"Uh-Oh, I've lost a button-hole." - Steven Wright

Okay, so here I am with Nancy Schindler of RoundRabbit last month at the Salt City Urban Arts & Crafts Market. She's curly, I'm fat. But enough about us - what you want to know about is the buttons.  I got all worked up a while back because she was making some special  earthenware, exclusively Nancy-style large chunky buttons just for me to use ... and she brought them to the show ... drumroll please:

I know, I know. I'm excited too.  Plus in the last wave of moving my studio I found the bin with the vintage mens' suits ... some of them match these and as soon as I'm past my holiday push I'll commence to chopping them up and rebuilding them into some vest-jackets and coats featuring these highly coveted buttons.

I swear, each one is lickable. But I have not licked them.

Just call me Tom Sawyer ...

It's Sunday, I have great friends, some leftover wine, a lifetime supply of rubber-stamped pricetags and an awesome heap of hand-painted and stenciled bags.

I put an offer up on facebook to see if anyone wanted to come in and get messy in my studio. It was a full house and a raucous fun time.

My friends are nice people and very earnest workers. Please admire the concentration. Margaret, Norm.

 Sue, Phil, Colleen.

I hope I shelved my control issues well enough and that we're still buddies. I think I did. Norm, Sara, Sue, Phil.

Lisa shows off the finished product. Her stenciling prowess is now known and revered by all. Ta-da!

Dear 221, No one will ever love you as much as I do ...

So I'm moving to a new studio. Just down the hall from mine. I've been on a list for a while, and it turns out that the space I'm getting is better than I imagined, both for creativity (nice shape, nice light, good colors) and for practicality (better heat and AC options, more windows that open, near nicer bathrooms!)

Well I'm not good at waiting.  This morning as I got dressed I realized I was already picturing arriving at the new studio. You should see how neat and organized it was! But sadly there are still other people working in there. The nerve.  So I swept by and took a quick picture. It's blurry because I'm not a very good stalker. At the end of the month 221 is all mine.

 Beams in the hall. I love this old warehouse.

 

self portrait of the artist thinking real hard-like.

Here is me a few days ago. I'm working on a super avant gardey black sculpted vest that has about, oh, 8 gazillion pieces and at this point they were all trying to fit together gracefully on my dress form. Apparently when I need to concentrate I clamp my hand over my mouth! Coincidence? I think not.

I'm wearing my bracelet from Michelle Darin that I just got to match my newish morel mushroom necklace from Kirsten Skiles. AND my scarf, which was a gift from Carina at feydesigns. Hurray for great handmade stuff and the people who make it.

Today I turn 46.

"'Love → Building on Fire' is sometimes represented on the internet using the title 'Love Goes To Building on Fire.'"

I'm not one of those perpetually slender design / architecture people with inexplicably overpriced eyeglasses who knows about buildings. A cornice might be a small chicken.  I nod when people refer to soffits while I am frantically building a vague formless concept that they are some ... thing ... that might be up in a corner. That's about all I've got. I may know the names of three architects. No wait - four, since a new friend is the grand-daughter of one. I made note of his name in case I get to pretend I know about him in future conversations.

But I was compelled to watch Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman because I secretly wanted it to help me figure out why I like those modern houses. You know the ones. The concrete slabs, floor-to-vaulted-ceiling windows, gaping spaces, the vague formless owners, always off camera, who seem to survive on a great view and little more - people who somehow have so much money that they don't seem to need anything.  I want to mock them but also I am sucked in, maybe by the myth of a neat simple life or mind or as someone in the movie said, by the idea of a "private utopia."  I could fall for that for a long time. 

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"  Well yes, a few times a day, but I'm sort of used to it. I just don't trust vague formless desires that I coincidentally share with so many other people I don't know. Heck, I don't even like some of them. I don't believe there is magic behind it. I don't think we share collective unconscious desires as much as we all grew up looking at the same pictures in the same magazines at the dentist's office and as it turns out Julius Shulman probably took those pictures. So maybe what we really liked was the photography of Julius Shulman. And I do. But those houses ...

There were a few other simple clues that helped me piece this together. The movie talked about how these architects worked. They used existing landscapes and incorporated the houses into the hills, the rocks, the desert, so that they were a part of their surroundings. They used readily available affordable materials and worked with them in inventive ways. Hey, I do that too! Okay, so that connection makes sense. Also, I am easily overwhelmed. I like things that are neat and simple because they help calm my brain. I like details to have a purpose. Ornament wears me out.  So add that to the list.

It's not that I feel like I have to pick desire apart until it bends to my logic and begs for mercy. But I do think that as someone raised in an unprecedented land of consumer whoredom I can be served by tracing my desires back to basics. Or at least I can try. There is value in peeling through the layers of memories and magazines to the simple act of naming what it is I like and why I like it.

Right now this liking is part of a bigger thing I'm working on. I can only sum it up as:  I like spaces and I think about them a lot. I could draw you a map of the street fair I went to yesterday, or the machine shop my father owned when I was a kid, with its paneling and secretaries' desks, drafting tables and Royal Palm soda machine in back of the loud floor full of machinists and their machines. Are you like that too? I don't think everyone is. (And at this moment I'm trying not to mention that my spouse can't find his way out of the mall.) Thinking about spaces helps me locate myself in the world and hold my self together at the same time it connects me to the larger scheme of things. It helps me move forward to create new things, even when those things are dresses and sweaters instead of houses. It's one of the ways I make order out of chaos.  Well okay then! Mystery solved. On with my day.