Several weeks ago, I took a book binding class through an awesome website called Verlocal.  I took it as a sort of dry-run for seeing how the site works and to find out if teaching classes in my home would be a thing that I would like to do.  The short answer is YES, and I’m planning on opening my home for my first classes in December.  You can find out more about that when I make the announcement, or by signing up for my newsletter-type thing here.

Anyways, I took a couple of friends out to the home studio of our instructor, Katie Netti, of Urban Oil Ceramics, for her amazing Book Binding 101 class.  It was a well laid out group class, we were three of seven students, with about twenty minutes of hands on instruction and more than two and a half hours of structured creative work time during which Katie was on hand to field questions and insert helpful suggestions.  I came home with what is probably the most beautiful thing I have ever made in my life.  Needless to say, I wanted to make more – pronto.

I have several friends who participate in National Novel Writing Month, so Kyle suggested that perhaps I do my own thing and instead of work every day on a novel, I make a book every day for a month.  Today I begin.  I built a tiny buffer last week – three books, which gives me three cheat days for the month in case I’m working a twelve hour shift and just can’t do it.  Otherwise, here goes a grand experiment.  I will be documenting all of the books on Facebook, as well as on my Tumblr – Day to Day art.  Wish me luck!!

I’ve been challenged by my collaborative partner, Kyle, to do and post one blog worthy thing a week for the month of August.  I haven’t been posting lately, because frankly, I haven’t been in the studio at all.  Sometimes I feel like I build myself this karmic debt to the studio when I haven’t put in my time.  Eventually, that imaginary karma promissory note balloons in my mind and I develop an actual block about doing ANYTHING in the studio.  This is not good for me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that art is something that helps put me on a more level playing field in my life.

What I have been doing lately, is gardening.  We have a huge, lush plot in the community garden.  It is immensely satisfying for me to just be present in that space and see the myriad crops we have planted and how well they are doing.  Last week, we harvested some swiss chard that had big beautiful rainbow colors in it, as well as tons of tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, peppers, carrots, etc.  Our harvest is going to be bountiful, and we didn’t even really have the best luck putting the garden in this year!  I’ve been taking a ton of photographs because the colors are saturated and beautiful and the subject matter makes me so happy.

What I have been doing lately, is gardening.  We have a huge, lush plot in the community garden.  It is immensely satisfying for me to just be present in that space and see the myriad crops we have planted and how well they are doing.  Last week, we harvested some swiss chard that had big beautiful rainbow colors in it, as well as tons of tomatoes, broccoli, zucchini, peppers, carrots, etc.  Our harvest is going to be bountiful, and we didn’t even really have the best luck putting the garden in this year!  I’ve been taking a ton of photographs because the colors are saturated and beautiful and the subject matter makes me so happy.

Also, this last week, I received a handmade card from a friend of mine attending a workshop at the Penland School of Crafts, and in my book, such a card deserves an equal card as it’s due, so today I sat down and dashed off a card in response using inks, brushes and my new B point Speedball nib.  It was a little nothing thing to do, but it got me in the studio and got me creating a thing without the looming payment on my studio-karma bank account.  I think it broke me out of my studio avoidance holding pattern.

The silly thing is that creating things makes me unaccountably happy.  Especially when I know that what I create is a part of me that someone else will enjoy.  I’m going to pop over to post it this afternoon and send a little piece of me off into the universe.

I will be at this year’s Chicago Northside Mini Maker Faire!  For free tickets, visit their website here.

I will be hosting the Interactive Art Booth including a retrospective of my interactive work, and we’ll be making sculptural origami lit with LED’s.  Make sure to stop by and visit!

Today, I was browsing Art News and stumbled across a TED Talk by an artist names Theaster Gates who is working out of the City to be a harbinger of change on the South Side of Chicago by addressing the twin problems of urban blight and the effect of cultural black holes in a depressed neighborhood.  It brought to mind other groups who have done amazing work for the good of community, such as Object Orange in Detroit in 2006.  It also made me wonder If I could do anything on that scale for my own community.

I have always been interested in the idea of art as a catalyst for social change.  Kyle and I flirted with this in our first collaborative show, Passive-Agressive, where we sought to educate people about the information that they share so unthinkingly in their day-t0-day lives.  That whole show was built around trust, as in do you trust us enough to swipe your personal cards through the readers in our show?  Do you actually want to know what information you are sharing with the world every time you swipe your credit card somewhere?

It was amazing to talk to people about this topic from both an educational standpoint, and to see them actually think about what was going on with their information on a daily basis.  Watching people experience their information in ways they had never done before was also an incredible thing.  It was almost performance art to see them interact with the pieces.

Afterwards, the thing that you hope so hard for when you create art happened.  People began to have a conversation about the work and what it meant to them in their lives.  Information works like a virus, it spreads because it wants to be free, and I was more than happy to help it be free to those who were open to it.  Being informed makes you more aware of how what you are doing affects both yourself and those people around you.

Presently, I am rehabbing two of the pieces from this show in order to put them on display for another purpose.  I hope that the purpose I am using them for sparks just as much conversation as their initial intent did.  Interested to know what I’m using them for?  I’m announcing it next week.

So last month I was listening to the CBC Radio show, Q, on my way home from work.  Q is an interview talk show that features artists, writers and musicians.  I listen to it because it is on when I get done with the night shift at work.  I never catch a whole episode – just the twenty or thirty minutes of it between work and home.  On this particular night, they had Canadian artist Kim Dorland on talking about his work and influences.  It is a great interview, and I highly suggest listening to it.

When I did, I had a moment of blinding inspiration.  At 3:39 in the interview, Dorland states very clearly that he is a magpie who steals beautiful things from the people he respects and admires.  I could not possibly give you a more apt description of what it is to be an artist in this day and age.  It was such a stunning statement that I had to turn the radio off and recite, “I am a magpie.” to myself over and over again.  I got home, parked the car and RAN to the studio where I wrote down these words.

What flooded into my head was a lush green background with beautiful magpies.  Have you ever seen one? I’ve been obsessing over them for a whole month now.  They have put everything else in my life on pause, because all I want to do is draw magpies.  Basically what’s been going on in the studio for a month is a deepening of my love affair with the beauty and intelligence of corvids.

I’ve done a lot of china marker on black paper for this, and only recently have I graduated to the ink on glassine stage, but I am crazy assembling elements for a small mixed media series on magpies.  It’s been a crazy time in my life lately, but art has really helped to keep me going.