Turtle Trax Diary. Page 33
July 24, 2001.
How does your garden grow?
by Lucky Magnolia (Susan Shie)
Page Two of this entry
Above is the Jimmy detail of the lid of Ammo-Amore, the box we did to illustrate our anniversary.
If you like, go to Page One of this diary entry.
In June I got an order from Michel Landerman
of Fairbanks, AK, to make a piece for one of the women in her art quilt
group, Judy Hopkins, who was moving to Juneau. Five friends went together
to buy this piece for Judy, who'd always been their group's doyen and wordsmith.
I sat down with my tarot cards and drew a card, focussing on Judy, what
I remembered of her from when we taught their group in Anchorage, and what
Michel had told me. The Queen of Cups came up in the cards, and she really
fit the bill! A nurturing mother figure, very intelligent and sharing her
wisdom.
I put the five who gave her the little quilt into the piece as flowers in a vase. The wolf signifies the teacher. The Moon, upper right, represents intuition, which is the Queen of Cups' specialty.
The piece is only 8" x 6" and is all done with embroidery, rather than any applique or painting. It's also very beaded.
It's not part of the Kitchen Tarot. Just an image I made up, not at all like what the tarot card that I pulled had. (I used the Universal Waite deck.) That would be boring, swiping, and highly illegal, to use someone else's art image!!! I just drew my own idea once on paper, after thinking about it a while, and then drew it on the fabric. Lots of times I don't draw on paper first, but for a commission, I need to be more careful. With stuff I make just for myself, I usually just let it flow out the first time on the fabric, or whatever surface I'm using. I like that little thrill of daring, making permanent marks on the final surface, with no idea what it'll be.
Anyhow, I hear that Judy liked her piece, which they gave her at her new home in Juneau, at her birthday party. Those Wild Alaskan She-Devil Quilters do get around!
I took this photo of the front door in late
June, hoping to preserve some of its color and design, at least in a picture
of it. It's really fading fast now! After nine years of Ohio weather, the
paint is really coming off and losing its color. I was going to scrape
it, sand it, prime it, and leave it a solid color for a while, so our neighbors
across the street could sell their house, without our door scaring people
away! But their house sold right away, before I could lift my scraper.
So now I can let it be a while longer. I never can decide if I'm going
to try to recreate this design or make a new one. I hate like anything
to redo a composition, choosing to just go at the surface with new images
that come rolling into my head. It's a lot more flowing to just do that,
than having to keep referring to some sketch. But anyhow, for now, it's
just going to become a weathered pastel looking door! Very Santa Fe, ay?
I think I'm really attached to the design that's on the door, so better
to keep it, even as very faded.
June 30 was our 11th anniversary (as long as
you're not counting the 14 years we lived together before we got married,
which we DO count.) This was the first wedding anniversary we got to spend
with Gretchen and Mike, so that made it really nice. It was a very hot
day in Cincinnati, but we all had great fun. We ended up out on the third
floor balcony of their big victorian apartment building, The Roanoke, with
the night lights of Clifton on the Gaslight sparkling all around us. Gretchen
and Mike, and Mike's brother Frank and his girlfriend Kristi, and we sat
and sipped wine and took pictures with various cameras. That evening would
become the subject for the box we'd paint at CraftSummer the next week.
Earlier in the evening, after a yummy meal at Biaggio's,
a sweet little Italian restaurant on their street, we went into Graeter's
Ice Cream parlor and bought some desserts to take home! I don't eat desserts
anymore (my simple middle age diet plan!), but I broke ranks for this celebration
and enjoyed it fully! You can see here that Gretchen and Mike also loved
cooling off with ice cream on the balcony! What a fun day that was!
And the next day, Sunday, we went to where Gretchen works, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and toured all the galleries. We got to see the giant cobalt blue Chihuly Venice chandelier that the museum had just purchased and installed in the atrium, and which Gretchen got to help install. It is so beautiful and that museum is really superb. I'm very happy that Gretchen works there, because I feel she truly belongs in a place where art is taken very seriously, as she takes it.
After the museum trip, Jimmy and I said goodbye to our kids and
drove up to Oxford, OH, which is about an hour and a half northwest of
Cinci. We taught our fifth year at CraftSummer,
a program of Miami University, where we love to teach!!!! Our class was
Diary Painted Furniture and we had a full workshop of 15.
Above is Kathleen Carels with some of the pieces she worked on during that week. Besides the painting on the glass of a picture frame and the suitcase (which is brilliant!), she also did a wooden tray and a white tux jacket, which had started as her dropcloth!
We set up the airbrush works in a room next to our main classroom,
and orchestrated a system in which we could work on 16 tee shirts at once!
