Please Excuse the New Image-Slider Construction!

While there are two images popping up in the once beautiful image-slider that seems a distant memory now! I am smack in the middle of getting a new and much improved image-slider in place, at the top of my art blog!

It uses jquery, css and javascript so, I am feeling quite accomplished having followed the insert instructions well enough, to get the device smoothly onto my art blog here. Just not smooth enough to migrate my own images into it yet! So, it's important to keep in mind, I am the traditional visual artist with some technical ability_ not the programmer. Programming is its own art form and an area that I respect and would love to have the talent working with me on the ARt project in fact! But this is another post.

Meanwhile, this state of improvements-in-progress for my new image-slider, is temporary! So please excuse the mess, and I appreciate your patience as I learn and grow in all skills needed to accomplish the task(s) at hand!

* No, the two photographs up there popping up near the header are not my art works.

*The artwork just above here in this post, is project-driven. Exercises to open my thinking up about map design inside the ARt project. So they are not particularly strong examples of my visual style in art making. Yet as I say, this is material for another post!

Keep checking back!

Glimpses on the Path: Self-esteem & Self-efficacy

Gifts of self-esteem, including: self-value, self-worth, self-respect and then very importantly, self-efficacy_ all came to reveal their messages for my birthday this year. September 1st was a day of sitting quietly and reading about this newfound orientation to greater inner well-being, all day long. September 2nd was a day of actual celebration.                                                                
Combined with reading a certain poem on self-empowering, female identity confirmation-building, beginning within, for the past few months_ as increasing bouts of insecure collaboration, transformed into months of inner anxiety, popping out in periodic struggle on the ARt project... I awoke today noticing that my own lifelong responses to women artists, their work and online professional presentations, were all glowing in my field of attention! 

What this symbolizes for me is all about being true to self on every level. The reality of which cannot be emphasized or proactively focused on enough, as I reacquaint my attention and understanding on these new coordinates for living and navigating the challenges of life, with greater fluidity even softness at my own edges.

For the past week and 3 days I have been at home & around town on a two-week stay/ vacation. I am enjoying having no schedule, sleeping, and slowly putting my house back in order after 7 months of intense achievement to reach one of the big goals of my post bacc studies. I have yet to internally celebrate what I have, with the expertise of talented others, recently & wildly successfully launched: a prototype project that combines ar technology with a portion of the Percent for Art Collection on the local university campus, at this time. Celebrating myself as competent and capable, gifted, intelligent & talented, is a must do for my own well-being that is not quite waiting in stasis anymore, as I more consciously redefine historical attachments, toward more positive internally fed acknowledgments, because I now understanding better why they never came earlier in life in ways that were apporopriately nourishing then. More than just the celebratory hoorah, I am truly on a journey of learning to become my own mentor in my life and professional development moments such as this.

Anticipating the new academic year beginning in a few short weeks, I know that I do want finish my 2nd bachelors degree in French this coming new school year; I also want to master writing skills well enough to have the choice to publish my research on E. Vigée Le Brun; I want the opportunity the ARt project affords as a custom internship at the end of the school year, summer 2013. 

I am saying this all out loud because to consciously develop my inner guidance, grounded in the above renewing encounters with authentic self-worth, impressions & vision description of solid self-esteem/self-efficacy_ is where I need to feel lots of (inner focus) support to be consistent, clear & on track. 

If I didn't say this enough, let me repeat myself:

I want all the intrinsic qualities of self-esteem & self-efficacy needed within to navigate very well; to be grounded in inner strength and clarity of conviction; to assert myself where needed in academia this coming year to reach these goals successfully indeed. All without making anyone else a target of historical insecurity habits. 

In fact, working in a much more supportive academic environment is appropriate to reinforcing taking care of needs, as I do become successful in reaching goals this coming year.

*I have finally posted an accompanying image. Enjoy!

the ARt project! ARtechnology?! What is all this?

Find the original article here!

For Mother's Day, Everyday, for ALL Women

Imagine a Woman
by Patricia Lynn Reilly, M. Div.

