OK, I have a good reason (or 10) for being late today. Just trust me. I could’ve gotten up earlier and written this, but you know what? I have just two days left before school stuff starts for real, and I didn’t wanna. So there.
So where’s the art at? Now that school will suck up a major portion of my life and I won’t get more than an hour or two a night? Well, the good news is that I finished tracing on Saturday night…almost 6 yards of Wonder Under in 23 1/2 hours…
And then last night, I started cutting all that out.
Guess what? It’s not fast. And chicken butt.
It’s fine. I’ll finish it this week hopefully and get it sorted, and then I can spend the next two weeks ironing it to fabric.
My quilt guild met on Saturday, so I did a little more on this…
Which will probably never be finished.
We also walked the dog…
It was after 6 PM before it was cool enough. Speaking of cool, we saw this tarantula and tarantula hawk wasp that had apparently been in a struggle…there were drag marks across the path…
So when you watch our video below, you’ll hear us guessing what is gonna happen next…
Oh no. Well here is what actually happens: The female tarantula hawk wasp stings a tarantula between the legs, paralyzes it, then drags the prey to a specially prepared burrow, where a single egg is laid on the spider’s abdomen, and the burrow entrance is covered. But oh yes, that spider is dinner for the progeny. Yummy. Mmhmm. Yup. Pretty cool to see it, although the creepy crawly things were going up and down my spine the whole time.
This morning, my co-teacher and I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art. It’s not that I don’t like Moore’s stuff…it’s just that I think I need to see it full size and I need to touch it. The security people are very much NOT about the touching. I understand…but also the airspace around things is sacred. Yeah. OK.
Anyway, it was a cool exhibit…quite a few O’Keeffe goodies in the show. You only have until 8/26 though. At the end is an interactive thing where you can sit down and color. I wonder sometimes why teacher professional development doesn’t have more sitting down and coloring, because it calms adults AND kids. The days we do cover pages of units at school are the calmest chillest ever.
And then we hung them up with everybody else’s and left them there.
Which is always a weird thing to do as an artist who sells their work, but this isn’t worth anything except in tribute to O’Keeffe. So there we are.
OK, so for the rest of the day, I need to organize all my clothes, cut the cord with cable TV, finish uploading 12 thousand photos to my art group’s Google Drive, try to organize WTF I’m doing the first week or so of school, finish the gardening list, and I don’t know, read a book or something. I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s book of essays, Burning Questions, but probably need some actual fiction as well. But seriously, these two old ladies of word and image…
When you read about O’Keeffe arguing that her flowers were just flowers, and not female genitalia, not what the masculine gaze demands, and you think back to your art/reading education and realize it was always from the male gaze…man, it just makes making art as a woman such a better thing to be doing in this world. As I get older, I get more and more feminist. I am also less concerned about wearing a bra…although that’s not such a shocker if you know me. OK. Do the things.
Kathy Nida 