was that a great vacation or what??????

I have had a couple of weeks to get away from deadlines, responsibilities, and busyness to spend quiet time with Virginia, just being. It has been a wonderful interlude and very centering and grounding for me. I have had a chance to put some new things in motion related to the business of my art, and some time to do nothing at all. (I saw all three Matrix movies for the first time.) Oh, it has been good for me.

I did some shopping for art supplies with a wonderful holiday gift card for Plaza Fine Arts and picked up a lot of unusual items that will be needed to construct the demo kites for my kite workshop this Spring, the inspiration of which is kind of interesting.

Many years ago, while still living in Florida, I helped to organize Victims' Rights Week Art Shows during Victims' Rights Week at the Crealde School of Art in Winter Park. These yearly shows were so moving and profound and became quite popular, receiving a lot of attention from the public and the media. I worked hard to make sure that survivors were well-treated, respected, and supported in showing their art and eventually I received an award from the Victim Services Coalition of Central Florida for a lot of work over the course of years that I was very proud of. The Coalition was a group of tremendous professionals and I really enjoyed all of the work that we did together to support Survivors and Victims of Crime.

At one of those shows a woman submitted a large silk kite (non-functional) with a long tail. It was decorated and embellished and she poured her heart and soul into the making of it. As I hung the show I suspended this kite and its long tail across the gallery at the Crealde School of Art, and it was stunning and magnificent in that show. I have never forgotten it or the message that it conveyed to me personally. My kite workshop emerged from that remembrance.

A kite as vessel, carrier, holder of messages and thoughts... whatever those messages might be. It is a perfect mixed media opportunity.

All of those art supplies needed in the studio and unusual items for the kite building - dowels, silk, string, and gorgeous handmade paper, etc. - have now been delivered to the studio with Virginia's help, and I am looking forward to creating some kite examples that can soar in the ceiling space of my studio.

This weekend I was answering some questions for an upcoming interview that led me to remember back to my formative years (very art-centric even then) and a private teacher that I took some painting lessons with in high school. She was young and a beam of light, and I remember painting outside her house by a terraced cottage garden that she and her husband had built, and I thought at the time that this was what an artist's life looked like. It was a talisman of positive energy that I always held onto, in all of the challenges and difficulties. I typed her name into a google searchbar on Saturday, not sure if anything would come up under that name after all this time, and then I found her website and saw an image that harked back to my high school years.

I jotted an email, and you have to be careful about these things in case you have got the wrong (and unsuspecting) person, and mentioned some details of when I studied with her. In my email inbox this morning I had a delightful note from her, and she is indeed the artist teacher who helped me along my path all those years ago. A fitting happenstance for the new year, and it is good to be able to tell her that she helped to nurture my career. Thank you Susan Bloch.