Outrunning hurricanes

Unbelievably, I am in Vermont.  I pulled up outside just in time for dinner after 12+ hours on the road yesterday, something I should not do and will not again; my feet and legs were still vibrating unpleasantly when I went to bed hours later.

Hurricanes and Halloween.

Wednesday, I wrote the last blog and caught up with all sorts of paperwork (electronically), and notified Vermont Studio Center that I would probably not be arriving till Monday, though the session began Sunday.  On Thursday, I was finally well enough to make it out of the house, still slightly bleary; I ran delayed errands, delivered a lot of artwork and picked up a couple of lovely items I bought for the studio, thanks to Evanston Print & Paper‘s generosity. Friday, Paul and I addressed the house (which I am sorry to say was absolutely disgusting; when I return, we’re having a guest for a late, weeklong delayed Thanksgiving celebration; now it can be kept decent for that) and I re-packed, switching out things from Ragdale for what I plan to do here.  That evening, I had a lovely visit from and impromptu dinner out with Gail Stiffe, who was visiting Chicago post-conference. We both discovered that we would be back at the Morgan the very next day! I offered a ride, but she had already booked a bus ticket.  I got only a few hours’ sleep so I could leave early in the morning, but was delayed; didn’t leave till 8 am, braced myself for horrendous traffic…and there was…none!  No traffic at all and I made my fastest time out of town ever: 38 minutes. (It was Saturday, and I didn’t even realize it; that’s what being knocked out for several days will do for you).

Behind the studio.

I got to the Morgan and put 2lbs of flax (I had none at home) to beat in the red monster beater; the Morgan folks had kindly soaked it for me overnight.  I had a great time talking to Susan and Tom and heard more about the conference and made some future plans; it was lovely to be there as it always is, for any reason. I beat Gail by an hour.  I drained the flax down to fit in one bucket (tossing out most of the hemicellulose, but I am casting with it, not making sheets).  On the way to Ohio, I kept getting text and social media messages, saying I was heading towards Hurricane Sandy, so Susan checked out the predictions for me. It seemed prudent to do the entire drive Sunday, instead of stopping overnight as I’d planned. I drove to Cindy’s and we only had a few minutes’  visit; she went out and I was in bed by 8 pm (which wasn’t hard to do; I was mightily fried by then and not capable of anything else); up and out early and a long, nasty drive, with Sandy pushing lots of rain and wind in front of her: rain from Ashtabula, Ohio to Syracuse, NY; advance high wind all through Vermont, rocking the car.  I was so tired (again) I didn’t even unload the studio last night; did that and set it up today (and snagged the last half-bag of casting plaster, woohoo!).  Now, this evening, we’ve got our predicted Sandy-related winds; spectacular gusts out there, and we’ve been told what to do in case of a power outage.  I’m wishing safety to everyone in Sandy’s path!

Hello, Sandy…

(Just as a side note, because of my damaged ears, I can be extremely sensitive to rapid pressure changes in the atmosphere.  All day, I’ve been a bit dizzy; now that the winds have arrived, I’m fine…)

Roof birds and Sandy…

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Into 2012

One of Paul’s friends recently got an embroidery machine. This is his name for me:

Bro left and we headed out to the ‘burbs for our family gathering yesterday. A quiet celebration tonight and this year’s sweet rich holiday season is over: time to see what 2012 will bring.  It will start out with a sustained monthlong busy bang, so I am grateful for the time we’ve just spent with friends and family, and I am always, always thankful for this wonderful connection with all of you here. Thanks so much for visiting with me!

And now, of course, it’s time for Odd Search Engine Terms 2011 - the most amusing ways people have found their way here.  Most searches were for me, the blog itself, specific artworks, shows and classes, and a nice number for people I’ve mentioned or subjects I’ve written about. I lost the week-by-week list I was keeping in the hard drive crash and didn’t start another, so these are all culled from the WordPress summarization for the year:

• kozo paper fossil leaves
• all therapists are crazy thats why I am one
• paca paca passion stencil
• how do work the Hollander beat?
• “Elizabeth in pain”
• limp clean jaw
• the book are lick mush room
• real life memory card
• art Melissa feet
• piano vibrates on sand and others
• bifocals admin boring
• upside down toonie
• why my tritomas glowing
• mad road is my address
• old linnin beatter
• fourfeetleven
• millimeter melissa
• twist and turns signs
• be museum contextual instal lation contextuall
• mjc healing house fucking
• Melissa Jay Air Canada
• my abaca my life
• Walloshroom
• Listen Listen Listen thirtysix
• Swearing Lichens
• hand felt shoes discoloured lower leg
• Ragdale resllying
• marvelously jay
• dayline focus MK2 headlights
• I ho ohh i
• some have been searching for books
• papersculptur fat ladies
• bindwijze van cater pillabetsy
• bookarty paperarty
• Stencil graffiti fungus animals
• how long it take to hear from resdency program studio center aplacatin notofocation
• Women with one short leg and brace ouch
• the book are have fungus lichen
• Melissa J Craig disappearance 2009
• Translation good for the mind

…aaand my favourite this year: Melissa Jay Craog Blig

Have a warm, happy, safe celebration tonight, everyone. Bliadhna Mhath Ur!