Imagine a woman
who believes it is right and good she is woman.
A woman who honors her experience and tells her stories.
Who refuses to carry the sins of others within her body and life.

Imagine a woman
who believes she is good.
A woman who trusts and respects herself.
Who listens to her needs and desires and meets them with tenderness and grace.

Imagine a woman
who has acknowledged the past's influence on the present.
A woman who has walked through her past.
Who has healed into the present.

Imagine a woman
who authors her own life.
A woman who exerts, initiates, and moves on her own behalf.
Who refuses to surrender except to her truest self and to her wisest voice.

Imagine a woman
who names her own gods.
A woman who imagines the divine in her image and likeness.
Who designs her own spirituality and allows it to inform her daily life.

Imagine a woman
in love with her own body.
A woman who believes her body is enough, just as it is.
Who celebrates her body and its rhythms and cycles as an exquisite resource.

Imagine a woman
who honors the face of the Goddess in her changing face.
A woman who celebrates the accumulation of her years and her wisdom.
Who refuses to use her precious life energy disguising the changes in her body and life.

Imagine a woman
who values the women in her life.
A woman who sits in circles of women.
Who is reminded of the truth about herself when she forgets.

Imagine yourself as this woman.

© 1995 

The poem that inspired the book Imagine a Woman in Love with Herself.
www.imagineawoman.com

My Apologies

Until Google & Apple both decide to play more inclusively, I must apologize for the compromised appearance of my once beautiful-looking blog.

Not being able to feature my artwork in the beautiful horizontal 620 x 360 pixel configuration, is just pathetic really.
If anyone has a lead on free/creative commons plugins that can help me restore the quality visual portfolio presentation I used to have, (re-imagine a 3" x 2"- horizontal, continually scrolling slidebar just under the blog title!)_ please let me know!

Meanwhile, as a Mac owner_ the evolution of Java is at a complete standstill; also NOT cool.

All constructive feedback on this front also welcomed.

Russia's Banksy does it for the motherland

Russian street artist P183 is covering Moscow with his politically charged murals – and says he's doing it for a 'strong, educated and cultured homeland'

A mural in Moscow by the Russian street artist known as P183. Photograph: P183/Rex Features

Decorating the walls of Moscow with politically fuelled graffiti isn't met with quite the same admiration as it is in the UK, yet an artist known only as P183 has made a name for himself by capturing the zeitgeist of modern-day Russia in his work.

P183's portfolio includes a sprawling mural of a masked protester holding a flare, a CCTV camera fitted with machine guns and a cardboard cut-out of a young girl hanging baubles on a barbed-wire fence. After gaining notoriety when photographs of his art got picked up around the world, he is now preparing a new series that will be unveiled around the Moscow streets soon.

Dubbed the Russian Banksy, or "Bankski", his art resembles the world's best-known street artist, although P183 insists he has never tried to imitate the Bristolian. Speaking from Moscow over Skype, dressed in his usual black garb and balaclava, he says: "I fully understand that we both have a common cause, but I never sought to emulate him or anyone else. I use the songs of people such as Yegor Letov and Konstantin Kinchev for inspiration – not public figures."

P183 first began writing poems at the age of 11 on the Tsoi Wall in Moscow, which pays tribute to Soviet musician Viktor Tsoi. Then as he got older, he began to spray murals elsewhere in the city. Lately he has set up guerrilla installations, including a giant fork shovelling industrial piping that looks like a plate of spaghetti.

As with most street artists, P183's canvas is all too soon covered with grey paint by the authorities. "The city government is categorically against street art, so any wall drawings are painted over. Graffiti with political meaning and social subtext are painted over especially fast," he says.

At the mere mention of this week's Russian election, he scowls. "I'm not going to talk about Putin, it's too much. In our country, there is a very heavy atmosphere. People are closed-minded, and money is the most important thing. Our state does not support creativity. To me, street art is a tool to send thoughts to people."

His motivation remains "to have a strong, educated and cultured homeland". If photographers continue to get to his work before the authorities, he may help to achieve just that.

