advance to go ....

this is a commissioned piece .... commissioned by a mom for a boy .... a boy who loves monopoly ... a boy who wore out his first monopoly game he played it so much ...

the middle bottom square says:
Life is a song - sing it. Life is a game - play it. Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a dream - realize it. Life is a sacrifice - offer it. Life is love - enjoy it. 
.. only ... it says it without those pesky capital letters, right? 


when i grew up, we would play on the floor of the dress up living room .... where we weren't really allowed to hang out or play ... but we could play there and leave the game out cause monopoly took days and days and days to get through .... and we could leave it out there cause it wasn't in anyone's way .... since no one ever went in there except for a party or christmas morning ...  i remember my brother david loving baltic and mediterranean ... my brother raymond (oldest, wisest) was always the banker ... i liked being the boot ... and i was most intimidated by the green monopoly .... seemed much more common to land on those than park place and boardwalk ... 


do you have monopoly memories? 

turquoise squareness ....one piece, three pictures of it ....

i had some white clay ... it was a little too wet ... 

so i rolled it out into a bunch of pieces ... more surface area means it dries faster .. gets workable ... 

that must be a sciencey sort of thing, right? 

 so after some of the slabs started drying, i fiddled with them ... i rolled stuff on them and printed them and poked at them .... 

and i put them  together in a square bowl ... 

is it still a bowl if it is square? 

squarish? 

bowlish? 

it's about four inches deep ...

and my favorite part? 

you can see it in the picture below here..... 

it's the part that looks like brain ... 

how'd i do that? 

 does it look like brain to you? 

shoule i make a whole bowl out of brain texture? 

or is that gross? 

cake or cheese?

this is about 16 inches by nine ... i'm guessing .... and it is my favorite sort of platter ... all filled up with my favorite letter stamps ... i have loads of letter stamps, but somehow these are the ones i choose far and away more than any others .... this platter is big enough for a birthday cake .... but probably has more cheese and crackers in its future than cakes ... just guessing ... i don't know who is going to own it ... maybe i should look for a cake sort of person to give it to ....

little letters ...

this is a platter that did not turn out the way i planned ... but i am not going to tell you how it is supposed to look ... luckily, i think it looks good like this ... it has a deep, rich, varied brown glaze ... and lots of tiny letters all over it .....

this happens to me a lot in pottery ... but even more in painting ... when i have a plan and the plan just doesn't work .... in painting, you see it as you go along that it isn't following the plan, the path, heading towards the idea you were trying to achieve .... and you alter the path as you go, i suppose .. but in pottery, it is just a WOOOO-eeeeeeeee ..... you open the kiln and surprise! ... or, in my case, i went to the kiln room and some trusty pottery worker had unloaded my pieces onto the finished shelf .... and then i had my woooooo-eeeee-why-is-it-brown moment .... but brown works .... whaddaya think?

new favorite shape .....

my new favorite shape is a long thin rectangle ... this is maybe 20 inches long .... and a bit rounded .... perfect for a baguette .... or a row of pillar candles ... what would you put on it? .... who should i give it to?

tur-kwahhhhs (did you pronounce turquoise correctly? )

this is a sixteen inch by nine inch platter ... white clay with a turquiosey greeny glaze that really shows up amazingly well in all those textures .... i mostly give away all my pottery but i might be keeping this one ... uh huh ... do you make stuff? do you keep some? give it away? sell it? am i being greedy if i keep this for myself?

and really? i think i need to get another bag of white clay and make loads of pieces in this color .... yup ... that's what ...

vase rhymes with face ...

two days ago i posted about the little notes i have taped about my house ... today, i want to show you two vases that i made ... but i conveniently put them in front of the splashed, faded, curled, old notes near my sink ... just so you see them ....

the vases are chocolate clay that i slab rolled (that just means rolled out flat like cookie dough .... i then pressed a little round googaw into it ... that's the dottiness you see ..... i am completely unsure of what glaze i used .... i'm thinking ann's blue ... and it turned out very brown ... and photoed quite green ... regardless, they'll look cute once they have some flowers or some greens in them .... i hope so anyway ....