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Merriment

Why not a blog on Christmas eve?  For me, it’s the beginning of a sweet holiday week.  For the first time ever, Paul and I are home tomorrow.  I’m progressively cooking a feast, it’s warm and lovely and the house smells like the spicy pie I just baked, and tomorrow the atmosphere will be savory, redolent of our roasting dinner. Monday old dear friend (family) the Bro will arrive and be with us till Friday, and much more cooking and even more warmth and laughter will ensue. (OK, I will need to work a wee bit, off and on, but I’m deliberately not thinking about that right now).  Both Bro’s family and ours are having postponed holiday gatherings at the end of the week, which makes this all possible, and gives us the best of both worlds this season. I hope you are all as relaxed and contented as I am right now: Happy Holidays to you, whatever and however you celebrate!

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Two Fourteen Eleven

If you are in the Chicago area (or if you can get here), we want you.  Just think: if you had taken this class, you might’ve had much less cabin fever while snowed in…

This morning I woke to a valentine card.  I don’t think either of us has ever acknowledged this particularly commercial holiday before, together or separately.  It seems odd to have that happen after we’ve been married, rather than early on when (presumably) we were trying to impress each other. Odd is good. I hope you had a fine VDay, if it’s something you celebrate.

Otherwise, we move on and things move in and out.  These contain bookshrooms. One crate got shipped out and two of three crates came home, but the identical third went to Fort Worth for some odd reason.  Technology was definitely that way too, but I finally got large web site changes mostly finished and with great effort, published, though it took a long late-night tech support chat session to make that happen, and the site still has many odd quirks that need tweaking; endless. Downstairs, an old friend (on his first visit to make use of my studio) employed cutter and beater to turn a large piece of old linen into new sketchbook pages in less than five hours. Here they are loft drying in posts:

What else?  Arranging things, planning the next projects, beginning to get ready for Penland. The snow is melting, and I have lovely new rubber boots that are as comfortable as old shoes. It’s all odd, all good, and…that’s all.

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Happy 2010-into-11!

The photos are my home office / library, the room I most often write to you from, though it is rarely, if ever, this clean.  Usually I’m writing amid piles of papers and coffee cups. (These were shot when I reassembled it after the falling bookshelf incident of 2010.  I have never managed -yet- to find the time to strip off the horrible wallpapers; I have, however, been justified in fearing what may lie underneath them).

I spent yesterday re-entering the health care system, a totally different one than I had before, and I was impressed in spite of myself.  Though I can’t ever help thinking about the vast difference between insured and uninsured treatment in this country, which is not only a referral to the level of care but also the general attitude towards those who are fortunate enough to be able to produce the magic wee plastic card. But that is a rant for another time. Verdict: bad sprain.  Other than that I appear to be rather healthy, and that is indeed something to be grateful for as a remarkable, busy year closes. So, folks, is this way of connecting with you. (Velma wrote that much more eloquently today; I feel the same way). Happy New Year to all, and thanks so much for stopping by .

Now it’s time for Blahg’s annual list of Odd Search Engine Terms, 2010 version.  The year’s tally showed an impressive, unprecedented number of searches for me by name, and also for specific pieces, events and shows.  There also were a great many searches for friends and people I’ve mentioned or who have commented on the blahg, and (of course) subjects I’ve written about.  Here’s the best of the rest:

