"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Nin

gold, frankincense and myrhh...

After a long week of vacation at home through the christmas craziness and fun (and it was fun), I think my head is clear enough to write. I am so grateful for my life right now.
Three distinct gifts came to me this season besides the presents and the family time.....
The kittens..reminding me to be myself, relax, and look for chances to play
Two books that seem to reflect where i am right now.  My daughter gave me her art history text from school, and I bought The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects by Barbara G. Walker. It is one of the most fascinating books i've ever picked up. Somehow these two books work in tandem to help inform my artistic process. They make a great miniature art curriculum for me...history and symbolism.
And the last one is possibly the most important. Last summer when my computer was stolen, I lost a music library of about 6000 songs. Some of that was still on CD, but some of my favorite music was gone. Thankfully, much  of it was still on my daughter's ipod.  She now had the largest chunk of the original library but we had not taken the time necessary to reclaim it.   Just last night we reversed the library from her ipod to our external hard drive. Voila. I now have much of it back. Miles Davis, Elvis, James Taylor, Jamie Cullum.....

Music feeds me, and I feel like I've been on a rather stict diet since the summer. Now I can belly up to the music bar and fill the belly of my ipod with luscious sounds.  I'm gonna have my headphones on for a while.

by the way...do you know how much poop 3 kittens and two adult cats produce?? egads. where is that frankincense??

Posted by: brutallycurious at December 29, 2007 12:21 | link | comments
art , kittens

I have totally been digging this holiday season. maybe it's because i have more money with which to enjoy it this year...or maybe not. Maybe it's that I feel much more in control of my own destiny and kinda like where I am right now.
Maybe it's because I am surrounded by my art and have a space that supports my creativity in every moment. This weekend I finished a painting and created a collage I've been wanting to do for a long time.

Several years ago I was at an estate sale, and the family was selling their mother's things..among them, her recipe box. I cried when I saw it ...and I bought it.  There is something so intimate about the recipes collected by a woman who makes a career of the family and home. And to see the family tossing it out with the coffee cups and old books really affected me.  Since that time I've been wanting to do a collage of her recipes, but knew it would be an emotional exercise for me. But all my art starts with my emotions...so into the water I dove. For me, the emotion was rooted in my own history of being a homemaker and the melancholy around that. It was wonderful while it made me happy. I mourned for what I missed, the ways I betrayed myself while being domestic, and the "perfect" housewife I could never make myself become. I mourned for the woman and the ways I imagined she sacrificed herself for her family and what, if any, notice they took.

It was a painful, cathartic, meaningful piece of work for me.  Just what I want to be doing.

Posted by: brutallycurious at December 18, 2007 00:39 | link | comments (2)
art , emotions

Inside, safe and warm

Three little kittens....Jack is on the left curled up in the back. Auruora  is on the front left with her dark stripes and Jake is staring at the camera.  Jake has a yellow spot between her ears...one of the few ways to tell her apart from Jack.  This morning, their  remaining sister, Tortie, came in for about an hour and curled up with them, but I didn't want to scare her by taking a picture.  Domesticating her will take a  little longer.

Posted by: brutallycurious at December 16, 2007 11:35 | link | comments

Art and new kitties

My entire life and my art have been in transition this year. Among all the big and traumatic events, one little one still affects me. I let my registration expire on arliahoffman.com because it had been with Yahoo, and I wanted to register it with my other hosting service. Somehow, when I let it expire, I could never find it available again, and eventually it was parked by someone else with a business with "Hoffman" in the name. I mean, really, what do they want with my domain name??
Anyway, I eventually found another domain name to use and parked it, but all this time I've been without a website. Now, that has nothing to do with the name of my website, but I felt it did. I was also afraid of putting my work "out there" which is funny when you consider all the words I put "out there" here.
I think about all this now because my profile on artistsites.org now accepts more images and I've updated it, so it feels like a good representation of my portfolio at the moment. It's only the photography, but eventually I'll be ready to put up paintings as well.
In the last few weeks I've begun to rethink my art and how to keep it alive while working full-time. I'm only just now ready to admit I'll be working full time for a while and so I'd better figure out how to still be an artist in the rest of my life.  It's getting easier. Singing Arrow is full swing into art now, and it helps that we both have something to do artistic with our free time. It's cool to watch him follow his inclinations to draw or work with leather or bead. He's turning out some very cool stuff that inspires me to just follow my heart like he does. He's very good at not letting his head get in the way of a good idea. He just goes with it.
This weekend I made some jewelry (thanks to the exposure to it at my job) and then I worked some on a painting. It's an acrylic version of the daffodil on my profile (see above to the right). For months the picture has sat without the red center, and now i've done a first pass at it. it will take a little more work, but I'm happy  with it. It won't be a "portfolio" piece, but I have to get used to that too....putting work into something that is just okay. I think it's a good study piece and the subject is powerful enough for me to take another stab at it.
My daughter and I went shooting last weekend, so I'm also looking forward to importing that roll and seeing what I have. I now shoot "stock" photos from which to collage and it gives me more freedom mentally to just shoot and not shoot too critically.

I think I'll shoot and post the jewelry I made. I'm also going to post pictures of my new kittens. They've been a little secret of mine for a few months, but now they are officially mine and Singing Arrow has accepted the fact that we now have 5 cats, (2 matriarchs of the indoors and the kittens) maybe 6 if the 4th kitten warms up to me. See, they were born wild in the garage next door, and after 4 months they didn't wander off but the mama cat did, so I began feeding them. I've bonded with 3 of them. The 4th still wanders off, not staying with the other 3 but she does come to eat. She see the others being petted and loved on, so she may come around eventually. Now that they  have bonded to me, it's time to get them spayed. The entire litter is girls! I certainly dont' want a repeat of what happened to their wild mother. They are beautiful. They all have names and personalities, and two of them have boys names because, well, they were acting like little boys and we just didn't know for a while they were all girls.
Pictures and names will follow :)

Posted by: brutallycurious at December 02, 2007 20:15 | link | comments (2)
art , website, kittens