the eyes have it

ever so long ago, the lovely tara thayer of eyebuzz fine art in tarrytown, NY, asked me to contribute some of my eyeball obsession photos to public bookstore, a beautiful book that the gallery, which she runs with her husband, was going to issue. well, public bookstore (the book and the exhibition) has arrived! you can see my contribution here, on tara's flickr photostream (do stay there and look around, her photos (taken with a nikon, of course) are delightful.  and if you like my eyeballs, they're available here.

a perfect day

the sun was shining brightly on the white cliffs of møn's klint

i took the pooka with me and let her use the D60

she shows promise as a budding photographer

this is one of hers

we took along a few friends to show off their new tails in their native habitat

and a couple of their friends

from resurrection fern 

and one from geninne 

it felt like there was some kind of poetry

in a stone from mexico meeting the baltic seashore

doesn't it look strikingly at home?

and there's somehow even more poetry in

geninne's stone meeting margie's stones on this shore.

and i felt somehow poetic for being the link between them.

the whole group got together on a rather eyeball looking treetrunk

see?

you know i couldn't resist.

we took along this friend too.

isn't he sweet?

sabin made him at her afterschool program.

i spotted a few more seeing stones (thanks jules!)

a few of them may have accompanied me home

i loved wearing my wellies...

and sabin had on hers too.

they're our only matching accessory.

more tomorrow about this...

see if you can guess what it is

this girl...

gillian at indigo blue wrote a wonderful "this girl" post about herself and asked readers to play along should they so desire. i'm a rather new reader of indigo blue, but as my sister always says to me, "it always comes back to you," so it feels like this game is a natural one for me to play along...

this girl is out of her element yet entirely at home. she is unsure but comfortable. at ease in her skin, but doesn't really know her own contours. she's navigating her topography, filling in the pieces as she goes along. she doesn't know the way, but is sure there is one.

she is searching, striving. wanting, always wanting. more knowledge, more input, more inspiration. more crocheted stones. more gadgets. more laughter. she's curious and open yet strangely closed and definitely opinionated. she's judgmental. she's live and let live. she loves to be with people, but just wants to be left alone. she's a mass of contradictions wrapped into one skin.

when she gets hold of an idea, she embraces it fully. she's obsessed with eyeballs. but it's because she's working on seeing. seeing the world around her in new ways (the camera lens helps this). she loves to wrap herself in mythology, which is why it's odin's eyeballs in particular that appeal... mythological sacrifice at the alter of knowledge. a prayer to sofia, the divine wisdom. (and now she's mixing mythologies too.)

she wants to be good, but she doesn't always achieve that. she's snarky and crabby and short with those she most loves. she's mean but generous. she procrastinates with blinding efficiency. she's not always a great mom. but she is constantly in awe of the little person she helped create. she worries about the world that little person will inherit and how to equip her for that task.

she jumps in with both feet and asks questions and figures out the logistics later. there rests within her a feeling that things will work out how they're supposed to. she strives to see. and learn. and seek. and love.

at times, she has a sense of being totally in the zone. she has no control of that feeling and has no idea how to make it happen (but knows that a great outfit helps). in those moments, she breezes in and brings with her a force of energy that's fairly beaming off of her and she can actually see its effect on people. during one of those times, someone once said to her, "you are like cocaine." she liked that very much.

she's always been one of the guys in her own mind. this has mostly been a good thing, but has sometimes gotten her in trouble.

once she's decided someone is stupid or not worth her time, it's totally over for her and that person. she can't really even be nice anymore. it isn't very fair. but she knows it about herself.

she is pedicures and fake eyelashes. she's natural, locally-grown organic produce. she's posh hotels and backpacking it on a balkan train. she's hugo boss suits and flannel pjs all day. she's a midwestern girl. she's european. she's sushi. she's tropical fruits on a philippine beach. she's pork rinds on friday evening. she's gold lounge and the first one off the plane. she's at home everywhere and nowhere. she's a coach bag and H&M dress.

she's moscow, not st. petersburg. she's nikon, not canon. she's white chocolate, not dark.

she's an avid reader. a writer. a photographer. an artist. she's finding her place.

she is mostly chaos. a force of nature. evolving. becoming. a bee charmer.

* * *

wow, that was fun and really liberating to write in 3rd person. you should try it too.

the eyes have it

once you start looking, you find that eyeballs are everywhere...

by the side of the road

on the beach

on the birch trees

and sometimes they even follow you home.

i did it!

i'm on etsy! as a seller, not just a buyer. go and check it out!

i just listed my first five items, including the famous eyeball pillows.

monday's lessons

things i learned this monday:

1. i wore my grey hugo boss suit today and the pants are really loose. who would have imagined that i'd lost weight? and how fat was i before? holy crap.
   
