I had a postcard started, it was pale, it was blue with little white cloud looking things down the middle, and I really didn't like the way it was turning out. So I smeared safety vest orange colored paint all over it.

Now in the past I would've tried to make it work the way it was. Miserably trying to rescue it over and over in its original form. I might've been able to save it, maybe. But why? Why spend time in a process that's anxiety provoking when you can just be a little violent (for lack of a better word) and throw caution to the wind and jump in to the giant safety vest orange void. It was pretty fun in there actually, sloshing around.

Sometimes mistakes are great things, especially in art. When you're open to just about anything, then anything can happen. Now I hope for mistakes, because more than likely I'll come up with something more exciting. It's co-creating with the Divine, and that new thing will have more depth, more emotion, than what I was going to make in the first place.

I find this goes for life too, just be open to all the possibilities. You never never know what will happen. And it'll be more perfect for you in the end than what you'd originally planned.

The older I get, the more unattached to outcomes I try to be. I just try to row in the direction of the stream I happen to be in. That's what wisdom is. Having control is an illusion. We have choices, yes, but control, not exactly.

So sing that old song, you know the one. Because "Life is but a dream".

PS This one is for the Leo man in my life, who by example, teaches me things like this all the time. Happy Birthday Sweet Pea.

I can't believe it's Friday already, time seems to be passing so quickly with everything seeming to speed up. And it's August, this is usually when things lay back and languish in the heat and humidity. Vacations happen, naps happen, time stops for moment and the dust settles for a few weeks giving us time to review and ground ourselves before that first burst of a cool breeze reignites us in September.

Sometimes I think the "busier" we are the faster time goes. As a nation we like to be busy, it's how we say we're important. That's a choice I'm now attempting to avoid. I've been trying to slow down and be available, more present to what's in my immediate surroundings again, more grounded. I find it keeps me less affected and drawn off by the swirling energies of late. It helps me reconnect to a part of my heart and mind I've ignored for too long, a part of me that I use to make strong work. Even as I try to breathe there's just an abnormal amount of things happening at once, and I gotta say I'm not liking it much. I want my August back.

So with the speed up of whatever time warp we're in along with the upcoming anniversary of my mother's passing later this month I felt like making a card with this message.

For right now, and maybe forever, this is what it feels like. We're here for a moment.

Next weekend is the 9th annual Tomato Fest here in East Nashville. I was invited to sell some work at Art and Invention Gallery where Meg MacFadyen started and organized this Festival for almost a decade now.

It had to be tomato or vegetable oriented and I had this collection I'd painted the year she actually started the festival. I've been thinking for awhile now that I need to start emptying out the flat files. I have a lot of paintings I've done over the years and it's time to start making room for newer things.

So I framed them up and did a little group shot before they went out the door. It's a little sad, I feel like a mother sending them out the door to their first day of school, a little sorry to see them go.

I've been gone for several days, helping my dad move in to his retirement community, leaving a house he and my mother shared for just over 40 years. It's been almost a year since her death and he has done so much, physically, mentally, spiritually. I can't imagine covering this amount of psychic work in so short a period of time.

The last few weeks I've been taking apart literally hundreds of silk men's ties that my mother collected for her quilting dreams. I take them apart, take the stiffening piece out from inside and take off the lining. Sometimes there are these flaps of silk that are sewn on the back of their fronts to keep the smaller thinner parts harnessed while wearing. A particularly pretty one came off the other day and I saved it.

It seemed perfect to hold something, something special and reverent in a way. So I sewed it to the card and kept going, knowing I would find the perfect thing to insert.

I had this feather "corsage" from one of my dad's old hats he used to wear in the 60's when I was kid. I've always loved it. I've kept it up on bulletin boards and shelves on display over the years. It seemed the perfect thing to be shown off in this card. I added some brass beads to the end.

So now here it is being held by one the silk tie straps from my mother's stash. Floating. It seems perfect, her holding him in the sky as he moved this week.

Symbols are all around us. We just have to look.

