9 to 5 Poet

On Saturday, I received my “pretty” print from Today is Pretty.  It is, to overuse the word, very very pretty.

I hightailed it to Target today and picked up a cute little floating photo frame and hung it this morning.  The wall is in my entry way, just as you come in the door.  It matches the red kitchen, to its right, which unfortunatley, has no more wall space. 

In other random news, I’m about a little over half done with my freelancing gig. It’s totally time consuming, as we can see from the little blogging, but so much fun.  My day work has been slower than all get out, so it has been so nice to have a diversion at home to keep my Capricornian-brain whirring.  I’ll be glad when I’m done before I go on vacation, but I’m loving it now.  I’m such a geek.   

I just want to mention that I never win things.  My dad and my brother are both really lucky. Before I was born, my dad won a bunch of stuff of game shows, including a car.  My dad would challenge my brother to all sorts of ridiculous long shots and my brother would win. 

Me, not so much.  A game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit every now and then. But never a sweepstakes or contest. 

So I’m incredibly excited that I actually won something today.  Sheri, over at one of my favorite photoblogs Today is Pretty, hosted a freebie contest. All one had to do was comment on a specific post and she would draw names for people who won a print of one of her awesome pics.  And I won!  Something I can actually use, beautiful photographic art!  Yay!

You can check out the photo I won here (mine’s the one in the middle).  I’ll post a pic of where I hang it, once I find out where it goes in the home. 

This weekend, Soulless Machine and I got to attend an art festival in our neighborhood, Red Hot Art.  It was probably the most punk art festival I’ve ever been to.  (I felt very uncool — no tattoos or dreads on me.)  There were several clusters of musicians, slack rope walkers practicing on a small slack rope tied between two trees, and very affordable and cool cutting edge art, including…

• There was one gentleman (who’s name I didn’t get) taking votes on two of his paintings. The winner “lived” and the loser was going to be whacked with an ax. 
• Cody Kiser, who had cool Picasso-ish paintings
• William Hessian, an illustrator and painter
• Elizabeth Montgomery, mixed media collage-y type paintings
• Lucas Glusenkamp, really awesome sci-fi/horror inspired art

Looking at the list of artists, I noticed that cris t halverson, whose very cool digital images got published in the first issue of Asphalt Sky, attended, but I didn’t see his booth. Bummer!

I am also a little bummed that I didn’t buy a very specific painting.  It would have looked so nice in our living room, another red item to match our red couch, curtains, chair, etc., and now I can’t find it online. The moral of the story:  buy it now. 

Despite these two disappointments, I was really impressed by the Red Hot Art Fair. It was partially supported by the local arts organization, Steven Square Center for the Arts, and I’m wondering: why am I not a member?  Something to ponder for later.

Back at the beginning of NaPoWriMo, Christine wrote an article at read. write. poem., that summarized some experimental forms.  One of the forms she described was the Rothko, which a poet writes when looking at a painting by Rothko.  There are other artist-forms, and people commented on other possible permutations. 

After that, I thought a Frida Kahlo form would be cool.  Kahlo created self-portraits that relied heavily on her subconscious and her self-image, so I thought a self-portrait with flaws would be apropos.  I never wrote anything on it until this morning, when this poem occurred to me while I was showering. The subconscious is an amazing thing. 

Self-Portrait with Flaws
after Frida Kahlo

I am not sewn together or shorn.  I am
cobbled together and clunky.  I am unsmooth
and imperfect, a trembling vessel
riddled with dings. 
I am encased in shells, invisible
layers of lacquer and shine.  But I am also
spiderwebbed with cracks, thin fissures
zigzagged across my skin.  I am
permeable, though I rarely admit this.
Crack me open, like an egg
and you will find
the soft structure of my self
sleeping, unprotected, inside. 

A close friend of mine from college, Kate, has launched a new site with a friend of hers called Wednesday Machine Arts Collective. This site’s goal is to bring artists and writers together in a virtual arts festival. They plan on connecting artists of different genres together to collaborate on their work. How the collaboration takes shape is up to the artists.

To me, this is one of the best uses of the online arts community — to connect writers and artists from around the world to work together. I’m really excited to see how Wednesday Machine takes shape.

