The use of seat cushions as flotation aids should be a last resort.

But if my living room ever floods, I won't drown.

Yes, I finally got a brand-spanking-new couch!!!
Having only one chair was a little inconvenient. So I caved in :)
I was planning on getting a futon or pull-out couch, but when I went to look at some, none of them were quite up to my standards. I expect that they at least be halfway comfortable in both seating and sleeping positions. They were neither. So I went to Scandinavian Designs, fell in love with this little brown lump, and adopted it right there as my very own. Brought it home in the back of L's truck, sticking out about a foot and a half...




 

"A leopard sprawled in the crook of an acacia tree, rising now and then to bite on the remains of a gazelle he had tucked away in a nearby branch, as one would get up from a couch to find some inviting edible in the refrigerator."

When I'm good, I'm very very good...

And 27% evil. Hehehe.

www.olava.org is 57% evil. Who knew?

But I am now 100% moved out of the old digs, into the new!!!  K and L helped me the first weekend, then I borrowed my grandparents van to finish up. And my grandma and cousin and her new hubby helped on Sunday.  But I'm still only about 30% unpacked.  

I'm still sort of in awe that I found this place.  It's got two bedrooms, which means I finally have my very own studio!!!  And it has wood floors, central heating, a bathtub, closets, and a 'real' kitchen!!!  With dishwasher, cabinets, and room for a table!!  And a garage (with washer/dryer) for my car!  No, the washer/dryer aren't for my car, the garage is!   Well, it's full of boxes and plants at the moment (actually got most of the plants outside yesterday afternoon) but I'll be able to park in it once I'm unpacked.  I have a hall closet!!!  I have a HALL!!!

Way more than I was initially looking for or even thought I could find in my price range.  I almost went for another studio, twice as big as my last place, but still a studio...  But K told me to hold out for what I really wanted, with a separate space for a studio.  She was right (yet again, that girl's invaluable).  I really wasn't counting on them offering me this place, because there were a lot of people at the open house, and one was even a former student of the owner.  
But I guess they must not have behaved themselves in class, cuz now it's MINE!

And there's surprising few places for rent in this area right now.  They're either total dumps or one bedroom apartments/studios (with no yard) for about what I was paying before, or 6 bedroom 'estates' with rent more than my entire income!   I don't have many criteria, but those I do have are non-negotiable. (Has to allow a cat, and have room for a studio and a garden all my own.  And it couldn't be a soul-less box in a huge complex...) 
Since I found this place (second week of April) I've kept an eye on what else is out there, and there's absolutely nothing that I would even be remotely interested in living in!  I was actually even considering the possibility of having to live in an apartment, or moving to Santa Rosa or Rohnert Park.  K tells me that I live a charmed life.  She may be right.

So now comes the monumental task of unpacking.  
I even got everything out of my storage unit, mostly art supplies, tools, books, records... 
I'm setting things aside as I unpack, so I can have a garage sale this summer...

Here's my new living room, from the door to the kitchen:


It's a work in progress.  I finally, finally, finally get to have my records with me again!!!  That's them on the right, in the bottom of the glass shelves under the window.  Which also happens to be the perfect spot for my orchids.  So far.  They're still alive after two days, we'll see if they still like it there in a few months...  

Next on the agenda is finding a sofa.  I need to get a pull-out, or a futon, so people don't have to sleep on an air mattress on the floor when they come visit.  I kind of need more than one chair for people to sit on.  Fights have almost broken out over that chair, because nobody wants to be the only one on a chair when everyone else is on the floor.  Might be kinda funny if it wasn't so sad :P


It is quite a spectacular chair though, don't you think? It's Swedish, and won a design award.  Mine has a different fabric, due for reupholstering soon. And my stool is in pieces at the moment, need to reassemble that too.