I'm glad I could reach out and grab these two and make a small piece of work to mark the time, the special time.

I've always loved Joseph Cornell's work ever since I learned about him in college. A shy man, he wandered the streets of New York City picking up detritus off the sidewalks, going through alleys finding old bits of wood and other ephemera, making them in to beautiful boxes and collages decades and decades before it was fashionable.

There's something in his work that touches me deeply. I was quite shy when I was young too, lonely from lots of moves and school changes. I relate to the sadness in his work, a poignancy that works on you when you spend time with it.

One of the images that reoccurs in his boxes are birds, parrots and cockatoos are the ones I remember. So when I saw this one in my suitcase of collage clippings I immediately thought of him and pasted it down. Later I thought I'd just work in a similar compositional style too and added the string with the hoops just like he did in several of his shadow boxes.

So this one's for Joseph, who's inspired me all these years. One of the artists who really gave me permission to be myself.

Namaste : )

I was recently invited to take part in an interview for the moon from my attic, a wonderful blog on art licensing. I'm actually beginning to transition from licensing to other arenas that are less commercial, and in trying to explain that response to the blog host, Alex Columbo I realized what I was really doing was writing an essay about my thoughts about art and life, about commercial art vs. fine art and how things have changed over the lifetime of my career thus far. Funny how life sometimes nudges you to get your thoughts in order. I ended up not sending the long email, but did decide to post some of it here. I'll let you know when our interview is posted on her site. My thanks again to Alex for her interest.

I was educated at the University of Kansas in the late 70's. The year I was a freshman they hired Richard Branham, to be the head of our design department. He was a well known industrial designer who'd just gotten done redesigning all of JC Penney's stores, everything, the stores themselves, the products, the logo, the advertising, you name it. He told us, "The public is visually illiterate, and it is up to you to educate them". I was young, I believed that, I still believe it, not in a condescending way, but in a hopeful "let's make the world more beautiful" way. After several years as an illustrator for advertising, design firms and publishing I decided I wanted to make more beautiful imagery, and licensing seemed like a more authentic way to express myself while also still carrying on the visual service doctrine put to me in college.

I believe that using something-a toothbrush, a mug, a journal-consistently in your daily life that is beautiful, that is considered, that is intelligent, elevates your mind and your soul. For me personally, using and being surrounded by an environment of intelligent beautiful things also brings clarity and peace to my life.

When I started licensing there were more manufacturers who were concerned with supporting artists in a long term way, interested in partnering with them in their careers. They wanted creativity and collaboration, they were proud of making beautiful work. I don't find that to be the case so much anymore, though there are exceptions. Through the rise of the internet a pushed hurriedness is inherent now in our society. Trends come and go more and more quickly. The bottom line looms larger. Everyone is chasing the same imagery, the same trends, the same customers. It has become very homogenized. And while I know licensing is commercial by nature, there were wider margins to exist in back then for folks like myself who had a different agenda. Now those margins are much narrower.

But that narrowing has forced me to quit compromising and go back to making work that is more authentic for me. Now the challenge is finding an audience that will align with what I create, rather than make work tailored for a specific one, and a mass one at that. There's a big difference there.

Just as an aside, the same thing is happening in the music industry. I currently live in Nashville and I hear all the time from seasoned songwriters and industry veterans, that their industry is under the same hurried production and financial bottom line that reduces artistic standards and panders to what they believe a mass audience wants, no longer challenging them intellectually.

BUT on the positive side, the internet has made much more possible the selling of independent authentic creative work to a very wide and consequently more diverse audience, one that shops now on etsy, and less at Bed Bath and Beyond. You may not be making the big bucks of old, but you can make a living.

So I've opened an etsy shop. I'm starting to make imagery I love again, making paintings again for galleries, and joyously challenging myself to make work that is based on art history, and poetry, and dreams rather than what trend a marketing guru has genuflected in front of.

Don't get me wrong I admire people who've been able to make a nice living in this industry. I'm honored to claim several as good friends. They make imagery that inspires people, makes them happy, that's not always an easy thing to do, especially as well as they do it.

