Allied Craftsmen Today at the Mingei

So on Wednesday, Julie, in an attempt to force my brain from its nasty circular crap, took me to see the Allied Craftsmen Today exhibit, which is at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park (San Diego) through January 5, so you still have time to go see it. It is an interesting exhibit with great variety and some awesome and inspirational work. That link to the museum includes links to all the artists, so to save myself some trouble, I send you there if you are more interested in a specific artist.

Of course, I start with the one piece where I didn’t get the artist’s name…and I went through the website and couldn’t figure out which one it was…but it’s what looks like wooden balls the size of bowling balls with stains and paint rubbed onto them and animals wood-burned into the surface. I know there was some reference to constellations as well. If Julie remembers who it is, I’ll edit this.

Arline Fisch’s crocheted metal neckwear…

Viviana Lombrozo’s Markings…a quilt that curves out from the wall.

Kathy Miller’s two pieces Speak Softly to Me…

and Character Map, both using a twine/fiber made from Japanese calligraphy pages.

My camera was being its usual bad self, by refusing to let me see anything in the viewfinder. Annoying.

Both Miller and Linda Litteral are in my women’s art group, FIG. I recently posted about Litteral’s paintings after a visit to her studio…here is some of her delicate ceramic work that those paintings reference…

The faces repeat around the bowl as they did around the paintings…

And the insides are carefully glazed as well. She calls these Possibility Bowls.

Julie really wanted me to see these pieces by Sasha Koozel Reibstein. This is Inadequate (with thready pulse)…

and Inadequate (with jagged breath). The ghost image of the ribcage is to show that “we are sometimes inadequately equipped to defend ourselves from emotional blows.”

Yeah. You got that right. Here is a detail of some of the stitching.

Truly beautiful work.

I liked the finish on this piece by Warren Bakley…this is Winter Landscape #1. You can’t really tell in the photo, but the glaze is cracked.

This is Cheryl Nickel’s DNA Mobile…

And Gail Schneider’s animal leg…wish I could tell you which one this is…possibly one of the two Emus?

Joanne Hayakawa’s Inhale…Exhale…ceramic lung paired with lung formed of thorny rose stems, with a background of drawings related to the lungs.

Hayakawa also made this Crow Tea II, a tea set with crow as teapot, exploring what the crow means in our culture.

Is it the harbinger of doom or something else when we drink tea from the crow? As someone who uses crows often in her work, I can tell you they mean many things.

Jeff Irwin’s Jumping Deer Trophy…a porcelain deer that seems to be made of wood and jumping through the wall.

Charlotte Bird is in California Fibers with me. This is one of the three pieces she has in the show, Living Fossils 3.

Julie and I had a discussion about the prevalence of teapots in ceramics…and why. These are seemingly fairly useless as actual teapots, unless you want your tea to fly off without you, which is not to say that they are not beautiful in their own right. These are by Kathy Kapolka Grudzas, who says these are metaphors for the balance in her life.

Upstairs is an exhibit from the permanent collection of the Mingei of animal art…called Menagerie. These two were perched up high on a divider. They are by Ricardo and Miguel Linares and are called Alebrijes, from a dream of their father/grandfather, Pedro Linares.

I liked the shape of this bird.

This is a tapestry woven under the direction of Joseph Domjan. It’s called Fire Peacock and is based on a woodblock that Domjan created.

The museum had a wall covered with batik tjaps that was nice to look at…

I have a few of these somewhere in my house that have never been used. I should just hang them on the wall as art.

The Mingei always has great stuff in their shop. The glass reflection on this piece is unfortunate, but really, I just want the story behind it. We have a cobra-like snake tail coming off some sort of demon…the cobra surrounds the head of a woman.

The demon holds the hands of a child, while standing on the back of a man who is holding the child’s legs.

Yes, there is a drawing in all that somewhere…but I don’t want to copy it. I just want it explained, and then maybe I will draw my version of the demon pulling people apart.

Julie and I wandered the park a little bit, since it was a nice day. These are cocoons of the caterpillars I saw back in June when I was here for my science program…same bush and everything.

