happy new year!

May 2013 bring you enough comfort to ease your mind, and enough chaos to feed your soul. May your great expectations all come true, and may you be ambushed by greatness you never expected. May the darkness of the next months bring you enough peace, rest and gentleness to prepare you for brilliant inspiration. May the quiet of winter let you hear the subtle beat of your heart's true desire, may you find whatever means necessary to follow it with all your heart, and may whatever direction it takes you be towards love.

Here's to another great year, my friends! 

snow meets sea

Last night it snowed big feathery beautiful snow on the Connecticut shoreline. It doesn't happen that often. And even more rare, it stuck around and didn't turn into slush with coastal rain. I ran down to the beach at sunset. 

Shebi Arus

Khadija hosted a 3 day retreat at my home-away-from-home, the Dervish Retreat Center of Ithaca, NY.    The weekend was full of whirling classes, meditation, good eating, and woods walking, leading up to an informal sema ceremony on December 17, the annual worldwide celebration of the passing of the poet Rumi. I could only capture a few photos on my beat up phone. Thank goodness there is Instagram to pretty up terrible pictures!

Top photo: Karen in the foreground. She is healthier than ever, and turning so beautifully! 

Sheikha Khadija correcting posture during the sema rehearsal. 

The 10 women whirling students pooling available white clothing to share.

Many breaks to walk in the woods with the staff and the resident puppy.

Putting the beds to bed.

The angelic kitchen staff, Vicky and David.

And the heavenly meals they make.

The sema beginning.

The turn.

The resident peacocks.

And the resident sunrise.

more facebook foolery

The facebook puppet show is still going with (almost) daily updates to my cover and profile pictures. Today the moon has finally become full, and there's a new addition with my old fiddle, and growing sprouts. Where this is going may be as much a mystery to me as you! But it's a heck of a lot of fun along the way.

An updated video, going up to day 34:

  Polly Sonic's facebook puppet show from ply snc on Vimeo.

searching

I'm wandering on with this watercolour on brown paper exploration. This one, photoshopped the black in part way, and left it in the speckly phase cause it felt pretty cool.

heart food

In the practice of attempting to perform every task with love, pancakes are fairly easy. 

And most appreciated.

watercolour!

I started out as a young artist in love with watercolour in the art of illustrators like Trina Schart Hyman. But at RISD I was a disaster in watercolour class, which was meticulous, planned, layered still life exercises. I found out there I'm not a planner. Frustrated one night with a watercolour assignment gone very badly, I squeezed acrylic on top of the failed piece then hacked and sanded into it with terrific aggression. It turned out beautifully. So I discovered acrylic to be my true love media, the one that could stand up to my indecisiveness and temper.  

I didn't touch watercolour again until last fall when I made a wedding card for my friends. Maybe I've gotten a to be a more subtle and contemplative painter with age, or maybe I just finally got over whatever happened in that class, but I enjoyed doing it very much.

Finding the tiny travel watercolour palette far easier to use on the road, I painted this map of the Ithaca Zen Center in my sketchbook when I was there this summer. 

Liking the effect of brown paper as a background and white acrylic as a highlight, I tried again with the mockingbird paper puppet for the facebook puppet show.

And then yesterday, the tiny tarot card Fool (at top). I realized I numbered it wrong, I've got to fix that!

I'm doing another mail exchange. Send a letter or some small object to me by November 18, and I'll mail you back a tiny print of The Fool:

Linda Wingerter

Ithaca Zen Center

56 Lieb Road

Spencer, NY 14883

I realize too another hurricane patch is probably in order. Stay tuned. 

stage hand

The incredible Andrew Dawson now has video up of his performance of my hand injury, from his show The Articulate Hand. This was the performance that came to the NYC World Science Fair where I was invited by the moderator to give the audience the finger as an honored guest during the talk back. That was interesting!

It's still hard for me to watch this. Not just because of my ridiculous voice, but also the breaking of the pencil makes me ill. The feeling of my broken finger is still sharp in my memory all these years later.

facebook theater

The new facebook format's cover photo area is a stage begging to be filled. I'm putting on a puppet show of sorts there, at first using myself and Boat #9. Now other characters are starting to enter. The scene changes about every day, making a very slow-motion stop-motion animation. I sped up the 17 days so far in the video.

It's some tricky business matching the profile picture inset up with the bigger picture. There's a lot to figure out with lighting, the photography, posing, and photoshopping. The first 16 were done in about a 4 x 6 floor space, the camera on a tripod rigged to a ladder with duct tape. I just took a new bunch in a bigger location with some different lighting, hopefully it gets easier, cause I have a million ideas to try. Friend me on facebook if you want to watch, just message me that you're an Antinomia reader.

mockingbird

Playing with watercolor and white acrylic on brown paper for an articulated paper mockingbird.

home port

My zen center friends visited last week and brought all kinds of wonderful things from Ithaca, including a stop over from Boat #5 which has been moored on the banks of the pond for over a month. The weather has made it infinitely more beautiful then before, with a fine pond-goo coating making a grey patina over everything, uniting all its parts into one antique vessel. All my boats from now on will have to be aged this way.

I did some repairs on the matchstick outriggers and sail, and added a bird. Then I cut some tiny fall leaves out of real leaves, cargo to take back northwest.

It gives me a grand amount of happiness that this little boat is contributing to the carving out of a well-worn path between New Haven and Ithaca.

boat #9

A fifth boat manifested suddenly, just in time for the City Wide Open Studios main exhibition last week at Artspace, where it'll be on display until the end of the month. This will be my eighth CWOS show since my first in 2002! It's in another great space, the recently abandoned New Haven Register building on the Long Wharf.

Boat #9 is larger then the Ithaca fleet, and has the addition of bunting and a small person on board.