I finished writing a grant to do more work on the Modern Muses. Asking someone for money to make an art piece makes me get very focused. What is a muse? Do they have less power now, as most women do? What are their working conditions and job descriptions? It came to me that the modern Calliope, would be the muse of communication. And what better emblem than an antenna. This is a maquette, (mock up) of an idea. 
Breast tax
I pay a 23% Breast Tax, for a pre-existing condition. 
Gorgon-Muse of Women
This is part of my modern day muses. If necessities cost the same for everyone, how do women live on .77 on the dollar? This is just the beginning of her hair. I lived in Dallas for awhile. This girl is going to have BIG hair.
reuse
The front of this canvas was a failure. I’m working on abstraction on the back.
Collage show
The Art of Collage is 100
The term collage derives from the French “colle” meaning ” glue”. This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art, according to Wikipedia.
Collage is an artistic composition made of various materials glued on a surface. The importance of collage was to push the limits of what could be called art. At that time if it wasn’t oil on canvas, or a sculpture of stone or bronze, it wasn’t art. Picasso and Braque were not content with the status quo. Collage yanked the stranglehold from the neck of “fine art”. Images and text from newspapers or magazines were layered in with paint to make comment of the news of the day.
Artist in Residence of Fines Creek, Susan Livengood, has combined cast- off computer parts, letters from scrapbooking, monofilament line, paint and other materials. The show exams what happens when humanity and nature intersect.
Celebrate the anniversary of collage with some glue and your imagination.
smaller and smaller
Jen gave me a bunch of small canvases. I usually work large, and I’ve been looking at these little things since Christmas. I’m going to paint each one from the image of a red daylily. Here’s 12″ and 5″.
TMI
I’ve been doing a series of drawings, well I call them drawings. There’s acrylic washes, writing, and collage, along w/ the drawing so maybe they are ‘mixed media”. Whatever. I use the oval face of a woman wearing a skull cap as the starting point to investigate the stresses on women, and lately stresses from the world news. I kept honing in, showing the stress on the cap, then a partial face, and finally just in the eye. The media is making me worry about women in Arab countries, or Japan, or now, Alabama. I feel there pain, but I also need to step back. This is called” Too Much Information.”
Computer Problem
I have discovered a new approach to drawing. It’s much more like my paintings. Part of this came from being forced to use acrylics thru the winter. I wasn’t thrilled w/ them for painting, but I stumbled into a winning tri-fecta of drawing, vellum, and acrylic washes. I’m using chalk and charcoal for the drawing. I sneak some color in. I’ve also added some collage after all of this, on other works. This drawing is 3′ x 28″.
detail
This is the eye of “Marsha Broke Her Ankle”. I love drawing big (large?).
Marsha
No, she doesn’t look like this. She broke her ankle. Surgery, 9 pins, a plate, and six weeks off of that foot is going to be a trial. Trying to work and pay for the hospital is going to be …more than a trial. She has no insurance thanks to a preexisting condition. This drawing is my take on the situation. Also, it’s the first time I’ve drawn on vellum. I really like it. This is 3’x2′. The roll is 36″ wide. Gregg’s going to make me a drawing board from a sheet of plywood, so I can draw as large as 8’x3′. I like drawing big, but then how to display it is a big problem. I’m supposed to cover it w/ acrylic sheet, but it’s very expensive. My approach is to pin it to the wall, but then it isn’t suitable for “collectors”. I want to enter a drawing show at UNCA, but not spend a fortune, which I don’t have, anyway, on framing two large drawings. Oh, well, my problems are nothing compared to Marsha’s.