My art work can now be seen at aero Gallery:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/aero-Gallery/126461904049607?ref=ts
Friday, June 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
New Photo App
My new app is on iTunes now! For $1.99 you will be able to view 50 of my eMERGEncy Series photographs. The photos are surreal, abstracted images that are a merging of two original photos. There is nothing like them out there anywhere!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
aero Gallery: drawings, paintings, and Photographs
As a visual artist, I work in drawing, painting, and photography. There are several sites to view my work, and you may contact me if you are interested in purchasing a piece. (I will be developing my own website in the near future.)
The sites include:
http://www.afonline.artistsspace.org/view_artist.php?aid=7812
http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?rid=151719
iPhone/iPod Touch apps:
The Art of Twitter
eMERGEncy: one + one = one
aero Gallery: eMERGEncy
The sites include:
http://www.afonline.artistsspace.org/view_artist.php?aid=7812
http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?rid=151719
iPhone/iPod Touch apps:
The Art of Twitter
eMERGEncy: one + one = one
aero Gallery: eMERGEncy
Friday, January 22, 2010
A Bit of My Writing I Came Upon from 2008
EASTER LAME 2008
I've never been an Easter enthusiast, but this year was one of my lamest ever.
When I was a kid, and a devout Catholic, Easter held some religious intensity for me. I pondered Christ's crucifixion during Lent by kneeling on the unforgiving church floor and staring up at the Stations of the Cross to meditate upon the huge sacrifice made for the sake of all mankind, as only an innocent indoctrinated child could. I really tried to immerse myself in it, and did for a few years, but in the long run I fell quite short.
As a kid, Easter morning was somewhat exciting for me with the discovery of my basket sprinkled with an assortment of candy - not the quality candy of today like Dove chocolates and extreme jelly beans: Starburst, Lifesaver, and Jelly Belly. No, I had tasteless jelly beans and obscure brand candies. Even if I did get a name brand Brach chocolate egg, it was often the one with some weird fruit-filled mix in the middle with the texture of rind, and the flavor of all bad fruits combined.
When I discovered my basket early on Easter morning, if I was over seven years old, I couldn't sample a thing - not even one jelly bean. I had to abstain from any and all food before going to Easter Sunday Mass in order to have Holy Communion, or I would certainly be sent to hell in the next life. So I would sit through a long drawn out Mass, having already forgotten my fervor over Christ's suffering at the Stations of the Cross a week earlier. The pew was hard, the kneeler was in the wrong place for a kid, and the incense was suffocating me, the kid with undiagnosed asthma, not to mention - I was starving to death.
In preparation for this Holy Day I would be decked out in a new outfit and hat to wear to church. At this point in the ever-changing rules of Catholicism, head coverings of some sort for all females were required by church law. Oh, the hours we spent searching for a straw hat that would sit on my head of short hair and not make me look too much like an extreme dork. (The word dork was starting to be fashionable slang way back then.) The hat was always a total disaster, not only in looks, but in fit. At times, those hat pins that look like ammunition for a blow gun were woven through my short hair, and the hat, to keep it tightly affixed to my head, which only made the itching of straw on scalp intensify.
My mother sewed all of my clothes, which was good and bad. I could pick out the type of material and the color, but I was pretty much stuck with the non-fashion sense of the people who published the huge pattern books we rifled through endlessly at our local department store. My attention wandered as we tried to agree on something that might look becoming on me, which was a lost cause. I was more interested in getting my brother's hand-me-down Cincinnati Reds baseball shirt, and new blue jeans.
Back to the patterns - that year of my pre-pubescence we settled on a tailored jacket and box-pleated skirt, translation - a suit. I loved the light blue wool fabric that we chose, and, I liked an outfit with a jacket - to cover up my pudgy waist. My mother slaved for hours at the sewing machine to create that outfit, even making fancy bound buttonholes. There are buttonholes and there are buttonholes. Bound buttonholes have not one millimeter of stitching showing - very difficult and time consuming; my mother was a perfectionist at the machine. (Guess whose daughter can’t sew a straight line?)
The suit was beautiful, and I did truly like it, but like all girl’s clothing, it restricted my activities. There exists a photo of me on that Easter Sunday standing on our side walk ,wound up in a perfect pitcher’s stance, ready to let fly the baseball in my hand - all decked out in my fancy suit. I couldn’t wait to take it off.
The next stage of the day in my growing up Easters was Sunday dinner. The grandparents were invited over for a long drawn out heavy meal full of meat and starch. Then, if we weren’t already groggy enough from inhaling incense, nibbling candy, and the huge meal, we piled into the car to tour the local cemeteries. Yea! What could be more fun for an over-stuffed, drowsy, car-sick kid on Easter than looking at the grassy spots where unknown or vague relatives were buried?!
