Where have I been?

Well,
It has been 102 degrees here for what seems like a month, and not a drop of rain for forever, AND I AM ALLERGIC TO DUST!
So, I have been fighting dust, having allergy related asthma (think dust) attacks and generally having a pity party.
I promise to post more if and when it ever rains and I get all this Dust out of my head and am somewhat coherent.

Color Field Painters

coming up,
when I have more energy.
been making art.
Later,
Charlotte

Flow Paintings

Ah......
Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaller,

more soon!

Labs versus blue heelers

So Sweetheart leaves for 1 hour this evening, on a very important PetsMart trip.

While he is away I decide that I must water the front yard and save Anita's (newly relocated writer and FF's sister), GIANT BEAN! I adore Anita and she seems to have given Sweetheart the Last Giant Bean Plant on the planet when she came here from Mississippi. I forget that the water hose is connected to Faulty contractor faucet and is in the backyard with dogs, I forget that Dogs have a huge dirt pit dug under Faulty out door faucet (that leaks) located under the Rose of Sharon bush that we inherited 7 years ago, that grows out of the foundation, AND NO ONE CAN KILL.

Sooooooooooo, I water the Bean for 5 or maybe 7 minutes, go back thru gallery and kitchen to backyard to turn off Faulty faucet and I no longer have white labs I have Blue Heelers. There is so much mud on Gess and Tugg, at first I thought they were Black Labs, then I noticed that only their Legs and Faces were black, and the rest of them have what they call in the south "ticking".
My back door was muddy, even the window.............
,
Me "Sweetheart is gonna kill me."

FF (cooking us dinner in our kitchen)" He will never KILL you, he adores you, it took him 40 years to find you, he would never kill you, no matter what!"

Me " I don't know this is pretty bad, just look at them".

FF ( looking out as Gess is up on the door ringing a 108 year old door bell).
" oh gawd this is hysterical", while hysterically laughing (thanks sister).

So Sweetheart comes home,
and I confess to every thing, it is all my fault, I am so sorry, Sweetheart just says

"What is your plan for this?"

Me "I am thinking they could just dry off, it is so ____ hot, and then we could just brush all this mud off them".
so we wait.
Finally, they look pretty crusty,
I cover myself in bug spray for the mosquitoes ( which of course does not work, Sweetheart says it has to do with pheromones, whatever) we are out back with 2 brushes (one cost $40.00) and dried mud is going nowhere, mean time, I have at least 400 M.bites just on my legs.

Me "This is not working, do you have a plan?"

Sweetheart "Yes, we Wash them".

So it is now 2 hours later, I made it through washing Tugg, my baby boy, but Sweetheart is still washing Gess. I could not participate in the Gess washing because Tugg cries if me and Pack Man (Sweetheart) and Alpha sister are not with him ( he and I are the Beta's).
So that is why I stay with Sweetheart,
and Aynex,
get over it!

What the heck is an Aqueous Artist??????

Well it does not mean I am made out of water........
I classically trained as a painter, and found printmaking my senior year of college. Heavily involved with putting together my B F A show and graduating, I went on to graduate school to learn more printmaking. Collagraphs, (where the matrix is collage relief plate, became my thing). For many years my paintings whether 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional, were "painted" collagraph plates.

During my under graduate years , my paintings were HUGE oil paintings, non representational, they were executed by laying the stretched canvas in the studio floor, flooding it with water and pouring sometimes hundreds of thinned oil paint colors , which I mixed up in baby food jars, onto the flooded surface. Tilting the canvas, manipulating the paint with found objects, feathers, sticks, scrap card board, more water, more tilting (you get the idea) til "it" was right. I was the only painting major in the studio program that did not own paint brushes! (well maybe a few).

I was a big fan of Frank Stella (who recently has left us) and I still am.

Anyway, I had to wait a while on those paintings to dry!!!!!!!!!

THEN, in the 1990's I married Sweetheart, a Bookbinder. To help him with his work I took some formal training in that field. Book binding, alas, is not for me so I tried a class in what the Artisans call Marbling. WOW!!! after all these years, I found a method that lets my "float" paint, manipulate it with sticks and combs and found objects and contact print the "image" to paper or fabric,or wood, is totally non toxic, where I can make the work in 2 or 3 minutes, and it dries in an hour!!!!!!!!!!!!! More on all this later.

I have been thinking recently about re-visiting my big oil paintings soon, just need Sweetheart to donate part of his garage floor, which could mean moving a lot of his motorcycles and his Stuff.
Now Stuff and Motorcycles are sacred to men, I know this, if fact the motorcycles are sacred to me too, and as an artist Stuff is majorly important!!!! But Sweetheart is open to the idea, we just need to get the time to do it, AND BELIEVE ME Time in the Hood is hard to come by!

AQUEOUS ARTIST ADVENTURES

Adventures, adventuring in art making, writing (my friend Aydra, a wonderful poet, calls me a lyricist), adventures in music making, and in just plain living. Every DAY, for me is a gift, and my life (as my husband, Sweetheart, is want to remind me, especially when I am feeling overwhelmed with deadlines and responsibilities) is "rich and full".
So...I guess there will be a lot of stream of consciousness, ramblings, lots of fragments, which I do not want to revises, even tho paper clip man will, probably, pop up and chastise me. You might want to stop reading right now!