Really, the garden is absolute first on the agenda.  
I felt kind of bad leaving my old garden as bare as I did.  But not really.  It's not as bare as it was when I moved in.  I left the grass and less than a dozen plants (not counting what was already there when I moved in)... but since they're selling the place, I figure they can just plant one or two plants, throw some bark on the rest of it and it'll match the rest of the yards 'landscaping'. (see pictures below)







Move-In, July 2006 





June/September 2007





Move-Out, May 2008




It just seems bare now because I had so much planted. I didn't realize just how much until I had everything out in pots. Yikes!!!  I took almost everything I could reasonably expect to live through replanting. I lost the first wave of rosebuds in the move, but the plants are doing ok, and should sprout new buds in a month or so. Everything else is doing great so far.

I just need to get things in the ground now.  There's planter beds along two sides of my new yard, but at the moment they're overrun with ivy! Kind of pretty, but if I want to plant anything else, it all has to come out. But after two weeks of going nonstop, I just don't have the energy or strength to pull it out right now.
I must have mentioned it to my boss when I was telling her about my new place, because yesterday she came to me and asked me if I wanted the empty planter boxes and barrels on the back deck at work.  I guess when they were in this building years ago they'd had a 'garden committee', and had a bunch of flowers planted in them, but now they're just old wooden boxes filled with nice fluffy dried up dirt.  So I took 5 home yesterday, and got my tomatoes and squash replanted in them.  They'll need to be replanted as they grow bigger, but it'll do for now, better than the little plastic pots.  There's a couple more small boxes that need some work before being used again, the metal band holding the bottoms together is gone, and I'll need help getting the two wine barrels from the front porch...  But that can wait a few weeks.
I also got some plants in the ground out in the front yard yesterday, a couple little rose bushes, lavender, a patch of crocosmia, a couple Heuchera (ok, I'll quit being nerdy, 'Coral Bells') a couple other bulbs that might be Amaryllis?  Only a few more still in pots that need to be planted soon.  The rest can wait until I get the beds cleared.
As soon as I get the plants stable (and off those pesky life support machines) I'll get started on the studio.  Can't wait to start painting again! I'll be able to set up a still life and not have to move it to have room to eat dinner! It's been a while since I had an actual studio, I'm still a little giddy about it :)

The downsides (so far):
No free internet.
The ivy in the planter beds.
Afternoon traffic noise:  it's right on the corner next to Bodega Ave.  
My neighbor smokes in her backyard (right up against mine)

But overall, I'd say the plusses far outweight the minuses...

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.

The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbor. ~Hubert H. Humphrey


In this case, the two have worked hand in hand.

I've lived in the same place, a (less than) 300 square foot studio basement apartment, for almost two years now. I won't go into all the details, but apparently my neighbor doesn't like my landlords... So, I have to find a new place to live. Of course, I found this out only days after building planter boxes and getting my garden planted. My new home will be bigger, better, with room for an actual art studio. Working/sleeping/eating/living in one small room just isn't working well for me, so it'll be nice to find a new space. A bit nerve wracking though, there's not very many places available that meet my requirements. Damn these high standards and low budget.


I did find one place, the most adorable two bedroom duplex (complete with garage, backyard and hardwood floors). I'm waiting to hear back from the owners right now. I hate waiting. Especially when she told me she'd checked everything on my application, and my references and everything was 'just glowing'. What does that mean?!? I'm hoping that it means that by the end of the month I'll be figuring out how to afford $300 more than I'm paying right now.




How hard it is to escape from places.

However carefully one goes they hold you -

you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences -

like rags and shreds of your very life.

~Katherine Mansfield

To Pass The Time 'Til I Return

The sun is back! The grey rainy days are fading away and the last few months of hibernation are almost over...    Just in time for all of my spare time to be taken up with everything but what I want to be doing...  Where'd those lovely lazy weekends go??  



I sometimes worry that I won't have time to build my planter boxes and get my garden in the ground in time. Of course, there's plenty of time, but there's so much to do...

This little beauty came up at the edge of my lawn again this year. One of these days I'll look it up and give it a proper name. For now, it's stuck with an improper name :P


In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. ~Sam Llewelyn


BTW, it's "Arum palaestinum", native to Isreal... AKA Israel Black calla, Solomon's lily or Jerusalem lily...