Most of the cocoons (chrysali?) had already hatched, but there were a few caterpillars who had procrastinated…

There was also a butterfly or two, but having a shitty camera did not help and they were all blurry.

Christmas gift for Kathy: New functional camera. But I also need a new down comforter. Which one? They cost the same, neither cheap.

Anyway, it was 2 hours where I could think (mostly) about things besides being depressed…although I never seem to leave that behind. It’s always knocking on the door, reminding me that I would have come here with someone else, that something large is missing. I seem to be unable to deal with social situations well…they suck my energy in a disturbing way. I am trying to stay positive about school, since constantly assuming the worst is not allowed, but I feel incredibly drained after social interaction, even in a professional development environment where I don’t even really need to speak. Everyone says I will be better, even using the word “happier” (does such a thing exist?) when school starts. No, I will just be distracted. Maybe that will allow me to recover better…who knows. Maybe I will just come home and crawl into bed, pillow over the head, blocking out the rest of the world. There’s just no way to predict what will happen. I guess my move from negative to positive thoughts includes this intermediary step…from negative to NO thoughts. Positive thoughts require me to have an emotion that just isn’t there at the moment.

It’s a nice exhibit…intriguing and strange and interesting. It’s open until January. Check it out. Good for the happy and sad.

Protected: I Am Not Me

Quilt National 2013 Travel Information

My quilt Spread Out on the Pavement will travel with Collection B for the next year, meaning I might be able to go visit it in San Jose, finances permitting.

Here is the travel schedule for all of the collections:

9/20/13 – 10/27/13: St. Louis, MO–[Collection A & B & C]
Safe Connections
St. Louis, MO

1/15/14 – 4/13/14: Columbus, OH–[Collection C]
Riffe Gallery
Columbus, Ohio

5/6/14 – 7/20/14: San Jose, CA–[Collection A & B]
San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles
San Jose, California

8/14/14 – 9/28/14: Moorhead, MN–[Collection B]
Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County
Moorhead, Minnesota

If you’re interested in what will end up traveling where, you can see the list of artists and what collection they’re in here.

Protected: Late-Night Ramblings of a Tired Person

Burning the House Down, and Other Signs of Mental Frailty

So I almost burned the house down tonight. I don’t even know how. I mean, I do know how, in that one of the stove burners was pushed on (probably when I pushed something out of the way), and I left stuff on the stove, because I’m being lazy and stupid and only half my brain is working, and now I have one less sweater and the entire printed powerpoint from today’s professional development class burst into flames when I picked it up off the stovetop (it was embers) and the charger for my phone is toast (literally) and some other things that may or may not matter because I can’t actually tell what they were, now that they’re melted to the stovetop. I mean, none of it matters, because I got home from my frazzled trip to the mall, where I almost killed someone in the parking lot because my brain is offline, and then I saved the house from burning down. All that after weeping mightily on the drive back, because I almost hit that guy, and then I went to Barnes & Noble because I thought they might have a book that would help me figure my brain out, because nothing seems to be working, but I did not see Kathy’s Brain Explained in the Self Help section or the Science section or the Fantasy section, so then I walked the length of the mall, because I was still too shaky to get back in the car after almost hitting that guy (I really just went to Walmart to buy stuff for school, because I didn’t want to sit at home for another 4 hours moping and feeling like tense crap), and on the way home, I cried. I told you that already.

So the house is still here, but I scared the crap out of myself, because the last thing I need right now is something like that. That would throw me right over the edge into Crazyland. Unless I’m already there.

And now I have a rancid headache as well, from burning plastic fumes. All windows are open and the stove fan has been on for an hour. The whole house reeks of Trying to Burn Me Down, Were You? and the kids come home tomorrow. And I cracked the lid on the only casserole dish I haven’t broken.

I replaced the charger right away. Will have to wait on the sweater. Don’t know about the casserole dish. Don’t use the lid that often. Don’t know if I care.

I am incredibly lucky that it didn’t burn more/faster or that I came home when I did. Did I mention I scared myself? Yeah. Please fix me. This is fucked up. I can’t be this person.