There's another "wall" of boards behind this one, so a galley
effect is made. Here Sarah Lanman and Cathy Bartos both are hard at work
on the backs of the shirts, which are nearing completion. Sarah is making
the big blue lips on all the shirts, like the lips she painted in the class
on her childhood-through-college desk. And Cathy is putting black outlines
and details on many of the images already put on by other students. Everyone
had at least one turn on the shirts. Some took more, depending on how much
they liked working with airbrush.
All the shirts say "CraftSummer 2001...Miami" on them, on the front. You don't want to get them confused with Turtle Art Camp shirts, after all!
Carol Barton, far right in this picture, always
teaches the same week we do. (It's a plan!) She teaches artists' books,
like pop-ups and tunnel books. She wanted to go visit some women near Oxford
who are friends of her friends in the Washington DC area, where Carol lives.
So Carol and I went out to meet Rose Marie Osborne (beside me) and Jules
Kiani (beside Carol) on July 4, and got a wonderful reception and fireworks
display of the first degree! Next night, Jimmy came back with us, along
with Tom Madden, center in the photo above, who was teaching electroplated
metals that week, and who is now part of our in-crowd of teachers at CraftSummer!
Here everyone is in Jules' huge and wonderful garden.
In this shot, everyone is just standing there, admiring the peacefulness
of Jules and Ro's pond and farm at twilight. Hundreds of birds, many of
them red winged blackbirds, were preparing for roosting for the night.
The sound was amazing, because all you heard was birds. No cars, no people.
Just peace!
And this is Baxter, the duck who came to the pond
a month earlier, who was raised by chickens, and who thinks he's a chicken.
Jules is hoping he finds a ladyfriend and figures out how to fly south
for the winter. He looks pretty lonely out there, alone on that big pond,
so we hope the best for him, too. If you make chicken sounds, he comes.
It's a problem.
After supper of salmon, shrimp, salad, cheesecake,
and margaritas, Jules pulled out her antique fiddle and played a little
for us. It was lovely! She's a bluegrass musician, and Rose Marie plays
guitar. Tom plays banjo, and I play guitar, but we both admitted we are
way, way out of practice. Maybe next year!!!!!!!
Jules is a leather worker, who makes knife sheaths for handmade and antique knives made by friends of hers. She travels around to black powder type rendevous and sells the knives and sheaths. You can imagine how much Jimmy and Tom drooled over the work! We saw a little pearl handled French Army Knife from WWII, and Jimmy and I both decided to buy it for the other, for an anniversary present. I went out of the room for a second, and when I came back with my money, ready to slip the knife out of the case and buy it secretly from Jules, the knife was already gone! I knew right away that Jimmy had already taken it for me. I love that knife. And I ended up buying him some music CDs.
So then, even though it was no longer July 4th, we got a second
fireworks display beyond belief! Here's a little tower I piled up, of some
of the firecrackers that were going to be blasted to Kingdom Come in this
night's show! It was wonderful! After that, none of us wanted to ever bother
with municipal fireworks displays again. This was the tops!
As we drove back to Miami University, we all talked at once. We feel we now have wonderful new friends in Oxford, well, two miles out, on their 18 acre farm. We hope we get asked back to teach at CraftSummer again next year, and that Jules and Ro will be home and ready for company again. Again we'll take the margarita makings and some food, and hope to see Baxter the Chicken/Duck's big family!!!
Back at CraftSummer on Friday afternoon, the
Walkabout began! Everyone in the program walks together to each of the
five or six studios of different media and gets a mini talk from the instructor
and a show of the work made that week.
Here are Joyce Ponder, coordinator of CraftSummer for many years now, and Kelly Malec Kosak, the new director of the program, who's also a metals prof at Miami U. They're standing with one of the sculptures made that week by a student in Ken Rowe's class.
Well, this is actually before the Walkabout.
In our classroom, we did show and tell almost every day, and here is Cathy
Bartos doing her final talk about her piece on Friday morning. She made
a wooden chest about her family. That's her floating in the air, holding
her husband's hand, as he anchors her to the ground. Sounds familiar to
me! This piece has a ton of writing on it, and is lined with purple leopard
print fabric.
Joy Mansfield made a box of the four elements
to express her life and that of her sons. This water side was my favorite,
but all of the sides are very strong images and flow together well. They
each have a feel that really makes you think of their element distinctly.
Off we go to New Orleans with J. Harris and
his chair. J. is mainly a ceramist, so he started molding tons of crawfish
for the chair right away, and if you look carefully, you can see some of
them on the seat of the chair. Sorry you can't see the fringes of beads
that hang down under that seat! J. put some voodoo spells to make a woman
love a man, and some to get rid of her later, on the slats of the chair,
and even did some fine drawing on the piece, while growling around that
he doesn't draw. Yeah, yeah.
On top of the chair is a clay ... alligator ... that J. had already made and had been holding onto for something special. It looks grand up there. Also he kept going back to Wal-Mart to get more stuff to either put on the chair or at least think about. I think he now has enough gee-gaws to last him a few chairs! Or maybe he'll have to take up art quilts!