*this article is originally posted on: the guardian- SHORTCUTS BLOG; A Sideways Look at the News

The False Dichotomy Between "Work" and "Home" For Many... Part II:

Paraphrased from: Composing A Life by, Mary Catherine Bateson, copyright 1989, "A radical rethinking the concept of achievement." -San Francisco Chronical

From my first posting, in September 2009, directly quoting from Mary Catherine Bateson's work, "Composing A Life":    

     "As I began to thing about the lives of women in this project, I was struck by the diversity of their homes and the spaces they created to live and work, by these concrete expressions of who we are. Joan is the only one of us who has spent long periods of her life as a traditional full-time homemaker. I have visited the Eriksons in at least half a dozen of their houses across the country. Joan talks about the sense of light and openness she tries to achieve for Erik, and I recognize familiar brightly colored pieces of art and handicraft from one house to the next, but they are always artfully recombined, each object at rest in its new place. Of all of us, Joan has the clearest understanding of how objects that enrich the senses can also enrich human relationships.
    
     It is possible to create a context of sharing with very simple material cues. This idea is best expressed by the old notion of sacrament. This word has been shaped and often abused by the Christian tradition, but it is still useful express an idea that occurs in many cultures: that the most ordinary materials. like bread and clay, as well as those that are rare and shining, are carriers of meaning, and that the proper action taken with these materials, around the day of the calendar, have a transformative value. The old Anglican catechism defined a sacrament as "an outward and visual sign of an inward and spiritual grace." I prefer the statement that turns up in some Catholic theological discussions: "a sacrament effects what it signifies." *The lighting of Sabbath candles, the giving of gifts, the preparation and sharing of food_ all have the potential to bring about human closeness, as well as simply referring to it.                                  

     When my husband and I visited his family in Beirut on our honeymoon I was frustrated to find that my courteous and highly educated in-laws answered me in English whenever I spoke to them in Armenian. Then, on the fourth or fifth day of our visit, his mother set out to make chee kufta, a dish in which finely ground lean lamb is kneaded at length with bulgar wheat, parsley, and onions until the raw meat simply disappears into the wheat. It's one of those dishes, shaped by their mother's hands. that sons go home to eat. Greatly daring, I went into the kitchen and took over the kneading. After that day, my in-laws began to answer me in Armenian, the kneading of meat and grain and the sharing of what I had prepared having transformed me into a different person, just as the mother of a new priest is suddenly shy with her son after he has been touched with sacred oils, just as desire becomes holy after the exchange of wedding rings. 

*Enchiridion Symbolorum: Definitions et rationum de rebus civii et morum, 33rd edition, ed. H. Denzinger. Freiburg: Herder, 1965. Nos. 1606, 1639. 

Only 7 more pages, after transcribing 12. 5 pages... to be continued. It won't be as long as 2.5 years. 

Hi! I'm Baaaaack!

Oh my gosh, it's been so long since my last post!

Well enough of that_ the present is what counts!!


Do take a read into my latest invite; consider it however it fits for you, and then leave a comment as that moves you!

Keep in mind, I love getting, reading & AGAIN responding to your comments!

Read on:

I hope this post finds each one doing well in their life endeavors & experiences where you are in this world!

Ok! I am making a target audience inquiry because I am working on a project to bring art & technology closer together in a format that invites non-artists to get more familiar with the inspirational influences/impacts of art in their daily world_

Part of my approach, is to ask each one of you to thoughtfully consider if you will, how it might be to do an interview about your favorite art commission experience(s)?
Some of you are experienced at this sort of thing so you might even have some pointers for me in making this inquiry.
For those of us who have never had this opportunity_ visualize your most opportune moment & paint that picture with me! I would love to hear about it & see it in my mind's eye as I read your projections!

The basic question is this: If you were interviewed and really wanted the world to know some things very specific or particular about your approach(es) to your work/process_ what five questions would you like to be asked that might best allow you to convey this message most clearly out into the world?

Feel free to only respond in part to any part of this contact that appeals to you.

Thanks in advance for your time in whatever form you feel available, again, to respond to this post. I look forward to your questions no matter how many they might be!

Merçi beaucoup!