quick queen

Another dashed off little painting, done last night at 3am in celebration of 18 straight hours of studio cleaning and reorganizing completed. Boxes of oil pastels, guache, inks and other kinds of unused art supplies I'd forgotten about turned up, mostly inherited from my grandfather. They've always been too pretty to use, but it's time they were sacrificed to the Bad Art cause.

calendar girl

Here's something to blog about--- the 2006 Peaceable Kingdom Children's Book calendar is out, and my piazza painting from One Grain of Sand
is in there for April. Yup, hanging out there with Maurice Sendak and the Dillons. Not to shabby.

quick sky

Boy I really like just playing with color, without worrying about rendering. Another little piece of Bad Art transformed. I think that's some jungian text by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

quick fool

A result of chopping up a piece of Bad Art from Bad Art Night #1 into small bits, mounting on board, and working over. I like making chaos then reining it back in. I do that with my commissioned acrylic book work, but this is far less painful, being fast, and free of an expected outcome. I've got this silly idea in my head that I might be able to do one of these every morning...

sorcerer's book

Busy catching up on neglected business since Elm wrapped up yesterday. No interesting photos to post, but here's one of the spot sketches I'm working on for a cd of the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Verona in New Haven

The set of Romeo and Juliet by Jamie Burnett in Edgerton Park. Taken last night from the fountain, as we waited to see if the rain would fall or an audience would come. It didn't and they did.

floating Rumi

Last night I made a Bookcrossing book release of Chasing Rumi, by Roger Housden, in the lower basin of the Edgerton Park fountain. It's been a long time since I've set a book into the wild. I think this is my best release spot yet.

bad art night #1

Monday night was the first Bad Art Night, an impromptu gathering of me and my apparel designer friend Meg Gianotti in her Megwear studio. The idea is to pool old art supplies and make art with no purpose, no pressure, no expectations. It was even more inspiring and liberating then we imagined, and plan to make it a monthly party for a larger group.

Master Peter

Two heads in progress in the costume shop of Wesleyan University, for Master Peter's Puppets, a new show by Puppetsweat that will travel to the Kennedy Center in November 2005. I'm sculpting the monkey head, Don Quixote is by Leslie Weinberg and her crew.

Master Peter is based on an episode involving puppets from Don Quixote. It's a puppet show within a puppet show, with human sized puppets watching and operating smaller puppets, and will be performed to live music with an orchestra and opera singers.

vintage poetry

Karl found this poem folded and tucked into an outdated electrical box behind a wall in an old school he was rewiring. Why it would have been put there is a provocative mystery.

Living Death
At sixteen, and anything but sweet
The perfect girl, I thought I did meet

So young, so mine, with all her black hair
Until I found out, this love, I did share

It hurt me so, to learn how she lied
I swear, that night, for a thousand, I died

Hence, firmly I state, unmoved from Above
That ne'er again shall I [fall] believe in Love

Tho' sound in body & sound in head
I know inside, my heart is dead

Anonymous [Wilfred Johnston Svinley added in different ink]

I would love to find the author, though I suspect it's a false name.

Ah, love!

Magische Pferde

Just spotted this: a book I illustrated recently, Magic Hoofbeats, translated into German. Language rights have been bought for a couple of my other books, but this is the first time I've actually seen one of them with translated text.

James Mars

Going back even further: me playing the Parson in a still from a video of a shadow/toy puppet show, James Mars, directed by Bob Bresnick, built by Leslie Weinberg, the brilliant husband and wife team of Puppetsweat. They trained me as a replacement dancer/puppeteer for this two person show with narrator in 2004, and performed 5 shows, in Springfield, MA, and Portsmouth, NH. I cannot express how much I loved doing this. Though I've been on the outskirts of theater all my life, this was my first time as a performer.

Der Signal

Der Signal, the second show I did with Puppetsweat, made the New York Times when we performed it live with the Tactus ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music. A big production with 7 puppeteers, and a big theater with a big audience. Pretty exciting stuff for a farm girl.

Terra Mirabila

Backtracking to May/June: Terra Mirabila, a spectacular of light, laser, music, dance, water and fire. A one hour show put on by the Projects2K group in a working granite quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut. I got recruited to join the movement/shadow team directed by Joyce DiLauro of the Starship Dance Theater. And it became my debut as a fire performer too. This was pretty much my life for 6 weeks, I miss the place and the people very much. A photo of the giant 60 foot sail-screen raised during a pre-set. (For an idea of the big-ness of this place, that is Joyce sitting on a rock, and her husband Raphael is the tiny dot on the dock under the sail.) And our luxurious dressing room, #26.

Terra Mirabila

A promotional photo of Terra, duel shadows of me doing my flag poi thing. A lot of this show was so similar to what I learned with Puppetsweat for James Mars, but the polar opposite as far as scale. James Mars is tiny tiny, Terra was big big!

Terra Mirabila

How cool! My debut as a fire twirler makes the local entertainment paper. From the same paper, beautiful photos of us as monks in the boat, and as the 3 graces on the docks under the sail.

fire spin / ice spin

Between scanning and uploading all the snowflakes by dozens of talented children's book artists for the Robert's Snow project, I managed to do one of my own too. I couldn't decide between my two favourite preoccupations, ice skating and fire spinning, so I did both and it turns out they compliment each other better than expected. I have an obsession with making things spin, and spinning myself-- not surprising for a lover of Rumi and wishful whirling dervish.

wednesday spin

Photos from the CT Poi weekly spin, behind IONs in Middletown, Connecticut. Joe, Scott, and Matt with fire poi.

mask making

Elizabeth and Margie

The Elm Shakespeare Company is doing Romeo and Juliet this year. I'm the chauffeur, but tonight I joined costume designer Elizabeth and the Andreassi family in an art party, to make 14 masks for the opening ball scene of the play. We did it, mostly, in one evening of wine and cookies.