Fly Away

Today I want to fly away,
(no thinking)
to rise,
(no planning)
to ride on a cool breeze;
(no worrying)

no thinking.
no planning.
no worrying.

Drop a bundle of regrets
into the deepest sea.

forget all boundaries.
just be.

today
I want to fly away.

Transformation 18 (state II): recycling

I'm doing some more of these small pieces, since they're what the gallery's selling right now. This is an old piece that I wasn't happy with; it had been put in the "scrap" pile. Sometimes old throwaways can spark new ideas. So I re-worked it, adding more things, subtracting others. These collage pieces are a great way to recycle things that don't work out, giving them a new "life". I've found that the oddest little bits of things can come in handy later on- you just never know. Of course, this does nothing at all for the organizational state of my studio!

Butterfly Girl (Little Mona Lisa)

This was another Photoshop exercise. I took this photo at a recent butterfly show at the Krohn conservatory. Unfortunately, it was a very dark and rainy day, so it turned out pretty grainy. But I liked the image because the girl had such a mysterious expression- an inscrutable smile, you could say. She reminded me of a young version of the Mona Lisa, so I wanted to see if I could fix the photo. I thought it would be cool, since it was grainy, to make it appear to be an old sepia print, with the butterfly in color to make it stand out more. I ended up calling my son, who guided me through the process of making a mask, etc., to accomplish this, which we finally did. Another problem was that the girl's face was at the edge of the frame, so there was a lot of unwanted space behind her. We were able to kind of blur this out and make it darker, but the yucky composition still bugged me, so I cropped it. My son said it was not "professional" to crop the frame, and that it was still too grainy. I had hoped to enter it in a photo contest, but because the quality isn't what it should be, I guess I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience. I still like it this way, though.

4 pieces sold!

I was happy to hear from the gallery that 4 of my pieces sold this past weekend. One couple bought 3, and then a woman came in wanting to buy 4(!), but there were only 2 left. she took one, but wants more, so the gallery owner has asked me for 6- 8 more pieces. So I ordered frames last night, and spent the day matting, with the help of my daughter. Anyway, here are some of the pieces that I'm going to take, as soon as the frames get here!