Course and annoyed but still chatty

January 30, 2013
Found Object: plastic thingy that I found on the road by my mailbox.
Word of the Day: brusque

January 31, 2013
Found object: a blue puzzle shaped eraser that I sliced into four pieces
Words of the Day: magpiety and peevish

Wandering while being grumpy (but sitting still all the while)

January 27, 2013
Found Object: green ribbon
Words of the Day: Empathy and Pilgrimaging

January 28, 2013
Found Object: Plastic Bird Foot (and a metal pin from one of the things where you press your hand or your face into the back of the pins and you have a contour of your hand or face in pins/ nails. But I didn't take it because it needed to be with its fellow metal bits.)
Words of the Day: Churlish and Collins

January 29, 2013
Found Objects: Blue Pen with blue ink, wispy gray feather, a dying wasp
Word of the Day : congruent

Lost, discarded and reclaimed

January 23, 2013
Found objects: The rapiograph pen I lost last week and the tea I lost yesterday. The black lines are from the pen and the wash is from the tea.
Words of the day: melancholy and algebra

January 24, 2013
Found object: nothing
word of the day: gourmand

January 25, 2013
Found Objects: word fragment and a local airfield map crumbled up in the kindling bin.
Word of the Day: amorphous

January 26, 2013
Found Objects: a leather thingy piece and a porcupine quill
Word of the Day: Offalist

The New Kid (Part 1)

 It was the new kid's first day.  She was a little nervous.

Some of the other kids were just so different from her.  How would she ever fit in?

Some of them had quite different ways of expressing themselves.  

VERY different from anything she had ever known.

Some of the girls seemed to purposely exclude her from their conversations. 

And she just felt so alone.

You can't compare idiots with artists, necessarily...

January 21, 2013
Found objects: blue feather, an eye that I cut out of paper last year sometime and lost, a coil of yarn made from loose hair I found on my dog.
Words of the day: Demonstrative and Neddy*

January 22, 2013
Found objects: orange seeds found in 2 of the 3 oranges I ate today. The oranges were supposed to be seedless.
Word of the day: Disparate

* A note on today's blog title:  A neddy is a donkey or in slang, an idiot.  Artists demonstrate what's going on in society.  Sometimes artists seem to be acting like idiots.  But that comparison is not a valid one...as the artist is reflecting the insanity/idiocy in society.  This is all in theory of course.  Sometimes theory and real life don't jive.  They indeed, are sometimes disparate.

Loving life more than Monsanto

January 20, 2013
Found Object: an empty licorice candy box left on the kitchen table
Words of the Day: Biophilia and Atrophy

Yesterday, my husband had to go into Portland to get books for class.  My daughter didn't want to go.  She wanted instead to curl up on the couch (that was pulled out to the full sized bed) and draw.  She wanted nothing to do with the outside world.  Snuggling- that was her objective.

I wanted to get out of the house.  I had a romantic idea that leaving the house would be fun.  So my husband and I left the dog in charge and wandered out.  We went to the bookstore, the art store and Trader Joe's.  We realized upon getting to the highway that our daughter had the right idea in staying home.

We encountered numerous jerky drivers on our trek down 295.  Upon pulling into the bookstore parking lot, some guy who was banging a u-turn in the parking lot almost plowed into our car...then yelled at us for pulling to an open parking spot that he was using as a turn around.

The art store was non-eventful save for the 8 year old boy that I thought was pocketing drawing pencils.  I'm not sure if he was or not.  His parents seemed completely tuned out to what was going on with him.  This of course is my perception.  I after all left a 110 pound Maine Black Dog in charge of a 12 year old girls.  Who am I to judge?

Trader Joe's was gross.  We went because a friend had been talking about the fake good and plenty licorice candy coated candies that were really good.  We wanted some.  And a sandwich.  Maybe a cheap bottle of wine.  Blurg.

The parking lot was a mad house.  No spots and people zooming in when other folks had been waiting for the empty spots.  Gross.

The store was packed and we both questioned why we were there.  Nothing was any better than the local grocery store near our house.  Yeah, we got the candy and some saffron.  But everything else was over priced and the store was filled with people.  Perhaps because Saturdays before football playoff games are mad houses filled with ravenous people filling their huge carts with stuff- meat and chips and meat and beer and chips and cheese and bread and soda and candy and meat.

Maybe.  I don't know.

My daughter had the right idea.  But the candy was good.  And I love saffron rice.  I'll go out into the greenhouse soon and grab some kale to make rice and greens for dinner.

The box the candy came in is what I used to make today's image.  I question where exactly the organic produce sold at TJ's comes from.  There is so much local food grown right near my house all year long, I usually don't bother with "organic."  I can meet the farmers and see how much they love their plants and livestock.  They care and put effort and commitment into their food produce.

This is the best candy.

Itchin' to boast about fightin'

January 17, 2013
Found Objects: a flattened rusty bottle cap and a white feather
Thing I lost: a brand new .07 black inking pen
Word of the Day: Impish

January 18, 2013
Found Object: One of the schools I was at today was having "Fresh Fruit Friday" and I was given a banana. I ate it and I didn't feel like saving the peel to place on this drawing. Also I ate about 5 oranges and another banana. No objects to display. You'll have to trust me.
Word of the day: Accolade

January 19, 2013
Found object: word fragment talking about Marlon Brando.
Word of the day: Bellicose (I think appropriate with the Brando thing and a little dog.)

