New Temporary Home for Nooks & Crannies Series

A group of my paintings across the hall from the rest of the exhibit.



Welcome to "Nooks & Crannies" at the Tucson International Airport Lower Level Gallery. I'm proud to have my work shown with the drawings of Rhod Lauffer, Tucson artist.



Here I am, taking a closer look at one of Rhod's interpretations of "Nooks & Crannies". His drawings are beautifully rendered in graphite.



A view of five of my paintings.



Four more paintings.



Another view, with Rhod's drawings, too.

Thank you to Jim for taking the photos. The show will be up until December 10.

Tucson Airport Reflection Painting at Tucson Int'l Airport

A few paintings resting before installation takes place.

A few days ago, 16 of my Nooks & Crannies series of paintings made their way via our intrepid Honda Element to Tucson International Airport.

More paintings.

My work is being shown with Rhod Lauffer. He had already dropped his drawings off, so I didn't have the opportunity to meet him. The trolley on the left has Rhod Lauffer's work stacked on it, ready for installation. His website shows some of his wonderful paintings. You'll just have to come to the show to see his drawings of airport/airline related Nooks & Crannies.

Yet another view of the gallery space.

It was fun to see the Tucson Airport Reflection painting in the gallery space since the painting was created especially for this exhibit.


The exhibit is located on the lower level of the airport will be up until December 11. I'm anxious to drive back down there to see how the work looks on the walls!

The Domino Effect or How to Effectively Procrastinate

For the Docents is one of my completed paintings from my "Nooks & Crannies" series. I am currently at work on several new paintings for the series. Well, I should be, anyway. And I am making some progress.

However, the state of my studio seems to be echoing the state of the inside of my brain–scrambled.


Besides painting, I should be grading. See above. I have a pile of stuff from my Basic Design class at Tohono O'ohdam Community College to grade. I love teaching. I do not one little bit like grading. Consequently, I'll find just about any excuse to put it off. Tomorrow is class. So I need to get with the program and deal with it.



However, somehow there doesn't seem to be a single surface in my studio that isn't piled up with stuff. And I need a surface to spread out the student work in order to do the grading. This table isn't so bad, but it's part of my painting set up, and I hate to mess with it, because then I have an excuse not to jump into painting.



Ouch. This one I wouldn't consider touching. I'm sorting family photos (many boxes of photographs in a big jumble). The idea was to put them into some sort of order. Also, I plan on using some of the images for various projects I have in mind. However, now the mess is much worse than the original jumble. And it's been like this for months. No grading is happening here.



Here is my fun clay stuff. I'm making lots of little gargoyle guys. Not sure why. But you can see that this table would be way daunting to clear off. No grading is going to happen here, either.



Then there are the boxes. I was doing this box thing a couple years ago. I got a wild hair and started making a new series of boxes. Road signs, the yellow and black boxes on the right. These are for the online store for my husband Jim and my project on US Route 89 . Clearly cleaning up this space is too much to tackle right now.

It seems I have the domino effect going on here. I'm not willing to just shove stuff aside. In order to clear up the studio and create a surface upon which to grade my community college students' work, I want to finish what I started. But each table is piled with stuff that represents many of hours of work before it can be cleaned off. That's the domino effect. Nothing gets done because there are so many things that need to get done before the real thing that needs to get done can get done.

And thus, you get a glimpse of the inside of my brain right now. Maybe it's just too scrambled to do justice to grading all of this work right now anyway.

Of Friends and the Homeless

I was up until past midnight the evening before I needed to bring my work to Phoenix to be installed at the Burton Barr Central Library gallery. I was finishing this painting. It's called Looking West, and is part of my "Nooks & Crannies" series. I ended up completing 20 new paintings for this show. It took a bit over a year.

While installing the show last week, people kept drifting in from the library. At the time I was pretty absorbed in getting the work hung, but I did end up having conversations with some of the people who were curious about what I was up to.

While we were waiting for the library to open so that we could haul the paintings in, it was clear that the sizable crowd waiting with us outside was comprised mainly of homeless people waiting to get in out of the heat.

One of the things I was hoping for in doing this show was to have an appreciative audience. I was especially hoping that some people who are familiar with the Phoenix Art Museum would come by and recognize that the spaces my paintings are based on are from the Museum. What I didn't think about were the homeless people who would also be drifting through the gallery. To be honest, they didn't cross my mind.

One guy in particular stick in my mind. He came into the gallery and spent a long time looking at my paintings while they were being hung. Then he engaged me in conversation. It turns out that he had gone to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and is (was, had been?) a graphic designer. He was excited about my work. He said he was relieved to see someone in the world who saw things in a similar way to his way of viewing the world. He said some really perceptive things about several of the paintings. Then he showed me a few photos he'd taken on his phone camera of a few of his own nooks and crannies. He apologized for their quality, saying that he'd had to hock his camera and didn't have the money to retrieve it. I wish I could have helped him out.

The opening came. It was Phoenix First Friday. I anticipated a sizeable crowd. Perhaps because it was Labor Day weekend, the big crowd just didn't materialize.

I did, however, have a steady stream of friends who came by. I was so amazed and touched that they would take the time to see my work and to see me. It was nice to have a chance to spend some time talking to friends I hadn't seen in awhile.

So, the work is up. The first reception has happened. Another First Friday to go (October 2). Meanwhile, I hope that some of the people who use the library will come through the gallery. Perhaps my work will resonate with a few more visitors.

Stairway to an Indeterminate Destination

I seem to have produced several new paintings with stairways in them. Now that I think about it, is this because of the stairway I must traverse in order to get to my studio?

See my last blog post to enjoy a view of that set of stairs.