When I became a mom with kids of my own, I tried to spark up Easter a bit. Long gone was the guilt that drove me to attend church, so my kids were spared the sedating ritual of Easter Sunday Mass. The wonders of nature and the universe, and all its beauty and intricacies, replaced religion in our lives. In other words the Easter Bunny came with no strings attached.
We always dyed Easter eggs, (and still do with whoever happens to be in the nest at the time). Now dyeing eggs in our family goes far beyond dipping eggs in colored water and letting them dry. Our family of artists amasses bags of crayons, tape, and scissors, often spikes each color with two tablets of dye or bottles of food coloring, then, we start dyeing eggs. The creativity flows, and subject matter ranges from the traditional spring theme to anything goes. This year we ranged from beautiful batik-like flowers, the family turtle, a flamingo, the universe, to a vampire and skull. Yes, anything goes - last year there was even a poop egg - Mom!!!
When the kids were little, Bunny brought some actual toys to the baskets along with decent candy. Plastic eggs with each kid’s name on them were left out on the Eve of Easter for the Bunny to fill the next morning. When the kids got up they would hunt for their own eggs, and leave their siblings’ eggs alone - a no squabbling plan by mom. The eggs contained more candy, small toys, and even money as they kids got older. Sometimes the Bunny was able to hide the eggs outside, but it was a rare occurrence in Minnesota on Easter where snow flies into May.
So then what? It wasn’t even 10:00 am and the festivities were over. Well, the traditional large Easter meal continued with my parents, either at our home or theirs. At least the cemetery visits had ended. Weather permitting, we would take a stroll around the neighborhood to work off our meal, and kill time. By 3:00 pm it seemed like any ordinary Sunday, except I had to be slightly dressed up.
The actual day of Easter has usually been a let down for me. It has a big build up as a holiday, but it is certainly not in the same league as Christmas. Now there’s a holiday: candy and cookies, presents for kids and adults, a real tree sitting in your living room with lights and sparkling decorations on it!
Easter 2008 came zooming at us, not even a week after St. Paddy’s Day! Sure, sure, I read all the articles about “this is the earliest Easter has been in the last 95 years, and will ever be in the next 200+ years. The calculations were interesting, but they sure didn’t do anything to improve upon the holiday. It just reminded me that this would not be a warm, green-grass, flower-popping day.
Good Friday started out with a “winter storm warning” which was to continue into Saturday. Just great. My husband, who works in another city that is a five hour drive away, was to head home on Friday, spend Saturday here, and hop, hop, hop back to his apartment, five hours away, on Easter. Well, that didn’t even happen. A person is not going to drive through five hours of snow just to dye Easter eggs on Saturday, then drive five hours back through the remains of the snow on Easter. I’ll have to admit, he is not the egg-dyeing enthusiast in the family. So we lacked the master of the house.
That was the start of Easter Lame 2008. Another factor adding to the lameness of the holiday was the absence of the person in the family who most loves the family ritual of dyeing eggs. My oldest son was 2,000 miles away in grad school, sitting alone in his dorm while all the rich kids were off frolicking who knows where on spring break.
Easter day dawned with grey skies and snow flurries. And what did this special day behold? Why, both the good and the bad. The day involved a three hour round trip drive to deposit my youngest son at his college dorm because classes started bright and early Monday morning - bad planning on the college’s part, I must say. The good part of the day was a stop to see my 91 year old parents part way through our journey.
Earlier that week my mom had mentioned over the phone that she had seen robins sitting in a tree in their yard. This excited me because our family has an ongoing contest each spring to see who can spot the first robin of the season. The earliest robin sighting was by my daughter. When she was in college a whole flock of robins landed on campus - in January, but the usual sighting time has been around St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve never won, so I thought here is my chance. I might see one in my parent’s tree right on Easter when my son and I stopped for our quick visit.
The usual winner of the contest is my husband, a-ha, but he was stuck five hours north of us, so my chances were looking good. I wasn’t even telling my son about his grandma’s robin sighting - I was keeping the secret to my full advantage.
Driving along the road to visit my parents, son fast asleep in the passenger seat next to me, I spy a bird, no two birds. They’re robins! ……. flying in front of my car …..noooo!….…. poof……..I just killed the first robin of the year.
I immediately canceled myself out of the contest, with a tear in my eye for the first robin. At least the second robin made it, Easter 2008.
I've never been an Easter enthusiast, but this year was one of my lamest ever.
When I was a kid, and a devout Catholic, Easter held some religious intensity for me. I pondered Christ's crucifixion during Lent by kneeling on the unforgiving church floor and staring up at the Stations of the Cross to meditate upon the huge sacrifice made for the sake of all mankind, as only an innocent indoctrinated child could. I really tried to immerse myself in it, and did for a few years, but in the long run I fell quite short.