In the end we all have different paths, and different priorities that inform our choices. For me, diversity is what makes the world expand and grow. My creative freedom is probably my top priority, more important to me than most. I don't think that's good or bad, just the way I'm wired. I don't have children, and I keep my lifestyle quite simple to afford that freedom. They were choices I made a long while back, for my sanity really.

I hope that by saying this that I give other people permission to be themselves authentically in whatever way that looks to them, and just them, not anyone else.

I've posted this art college graduation speech by Neil Gaiman on my facebook page. Here's the link. His honest speech is very empowering. "Just make good art". He states it over and over again like a mantra, "Just make good art".

So I've decided to change lanes so I can continue doing just that. The old lane wasn't bad, but for me I needed to move over, to slow down a bit and reconnect to what's most important for me. I want to experience the richness of my life in a contemplative way, and make work from a deeper part of myself, that's where the joy lives for me, it always has.

Thanks for reading : ) I hope to share more soon.

I worked on three postcards over the weekend. With the mixed media that I've been working with lately I've started working on a few at a time.

I find I need the time often to tease out what needs to happen next. Forcing it just doesn't work and having several going at once keeps things fresh and interesting. I've started doing that with paintings too. I like the way it feels.

So here's the first one, an old cigar label, an old tea East Indian tea label, lots of paint, and more hand cut cork stamps. I didn't know it was a compass until the end then the word "search" seemed to be what the whole thing was about. It's what I, and a lot of the people in my world seem to be doing a lot of at the moment.

Have a great week everybody.

Namaste.

I decided to start several more postcards after the last success with "gemini". I've always had an interest in the tarot and oracle decks in general and have been thinking about art that incorporates them in some way lately.

So this just sort of happened as I worked tonight. I used the corks again, and again they add just the right element of pattern and tone on tone atmosphere that I like so much. I'd better get busy carving some more : )

Just lots of layers here of paint, stamps, paper and collaged pieces from my little suitcase of stash. I can see moving to bigger paper for larger pieces soon, this is so much fun.

Happy 4th everybody. Take care.

It's saturday, it's 106 outside, 2 degrees above what they thought would be the high for today. Yesterday the high was 109.

I went on errands early to avoid the heat and decided to hunker down here and paint, organize piles in the studio, and do a postcard.

I have this pile of little acrylic bottles from my mom's old craft stash I got when I cleared out her sewing room. Then my dad gave me his old acrylics several months ago, after a renewed interest in painting that was short lived. I love using these premixed colors to do the postcards. It's fast, and I end up using colors I don't normally think about using. I've been more attracted to saturated colors lately.

This one started out with reds and oranges. Then I collaged part of an East Indian loose tea bag on top with matte medium. I liked the collage bit, so continued with some old patterns from an ABC rug ad, some painted pattern, and some stamping from some of my own home made stamps carved out of corks (the new fake corks actually work best).

It still didn't look done, so I added the alphabet and numbers down the right side, painted over those, added a lacier tone on tone sideways alphabet in the middle. It was starting to really look the way I wanted, but something was missing, so I added my birth sign of gemini with cut out letters and the tiny butterfly.

I really like this one, so much so that I think I'll do the astrology sign for each month as they come due. If I'm pleased with the results I'll print them up as cards for my etsy shop.

You just never know when the creative angels will visit and bless you with some magic.

Stay cool everybody, here's to some rain and a cool breeze.

I've been taking a little mini break on the postcards recently, lots of other things going on including trying to make room for some time to read other books on creativity. Two of my favorites so far are Flora Bowley's book on painting, and Digital Wonderland by the folks at Duirwaigh Studios.

Flora's book is more for beginners but it has some great reminders on how to keep yourself open as you paint. Digital Wonderland is a nice photoshop book more oriented towards collage artists and artist's in general who are not photographers which is a great help. I'm finding a lot a great tips and help in there.

Here's a postcard I created about a week or so ago. I was thinking about sound and wanted to create a visual way of representing it.

Take care everyone and enjoy the rest of your week!