Ribbons are the New Bird Cages

Most people use the term, "watching paint dry," as a negatively charged simile:  "That movie was so boring, it was like watching paint dry."  But I use the term literally, and to tell you the truth, it's really kind of a relaxing way to spend one's day.  Since watercolor changes so much as it dries, it also makes watching it kind of interesting.  Not exciting, but definitely interesting. I'm experimenting with a brighter, more purple background color for my latest piece, so I was eager to see how things turned out after I applied each layer.  

And here's a ribbon river set up in my studio:
Don'tcha know, ribbons are the new bird cages.

Phat Loots

Yesterday I went nature-romping to gather inspiration for my next series.  I saw these pitcher plants at The Garden in the Woods in Framingham:I also saw a very majestic-looking frog and several painted turtles in the lily pond there, all of whom made me wish (once again) that I had a zoom lens, or at least a pair of waders.  I do, however, finally have a UV filter on my 28mm, so that removing my lens cap no longer feels so dangerous.  

I also bought 45 yards of ribbon at Playtime in Arlington.  I have a plan for all of this ribbon, which will reveal itself over the course of the next few weeks.  But right now it's time for a little tangent about Playtime.  Cue music.

I love Playtime.  They have the best, strangest, most disorganized array (is that an oxymoron, and can disarray be used as a noun?) of art supplies, craft supplies, party supplies, coloring books, and of course Queen Elizabeth paper dolls, this side of the Mississip.  Playtime is also fodder for excellent, quirky anecdotes.  The ladies who work there are very nice, but sometimes they don't know a lot about the fine art supplies that they carry.  I once plunked a big roll of drawing paper up on the counter to pay, and was met with a great deal of confusion.  "What is this?  Where did you find it?  Was there a price on it?  I've never seen this before."  But the ladies are quite helpful in other ways.  Not overly helpful, like "Overly Helpful Librarian" in the Wellesley College science center (a story for another day), but helpful in an even more surprising way.  You know when you go to a car dealership,  or a mattress store, and the sales person makes you squirm with the feeling that you're about to be sold up against you're will?  You know that you don't want to buy the all-season super-deluxe car mats, or the special, $70 mattress cover.  But the salesperson tries so hard and with so many different (albeit transparent) sales tactics, that you have to bring out your inner jerk-face in order to successfully shut him/her down?  Well that never happens at Playtime.  The ladies who work at Playtime check prices with disapproving clucks and raised eyebrows.  At the register, the cost of each paintbrush is reported to the customer in a skeptical tone, suggesting that no one in her right mind should pay $5 for such a little brush.  I was once seduced, while wandering through the aisles, by a gorgeous, super-soft, super-deluxe $65 sable brush.  This was too much for the lady behind the counter.  She flat out refused to sell it to me.  "Oh my God, this is $65!  Oh, noooo.  You don't want this!"  

Oh, Playtime, I do love you.

End tangent.

Yesterday I also snapped a whole bunch of pictures of my mom and stepdad's garden to tide me over with garden/nature imagery until next spring.  

I also made off with some more phat loots:

And look at the view we discovered this past weekend, just a little uphill walk from our own backyard in the Waltham Highlands:

Breakfast Blog

Yesterday I installed my show at LynnArts.  It was a good day, productive and crisis-free.  All paintings arrived at the gallery unscathed, nothing fell off the wall, and there were very sweet interns there to help me.  The space has great light and interesting architectural details.  My show faces out onto the street, and passersby stopped to peek in, wave, smile, and give me the thumbs up.  As mentally exhausted as I was at the end of the day, I left the gallery full of warm fuzzies.  My one regret is that I failed to realize that there are windows on the actual walls of the gallery space.  You can see one in this image.  There's another, beautiful arched one on the other side of Fish Rain and one long, vertical one at the very top of the wall, but I didn't get pictures of those.  I can't, for the life of me, figure out how I missed the existence of these windows, except that the artist who was showing when I first went to visit the space must have covered them with some big paintings.  In any case, if I had realized the windows were there, I would have created some kind of site-specific piece to interact with them.  I'm dreaming about long cut- paper vines hanging down from the ceiling, veiling the windows, but not hiding them.  Kind of like strange, human-made ivy covered walls.  I've had two shows now–this one, and the one at the Belmont Gallery of Art–where I wish I had taken more full advantage of the particularities of the space.  In the future I will be sure to investigate these things more carefully!  Ah well, here are some more views of the show:
Setting my delightful experience at LynnArts aside, I have decided that the city of Lynn must surely be the catcall capital of the universe.  I am not even kidding.  And it wasn't just that I accidentally parked next to a barber shop outside of which legions of young men appeared to congregate for hours on end.  There were also creepy comments from even creepier middle aged men in passing cars, and there was a lot of honking, waving and hollering out of car windows.  I found the whole experience mystifying.  If all of these *cough* "gentlemen" expend this amount of energy on a woman walking down the street with messy hair, flip flops, bermuda shorts and a t-shirt, what happens when they see a woman wearing a dress?  Do they spontaneously combust?  Now that would be something to see.  