As a kid, Easter morning was somewhat exciting for me with the discovery of my basket sprinkled with an assortment of candy - not the quality candy of today like Dove chocolates and extreme jelly beans: Starburst, Lifesaver, and Jelly Belly. No, I had tasteless jelly beans and obscure brand candies. Even if I did get a name brand Brach chocolate egg, it was often the one with some weird fruit-filled mix in the middle with the texture of rind, and the flavor of all bad fruits combined.
When I discovered my basket early on Easter morning, if I was over seven years old, I couldn't sample a thing - not even one jelly bean. I had to abstain from any and all food before going to Easter Sunday Mass in order to have Holy Communion, or I would certainly be sent to hell in the next life. So I would sit through a long drawn out Mass, having already forgotten my fervor over Christ's suffering at the Stations of the Cross a week earlier. The pew was hard, the kneeler was in the wrong place for a kid, and the incense was suffocating me, the kid with undiagnosed asthma, not to mention - I was starving to death.
In preparation for this Holy Day I would be decked out in a new outfit and hat to wear to church. At this point in the ever-changing rules of Catholicism, head coverings of some sort for all females were required by church law. Oh, the hours we spent searching for a straw hat that would sit on my head of short hair and not make me look too much like an extreme dork. (The word dork was starting to be fashionable slang way back then.) The hat was always a total disaster, not only in looks, but in fit. At times, those hat pins that look like ammunition for a blow gun were woven through my short hair, and the hat, to keep it tightly affixed to my head, which only made the itching of straw on scalp intensify.
My mother sewed all of my clothes, which was good and bad. I could pick out the type of material and the color, but I was pretty much stuck with the non-fashion sense of the people who published the huge pattern books we rifled through endlessly at our local department store. My attention wandered as we tried to agree on something that might look becoming on me, which was a lost cause. I was more interested in getting my brother's hand-me-down Cincinnati Reds baseball shirt, and new blue jeans.
Back to the patterns - that year of my pre-pubescence we settled on a tailored jacket and box-pleated skirt, translation - a suit. I loved the light blue wool fabric that we chose, and, I liked an outfit with a jacket - to cover up my pudgy waist. My mother slaved for hours at the sewing machine to create that outfit, even making fancy bound buttonholes. There are buttonholes and there are buttonholes. Bound buttonholes have not one millimeter of stitching showing - very difficult and time consuming; my mother was a perfectionist at the machine. (Guess whose daughter can’t sew a straight line?)
The suit was beautiful, and I did truly like it, but like all girl’s clothing, it restricted my activities. There exists a photo of me on that Easter Sunday standing on our side walk ,wound up in a perfect pitcher’s stance, ready to let fly the baseball in my hand - all decked out in my fancy suit. I couldn’t wait to take it off.
The next stage of the day in my growing up Easters was Sunday dinner. The grandparents were invited over for a long drawn out heavy meal full of meat and starch. Then, if we weren’t already groggy enough from inhaling incense, nibbling candy, and the huge meal, we piled into the car to tour the local cemeteries. Yea! What could be more fun for an over-stuffed, drowsy, car-sick kid on Easter than looking at the grassy spots where unknown or vague relatives were buried?!
When I became a mom with kids of my own, I tried to spark up Easter a bit. Long gone was the guilt that drove me to attend church, so my kids were spared the sedating ritual of Easter Sunday Mass. The wonders of nature and the universe, and all its beauty and intricacies, replaced religion in our lives. In other words the Easter Bunny came with no strings attached.
We always dyed Easter eggs, (and still do with whoever happens to be in the nest at the time). Now dyeing eggs in our family goes far beyond dipping eggs in colored water and letting them dry. Our family of artists amasses bags of crayons, tape, and scissors, often spikes each color with two tablets of dye or bottles of food coloring, then, we start dyeing eggs. The creativity flows, and subject matter ranges from the traditional spring theme to anything goes. This year we ranged from beautiful batik-like flowers, the family turtle, a flamingo, the universe, to a vampire and skull. Yes, anything goes - last year there was even a poop egg - Mom!!!
When the kids were little, Bunny brought some actual toys to the baskets along with decent candy. Plastic eggs with each kid’s name on them were left out on the Eve of Easter for the Bunny to fill the next morning. When the kids got up they would hunt for their own eggs, and leave their siblings’ eggs alone - a no squabbling plan by mom. The eggs contained more candy, small toys, and even money as they kids got older. Sometimes the Bunny was able to hide the eggs outside, but it was a rare occurrence in Minnesota on Easter where snow flies into May.