This week, I filled my first Academie journal with morning pages from my bus commute. I’ve been at this practice for about two and a half months now, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I like the accomplishment of filling a journal, but I feel like it all says the same thing. Here are the people on the bus, this is what the landscape looks like, I want to complain about this. I’ve been mentally calling them Mourning Pages for the past couple of weeks.

While I’m trying to think of a better way to spend my 20 minutes on the bus, I made this new journal cover with my new paper and a postcard I bought at the art museum last month. The teeny tiny quote by the bottom of the picture is a quote from a John Keats poem:

She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost

Around the border is my own imagining of what she’s thinking while posing for the picture.

I’m not sure if the cover is done, so I haven’t laminated it yet. I’m going to spend the weekend with it, and see if I like it. This is one of the only creative things I’ve done this week. It feels good to create, even for only an hour or so last night.

The other creative act for the week is a collaborative poem for read. write. poem with Jack from Monkeyboy. it was an interesting experience writing something line by line via email with another person. It’s a pretty cool poem and I know I wouldn’t have written anything like it alone. I will post it after the holiday. Until then, I’ll be spending time with my in-laws and generally making merry.

Happy Holidays!

Today was a long day at work. I knew it was going to be a long day. I had six days off for Thanksgiving (and because I work Saturday) and in the back of my mind I knew that today was going to be long. Those six days off are now a fleeting memory.

Since I knew what was coming, I did a little preventative retail therapy yesterday. I visited my local paper shop and did some buying. I got myself a Paper Palette, which is a huge combination of scrap papers and two different paper color packs, blue and red. Hands down, the Paper Palette is way better.

I sorted it all yesterday into color piles yesterday, while watching Bones Season 1 on DVD. It was so much fun to just sort it, because I couldn’t tell from the package what was included and I was constantly surprised by the papers. Ooh — orange and blue floral! Wow — black with pink paisley! Purple and lavender zebra stripes, cool!

While there are lots of colors represented, my favorites are these deep wine-y magenta fuzzy floral patterns, that are paired with gold metallic relief. It’s fuzzy and pretty. So while I was running around my school like a chicken with my head cut off, I was secretly dreaming of purple paper.

Now if only I wasn’t too tired to play with it. *Sigh*

Today, I’m thankful that I get to see art and learn more about the artist’s inspirations.

Yesterday, my mom and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit, Circling Around Abstraction. While I know O’Keefe’s work only marginally, I have always associated her with her quasi-representational flower portraits and desert landscapes. But what I learned yesterday is that she was committed to abstract art throughout her career.

Several things struck me as I took notes in my journal. First, it was interesting to me that she moved from more representational work, like these fruit portraits here, to ever more abstract images, like these paintings from the end of her career. If I happened on to any of these pictures at another museum, I don’t know if I would have recognized them as O’Keefe. It seemed that she found a happy medium between the overly representational and the overly abstract in her landscapes and flowers.

Second, I never really understood abstract art. I took no art classes in college and so I always feel stymied when looking at an abstract piece. But the exhibit provides an excellent O’Keefe quote that explains her aesthetic:

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, elimination, and emphasis that we get to the real meaning of things.”

At first, I rebelled against her statement, because in my writing, I focus on details in my poetry. But I don’t include all details — I emphasize and eliminate in order to distort and/or represent meaning.

Lastly, I was intrigued by her pelvis images, where the bones are used as a frame in which to view the sky. Somewhere on the explanatory passages, they used the phrase “bone as lens.” As in, O’Keefe used the bone as a lens through which to see the world. That has resonated and stayed with me, ever since I saw it. It’s an interesting movement from interior back out to exterior, and I wonder how that aesthetic informed her work. I also thought it was an interesting mini-trigger for a poem.

Today, I was lucky to participate in a collage workshop at my alma mater. The event was sponsored by West Egg Literati, a student organization that produces an awesome journal and it was lead by my former advisor, Deborah Keenan. While Deborah considers herself a poet first, she is also a pretty accomplished collage artist and each year she runs this workshop.

