April 2014

Apr 16 2014

Easter Egg Filled Empty Nest

By melissasasichambers Holidaze

In spite of Lina and Logan being grown and gone, and the desire to decorate for Easter being somewhat diminished as a result, I still manage to refill our empty nest with painted eggs and funny bunnys every year around this time.

Painted wooden eggs apparently last forever. You can’t devil them, and they don’t make your teeth hurt like Cadbury’s Cream Eggs, but they sure are pretty.

Bringing them out every year whether the kids are home or not, we go to church or not, we share a meal with family and friends or not, is one of my domestic rituals.

I see my life in circles, and bringing out the painted eggs and placing them this year in our empty nest…another circle is complete.

Apr 15 2014

Leftovers

By melissasasichambers Exhibitions

Today is the last day to submit work for the Wingtip Press Leftovers Print Exchange. I’ve only participated once before, but it was such a cool thang — you get 12 different original prints by other artists in exchange — that I’ve been meaning to repeat it, and I actually managed to get my act together this year!

In keeping with the idea of leftovers, my block is made of cut scraps of adhesive backed rubber from some long forgotten project which I stuck randomly onto a piece of cardboard, instead of just throwing them away.

The paper I used is black printmaking paper which I’ve also had hanging around for quite some time just waiting for a project like this to come along.

Mike let me borrow his ink, brayer, and method — which I have carefully observed over 27 years of watching him create our Christmas card each year.

First you ink the block with the brayer.

Then you lay the paper on the inked block and rub the paper evenly all over with the back of a spoon.

And finally, you pull the print.

I made 18 prints in all. 14 go to the Leftovers Print Exchange.

I’ll show you the 12 I get in exchange when they arrive. Meanwhile, here’s #6/18 “Pieces of Summer.” (I guess I could also call it “One more reason to save your scraps!”)

Apr 14 2014

Second Helpings: Painted Chairs

By melissasasichambers My Artist Home, Second Helpings

I don’t know what makes people think matched sets of things are so special. Personally, I prefer the intentionally mismatched. The sets where everything is the same, but different, like in SET, the game.

GOOD……………………………BETTER……………………..BEST:

So when I set up our new cosy dining room and we needed two more chairs to round up our seating capability to four I looked for a couple of “Windsors” to go with the two we already had. I found two which were similar — same rounded back, but smaller — giving me the kind of mismatched set I like the best.

Then I decided to paint them in entirely different ways.

The first, I painted black. You may have noticed by now, I love black as a background.

I painted glazed donuts with sprinkles as the motif. Better I should sit on them than the reverse, if you know what I mean!

I used acrylic paint and sealed with Minwax Polycrylic Sealer.

For the second chair I looked to my traffic box painting “Good Luck Sweet Cookie” for inspiration and cobbled together a variety of Chinese mofifs.

I used three shades of blue, and metallic copper acrylic paint and sealed it the same as the first chair.

I’m pretty sure the characters translate to “Do not sit on the Donuts.”

Second Helpings? Yes! The same but different? Yes!
Intentionally Mismatched? Yes!

SET!

Apr 13 2014

My Cosy Dining Room

By melissasasichambers My Artist Home

Since the beginning of the year I have either been swamped with my public art project; in the process of taking down (Foray III) or putting up (Metamorphosis) an exhibition for TVAA; or on artistic “hold” waiting to shake off the throes of inertia.

One of the things which I neglected during that time was my ongoing remix of our house, now that Logan has moved out and our space has essentially doubled.

I left off working on our cosy dining room in December. I was really happy to have gotten as far with it as I did before the holidays, and now that things are returning to a normal pace, I’m back to work on that room once again.

Here’s how it’s looking now…

Tomorrow I’ll show you the two chairs I’ve painted so now we can seat four. It just keeps getting cosier!

Apr 12 2014

Inertia, My Stone to Roll

By melissasasichambers Personal Her-story

We’re all Sisyphus. Some of us just choose to whistle while we work. I choose to whistle while I work (between whining sessions). It’s when I stop working and the inertia surrounding my lack of work sets in that the whistling stops and I find myself back at the bottom of that metaphorical hill facing my stone to roll. Again.

That’s where I’ve been for the past 9 days — the longest I’ve ever gone without posting to my blog since I began it 104 posts ago. I’ve been in that zone. Rolling that dang stone.

And now I’m done. Did you see that? I just rolled past the line between “inert” and “in motion” and now I’m back to work.

Every time I find myself starting again I have that forehead slapping moment when I remember that the secret to avoiding inertia — “the tendency to resist a change in motion” — is simply to NOT stop working. Seriously.

I don’t mean it’s necessary to maintain the sweatiest, adrenaline drenched, looming deadline angst-laden version of work. I mean maintain the “bean by bean” version. The steady, one foot in front of the other version.

And always try to have an unfinished piece to get back to the next day so you’re not starting from zero. That’s key. Once you’re “finished” then you WILL wake up, sooner or later, and find yourself in the silence, “resisting a change in motion” one more time. The change from NOT working, to working. Again.

So, try this instead. You know how to whistle, don’t you Sisyphus?