So then what? It wasn’t even 10:00 am and the festivities were over. Well, the traditional large Easter meal continued with my parents, either at our home or theirs. At least the cemetery visits had ended. Weather permitting, we would take a stroll around the neighborhood to work off our meal, and kill time. By 3:00 pm it seemed like any ordinary Sunday, except I had to be slightly dressed up.
The actual day of Easter has usually been a let down for me. It has a big build up as a holiday, but it is certainly not in the same league as Christmas. Now there’s a holiday: candy and cookies, presents for kids and adults, a real tree sitting in your living room with lights and sparkling decorations on it!
Easter 2008 came zooming at us, not even a week after St. Paddy’s Day! Sure, sure, I read all the articles about “this is the earliest Easter has been in the last 95 years, and will ever be in the next 200+ years. The calculations were interesting, but they sure didn’t do anything to improve upon the holiday. It just reminded me that this would not be a warm, green-grass, flower-popping day.
Good Friday started out with a “winter storm warning” which was to continue into Saturday. Just great. My husband, who works in another city that is a five hour drive away, was to head home on Friday, spend Saturday here, and hop, hop, hop back to his apartment, five hours away, on Easter. Well, that didn’t even happen. A person is not going to drive through five hours of snow just to dye Easter eggs on Saturday, then drive five hours back through the remains of the snow on Easter. I’ll have to admit, he is not the egg-dyeing enthusiast in the family. So we lacked the master of the house.
That was the start of Easter Lame 2008. Another factor adding to the lameness of the holiday was the absence of the person in the family who most loves the family ritual of dyeing eggs. My oldest son was 2,000 miles away in grad school, sitting alone in his dorm while all the rich kids were off frolicking who knows where on spring break.
Easter day dawned with grey skies and snow flurries. And what did this special day behold? Why, both the good and the bad. The day involved a three hour round trip drive to deposit my youngest son at his college dorm because classes started bright and early Monday morning - bad planning on the college’s part, I must say. The good part of the day was a stop to see my 91 year old parents part way through our journey.
Earlier that week my mom had mentioned over the phone that she had seen robins sitting in a tree in their yard. This excited me because our family has an ongoing contest each spring to see who can spot the first robin of the season. The earliest robin sighting was by my daughter. When she was in college a whole flock of robins landed on campus - in January, but the usual sighting time has been around St. Patrick’s Day. I’ve never won, so I thought here is my chance. I might see one in my parent’s tree right on Easter when my son and I stopped for our quick visit.
The usual winner of the contest is my husband, a-ha, but he was stuck five hours north of us, so my chances were looking good. I wasn’t even telling my son about his grandma’s robin sighting - I was keeping the secret to my full advantage.
Driving along the road to visit my parents, son fast asleep in the passenger seat next to me, I spy a bird, no two birds. They’re robins! ……. flying in front of my car …..noooo!….…. poof……..I just killed the first robin of the year.
I immediately canceled myself out of the contest, with a tear in my eye for the first robin. At least the second robin made it, Easter 2008.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
First Day on the Blog Job
My first day on the blog, and it is a job! Who finds time to do this daily? Probably not me. This will be a place to direct people to in order to view special happenings in my life.
!. I have an art show of paintings based on Twitter going until February 19th. It is entitled - "Twitter: Oh, the Inanity!" and is composed of a month's worth of random Tweets i.e. 30 paintings.
!. I have an app on iTunes to go with it: Twitter: Oh, the Inanity! It will cost you under $2.00 to own it, see my paintings, and get some connection with Twitter (not my favorite social website as explained in my artist statement).
! I have my second app out today on iTunes. It is a clock which has 99 photos from my series "eMERGEncy", surreal abstract original artistic photographs. This will also set you back less than $2.00. Alright, I'll be up front with you. It is $1.99, cheap at half the price. To find the app search for "eMERGEncy: one + one = one".
Now I must get busy on the drawings for my next art show.....more later. it's been real.
aej
!. I have an art show of paintings based on Twitter going until February 19th. It is entitled - "Twitter: Oh, the Inanity!" and is composed of a month's worth of random Tweets i.e. 30 paintings.
!. I have an app on iTunes to go with it: Twitter: Oh, the Inanity! It will cost you under $2.00 to own it, see my paintings, and get some connection with Twitter (not my favorite social website as explained in my artist statement).
! I have my second app out today on iTunes. It is a clock which has 99 photos from my series "eMERGEncy", surreal abstract original artistic photographs. This will also set you back less than $2.00. Alright, I'll be up front with you. It is $1.99, cheap at half the price. To find the app search for "eMERGEncy: one + one = one".
Now I must get busy on the drawings for my next art show.....more later. it's been real.
aej
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