Linda Scholten's mother died unexpectedly this
Spring, and Linda decided to make a chair about her, to move through some
of her grief. On the seat of this chair is her mom's Mayonaise Cake, complete
with the recipe! And on the back (this side) are her mother and grandmother,
in their gardens. On the back back is a very nice portrait of Linda's mom.
She also made an end table about the saint SHE made up a few years ago, St. Oblivia. (My inventing St. Quilta the Comforter has inspired a few artists to come up with their own saints, which is great, because Quilta is mine!) Anyhow, St. Oblivia has a magic toaster. You write your problems on a piece of her special toast, pop it down, and she incinerates your problems. Poof! The table is not the first piece Linda's done on this theme. There is also at least one art quilt, made in our classs a few years ago. I think it's a really cool concept. Maybe she'll start making art out of old toasters!!!!!
This is the whole class. Front row: Tiffany
Hoffman Rees, Jennifer Theisen, me, Debbie Downie, Marsha Reynolds, Elaine
Brandner, and behind her, Tammy Strong. Middle row: Linda Scholten, Joy
Mansfield, Cathy Bartos, Kathleen Carels, and Mary Ann Fuller. Back row:
Sarah Lanman, Lois Lammers, Jimmy, Chris Ryan, and J. Harris. We wore our
Diary Painted Furniture tee shirts all day and made everybody else fashion
jealous. It's part of our CraftSummer tradition!
This is the central image of the ammunition
box we painted in the class at CraftSummer, about our anniversary night
at Gretchen and Mike's. It's called "Ammo-Amore" and is 33"
x 12" x 7". The box was raw and roughsawn pine, hard as anything
to paint on, very dry and bumpy, regardless of lots of sanding. But I persisted!
After you sand and wash the furniture, you prime it with waterbased white
paint. Then you put on the images, and finally draw in the lines and writing.
Last comes varnishing the piece. So this is us and goblets of the Love
Goat wine we took down to Gretchen's from Wooster.
This
is the inside of the above lid. Gretchen and Mike have these flying saucer
and stars patio lights on their balcony, so I put those all across the
inside lid, along with a big Love Goat head. When we got the Love Goat,
a Bully Hill wine that is wonderous, we also bought a teeny weeny 1 oz.
bottle of Sour Puss, because it had a black cat face on it, and Gretchen's
cat Isis is all black. So here is a huge version of that tiny bottle of
raspberry schnapps we got for Isis to look at, and here is Isis, in green,
admiring her bottle of Sour Puss.
Below Isis and her bottle, on the inside bottom
of the box, are me and Jimmy, with Gretchen and Mike flanking us, and Kristi
and Frank beside them, like a wedding party, since this was an anniversary
party. You can't see it, but the ice cream and strawberries and Mike's
guitar and Frank's giant SLR digital camera are also in this part, on the
side walls, along with Paul McCartney's hands image from Wings, because
we were playing "Wingspan" that night. It 's the new two disc
compendium of music by Wings. We all love it! We also played it too much
in the CraftSummer class, because it's so good. But don't worry, we played
lots of other cool music there, too. Gotta have atmosphere to create by!
This is a painting I made in April, about my favorite store, The
Wooster Food Co-op. I gave it to the co-op, because I feel very sad and
sentimental, because the store was changing its name to Wooster Natural
Foods. The painting is 24" square on wood.
Now I'm a member of the newly named store's council, like I was for many, many years before. I'm still going to call it The Co-op though. Grrrrrr. Anyhow, in the picture is my brother Jimmy on the left. He isn't old, but has albinism like I do. He's 53, three years older than me. Passing over the free range brown eggs, you'll see Terry Moser on the right, the manager. In the bottom right corner is his daughter Gemini, only it also looks like Brandy Schafrath, who also works there. It's a mixture of the two women, I've decided!
Other images in the piece are the great garlic, bread, bulk herbs and spices, rainbow candles, and the really fine old weighing scales we customers use to measure out our herbs from Frontier Herbs, a women's coop in Iowa. The squirrels are the logo I put on the business card design for the co-op back in the 80s, and which I hope will remain their image, regardless of name change. The Co-op has been in Wooster since 1969, and gets better and better with age! Come see it and shop!
That's it for now. I plan to be back with a new diary entry on Sept. 28, my birthday. Lots of weeding to do in the gardens between now and then, and two camps to have here, starting tomorrow!! Lots of art to make!! Maybe we'll have bought our new car by then. We've got one all picked out. Just waiting for the right signs! Though we adore our darling Isuzu Trooper named Babycakes, she's got 205,000 miles on her, and a sweet new Subaru Outback is calling us.
See you Sept 28. Adios, Lucky
If you like, go to Page One of this diary entry.
Turtle Moon Studios
Susan Shie and James Acord
2612 Armstrong Dr
Wooster, Ohio 44691
330-345-5778
email: turtles@bright.net
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