While I found the catcalling men of Lynn uncomfortably absurd, here's something that I am finding delightfully absurd:
This is the second book in Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime Series.  I read the first one, The Big Over Easy a couple of weeks ago and I highly recommend them both.  They are perfect end-of-summer reading books.  Especially if your early summer reading list included A Thousand Splendid Suns and Plague of Doves, both of which are amazing, but in no way embody the kind of light, hammock lounging, beach sprawling breeziness that normal people associate with summer reading.  

You might have noticed the above reference to end-of-summer.  Sorry, but it's true.  Not only are my mom's dahlias in full swing:

But the leaves are already beginning to change, the air is getting crisp at night, and I've seen several big V's of Canadian Geese on the move.  So for those of you who love summer best, my condolences.  And for autumn-lovers like myself, wahoo!

I don't recommend the kind of reckless devil-may-care approach to baking that resulted in these:

Now if there's one thing I like to do in the kitchen, it's experiment.  But to experiment on cupcakes is downright irresponsible.  It might even border on heretical.  

I DO recommend marrying a man who will run BACK to the grocery store at 9:30 pm to acquire those little cupcake paper thingies.  This kind of heroism not only expresses his commitment to you, but perhaps more importantly, his commitment to cupcakes.   

The postcards for my show arrived the other day, and almost immediately upon their arrival I also received the press release via email.  Apparently at some point someone changed the dates of the show and failed to let me know.  The show is going to be up from September 1st–October 18th, and not August 29th–October 3, which are the dates that I had printed on one thousand postcards.  This wouldn't seem so bad if it weren't for the following additional horror:
That's right.  Kaetlym.  You can email me at kaetlymwilcox@yahoo.com, because apparently that's my email address.  

The images on the front look really good though.  I'm getting much, much better at documenting my work, which makes me a little bit giddy.  

In other news, it seems that I'm not immune to the following two things after all: 

1) cavities

Yes, it is the end of an era.  After almost three decades of pristine teeth, I have been diagnosed with my first two cavities.  Sigh.  

2) bride stress

My emerging wedding mania has successfully been nipped in the bud, but all of the phone calling, online searching, venue visiting and number crunching was definitely starting to consume parts of my brain that I need for other things....Like painting, blogging, and (apparently) correctly spelling my own name (see above).  So we had a family meeting, and Charley is going to be in charge of wedding planning for the next few days so that I can un-obsess. 

Sick Day

I fight the idea that I might be sick the way that a small child fights bedtime.  Stubborn denial is my favorite strategy, and the phrase, but I'm NOT sick has been my little internal mantra for the past two days.  Unless I have a fever (the only real, tangible proof of illness in my mind) I am able to dismiss all other symptoms as allergies or the ever-popular "just tired."  But this morning I was so dizzy and achy-all-over, that I decided to call in, sans fever.  

The minute I hung up the phone, I promptly went to sleep here:

And slept for six hours.  And woke up feeling quite a bit better, despite the fact that I'd forgotten to take my contact lenses out. 

 
On Monday I snuck into my studio for a couple of hours and got this shot of my egg installation.  I like this arrangement.  By the way, this piece (along with many others) will be included in my solo show, From My Forest, at LynnArts in Lynn, MA from August 29th–October 3rd.  The opening reception is on Saturday, September 6th, from 2–4pm.  And yes, (*sigh*) my name is spelled incorrectly on their website.

I also started tackling this guy once again:
 

I ordered these Camilla Engman decals last week from Third Drawer Down, and they arrived on Monday!  I used some of them to make a little story fragment on my microwave stand-thing:

The Nesting, Part Deux

I am in love with the sugar bowl that I bought at anthropologie last weekend:My stepmom won the Fiesta Ware cream pitcher and the little blue tray at an auction, but the sugar bowl was missing from the set.  I wasn't even thinking about trying to match everything when I bought the sugar bowl!  I do believe in fate.  

It's Renaissance Week at the Arlington Center for the Arts, and my middle school students are making letters inspired by medieval manuscripts.  Did I mention that I LOVE medieval manuscripts?  And yes, it is a love worthy of bold, capitalized italics.  In any case, I made these letters for our house while the kids worked on their projects:

In other news, it has been a month of awful car luck in our house!  The saga is long and not very cheerful, but the end result is that we are picking up our new car tomorrow, and the insurance company has been very slow about towing away the old one.  Which is currently parked in the street, it's sad rear end all mangled.  And it's license plates have been mailed to the RMV.  And the keys have been Fed Exed to the insurance company.  And a neighbor called the police, who paid us a little visit last night at 11:30pm.  Because apparently it is illegal (who knew?) to park a car in the street without plates.  And even after the whole scenario was explained, including 1) the imminent arrival of the scheduled tow truck, and 2) the impossibility of pushing the car, given the wheel lock thing-a-majig, the police still insisted that we move the car immediately.......

Oh, I have become very cynical over the past few days. 

Needless to say, the car remains in the street.  But the insurance company did promise that they would take responsibility for the car if it's impounded, so I feel like we won at least an itsy bitsy tiny victory today.  Huzzah-ish.  

More Eggs

These eggs are completely finished, including their little hanging spikes.  

These just need their spikes.

I played around with possible arrangements.  I don't feel like this one is quite there, but it's starting to come together.

My work table gets cluttered when I work on these! 

I took a break from the miniscule detail work of the eggs to slop some watercolor onto this piece of rice paper.  My studio mate gave me three drawers in her flat file the other day, and it made me giddy to store this paper inside once it was dry!