2. some moron apparently packed my suitcase because it was missing:
1. deodorant
2. clean underwear (too much information, i realize)
3. my wolford knee-highs (which meant i was wearing slightly bulky grey SOCKS with the heels and the hugo boss today)
4. any tights for tomorrow's austin reed skirt suit.
5. no shampoo or conditioner whatsoever.
   
3. it did, however, contain:
1. 3 different kinds of perfume
2. a ball of yarn and some knitting needles
3. my 20-pack of staedler triplus fineliners
4. about 50 receipts from stores in manila
5. 6 different mac paint pots
6. 2 sets of false eyelashes
4. i am lucky this hotel is right next to the largest mall in scandinavia, so i have now remedied all of #2 (except for the bulky socks i had on all day with my open-toed pumps).
5. my fingers remember how to do all that dumb PC stuff (like ctrl-alt-del), even if my conscious mac brain has blocked it all out.
6. learned a new term in the IHT: mediagenic (new for me, anyway).
7. i have a hard time telling the difference between spoken norwegian and spoken swedish.
8. that ryan air guy is really wacky (yes, i'm watching BBC world).
   
9. i think the mirrors in this hotel might be long-hair mirrors. i swear my hair seems longer in norway.
   
10. 38% of the people in my new company have a master's degree. 4% have a Ph.D.

i hope you learned something too this monday. :-)

p.s. i haven't forgotten the 50 followers thing...post on that coming soon!!!!
p.p.s. i'm not done with the whole eyeball thing yet. 

an eye-opener

today was the day of the inaugural meeting of the artists' group that's being formed in my community. i decided last month to join and paid my 100DKK fee to be part of the group, but as the meeting approached, i felt less sure i wanted to go. however, i took hold of myself this morning, flat-ironed the hair and drove over to the meeting, artwork in hand for the photo for the local newspaper. it was one of those moments when you dress up a bit too much because it feels like the best way to feel psychologically prepared. so, on with my fave gap dress, funked up with electric blue tights, grey socks and purple furry boots--looking suitably arty, right? (why did i not have someone snap my picture--oh right, because they were all still asleep when i left.)

thankfully, i pulled up at the same time as a very nice, smiling older man who actually spoke to me (i actually wondered for a minute if he was danish--he was) and walked in together with him and ended up finding a chair and sitting next to him in the back of the already-crowded room. no one said hello (not that i expected them to). soon, the meeting got underway. strangely, it started off with a list of what the association wasn't, given by the presumed chairman of the board (she wasn't elected yet at that point). i found it a strangely negative tone to start off on, especially as it mainly consisted of a lot of whining and pushing away of responsibility by the board that wasn't even yet elected and foreseeing of problems caused by group members who weren't yet causing any trouble. i sat back and reminded myself to put on my anthropologist hat and just observe the natives in their natural habitat. they say that anytime there's a group of at least five danes, they will form an association of some sort, so i wanted to see this in action.

one of the most interesting and to me, incomprehensible, aspects of the meeting was the presence of what they called an "overstyrer." this seems to translate, as near as i could tell, as meeting nazi--as she rudely interrupted people, spoke in the most patronizing, agressive manner, only allowed grown adults to speak if they had raised their hands, cut them off and loudly answered "no" whenever the gentleman taking us through the by-laws point by point asked if there was any feedback--thereby preventing anyone from offering any feedback at several junctures. what was most strange is although this particular individual was not elected to the board, she ran the entire meeting, even closing it with a little speech that conveyed that she thought it was a room of small, dull children rather than grown-up adult, creative artists, most of whom were in their 50s and 60s. it was really quite astonishing as a cultural phenomenon. i'll admit i don't yet have my head around it.

i wasn't the only one astonished, as at the end, one of the older gentlemen--one of six in the room that i had decided really looked like an artist--called her on her patronizing speech. she didn't take it well and the other righteous women in the room rallied around her, so she didn't actually learn from it at all, which was a real shame.

however, there are good things about the group. it's cool to be part of a group of 68 artists that live in my community. there's going to be an "art route" on may 17, where the public can go around and visit the studios and workshops of all who want to participate. i signed up for that, as my studio is perhaps my main point of pride (other than the famous kitchen, of course, which i'm still a little giddy about) and it will give me the push i need to be ready for that (i'm a girl who needs an assignment). i think it can only do me good to meet artists and find sources of inspiration within my own community, rather than almost exclusively online (as much as i love and appreciate all of you).

