Here’s Paul Smith standing next to the shelter he built recently in one long weekend in our back garden. After summer #1 of the pandemic we realized our great luck at having a peaceful spot to sequester, but were pleased to have Paul agree (after we saw the shelter he built for our son and […]
Category: Small Buildings
Damn It
This would have been the Garden Tour day, Patrick’s wedding in Idaho, tomorrow the kids and the grands would have arrived for the summer. The world would not be in turmoil and contaminated…if only…if only… So this post is for my reading group. We are three…one in Denver, one in Santa Fe, and me. We […]
Kyle Cook at the Helzer Gallery
You still have 10 days to go see Seattle painter Kyle Cook’s show (https://www.pcc.edu/galleries/2019/01/14/events-excavations-constructions/) at the Helzer Gallery at Portland Community College Rock Creek Campus, gallery hours 9-5:30 M-F…up until February 22, 2019. The paintings are handsome with a map-like quality which hovers between landscape and abstraction. Bits of the road are embedded in the […]
A Quilt from Kenya
All summer long I’ve been working on a vibrant quilt. It’s not of my making but I’ve had the great good fortune to be part of the process, and my work on this quilt has given me a hopeful feeling about the creative work of the world and people of goodwill. Here it is, just […]
“Back in the Day”
In cleaning one closet out this weekend and throwing away lots, taking a box to Goodwill, some things to file…I found a stack of cards that a local funeral parlor (now the site of a Starbuck’s) made up in the 1950’s and handed out. They are all photos of Salem from the early 1900’s and […]
Checking in with Jon Colburn
I’ve written a lot about Jon Colburn and visited his studio many times, since his partner is my long-time friend and garden mentor Irene Longaker. The other day R and I were in the PNAA (Pacific Northwest Artist Archive) and archivist Mary McRobinson had a nice painting of Jon’s over her desk, on loan from […]
Cleaning the Sewing Cottage and Thinking About the World
December, the month for cleaning studios to get ready for the new year. Right after New Year’s I swear I can feel the light increasing every single day…until it’s a little bit light at 5:00 and on we go. New Year, new work, new energy. So today I started by tidying up the sewing cottage…what […]
Creative Thinking When Zoning Fails
“Densification” “Infill”…modern words. These words weren’t part of the vocabulary 25 years ago when we bought this little beach house… Across the street was a heavily wooded lot with huckleberries, salal, shorepines, rhoadies…it looked like this…and birds lived here…”habitat.” For 25 years we rolled up to our house knowing that one day we’d drive in […]
Studio Addict
The first week of January. Snow. In an effort to get the year started right, I’ve been in one studio or another of mine every day. In both cases I entered into long reveries about studios and how lucky we are who have them…alternate realities really. They don’t have to be clean and tidy (though […]
Zena Zezza
In November of 1974, in New York City, the artist Jean Dupuy spent 9 hours making soup and then invited people to come to The Kitchen, have some soup and bread and apple tart and watch 38 artists each present a 2 minute performance, reading, dance, musical piece, poem, story…whatever. It was called “Soup & […]