddness i am feeling (also the fact that it is my long solitary weekend and it has been VERY solitary.) but i need to read those books now if i am trying to include supernatural goings-on, i need to see how other people handle them. so far, it looks like i was doing fairly well, even in my blindness. so i will continue. but i need to not be shy about magical things. and just go for it.

last night i finished The Wood Wife and it was the first book in a very long time that i read slowly because i never ever wanted it to end. it also made me so nostalgic for the Southwest. i have been blocked artWise again and that is depressing. finally yesterday, there was sunshine and i could see at the artTable, so i worked on some new pieces. slowly. putting them away to dry each layer, so i couldn’t sit and judge them. then pulling them out, adding some more, hiding them again. it is tedious. art has never been so hard and i am losing all confidence lately. but i feel like i will die if i stop trying.

it is the restless time of the year. sure i am glad i will go see my family in Texas next month, but i long to go … elsewhere, too. that is the only thing i dislike about being poor now. the inability to travel. anyway. this sounds dreary. but i’m not depressed. just … odd.

kansas river : winter 2010 : cold

it was a good weekend. even though the weather was not sunny and certainly not as warm as we were led to believe. instead we have had several days of the most beautiful dense FOG. i LOVE fog. i love winter tree branches. but there is nothing like winter tree branches in FOG. so we went to see them. one day we went early to the Baker Wetlands, which was gorgeous and amazing. the ponds frozen, a dull yellow-white ice, everything soft and distant. another day, we walked in the morning to the Secret Pond, which i found last summer. i was afraid to walk around alone then, it was so brushy and i *think* there was a posted sign. but yesterday, i didn’t see a sign and of course the only brush was branches, not the snakey kind, so we explored bravely. my poet was quite surprised that he had always missed this place and i could show it to him! we saw a badger’s hole and many feathers from a red-shafted flicker, who had recently been sacrificed for a dinner. i thought it was something fake at first, because the feathers seemed to be painted with neon orange! then we jumped over the drainage pipes and trudged through knee-high snow and found our way to the still arctic river, walked there for a while. also, we ate good things and watched more movies than i want to admit to. it was shocking. most were on macBook theater, but we also went to see Daybreakers, too! our suburban movie theater in town SUCKS. the matinees are not a bargain, the seats are crummy and it always feels dirty and sticky. from now on we will only go out to the movies in his town, unless we go to Liberty Hall here.

now i am supposed to be doing laundry and working at the artTable all day, but … uh … it’s so cozy sitting and writing and playing pictures!

PS - and BLUEBIRDS! we also saw BLUEBIRDS! what wonder!

kansas river : winter 2010 : picnic, anyone?