creative thinking

We drove through Houston yesterday, and drove and drove and drove.  I had plenty of time to consider my surroundings. Houston is on a coastal plain.  Flat, with lazy bayous meandering gulfward, by horseback or by foot the landscape might have been striking for its big sky before

A wall.  A looooong, blank, cement wall. My current art commission clients looked at the plans for their new retaining wall and they saw it covered in mosaic.  LUCKY ME!  They bestowed the design-and-creation job on me. When they saw their wall in their minds’-eyes, they

  The planet-themed tabletop is completely glued now, and I’ve been contemplating grout colors.  Since this is a table that will be used heavily, I plan to use epoxy grout, which dries hard as a rock, is impervious to liquid, and never needs sealing.  My color scheme

I need to share with you a little secret known only to those who study drawing as adults:  drawing lessons drag negative feelings out of your unaware-ness into the sunlight of your consciousness.  This is very disconcerting and discouraging for those who walk into drawing lessons

When you mention to me that you like to stay scheduled and busy, not have any free time on your hands, I will admit that the question passes through my mind, “Why do you not want to spend any time with yourself?” You see, in my world, spending time alone and

When you’ve been married as long as I have, there is a lot of knowledge about relationship and living that accrues.  One approach to life that I’ve learned from my husband is to face adversity by breaking down the problem into do-able chunks and pursuing each in

The planet-themed tabletop is underway, and taking me a LONG TIME to mosaic.  But, how I’m loving inventing planets!  And, I listen to podcasts while I’m working, so the hours fly by.   I love RadioLab podcasts, and there are lots of them related to space in some way.

Three blogs.  Three blogs I write.  Three is too many for me, but there is good reason I have three. The first blog is this very one, started in 2009.  It is about art, or about ideas that relate to the art I make. The second blog is called The Home Archaeology Report and it

The second day of the CIVA conference brought questions- important questions- for any artist who examines cultural assumptions and calls them ‘lies’.  An artist who believes that a personality underlying the universe, both re-creating and re-newing it, is both

A big part of the CIVA conference, entitled JUSTart,  for me, was lying in a gulley, in the rain of a thousand different ways of recognizing injustice and responding to it, and not drowning.   After spending the day drawing from life, then attending the juried CIVA show