These shelves may be empty, but I can assure you neither my head or heart are! I am full of enough good memories of each and every one of my customers, shows, fellow Etsy sellers, and followers to last me a lifetime! The projects we have worked on together have been just beyond fun.

My head is about to explode with new ideas for me to work on. Obviously the photography is right up there... I keep thinking of a combination of my photo and quilting, but haven't quite formulated it yet! I found a myriad of wonderful fabrics I have purchased to make garments for myself, but never have had the time to do so! So that is on my agenda. Exploring a whole new part of the country and living the city life instead of our rural existence will take time and be fun!

And of course... there will be grandkid time! We will now be two hours instead of two days from them, so I am thinking we have some lost time to make up for this summer!

Cleaning packing and purging is exposing some real finds! I had totally forgotten about this gem. One year (probably about 1990), in the after Christmas sales, I ran across this doll. I could not leave it in the clearance bin at Toys r Us for fear of it being foisted upon some poor child, so I bought it. It is an amazing piece of fiction - sure to permanently scare any child who encounters it. 

It was evidently developed by a Yale grad (and mother) who felt this was helpful. I hope Yale has reconsidered her diploma by now.

All that stuff that "might be good for something someday"
isn't and probably won't be.
As an artist, I tend to see potential in most things. As an artist who has done both collage and quilts using non-traditional materials, the percentage of potential usage seems to have risen to about 100%. Things of note: A metal heat duct grill that I think I got out of the trash about 30+ years ago. A rusted metal oil space heater that I am sure could have made a fine table. Scraps of every kind of paper imaginable, and drafting supplies that I have sworn I would never use, now that a computer can draw a circle without a ruling pen. Of course there is also the aproximately 50 sheets of dryer lint lifted carefully from the screen, but those DO have potential and will be carted to Virginia. Did I mention the polyester jump suit in gold from about 1980? (My only solace is knowing that there are those of you out there who are saying "why would you get rid of ANY of that")

The important family heirlooms are not
made of crystal or gold.
The cut glass so carefully protected by prior generations means little to me; The small glass that my grandpa kept his pennies in means a lot, but will probably be meaningless to my children. As I sifted and winnowed through the "good dishes" and the other artifacts of the family, I realized that it is the experience that the object evokes is meaningful to me, not the object.

When I was a kid, we went to a farmer's co-op in my dad's home town of Brantwood, WI. A chunk of brick that I got when visiting the ruins of it with my sister last year, means a lot more to me than the china cups my mother so carefully saved through the years. There are many antiques I appreciate for craftsmanship or history, but the mere fact they were owned by a prior generation does not instill greatness in them for me. The older my children get the more I realize that memories are so relative to the individual, and so are the objects that inspire memories. When the time comes for them to clean out my house, I would expect them to say "why the heck did she save this?" a lot. They will not know that the sand dollar was given to me by a close friend or that the plastic magnet from the "Chapel of Love" at the Mall of America is from a very special day. Or that chunk of brick still connects me to my dad

More lessons learned, but that will do it for now. Off to get the couch cleaned off for the person who is buying it today.

My memories are not of place, or even always, of people but of what came from it. I remember a Joseph (the one with the coat of many colors) from pre-school Sunday school. He had a circle that attached with a brad and had many feet on it, so when you moved them it looked like he was walking. I remember carefully choosing the colors for his coat. I remember drawing a moose in kindergarten, and I was dumbfounded when my teacher got so excited about it. It was just a moose!

My first run-in with school authorities was when I (apparently) dripped black paint on the floor of the first-grade while doing my art project. In fourth grade, There was a three-dimensional jaguar for the Amazon (country not software!) display, and my clay sculpture of Lily the dog next door. 

Jumping ahead to middle school, there was the introduction to printmaking and pen and ink drawing, which thrilled me beyond imagining. The combined physicality of carving and the starkness of the line was really compelling to me.

In high school, I also tried my hand at jewelry (couldn't do gold because gold was too expensive at $35./ounce!) and the pottery wheel. Neither really got to me because of the finesse and lack of immediacy in the processes involved, so I did slab clay pieces and discovered welding. And I continued to draw and print.

High School was a challenge for me, and without Don Hunt and Evelyn Bauman I may never had made it out. Their art rooms provided a sanctuary for those of us who didn't quite fit in with the science or jock activities. It was a place you could bare your soul, speak your mind through your hands, and go at your own pace, it was a place where hearing a different drummer was lauded not chided.

Then came adulthood, but I will leave that for another post.

I was not alone in these art rooms. There were many, then and now, who found refuge and joy there; And now budget cuts find them "dispensable". Sorry, but I think not.

Art has been a compulsion and solace for humans since the cave paintings at Lascaux. The arts have, at one extreme, moved our souls and celebrated or exposed human events; and, at the other extreme, made life simply more enjoyable and pretty. The arts are both subjective and objective; They are private in the creation and and public the experience. The arts can be a livelihood, a hobby,  a rehabilitation or a spectator sport. But they are not dispensable or a luxury to society.

What can you and I do? Make sure our kids have a box of crayons as well as an Xbox. Make sure that in between Spiderman and other blockbusters, they get to go to live theater. How about a stroll through a sidewalk art show. Do we get as excited about the art elective as we do about another AP math class. Do we  chuckle at the idea of an art or music choice for a profession; maybe we should acknowledge it is a viable option?

Finally. And maybe most importantly, do we check the opinions of our candidates about education in the arts before we vote? Maybe we should.