Eldest Daughter, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″
If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It’s a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it’s time to reflect on what’s come before.
Here’s something fun and cool for those of you into personality quizzes and such. It’s a blog-type analyzer! Insert a URL and it spits out a type. It took about seven seconds to pop this out about mine:
ESTP – The Doers
The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.
The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.
These babies are hake (pronounced HA-kay) brushes and they’re great for encaustic paint. They meet encaustic’s technical requirements (they’re heat resistant with a metal ferrule & natural bristles) while making the most gorgeous, juicy, splooshy marks imaginable.
I buy mine in the sumi-e ink section of my local art store but you can find them online too.
Portugese artist, Susana Soares is doing some science-y work. She’s developed a glass breath chamber for diagnosing disease with honeybees. You can read more here.
Filmmaker, Michael Moore, has written some interesting things about what an Obama administration might mean for artists. Here’s a tasty bit from his longer message…
We may, just possibly… see a time of refreshing openness, enlightenment and creativity. The arts and the artists will not be seen as the enemy. Perhaps art will be explored in order to discover the greater truths. When FDR was ushered in with his landslide in 1932, what followed was Frank Capra and Preston Sturgis, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange and Orson Welles. All week long I have been inundated with media asking me, “gee, Mike, what will you do now that Bush is gone?” Are they kidding? What will it be like to work and create in an environment that nurtures and supports film and the arts, science and invention, and the freedom to be whatever you want to be? Watch a thousand flowers bloom! We’ve entered a new era, and if I could sum up our collective first thought of this new era, it is this: Anything Is Possible.
Attended a dinner a mile below the tower in 2nd Street to celebrate the raising of the roof of an African Church. About 100 white persons, chiefly carpenters, dined at one table, who were waited upon by Africans. Afterward about 50 black people sat down at the same table, who were waited upon by white people. Never did I see people more happy. Some of them shed tears of joy. A old black man took Mr. Nicholson by the hand and said to him, “May you live long, and when you die, may you not die eternally.” I gave them two toasts, viz: “Peace on earth and good will to man,” and, “May African Churches everywhere soon succeed African bondage.” The last was received with three cheers.
Alyson Stanfield, the Art Biz Coach, has come up with a new series of affirmations & they’re just what the doctor ordered for this weird economy. You don’t need to be an artist to appreciate. Just open to hearing a postive message about money and flow.