matisse

last weekend i went to the high museum ... i saw fabulous art .... and i keep thinking about one piece .... matisse, when he was old and doddering and barely hanging on, wanted to keep creating .... he's say YOU THERE, paint all those papers blue ...and you ... paint some papers pink ... and all his people, his minions, his helpers would dart around and do his bidding ... GIVE ME the scissors ....and he'd cut .... GLUE this up there ... and so it would go ... maybe he was a sweet please and thank you guy .. but i'm guessing he was old and bossy ... and trying hard to get all his artsiness out of him before his last day .... i'm not criticizing the bossy, just saying i think he was. i am. i'm super bossy. i try not to be, but i am anyway. that's maybe another post. so, in his later days and years matisse became a collage artist using his own painted papers ... i like that. i do that.

so, the piece on the right is called maquette for nuit de noel ... it is his mock up for christmas eve ... this is his christmas eve ... i LOVE the colors ... and the only thing that screams christmas is the one shining star at the top .... and only if you know you are looking for christmas thematically .... and, this collage is huge ... maybe ten feet tall and four feet wide ... big, big ... and it is just a mock up ... a sketch ... because it was to be a stained glass window ... well of course it was, we should have guessed ... just look at the shape ....

it makes me want to use that window shape ... ok? i'm going to do that ...

that's what i've been thinking about.
matisse.
stained glass windows.
cool colors.

so what do you do when .....

i write little notes .... 

my house is dotted in them ... 

my backsplash behind my sink, and out in both directions for three more feet each way, i have notes ... 

inside cupboards? notes .... 

currently, the downstairs bathroom mirror has a note that says ... whenever i see your smiling face, i have to smile myself because i love you ... yes i do .... 

do you think my family rolls their collective eyes when they see that? or do they not even notice it anymore .... 

i sing it every time i see it .... 

so my house is running out of space for tidy displays of notes .... so i have some untidy note spots ... 

and some notes get tatty and taken down when i have a new one to replace it ... 

but as often as not, i'm so attached to the words, that when i think one has gotten too curled or messy or splashed, i just remake it ... in a nicer handwriting or a colored paper .... 

by each of my children's beds there are notes i've written them ... some are years old .... 

have they become attached to oddball scraps of papers too? 

maybe

is that ok?

probably... 

so, the perfect spot for my notes? someplace that not everyone can see .... inside cupboards, tucked away inside closet doors ... places where a cursory glance from a visitor wouldn't find any .... 

tonight, i read this quote online: 

it is better to know HOW to learn than to know. dr. seuss.

i just LOVE LOVE LOVE that.

so i grabbed a sharpie (whole jar of them right here beside my computer) ... grabbed a scrap paper (because it is right here beside my computer.. the back of last year's page a day calendar) instead of fancy paper (would have had to get up and go to my supplies and dug through the box that says groovy art papers and that's a whole give a mouse a cookie thing) ... and i wrote that suessy quote of joy down .... 

and then i looked for where to put it ... 

nothing behind the sink needed replacing ... the cupboards would need total reorganization cause if i'd put it in, the note would have been so high that only mr.e.beck.artist could have seen it usually ... 

so ... the space i've been conserving ... trying not to fill up ... yup ... that's where it is going .... 

in the fridge ... 

on the door .... 

left to right, pesto jar on top of garlic, jelly, a lawry's marinade, blackberry jelly, soy sauce in front of something, wine, syrup, worsteschire, vinaigrette dressing .....

and the quotes ... 

every morning that you wake up is another chance to get it right.

a love note (actually a love email... the entire body of the email is : i love you) ... from one of my kids..

always try to be a little kinder than necessary.

love me when i least deserve it because that's when i really need it.

  a fortune cookie note (or maybe it is from a christmas popper?) a day without laughter is like a day without sunshine.

