Stranger than Fiction

This weekend I had to give a little intro at a workshop - you know the kind - who I am and why I'm qualified to stand up here with super glue and tell you about fairies.


Somehow the biographical facts came flying into the story in a new and fun way.

One of my fairy sistahs. . . actually my very first fairy sistah - had come up to help me put on the workshop. So I introduced her instead of me.


"Khloe is my Fairy Sister. She's a fairy sister because we met in a magical place - under a Blackberry bush.  A very large bush that has an Enchanted door. You could walk around that blackberry bush all day and never find the door if you hadn't been invited to come.
We were invited. Under the bush is the Fairy House Builder's work shop. When you pass through the door you go down the steps...and of course there are saws and tools and things. But there's also ferns and flowers growing inside - because it's not really enclosed. There's massive tree trunks holding up a roof that lets in star and sunlight. There's chittering chipmunks skittering by, deer munching on the ceiling and the purr of bats in the beams.
There's a wizard there that builds fairy houses. He has flowing white hair, a long, long white beard and twinkly blue eyes that are always smiling. He can talk to stones and snakes and trees and knows their stories. He wears stones around his neck to remind him of Earth's magic.

Before he made fairy houses he built movie sets for the Muppets. He might still be doing that, but he fell in love with a woman who changed that. Her name is Lady Wolfe, and she's really a fairy in a human body. He loves her so much that when she asked him to build houses for her fairy friends he spent years perfecting this method Khloe and I are going to teach you today.  Because, lucky us, we got to become his apprentices, and he taught us a bitty bit of what he knows and most of what we know.'




And Khloe looked at me and smiled - because it was all true. And is why we can create magic with super glue.

A room full of sparkly fairy house builders!

Khloe, right, at FairieWorlds

Working hard

Most Amazing Sticks!  this is a portal!

What does your art say to you?

The artwork we keep around us say a lot about who we are and what we love. 

photo I took long ago,

When I lived in New York I had lots of creative friends and I photographed them at work. I blew up my black and white photos and had artists, composers and dancers on my walls. When I'd walk into my apartment I felt powerful. I didn't know my photos were not that great, I just knew I loved them and the people in them.

When I was an art director in Washington I had a tiny place and went to the Smithsonian and got big posters of my favorite impressionist art. It dominated my space and when I came home I felt both the richness of a small-town girl now living in a place with fabulous museums and galleries, and a rush from the juxtaposition of color and peacefulness. I loved it. 

Painting John Singer Sergent
painted even longer ago.

Lots of living and many major moves later, I now live with a gallery of nice pieces left to me by kind relatives. Looking around there's my father’s love of the ocean, my mother’s love of dance and my mother-in-law’s fascinating pastels of what she could see from her window while house-bound for 30 years. They’re all pieces I that speak to who I love, but not who I  am. When did I cede my space to circumstance?

I’m the person who can’t walk past a magnificent tree without saying 'hi'. I turnoff the radio when the birds start to sing, touch flowers gently and steal agates from greedy waves on the beach. I’m inside by force, outside by choice. When I walk into the house now I feel - nothing but the fact that I need to dust again.

It’s time to take down some of those paintings, clear the space around me and reclaim it  with light and sparkle and things that I energize me when I walk in the door. 

Hmmmm.... isn't this calling to you?

Now you know my New Year plan, Do you have one that's similar? 

I’d love to hear!