A Non Techy Artist in a Technical World

Give me a lump of clay and I’ll be just fine is my motto. Then arthritis struck my wrists and hands and poverty hit my wallet. It was time to finally make the switch over from a creative artsy career to an organizational managerial one. No wish-y washy “I can do both” attitude was going to make me successful. A colleague needed my project management services and I took the plunge. The water was warm and friendly even though it was murky. Like everything else in life, I decided that I would have to make my own rules and systems to follow. As long as I successfully kept the projects on track who cares what form my organizational systems took. Now I am working towards proficiency in excel and having a completely mobile office in order to accommodate both onsite time and working from home time. Cell phones are just mini computers these days so I figured that I would start with that and decide later if I needed a tablet. My laptop is just too heavy to lug around with my arthritis and stressed out muscles. Friends and coworkers give me advice on all the cool and useful apps out there. So for starters I thought I should try something fun--Pandora. Looked it up on my laptop, read reviews. Signed up. Then put the app on my phone. When the laptop and the phone were playing different songs on the same Aqua station that I set up I was discombobulated. Then I signed off of the laptop portal but the music played on. Panic! What if Pandora still is playing even though I closed the window? Will it eat up my 40 hrs in less than 2 days—guess I’ll find out. It’s only a buck to extend music for the rest of the month. I can handle that. Breathe, relax. Go close Pandora on the cell phone, but there is no sign out option on the screen. Hit the home button but the music just plays on. It never ends, just like the background music at the theme parks. Make it stop! Finally discovered that the menu button was the key to other options. Yaaa! Enough technology for today, where’s the Sculpey clay?

Childhood things

Rubber tires, fake fur, and old cut up pantyhose from Halloween costumes past. Paints, papers, jars, and stencils. Bits of clay, wire, metal, and glitter. Little boxes of round pebbles, dulled broken pieces of glass, various hardware, and springs. Scraps of ribbon, leather, and feathers. Old dried flowers, seeds, trinkets and things. Well played with matchbox cars, a stack of Chinese fortune papers. Spirit pins and an old dried up friendship flower from a guy just to say thanks for all the help in school. Wax candle stubs and candle molds. Notebooks filled with ideas and sketches and memories. Boxes of letters from friends, a time capsule opened at last. All of this gets sorted through. Some discarded, others treasured, none overlooked.

Early Influences

I remember painting in kindergarten and first grade. Those huge jugs of watery tempura paint and stiff brushes with layers of hard, chipped paint covering the handles. That pretty much described the easels as well. I wanted to be out in the hallway painting for hours each day, but we were only allowed out there once every couple of weeks. That was where I painted my rendering of the Statue of Liberty. I won an award for it. Looking at it years later I realized that it was a pretty realistic silhouette. Undoubtedly, this was one of the places that inspired my art career years later. The other place would have been at my grandmother's dining room table making crafts with construction paper, glue and glitter.

The Sketch Book Project 2012

The project began in 2011. The Art Co-op in NY had a call for artists to fill a 5 X 7 notebook about 30 pages (if you count both sides of each page) and mail back to them in 2012. They digitize them and then send them touring around the country. Book Art show attendees are issued a library card which is scanned with each book they look at so that the artist can see who and how often their book is looked at. It struck me as a really cool idea so I signed up. I saw the project as a way for me to expand my horizons. Since I have been sculpting for years I have gotten away from the 2D arts. I hoped that I could still inspire through a medium so beyond my comfort zone. For several months I thought about my book and worked on the cover sporadically. Beyond that I was having a bit of artist's block.