It was great because it was a no pressure, creative event, like most workshops run by Deborah. All we had to bring was 30 words of writing, 3 backings, and scissors and a glue stick.She gave us a little intro where she discussed her approach to collaging, what works for her. Her approach is interesting because she collects mountains of collage material throughout the year and then when she goes on vacation, she works on her collages. She works with both words and imagery and tries to integrate both into the finished product, although they don’t always end up combined into one piece.

After reading some poems, she sent us off into our corners. Once we got to work, we got to pick through her scrap reserves, which had a great combination of modern and older stuff. I found myself drawn to mostly black and white images, and religious iconography (for some reason), and I spent most of my time on the first one. It was very much a fluid, instinctive experience, although I don’t know how I feel about the finished product…or what it says. When she gave us the fifteen minute bell, I realized I hadn’t used much of my haiku that I brought, so I put together the more spartan second piece. I like it because it has more texture, although again, I don’t know if it’s done.

Finished or not finished, quality or crap, I enjoyed the process of cutting and trimming and gluing together these pieces, and I think that I want to spend more time collaging.

So, my question for you collagers out there, especially those with limited work spaces: how do you organize your scraps? I normally go through my magazines on the day that I collage, but I find that it creates kind of homogeneous pieces. I want to collect, but I’m limited on room. Any advice on organization would be appreciated!

This weekend marked the 44th annual Uptown Art Fair in my neck of the woods. The fair is a major event in our area because it brings a lot of art, people and drama to our cloistered little ‘hood.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the Art Fair, which is often ruled by whether or not I work in Uptown during the event. See, the fair brings hundreds of tourists who converge on a 4 square block neighborhood, take up all the parking, walk through the local shops without buying anything and generally leave their trash everywhere. When I’ve worked my various summer and grad school jobs in the neighborhood (at the bagel shop, movie theater, and furniture store, respectively), I’ve dreaded the arrival of the Art Fair. It always meant lots of snarky pushy customers without much reward. I was never able to tour the art fair, simply because I would be so fed up with the fair crowd after my shifts. One summer, I saw a little sticker on a phone booth that said, “It’s not Uptown. It’s Not Art. And It’s Not Fair,” and I felt vindicated.

Now, as a non-retail working resident of Uptown, I grudgingly admit that the sticker is mostly wrong. It is Uptown, a lot of it is beautiful art, and well, it’s still not fair, but we can be big kids for a weekend. My husband and I toured the stalls this weekend and coveted some really unique and interesting art. Since our finances are tight right now (really, when are they not?), we couldn’t manage the $100-3500 price tags for the pieces we really wanted. So instead, I’m going to offer links to the people I really like, in the hopes that someone out there can afford pretty art.

So here are my favorites, in no particular order:

Chicago native Gabe Lanza creates some really creepy(in a good way) acrylic paintings that are inspired by comic books and packaging from the ’60’s. He also had a blog, which I’m looking forward to exploring.

Mary Beth Shaw from Missouri does some really interesting collages using old black and white pictures. She also has a blog, which showcases her art and processes.

Ann Wood and Dean Lucker, St. Paul natives, do some beautiful and surreal mechanical pictures that you need to see to believe. Their site has video clips, so you can see the art in motion.

I remembered Wisconsite Marvin Hill’s work from last year — he does beautiful water-colored block prints that seem to center around his own understanding of mythology and dreams. I dig the themes and I also dig his technique.

Wendy Detrick Worhsam does these amazingly vibrant paintings of animals. I normally don’t dig on animal art, too cutesy, but her pieces put the animals in semi-surreal settings and are just beautiful. I especially like her birds.

Kina Crow does some wonderfully weird sculpture that centers around these strange little bald figures. There was one at the fair that had three in a row inset into a picture frame, and below it was written “I wonder what they are looking at.” She seems to have a very odd sense of humor, which I like.

Keith Grace’s work didn’t appeal to me at first. He uses a lot of bold colors and large designs that seemed good, but not all that intriguing, until I looked up close and realized that he had collaged typeset words into all of the images. Totally interesting and cool!

My husband really liked Chuck Wimmer’s work, which focuses on really cartoonish paintings of animals. I had to peel Aaron away from the print with the monkeys. Maybe next year.

So if you’re swimming in money, support these artists who come from far and wide to cause traffic jams in my neighborhood. All in all, it’s worth the hassle for a weekend of art.