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Arts & letters

Letters first. The letters are (in a nice return to Friday routine) by “Jake MacGregor” — who this week brings hungry readers chapter 38 through 40 of his novel The Advisor.

Good to see you not only back but picking up steam, Jake.

—–

Then arts. Well, those are by me. I’ve been neglecting the lovely site that a friend set up for me to sell my jewelry. That’s because after the crash the jewelry market — at least the normal people’s end of it — pretty much went kablooey. I have one steady customer who buys necklaces for his lovely wife, bless his heart, and other friends make occasional purchases. Otherwise the site’s just been sitting there. I finally removed large swaths of it.

But the site also has a gallery of artwork, and to my delight I’ve been doing more of that. So I updated the gallery page yesterday. Here it is.

You’ve already seen some of the pet portraits here at the blog, but there’s more, new and old. I don’t claim to be any genius artist, but having lost the ability to do art for decades and only regained it five years ago thanks to The Artist’s Way, every line on paper is a little miracle.

Oh yeah, one of the images there is a .pdf of the sexy “Gadsden Girl” poster you may remember from a few years back (with layout courtesy of L). It’s suitable for printing if you want a copy.

8 Comments

  1. Water Lily
    Water Lily October 14, 2011 9:22 am

    I have that book on my reading list. Perhaps I’ll have to actually get around to reading it. Your artwork and jewelry are lovely. 🙂

  2. Water Lily
    Water Lily October 14, 2011 9:38 am

    I forgot to say, I put your website link on my Facebook page.

  3. Claire
    Claire October 14, 2011 9:46 am

    Water Lily — Thank you! Coming from a fellow aesthete, that’s a high compliment.

    And I can’t praise The Artist’s Way enough as an aid for writers, artists, or other want-to-be creative people who feel stuck — who either aren’t producing or aren’t happy about how they’re working.

    I can’t recommend any of Cameron’s follow-up books. The one or two I’ve tried weren’t even close to TAW in quality or usefulness. But TAW … wow.

  4. naturegirl
    naturegirl October 15, 2011 12:06 am

    Ages ago I had a stack of scrub oak pallets and I decided to teach myself how to paint (acrylics) by tearing those pallets apart (they sand up nicely, really) and looking at art magazines for ideas…..this was one of the first few things I managed to finish (LOL) – since I’ve never linked anything on here, this may or may not work –
    http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v493/naturegirl/naturegirlscrafts/eagle2.jpg

    Long ago, crafting use to be a business for me, but as each decade goes by (and the economy tanks further) I rarely do any of it any more….when money gets tight then the “happy purchases” are usually the first to go, so it’s not a sole source of income like “the old days” – and I miss that a lot…..As for jewelry, it seems everyone in the world makes their own jewelry now and that makes it even harder to compete with (same thing happened to crafting 20 something years ago, it became something everyone was doing and therefore: not so much buying)….

    It took me forever to get the hang of painting eyes, and what I admire about your art is the huge amounts of soul you manage to capture within the eyes you draw…..especially the animals, they radiate soul and love……don’t let any discouragements stop you from sharing that rare talent…..

  5. Claire
    Claire October 15, 2011 7:35 am

    Oh, naturegirl — that is amazing. And you say it’s one of the FIRST things you ever finished when you began painting in acrylics? Extraordinary.

    More links, please!!

    And yeah, you’re right about jewelry. It was partly the economy that killed sales, partly home beading. I think I could have continued had I branched into doing much more elaborate, unique designs of the sort people wouldn’t even think about doing for themselves (check out the book Beading for the Soul) to see what I mean. And I still occasionally get an itch to do that — though just for my own satisfaction.

  6. naturegirl
    naturegirl October 15, 2011 1:12 pm

    Thank you :)…..yeah, that was the third one, I think, but the first one that was so detailed…..It’s ok if I have something to look at (an actual photograph or a picture of something similar that’s already painted), winging it all on my own – not so good at that, LOL…..

    That’s really all that made it online, never bothered to ever scan in all the others….about halfway thru the pallets I discovered plaster statues (dimensional yea! LOL) and sorta wandered off into doing those….and I still do them now and then, mostly for me (since I never kept anything I made way back in the day)…..they are the most daunting things when you get them, LOL – all white and absolutely no instructions on how to put color to them….I tried chalking in the beginning, but went back to acrylics for sanity sake…..my first one of those was easy – a mean looking eagle (LOL) http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v493/naturegirl/naturegirlscrafts/dirtyeagleart.jpg

    The great thing about what happened with jewelry-beading and the craft boom was that it just opened up more creating choices….the stones and beads now a days are stunning, some of the materials and tools in crafting are fun to play with…..unfortunately it just made more things to BUY rather than sell, hehe…….

  7. winston
    winston October 16, 2011 3:51 pm

    You know I had forgotten about Gadsden Girl…shes going up in my cave now!

  8. Claire
    Claire October 17, 2011 7:16 am

    naturegirl. Very, very good! Keep pix coming as you can.

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