i guess overall, what surprised me most is that i thought that a group of artists would be extremely open--open-minded and generally open as people, but quite the opposite was true. their views on the incorporation of the group were really very square and what i can only characterize as non-artistic in nature. at one point, several people wanted to exclude young people under 18 from joining (not that there were any there), but why should young artists not be welcome? i just really didn't get that and luckily one of the elder voices of reason spoke up on that point and it was voted down. there was a closedness that surprised me, tho' i suppose it shouldn't have in light of how denmark is in general. i just expected artists to be different. in all, i guess it was an interesting experience.

i'm curious to get to know some of the others and find out why they got involved. i think it could be a real eye-opener for me to learn that, because i'm beginning to think that it's not for the reasons i would have imagined.

thinking and hyperlinks

as we've seen already this week, my mind works very strangely. i can go from a simple teapot to early soviet film in one post. and even (more or less) explain how i got there. and because i just finished malcolm gladwell's blink, i've been pondering thought processes in general.

consider the following series of pictures:

our brains are processing stuff in the background all the time. as an example: i tried to consciously note all of the things that went through my mind as i just went downstairs to pour another cup of tea--a simple and rather automatic act. along the way, i noted that one of the pictures in the stairway was a bit crooked and thought about how they get that way all the time because they're in such a high traffic area. i flashed also for a moment on the ruin of pergamon that was IN the picture and smiled as i remembered the heat and sunshine and how i was wearing white linen and sabin a sundress that day. as i stirred my tea, i looked at the skinny laminx cloth napkin that was sitting on the countertop with a sprig of evergreen still laying on it and one of my precious resurrection fern crocheted stones. which led me to think of the set of my own stones that i sent to margie yesterday. that in turn made me think of some of the stones upstairs in a dark corner of the bookshelves and i wondered if i should have included any of them. i went up, cup of tea in hand and looked at the stones and saw a shard of ceramic with numbers on it that i found on the old base in subic and i remembered the little bottle of sea glass gathered on a beach near there in the philippines. which made me think about how the treasured and revered sea glass is really trash that some jerk has thrown into the ocean in the form of glass bottles which then break and tumble in the waves until they are smooth, pretty pieces of tumbled glass that wash up on shore and which people actually sell on etsy. which made me think of my list and how i need to just get my eyeball pillows up on etsy already.

it has taken me nearly an hour to write and gather pictures for the above (while doing laundry and lighting two fireplaces and a dozen other tasks), but the whole chain of thoughts probably took under 30 seconds in reality. because our minds are fast. they link things and make connections. i've been thinking for awhile about hyperlinks and whether they map this thought process and reflect it. and that's part of why i set all the hyperlinks above.

of course the whole concept of hyperlinks is manmade, so it no doubt reflects something of a human thought process, since it is born of it. (why am i always getting myself into chicken and egg circles?) but is it an example of that sense i get of the internet as taking on kind of life of its own--evolving us (and perhaps itself) to the next level? or is it just a topography of thought insofar as thought can at all be mapped? how many thoughts did i actually have along the way during those 30 seconds that i didn't catch hold of, that couldn't be mapped? would my topography simply have blanks, or would i be able to fill them in if i could tune in to that unconscious level?

that's some heavy pondering for a thursday and i'm definitely not done thinking about it. how about you?

a quiet sunday

it's raining one of those bone-chilling cold rains--the kind with really big drops that somehow land exactly down the back of your neck when you poke your head out the door or dash back and forth to feed the fire in the studio.  so, we sit, the three of us, here indoors, each at our own computer, quietly existing in our own mutual but parallel worlds. we'll soon take a fika break to eat hot banana bread together, fresh out of the oven.

it's the kind of day that breeds introspection, but introspection is the last thing i'm feeling that i need these days. i've had quite enough of that lately. i'm reading malcolm gladwell's blink, which is a book that explores intuition and our decision-making processes. and i'm led to believe that all this introspection is keeping me from my intuitive side. there is such a thing as over-thinking. so i'm trying to get away from that today.

but my mind wanders to the dinner party we went to last evening with husband's old work team. it was at his old secretary's house. it was a nice evening with catered food and everything. the hosts had prepared a powerpoint slide show of photos of their holiday last summer. they'd done a grand tour of the US--starting at niagra falls, then going to hawaii and ending up in las vegas and the grand canyon/zion. then, another of the couples happened to have a memory stick full of pictures of their recent safari in kenya. although i inwardly groaned when the powerpoint opened, both viewings and hearing the stories attached to them were actually both amusing and interesting. i will, in the interest of trying not to be so introspective, spare you my thoughts on the bourdieuvian cultural capital present last evening. at least until another day.

and so my thoughts turn to how awesome sabin looks on a horse and it's only her second lesson. she would seem to be a natural, tho' she hasn't gotten the thing with posting the trot. she's fearless and she just sits so well. definitely makes me very proud.