In positive news, I finished quilting the beast. I think I did a total hack job on the last bits because I couldn’t stand it any more, but only I will notice. I also stopped EARLY, even though I wasn’t done, so I could go buy binding fabric so I could possibly bind it tonight. Then I came back and finished quilting. That was before I almost burnt the house down. I am still shaking, so I will not be using a rotary cutter or a sewing machine with a fast-moving up-and-down sharp bit tonight; I will have to do that tomorrow.

I don’t have any pictures. I could have taken pictures of burnt stuff, but I don’t want to freak you out. Or me. Any more than I already am.

I spent almost all day at school in professional development, realizing I am woefully unprepared for the beginning of the year, not because I don’t know what I’m doing, but because depressed people shouldn’t be teaching middle-school kids. I can only hope that I will be able to fake the right amount of enthusiasm, energy, and care until those aspects of my personality return naturally. Like when people are asking me “How are you?” and “How was your summer?”, I should not worry about telling the truth. I should fucking make shit up. GREAT! I had an AWESOME summer! I’m GREAT! Yeah. Maybe something a bit more toned down.

I’m going to go draw my house burning down now. Or something nicer. I don’t know.

Protected: Super Glue

Protected: Mush for Brains*

Reading as an Escape

I love summer for the time to read. I read fast and I read a lot. The best books are big hulking tomes over 800 pages. I read a fairly wide variety of stuff, although rarely nonfiction. Going through this summer, I think the only thing that has calmed my brain’s overactivity has been reading (and even then, sometimes the book failed). This is the last three weeks of books (I’m also on Goodreads, which I think posts to the right sidebar, although on mobile devices you won’t see that). These have been a real escape for me. When my brain goes on overload, I read. When I can’t fall asleep, I read. I read at the gym. I read as I’m eating yet another meal alone. When school starts, I have less time to read, but I will still do it…

First there was Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d’Art by Christopher Moore.

I had checked this book out months ago, but then didn’t have time to read it (my job!). I loved this book, but I have a big art background and I think that helps. It’s a little out there, but I was highly amused and entertained by it.

Then I read Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver.

I also loved this book, about climate change and the Monarch butterflies. Then again, I love all her books.

I picked this book up at Powell’s Books in Portland last month, but hadn’t read it yet. This is Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne.

I chose it for the cover, obviously, but I realized as I was reading that I had seen this movie a while ago. The book was OK…it got a little annoying at parts, but so do teenagers, and that’s what it was about. There seemed to be way more words than were needed to tell the story.

On the same trip, I picked up Storm of the Century: An Original Screenplay by Stephen King.

This was interesting because it was actually a screenplay with directions and everything. The story itself was OK…considering it was meant to be a miniseries and never existed as a book, it was OK.

Then I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Yes, I know it’s a movie too, but I haven’t seen it. I almost didn’t read this one, because I knew it would have sad parts, and maybe that’s not such a good idea at the moment, but it was a good story and I liked it.

Then I read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.

You may start to think that I like everything. I liked this, and there’s a 2nd book coming out about the same characters. It’s kind of more of a kids’ book (even though it’s marketed to adults)…it’s a little quirky, for sure.

My dad hiked the whole Pacific Crest Trail some years back, and I’ve hiked short bits of it, so I wanted to read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, about her crazy-ass trip on the PCT.

It was an interesting book. She’s kind of a whiner and not particularly smart (at least about trails and hiking), but she does survive it (and she’s writing this about it years later). This was the only nonfiction book of the bunch.

Then I realized the second book in the Ashfall series was out, Ashen Winter by Mike Mullin.

I really really liked Ashfall. I only liked Ashen Winter. There were some unbelievable things (I know, when you look at what I read, there are LOTS of unbelievable things, but this was really over the top) and a little too much drama, but I think this is a YA book, so that’s pretty standard. I suspect there will be a third book, but maybe not.

I haven’t stopped reading…I just thought I should catch up on all these, because I hadn’t been posting about them when I finished, like I normally do. Maybe I’ll get back into the habit now.

Kathy Nida