Do birds contemplate their own mortality?

A recent jaunt to the coast turned up a few treasures...
This is just a 'sketch', I'm not sure what it'll end up looking like.  

Autumn sprite

“Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.”
Robert Browning

Fristelse

This year for christmas, B got me a crafting tool with a wood burning tip.  He didn't even know I'd been wanting one for ages.  So of course I had to try it out right away.  Not bad for a first attempt, eh?

More of the same, but different

Almost done! Added a few nibblybug holes in the leaves, still have some details to work out (mainly shadows on the face), but overall I'm pretty happy with the outcome...


passion, pre-decay...

Wallowing in passion and decay

Ooh, two posts in one day! How'd you get so lucky? 
Just thought I'd throw in my real 'lastest' piece.  
(Yeah, I lied in that last post)
It's probably about a quarter of the way done so far.  Slightly Lord of the Flies, I think? (should that be 'Lady of the Flies'?)  I was thinking of adding a couple bugs on the passionflower.  Hmmm.  I still might, if I can make it work.  And maybe a few small holes eaten through the leaves.  Raw passion as decay.

 
Because of the way the wood interacts with the coloured pencil, you can see more of the highlights at an angle.  That's one reason I love the stuff.  It changes as you move around it, you see new things, little details that you wouldn't see standing even a foot to one side or the other.  The woodgrain plays with your head :)  Doesn't necessarily translate that well into a photo though...  Oh well.  Who cares?

Embla on the First Day

Behold, my latest masterpiece.

I took the torso (shoulder blades to ankles) from a sketch I did in figure drawing.  (Need to go back there, haven't been since before Turkey day).  And I've had this picture for years, of an old drawing or print of branches, that I've been wanting to use.  And they somehow just fit together.  I had to make a lot of it up, good reference pics are hard to find, especialy when you're looking for something specific, not just topic but style as well.

"In Norse Mythology, Ask and Embla were the first two humans created by the gods. Odin and his brothers, Ve and Vili, took two pieces of driftwood from a beach and gave them human shapes. Odin then gave them the breath of life, Vili gave them wit and emotions, and Ve gave them senses and speech. These two people, Ask ("ash"), the male, and Embla ("elm"), became the progenitors of all humanity."

So basically, the Norse equivalent of Eve... With a bit of Daphne (sculpture by Bernini) and Pygmalion's statue thrown in...

It took several weeks to finish, the longest my attention span has lasted so far. I tend to prefer 12 hour marathon sessions, where I stay up all night hopped up on caffiend and good tunes and throw off my entire schedule for weeks afterwards. This time I tried something different, working on it for a few hours after work, all day on weekends, and actually encouraging a symbiotic relationship between my art life and my work life. Whoda thunk it? It actually works!

I took a picture of it half way through, when I had just the outlines done. That was the easy part. It just flowed, each part fitting perfectly with the next...  She just wanted to be :)



Then I added colour.


Eeesh!!  You'd think I'd have learned by now not to torture myself with such large pieces.  Painting big is one thing, coloured pencil is horrendous.  Just to get the richness and saturation I want I have to press so hard my hands ache for days afterwards, and my knuckles swell up and my thumb and two fingers go numb every time.  
 
But I think it was worth it this time.  I could have done it better, but at least it doesn't suck.

Over and done with

So, I'm fighting my severe aversion to all things blog. But I thought I'd try it out, put up pictures of what I'm working on, kind of have a record of what I'm doing...? I've only been putting finished work on my website, and need a bit of incentive to take pictures of the process... But I'm not putting pictures in this first one, because I don't have pictures of my latest yet..

The chaos of the last few weeks is finally over.

Everything kind of ganged up on me at once, work, play, preparing for the show. It's so nice to finally be able to relax. I have time, now that I have my place cleaned up again, to sit down and actually think about what to make instead of cranking out anything I could do quickly. I started a new piece last night though.  I've had this picture sitting around for ages that I couldn't figure out how to use. I can't wait to see what it'll turn into.

That's all. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.