• handmade book + woman
• Melissa Jay can feel it
• Cold Day Hell
• Melissa art craig shrooms
• Melissa met art
• Melissa met art mu
• Melissa a metart
• Listen, Melissa  JC
• Craig and Melissa paper in Chicago
• mjc photo studio
• mjc press paper studio
• mjc shooting
• MJC Kapoor
• mjc 2010 prom
• Life remembering Marilyn yes
• chan ann leis a’chiad bhuille thuiteas a’chraobh
• Melissa Audrey Wisconsin
• Things could be so much worse
• How soon after December 1 did you hear from Ragdale
• Snow Day Craig
• Used bookbinding equipment myth
• Saturnalia illustrations
• Big fat red hard
• Site que compra melissa mary queit
• Do and does
• bock artest melsssa crag
• Melissa jay university of the art
• Class Craig JayM makes Paper Making
• Turn books into sculpture
• Paper sculpture low live
• sculpture by industrialization
• Fucking racoons
• Jayblahg and paper
• Computer sculpture hears lawsuit
• Womens studio center and Melissa Orange Blue
• Holiday humanities, window
• Limen pronunciation
• melissa jay i can feel it in the air
• craig’s packing house equipment
• metal art + book sculpture
• Art of warm Melissa
• Betsy Palmer Shoes
• chicago. Beauty.
• Limn Lymen Liminal
• WordPress met art
• met art new stockings galleries
• Art blahg who is
• not with the first stroke that the tree falls
• i can clean my class
• Prototype Prototype Prototype
• The Craig Tidal Reunion
• ripped out of the wall bang
• why do make alternate books?
• Sidoes Si Does Doessi
• Zip mouth on picture arts
• Catepilla biding
• How two sell my spawn figures in graig
• Succelent petris
• Frent.
• Yard undocumentable method not
• Medieval beat
• Who is writing the blahg?
• “I cant hear you”
• Cricket in the wild ol pejeta, kenya mel craig
• Jau tuhb
• People reading books
• Crosses mist
• Classrooms with lots of book in them
• “hair chop”
• “nonacademic” life news
• “my hearing aid stories”
• beans exhibition
• sammon bottles
• book is a sculpture?
• Sculpture booock paper
• Tax free new Ham
• who were the smiths who lived on west st
• olive color walls
• ninetennine.com
• see ohio road tripes
• paper studio summer bugs line
• amazing book sculpture
• he beater
• art work with packing fpam
• velam has captured been from the monster and they tied her up and zip in his room and mouth he put he…
• ………aaaaand:
• search engine terms wordpress

Warm Melissa is off to make low live industrialized sculpture bocks with packing fpam. I can feel that Medieval Beat in the air. Have a lovely evening.

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Happy Halloween / Samhain / Samhuinn

This is Jill Summers and Susie Kirkwood’s attic installation for House, Dreaming.  They made a great stop-motion video which was projected onto the screen and is perfect for Halloween.  The ghosts in my machine will not allow it to embed no matter what I do, so check it out here, and Happy Halloween and/or Blessed Be.

 

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Fast Forward Fall

September closed out and the first bit of October began with one of the strangest five-day runs of technology screw-ups I’ve experienced in a long while, and it wasn’t just me.  I lost my text phone for three days, and of course its battery died.  Someone sent me a text, had their phone immediately die, borrowed another and sent the text again only to have that phone die as well.  Three different people got lost on the way to our house; one, an old friend coming in from out-of-town, actually gave up and spent the night in his car in a parking lot east of here (while I stayed awake till 2am, worrying)…his phone had died, too.  E-mails and a job application went missing, and due to it all, carefully timed schedules basically exploded.  Amazingly, almost everything got done anyways, though I did miss some folks who were passing through, and a chance to be present when my old Critter was fired up for the first time. Perhaps my astrology friend will read this and come up with a celestial explanation for those five days.

I did have a great three-day visit with my old friend (really, family: we’ve known each other for well over 30 years, and for many of those, he was my contact-in-case-of-emergency person)… once he arrived. I kept the workload to a minimum during that time; it had been over two years since we’d seen each other.  He and Paul get on well, and it felt like a holiday. I even cooked. Twice!

Good things happened: an interview for an article which will be out soon, a nice surprise description of one of my pieces by Audrey in an interview of hers (which brought a lot of website and blahg traffic), Gallery Shoal Creek in Texas is keeping the (S)Edition installation up till the end of the year even though Paper 2 is over, and the spring event is definitely happening and will allow me to hook up with another old friend, too.

I spent yesterday, today and most of tonight at Ragdale in lovely fall weather, doing my installation for House, Dreaming.  Those are two of my pink foam insulation crates on the porch. I chose the workroom of Alice’s suite, and am pleased with what happened…it was a great opportunity to sort-of translate my experience of Ragdale, and a treat to work in the house. Three other installations are up, and I’m eager to see the whole house transformed on Saturday. I’m finished and, thanks to permission from Lake Forest Open Lands, I also harvested a nice pile of both green and field-retted milkweed, currently residing in my car overnight.

Tomorrow, errand-running early, beating cotton and cooking daylily and packing up for Saturday’s Portable Papermaking class at Evanston Print & Paper (oh, and laundry); Saturday: teach all day, pack up, and head to Ragdale for the House, Dreaming reception.  After that, things calm down a bit, till this:

Thanks to Carey Watters for a great job on the postcard design!  Here’s the info.

