Birdwoman

Happy, Happy New Year!  Today, while all those pesky New Years Resolutioners are clogging up the gym and the yoga studio, I'm taking the opportunity to laze about the house, scarfing down loads of my favorite orange cupcakes.  Not to toot my own horn or anything, but man, are they good...

For the sake of catching up I'll just jump right in: Before I left for Montana I was working on some more of these painted eggs:The eggs below are left over from my last show, but I changed their colors for a more subdued palette.  I'm not really sure why, but I think it might be a winter thing.  I always feel more subdued in winter.  I made a few more eggs yesterday, but I forgot to bring my camera to the studio.  

This is a corner of a collage that I've been messing around with for a while.  I like this wily fox.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I collect old photos of strangers.  This album, which I bought 4 years ago off of ebay (of all the romantic places) contains 250 photos.  The only date I can find anywhere inside is on the back of a picture of two young men.  It reads "....Cleo is from Boston.  19 years old.  June 26, 1924."  I think this photo is one of the later ones in the album.  There is one woman who appears over and over again, from the time she is around 5 until she is around 18 or so.  I've decided the photo album must have been hers.  I have a whole complex explanation for why I believe it belonged to her, but I won't bore you with my craziness today.  I flip through this album about once or twice a week, and I'm always finding new images that I've never noticed before.  Like this one:

And this one:I find these pictures achingly beautiful and provocative.  The way I think about them goes hand-in-hand with my experience, this past Christmas, of being with a new family, and away from my old one, for the first time.  I've been thinking about family history and the stories we tell when we're together, and the ways in which those stories create identity. 

I'm also still working on my series of fabric and paper collages.  I'm hoping to finish this bit of sewing today: