Picture of the day Friday

Today I'm grateful my Mom held on to all these little things from my childhood. This little wallet purse is labeled 1980, before I was born, so I must have used it when I was real little. Pretty Awesome, I think I may use it again =]

Gratitude of the day Picture

I've decided to take a lesson from all the law of attraction hubub and start my own type of "gratitude journal". Since i am a visual person, I'm going to do it with images. I have always taken snapshots in my mind of beautiful things I want to remember. I have some from when I was very young. My favorite is from a camping trip for my brother's birthday we went on to Roosevelt lake outside of Phoenix, I was probably 7 or 8.. Since these pictures are all in my head, let me try and paint it with words...

We were driving way too fast again on the Apache trail, a dirt road clinging to cliffs, once a horse trail used by the Apache's. We come to a hairpin turn inside a steep canyon with a bridge and a cave off to the side of the road we had explored before. But this time the spot was even more magical, we just had to pull off to the side and get out of the car. A huge monsoon had just passed through and the canyon was streaming with waterfalls coming down the cliffs on three sides into a roaring river under the bridge. The canyon was reververating with the sound of rushing water, and smelled like fresh rain in the desert (my favorite smell). It was one of those moments when you feel small under Earth's beauty and power, and soblessed to witness something as rare as waterfalls in the desert.

We pulled over and stood on the bridge, along with everyone else on the road who could not resist, and I took this mental picture and vowed to remember it forever. And i do! So many years later, my cells are completely renewed, yet this picture is fresh in my mind, I can go right back there. I can feel the rough concrete bridge under my fingers. The tangible photographs I take have never stacked up to the mental ones, I guess they are just reminders, tabs in the files.

I'm sure this is why i became a photographer early on, to capture all these beautifull things for others to see. And I've gotten away from it lately, so I'm going to start a picture of the day of something awesome and post it here..... here is the first one..

Some purple basil and chives from the garden for tonight's dinner, my favorite raku bowl i made this year, and Trigger my gorgeous cat sniffing chives.

Owl Masks

Chrome Green Raku
Tomato Red
Orchid Purple RakuHere's the 3 best owl sculpture masks i made this year. Click on the color to see them in my etsy shop. I tried to make a bunch of them in candy colors, but damn is it a long process! I broke 4 or so in the process, raku is a dangerous game, but so fun when they come out unscathed and all crackled and burnt black. Scrub off the ashes and a shiny new piece shows up. And they have a faint scent of campfire. I Love it!

Wedding Season!!

Wedding season is busy as ever, I'm making things as fast as i can, and making lots of good connections as well. A customer of mine just contacted me, turns out she is an Amazing wedding photographer. Upon looking through her site i found more of my work on one of her clients! what an awesome coincidence. Apparently we have styles that really mesh. i love her work. Check it out.

Dreambox photography

Fugly Art. let it be Fugly

For the past oh, 7 years, i've been working on making it pretty. When i did interior plant design my boss would say "Make it pretty'. And thats what I did all day, and still do. I make my floral shop pretty, make nice arrangements. But lately, out of boredom I've also been making funky, sometimes downright ugly arrangements. for example, pulling all the petals off the sunflowers so they are just a big black eye, and arranging them in a row with cattail spikes. and i'm always surprised when they sell. People like unique.

I've been a jane of all trades for as long as i can remember, but have become a master of none. Now i am determined to overcome my Libra tendencies to flip flop and buckle down and become a master of a material. And on that journey i am going to make some Fugly art in the process of learning that material. So here's my first attempts at Raku, exciting, hot, and fast. i learned so much from making these tiles I will not be deterred by their Fugliness!

I got this crackle by waving the red hot tile in the air before lighting it on fire. You can hear the glaze cracking, sounds awesome =]

Goddess skateboard

This is my one-nighter skateboard design. I wanted to just do it and not worry about the outcome, and not try to make it to perfect. Go with the flow ya know.. And surprisingly it turned out great. It's a huge longboard skateboard. We are going to get hardware and wheels to skate it someday. meanwhile, it brightens up the living room.

Art Sabbatical

Well I've been holding off on doing art for about a month now (ok i did one quick painting will post later) I am getting super antsy. I want to do metal work, but i have to teach myself to weld first and go collect some metal, which requires days off and summer trips into the desert whew~

I have started the welding in my garage (scary and fun)

After my decision to switch gears i planned a weekend trip to my favorite escape. Madre Grande monastery. It was so wonderfully quiet I kept falling asleep in the meditation room. It's very inspiring to be with people truely working to get off the grid and change society with thier own acts.

I love photographing the trees there too, here's some i did with the age-old technique of breathing on the lens~ and flipping the camera around super fast. Even harder when it's super hot and dry.

This one really shows the heat