New work

I've been slowly but surely making progress on several pieces on my worktable right now, including a fairly experimental piece incorporating a packing tape photo transfer. It's a technique I picked up in a recent workshop and I like the transparency of it and I wanted to find a way to highlight that transparency in a new work. After a little playing around, I hot an idea for suspending it in a shadow box. The piece I was working with was finally at the stage for adding the transfer today and I'm pretty pleased with the results - it looks just as I envisioned, which isn't always how things work. I've still got some more to do to the whole piece, but here's a shot of it as it sits on the table now.

Today's Table Shot

I've had to concentrate on other aspects of work, like getting a new syllabus together for classes (which start in a scant week and a half!) So I haven't been able to attend to the works in progress or go house hunting... Sometimes the Worktable taunts me.

Likewise, my 'dead stick garden' (so named by my brother Joe) beckons me to play. Soon...

Try Again

Got the new wood doll house yesterday, but it's really too big for the 'Rooted' base... Guess I'll have to do more shopping...

Garden Seeds

Sometimes inspiration comes when I least expect it. Though usually my art starts with photography, sometimes it starts somewhere else, like while I was gardening recently. Ok, so mostly I was cleaning up from my serious lack of gardening, but that's gardening, right?

Anyway, in my cleaning up, I emptied a pot that once had a living plant and uncovered a really interesting rootball. I instantly knew it was destined for something besides the green waste bin, so I put it inside on the kitchen table, to keeps dogs from chewing it up before it could fulfill it's destiny. At some point shortly after that, I realized that it was destined to become the root structure for a house. We often talk about "putting down roots" when we talk about our homes, so this just seemed like a natural illustration fort home series.

Pretty soon I was going through my collection of wood houses that I've been building and found the perfect house, then I envisioned a structure that would simultaneously house the roots and support the house. Not being quite that handy with woodworking, I took the project to someone who is very handy. I'm so grateful to Phil the Wood Guy! (without Phil I would be lost...)

So Phil built a structure for my roots, doing just what I had envisioned but somehow I had envisioned too small and now my house is out of proportion, so I started looking att houses again but nothing was quite right. Wouldn't you know that a quick eBay search produced a little wood house of the perfect proportions? What could I do but put my bid in? As fate would have it, my new little house is now on it's way and I'm one step closer to putting my vision together.

Here' a couple photos of the rootball in it's frame and the too-small house. I'll be sure to post more as this process continues.