I met Vicki Teague-Cooper in the 1980s, and bought one of her encaustic paintings while photographing her in her Santa Fe studio. She has been making and showing her art for about 35 years.
Primarily a painter, her work has included oil paintings, encaustic paintings, drawings, watercolors installation art, and monoprints. Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Vicki Teague-Cooper”
Sometimes I’m grabbed by the heart when I look at art. In those times, I don’t look for “meaning” in the painting, I don’t do anything but feel: pleasure, love, excitement, sometimes a physicality that is like melting or merging with shapes or color or line. It’s like falling in love.
“Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,
and paints his own nature into his pictures.”
— Henry Ward Beecher
Continue reading “Thinking, But “Not Feeling It” at the Bill Traylor Show”
How long must a person knit before she accepts a basic–and crucial–understanding about the craft? How many misshapen, unexpected, Star Trek costume-like sweaters does she need to knit before she realizes she is doing something very, very wrong? How many hundreds of dollars must be wasted on good yarn that is turned into shrouds for octopuses? Continue reading “Lesson Learned Along The Walk of Shame”
As the daughter of parents who went through the Great Depression of the 20th century, I grew up hearing–and believing–that “just because something broken is no reason to throw it away.”
Continue reading “The Signature of My (Im)perfection”
In January, I announced a new feature of my blog: Creativity Talks, short interviews with creative people about what drives them to create, how they work, what advice they might give us, and whatever else comes up…
Pamela Viola is a photographer and mixed media artist who lives in Old Town Alexandria, not far from me. I met her about 14 years ago, in creative writing classes at Duke University, in North Carolina. I recently reconnected with her.
Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Pamela Viola”
Recently, I had to have my computer’s hard drive wiped clean in order to recover some 13,000+ mysteriously missing photographs.
The Apple Genius assured me that wiping out everything and “manually reloading everything” from a previous back-up was “no big deal.”
Continue reading “Wiped Out”
My sister was the one who started the idea in my head. “Have you ever heard about a ‘weather scarf’?” she asked. I hadn’t. She explained that she had heard that someone had knit a scarf with colors for daily temperatures and she thought I might want to do that now that climate change has brought my Northern Virginia hometown more wild swings in temperatures. Continue reading “Putting It All Together”
As I posted earlier, I spent a lot of the second half of 2018 trying to recover from a torn tendon and tendonitis in my right hand–that meant no knitting, no hand writing, no bread dough kneading for months. Well, that has changed! Continue reading “Marathon Knitting”
2018 was, for me, a wasted year of missed opportunities and lost ideas. A time of hibernation and suspended animation. Besides the mid-term Blue Wave, there wasn’t much I was happy about. So I’m moving on. It’s a new year. A new focus for the blog. Continue reading “New Year, New Feature”
I knit a lot for charity. It’s rare that I knit anything for myself. When I focus on a need that I can help fill–in my very small, but creative way–I get fully immersed in the work to the detriment of all else.
Until recently, I wasn’t aware of just how detrimental my singular focus could be–to me.
Continue reading “In the Absence of Creation”