my latest eyeball-related project is shaping up nicely:

on thursday evening, i was IMing with a friend who has recently gotten back from a six-month stint in china. she does a lot of painting and so i sent her a link to an art exhibition where you can buy a stand and be part of it--showing and selling your art. it takes place at the end of october in a nearby town. anyway, during the course of our conversation, we decided to go together and get a stand! so yes, i'm going to do an art exhibition in october! i'm a girl who needs an assignment, so i figure it's the best way to kick start my production, since i'm full to the brim with inspiration. so, on that note, i think i'll go out and work on these:

 photo taken the other day when the sun was shining.

i'm working on another something that's really exciting and i'll be back to share it with you later today. in the meantime, don't forget to go vote for my photo assignment!

when one thing becomes another

husband and i went for a walk in the woods on sunday. our real purpose on such a walk is what we like to call forestry. because we always spend some time liberating small beech trees to bring home for our hedges. we're thinning them out, helping the forest, you know, forestry. husband is making a labyrinth in front of our house (we hate being like the neighbors, you see) and it requires quite a lot of beech hedge. we don't mind waiting for it to grow up, so we bring home really small saplings from our forest walks. you can see the beech trees above, they're the ones with the brown leaves that don't fall off 'til the new ones push them off in spring. the ones you can see in the photo are larger than the ones we take, those are like only a foot high.

anyway, on our walk, i kept stopping to take photos of things like seriously tiny mushrooms:

i am amazed at how there are always mushrooms of some kind growing in this forest, no matter what the weather or when you go. year round, there are mushrooms or fungi of some sort. i only know of edible ones in the autumn, but there are probably some you can eat year-round. it's just that you don't want to mess around with that if you don't really know them well. 

we got to talking about inspiration, which, as you well know, is on my mind of late. i said i felt driven to take pictures of mushrooms for some reason that i didn't yet understand, but that i felt it would come to me eventually. and i wondered aloud if there was some way to fast track that process, because right now, it seems like it's taking an awfully long time from inspiration to product, so to speak.  

just as an example, two years ago, when peter, my father-in-law died, we got these ceramic "odin's eyeballs" that had belonged to him. odin is the head god in nordic mythology.  part of the story, which i need to do a bit more looking into, is that odin dropped his eyeball into a well, in order to gain the gift of knowledge. i don't remember the exact reason that peter had these eyeballs (there were several sets, we got one of them), but it also had to do with seeing clearly after the breakup of his long marriage in the late 90s. in any case, they have held a strange fascination for me since they came into our home. they reside on the window sill in our addition and i am drawn to them often. one snowy day, i took them out and took some pictures of them and we used them for our snowman's eyes.

combined with the memory of my friend michellea's fantastic i-eye collage and heavily influenced by this photo from flickr (and who wouldn't be inspired by sandra juto?), i have been feeling that i need to do something with eyes. and somehow, all of this input clicked into place on friday and i came up with this pillow, which will be the first item i list in my etsy shop later this week, together with two more i'm working on that are of the same theme.

but it took me a really long time to get to this point (especially if you take into account that the first inspiration came clear back in 1990). if i really want to have an etsy shop and be part of a local artist's group and contribute something to eyebuzz's first 'zine, i'm going to need to fast track this inspiration a bit. (i'm trying to find my way here and any advice is appreciated, by the way.) 

yesterday, in an attempt to get on this creative fast track, i gave myself a little exercise. i saw this beautiful embroidery by the ever inspiring margaret ooman of resurrection fern on flickr :

and i gave myself the assignment of making one like it from all of the scraps that were laying on the table after a weekend's worth of creativity. what i thought was that i would imitate it, that i would make a nest and a bird and eggs. that it would, of course, reflect my scraps, so it wouldn't be an exact copy, but that i would somehow end with something similar. well, something interesting happened along the way. i began by making the nest, but when it was finished, i saw something else. i saw a bowl. and among my scraps, i spotted a red felt circle, which demanded to be trimmed into apples. and in the end, this is what i created (#24):

i can hear the echo of margie's lovely nest, but i did end up making something my own. which i guess is what inspiration is about. and i did manage to fast-track the process--since i saw the nest on flickr on friday and made this already on sunday. so perhaps there's hope if you just push yourself a bit. if not, there's surely a ton of things i've been pondering in the back of my mind from the inspiration gleaned years ago, if i can just coax it out. 

i promise to stop harping on about creativity very soon. i'll start my new job and get out of the house and be with people and the navel gazing will surely taper off.  thanks for bearing with me in the meantime!

winter solstice

today is the day that the tide turns and we move away from the oppressive darkness back towards the light time. we had a little ceremony, lighting a candle next to hyacinths and our odin's eyeballs in order to help us look forward towards spring. in a way, winter solstice is like the beginning of a brand new year. how did you spend yours?