and my new seuss note .... 

does your fridge make you happy? 

high time ...

i went to the high museum yesterday ...
it was a date ...
my date took me to lunch first ... we ate mexican ... then we got some culture at the high .... for those of you not HERE, the high museum is a gorgeous fine arts museum in atlanta, georgia .... in an art history class in 1985 i had to do a paper on the architecture of the new building ... it has been added to again since then ....

we specifically went for the exhibit, picasso to warhol .... a MoMa (nyc) show that is travelling .... some of the pieces i had seen before on trips to MoMa, probably my favorite museum ever ....

one of warhol's marilyn series was highlighted in the main lobby of the museum where we bought our tickets (oops, i've let my membership lapse) ... and the focal picasso was on the wall that you see right when you step off the elevator ...

i just snatched that photo off google images ... don't know the photographer, but the artist is picasso

.... this was the perfect exhibit for me .... 20th century artists have always been my favorite .... the focus of this exhibit was artists who were breaking with traditions and trying new things .... the obvious ones are picasso with his cubism, warhol with his iconic commercial imagery, pollock with his splatter paintings , matisse with his colorful gigantic collages, mondrian with his grids, calder with his mobiles and stabiles ... i think people who know a little about art, know of these artists ... when we walked into the calder room, mr.e.beck.artist said, i always recognize this guy's work, but i never remember his name .... there was a lovely whispy mobile in the corner that was NOT moving ... but i blew a couple of times and got it twirling .... there was NOT a no blowing sign ....

there were some artists who surprised me ... romare bearden ... i LOVE LOVE LOVE him .. he is a collage artist ... i have one of his pieces in a poster in my studio .... and girl.beck.artist has his three guitar players as a poster in her room (that's the tiny pic above, from google images) .... but i was surprised he was on a short list with the likes of picasso and matisse ...

jasper johns was on there ... mr.e.beck.artist recognized him as being influential on my work ....

and only one artist that i had never heard of ... louise bourgeois ... the only woman in the group and i had never heard of her or seen her work? i would have guessed louise nevelson who does amazing assemblages .... so, louise bourgeois beat out louise nevelson i suppose?  could there only be one woman? or only one louise? anyway, i need to study up on ms. bourgeois ... my guess is that when i was studying art history avidly in the 80s, that she wasn't cool, hip, studied, appreciated yet .... she's now dead, giving her art some extra panache ... such a pity that artists are more celebrated dead ....

 there was a nice learning moment with a miro painting ... he had used a dutch masterpiece and "copied" it ... his version of painting .....

the audio that i listened to at the high did a great job of comparing the two and making you notice the similarities and miro's intent ... he gave his the same title, not hiding the fact that he was being inspired or copying .... here's an article about it that i found ....

so ... a date and art time ... doesn't get much better than that, right?

.... flowery ...

this is a 36 inch square canvas .... with some drop flowers .... i think i did most of the background a couple years ago (eek!) ... and added flowers recently .... i think i need some lovely word happiness running around on the bottom ... but i haven't figured out what yet ... hmmmmm

spinning a yarn ....

why is a story a yarn? i titled this spinning a yarn, but really it was spinning clay and glaze ... 

 i spun four pieces of hand built pottery .... i attached it to a pottery wheel and threw glaze at it ... really, i squirted and poured glaze at it ....

 my problem with this ceramic event was knowing when to stop ... just like in all art really ... when is it done? haven't you seen art before (natch, even on this blog) that should have been finished a few steps earlier than what you see? that's what is happening here ... not sure how those glazes will look all layered up like that ... if after firing they will be true to these before pics ... or if they'll go all muddy looking ... crossing my fingers for no mud ..

 but, if perchance they come back muddy, i'll just do more ... and use a lightter hand ... i'll stop earlier .... not go quite so giddy and out of control with my spattering and spinning ....

 this is my third spin art post in a row ... but now i'm out of photos to show you ... well .. until friday when i make some more at my pottery class ...