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Again Awesome Austin

Austin was once again fabulous.  I got in late Thursday evening and had a great time visiting with Judy Taylor, Gallery Shoal Creek’s warm, wonderful and utterly gracious owner and director.  She told me that preparator Duane Sanford wouldn’t let her help install the 35* copies of (S)Edition.  The only instructions I’d sent pertaining to the installation as a whole were, “Don’t make them look like art!  Install randomly, as if they are growing in the space.  Have fun!” (Afterwards, he told Judy, “…Random is difficult!”)

Duane did a fantastic job. The books were installed on four walls, two on each side of the gallery’s entry room. It’s fronted by windows and is much larger than a foyer, with a wide entryway.  Because of the reflective quality of the windows, I couldn’t get a single shot of the entire installation, but it was most effective to experience; you were surrounded by sprouting books. I liked the rhythm, and seeing the books on the gallery’s grey/ olive/ tan walls – the depth and tonality of this color is also frustratingly elusive in photos.

I did do just a tiny bit of tweaking early Friday, tilting some of the books so that their covers were more visible. I documented, then had a lovely lunch upstairs with equally lovely Laura Harrison, who works with Judy.  More prep, Judy and I left to change clothes, and then: a massively packed reception. I had a great time reconnecting with Leonard Lehrer and meeting his lovely, funny spouse, Marilyn, and finally meeting Karen Kunc in person, as well as the other artists; seeing folks I’d met in 2008 again, and meeting many, many new people.  Best of all for me: our niece Jackie has just moved to Austin to begin working on her doctorate. She came to the opening too; it was her first ever.  I got to hang out with her in the back while resting my ears (which I usually do alone) between frequent schmooze forays into the huge, noisy crowd.  Excellent…the show got a thoughtful review, too.

Afterwards, a dinner party for 18 at Judy’s beautiful, comfortable home: two dinner tables elegantly prepared by designer Bonni Taylor, Judy’s niece (who once  did a floral re-interpretation of ‘Force and Duration’ for one of the gallery’s shows melding art and design). Delicious food, lovely wine, a fine flow of conversation and a lot of laughter as well: the word for the evening would be sumptuous. I happily collapsed at about 2 am, entirely satiated.

On Saturday, Jackie and I spent the entire day having a total blast. With a list of recommendations, we set out to explore a bit of Odd Austin.  This is not at all difficult to do in a city where you see the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird!” everywhere…do you wonder why I like it so much? We wandered all over South Congress (aka SoCo), with its huge assortment of weird and wonderful shops and congregations of food vans and airstream trailers in the vacant lots; then we went back towards the gallery and had a BBQ dinner at Ruby’s (mmmm), visited Toy Joy and Book People (where we ran into Judy), then took in the not-odd but lovely botanical gardens, and finished up with some fine gelato at Teo’s (my fave: salted caramel). So much fun…and so much more fun to be able to do this all with Jackie!

Sunday, Judy and I left for the airport early enough to thoroughly peruse an exhibition of Romare Bearden’s prints, which not only focused on the works themselves, but on his extensive experimentation within the various techniques, and he pretty much used them all: silkscreen, collagraph, lithography, etching, and offset.  Plates were hung along with the prints.  It was a fascinating show that I’d had to miss when it was here at the Cultural Center earlier this year, and it was great to see it with Judy, not only because I also met the curator and museum director who, of course, know her.

Just to top it all off, below was one of my last sights on the way to the plane. I’m not sure if it’s meant to be an artcar, but Austin does have an annual artcar parade.  Love the bumper, and I do love Austin. Many, many thanks to Judy, Jackie, Laura and everyone who made my visit so great.

* I was supposed to send 36.  I was sure I had but when I had two left over, I began to worry that somehow I had actually made 100, and not 99, and that I’d miscounted at the Morgan. Nope.  That was the only time I had counted correctly!  Right now there are 62 instead of 63 in Door County, 35 in Austin, one at North Branch projects, and one here at home (sigh).

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Yes We Did

Last week, Paul and I quietly got married, then I flew to Texas (and had a completely different type of fabulous time, which I’ll write about soon), and now I’m back in Chicago for a few days.

We very intentionally did not make a big deal of the ceremony; it was just for us. In our eyes, commitment has nothing to do with institutional acknowledgement, and personally I deplore the fact that because we are a heterosexual couple, we now have advantages others are denied. But we had a fine, fun, relaxed and private day: exactly what we wanted.

Where we spent part of our day.

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