Safe Friends who judge your milk (shake)

January 15, 2013
Found Objects: a shopping list and a pine cone
Gross Thing that I wasn't allowed to pick up: dead skunk
Word of the Day: Amicable

January 16, 2013
Found Object: Penny found heads up (found at my house in the living room- nowhere near any grossness (just in case you were worried))
Thing I found but thought better of picking up: loose 1 inch square tile on the floor of a girls bathroom stall in one of the schools I was at today (I was at 4 different schools today)
Words of the Day: Galactometer and Benign

We always go there...

January 13, 2013
Found object: purple string; the cast offs of three beets that were left on the paper for 3 hours staining it pink in four places
Word of the day: Incessant

January 14, 2013
Found Object: plastic bat ring and fragment of a tape dispenser. (What I really found was two fake fingernails but my coworkers said it was too weird and I threw them away.)
Word of the day: Patronize 

Sniveling harshly that I love you...

January 10, 2013
Found Object: a very very small two whole button
Word of the Day: Servile

January 11, 2013
Found Object: yellow eraser
Word of the Day: vituperative

January 12, 2013
Found Object: bone fragment from a ham hock
Word of the Day: Ardent

Helping each other soar...

January 9, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
Found Object: small magnet with the word "NEED" printed on it.
Word of the Day: Phalanx

January 8, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
Found Objects: animal crackers (as purposefully left for me to find by a lovely coworker), glitter stars, shiny stars from a garland, and the word gift
Word of the day: volar (the Spanish word of the day I found on one of my searches because the animal crackers flew across the room to be found by me and because all my coworkers help me to fly!)

A collection of truth searches?

January 6, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
Found Object: Glittered Stars (found while cleaning up holiday decorations) and a word phrase fragment from a book
Word of the Day: Compendium

January 7, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
Found Objects: Key, Paper Butterfly, Adhesive Visitor's Pass with only the word "well" exposed
Word of the Day: Discern

Irreproachable ambiguity: Unknown keys and skeletons

January 4, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
 graphite 
Found Object: key tag (actually it was my key tag that fell out of my pocket before I walked into a school today and then I found when I was leaving the school later in the afternoon.)
Word of the day: Equivocal

January 5, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
 graphite 
Found objects: ribbon, paper with "Name and Date", and staples found in various locations
Word of the Day: Canonize

Reoccurring Dream: Dinosaurs in the Basement

There are dinosaurs living under my house.  In the basement.

But the basement is not really a basement.  It is a whole other house, in Florida. But it is under my house and the basement.  And there are dinosaur living down there.

They have a colony set up.  I watch them from the stairs.  They have termite-like mounds set up in the corners of the rooms.  They are tall adobe structures that mingle with the wicker furniture.  It is warm and I cannot account for the full streams of sunlight that billow into the windows.  This is the basement and it is nighttime in the winter.  Why is the basement in Florida?

The dinosaurs actively ignore me.  They speak in a mix of Russian and French.  I can only understand pointed words that they exaggerate seemingly on purpose in my presence.  They say that I am not supposed to be they.  They can't understand why I keep jumping on their roof.  Also, they say, there should not be snow in July in Florida.  The ice that I track and dump on their roof is leaking into their walls.  It threatens to wash away their adobe structures.

I climb back up the basement stairs.  In my living room, winter has settled in.  It is cold.  It is night.  I am kept awake by the dinosaur party in my basement.

Found Object Drawing a Day for January 2013 (at least so far)

January 1, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
watercolor and graphite 
Found object: button (found in my studio tucked in a corner among dustbunnies)
Word of the Day: Sapid

January 2, 2013
3.5 inches by 4.5 inches
watercolor and graphite
Found Object: a dime in my dryer lint trap
Word of the Day: Obdurate

January 3, 2013
4.5 inches by 3.5 inches
graphite
Found Object: a paper clip and a swedish fish on my coworkers' office floor. (One of my coworkers threw the swedish fish on the floor so that I could "find" it.)
Word of the Day: Audacious

Keep Children Safe...

I found a quote from Dostoyevsky in an alumni magazine I get every so often.  I ripped it out and posted on my refrigerator as a reminder when I get milk for my coffee.  I wish everyone had such a reminder.

Children often don't spare the truth.  They see to the bone of the issue.  Such is true in the images from the travelling exhibit "A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against Censorship."  In Maine, we are fortunate enough to have this collection of artwork be on view at the Meg Perry Center in Portland for the month of January 2013.

There is an opening event on Friday, January 4.  Held during the First Friday Artwalk here in Portland, I hope folks go bear witness to these powerful works.  I will be teaching personal space to Kindergarten children in Lewiston, Maine then heading down with my own daughter.  I hope to see you there.  And if the distance is too far, I wish wherever you are is safe and filled with happy green.

Happy 2013