Tour of Silver City

What a road trip! What a workshop! The best workshop I've taken so far. Leighanna and I went down to Silver City last week for an acrylic workshop in encaustic effects taught by Nancy Reyner. It's part of Golden Paint Living Artist workshop series. Wow! Every aspect of the workshop and trip was wow! We took the scenic drive down through Magdelena and saw the Very Large Array.

We stayed at the Palace Hotel which used to be a bank building. In fact, I think many of the buildings there used to be bank buildings (being the central hub to all the surrounding mining towns).

We took a lot of pictures; so many that I think I'll have to do the VLA (very large array), the graveyard and the City of Rocks as seperate posts.

Scroll down to the subsequent post here for more images from Silver City. I'd like to post nearly all that I took, but...I'll be good and refrain!

It's like a collective 'someone' a long time ago said, hmm...I think I'll paint this town red. Blue. Orange. Yellow. Green. Pink. Purple. Heck, I'll just paint this town with an abundance of color!

It is such a visual feast everywhere you go; particularly in the art district which is all of the downtown area! It's like arriving hungry at an all you can eat banquet that has really good food (speaking of which, they have a small handful of fantastic restaurants there).

I could do a segment alone on just the doorways. And the fences. And the windows. The architecture. Heck, even a tire that had contained a tree many years ago (the tree won) was cut decoratively and painted yellow.

And I couldn't figure out why the string of pearls was on the rear view mirror of an old car, but it was a nice touch.

Glass Graveyard

I'm baaack!! After acouple of weeks of computer woes (my main drive went kaput), I think I'm back in the saddle again. Not everything is fully resolved, but now I can get back to posting and catching up on what folks have posted.

A few weeks back, Leau and Raine were all excited from their trip to what is called by local artists as the Glass Graveyard. From what we can ascertain, this used to be a dump/landfill at the earlier part of the 20th century; we don't know when it was discountinued as a dump, but during those decades, the contents would be burned and soil scarped over it for a new layer. Years and years of this; the site is now a part of Albuqueruque's open land areas and open to the public. Mixed media artists started rummaging the site as it has lots and lots of neat old glass;many jars and bottles are still unbroken. All have this wonderful shimmery patina from the heat and sun and being blown by sand blasts during the spring. And, some of the glass has melted and warped from the burning. Things that cannot be artificially contrived.

Anyway, they were excited because since their last visit, some cross cutting had been done (and Leighanna and I are asking ourselves what cross cutting is, but I took a photo of the straita that it reveals). The upshot is that it exposes new layers from below.

Two weeks ago I got to go and do some excavating; there were several of us as a group. It's fun, it's additicing, this search for glass debris. We become like prospectors searching for gold. And, trust me, the behavior we'd like to engage in would be along a similar line to prospectors. Like, if someone finds this really cool, tiny bottle right at your feet, you have to restrain yourself from yanking that sweet treasure from their hands since you feel some sort of entitlement to it due to your proximity. But, you remind yourself silently that you are civilized and that is your good friend and it really would be BAD behavior!

The images posted here are of the sea of shimmery glass, the cross cut, Raine in the midst of excavating, her cache, one of the cranes that flew overhead (we heard them coming towards us and three of us were fumbling for our cameras to turn them on and to try and get an image of the flock overhead; I thought didn't get any shots, but was happy to see this one). And the remainder are at home images I took after I've washed as much of the soil off as possible from the glass. You see how nicely warped that jar got? And the patinas on the glass? In one of the closeups, you can see a tiny old Bayer Aspirin jar (it's a curved bottle and small).

It's good to get these posted at last and good to be 'back'!

Feb 2008 ATCs

Ah, yes, it is time to post a sampling of the stash of ATCs I've made for our trade tomorrow.

The suggested theme for this month was, "Recycle" and I started working on these off and on since...hmmm...December maybe. In small spurts and bits and pieces. It started off with cutting down cardboard that comes in shirts that you buy to give them their 'shape' and using all the bits of scrap paper that sits on my oh -so- cluttered desktop. It felt good to use those pieces that I've been hanging on to for so long! I keep meaning to clean off all that debri from my workspace area just so that I will have more room to work, but alas! Unfortunately, this project didn't even put a dent in the art debris that has taken up a permanent residence on my desk. Or, so it seems permanent.

As you can see, I got carried away! This is only a fraction of what I made. Like I said, it felt GOOD to use some of those things on my desk (I'm still optimistic that I might clean my desk off someday).

I also recall hearing someone say at last month's trade that since it was close to Valentine's Day, one could also make charms to trade too. I had totally missed the other charm trades in the past, so I didn't want to miss out on this one. Hence, the blue heart at the start; that's my charm to trade. Just hope there's some to trade with!

Glass

My fascination for glass never ends...this week's prompt for IMT is, "glass". A material that is indeed a paradox. I have a lot to say about glass as you can see in a previous post called, "Living Glass". There is a glass blowing studio north of us called Tesuque Glass just outside of Santa Fe next to the Shidoni Foundry. If you are ever in the area, make it a point to stop by. They will even recruit you to help them blow glass, as the process of blowing glass is usually dependent on a community. Bring a picnic lunch with you as the property is beautiful with a little stream that runs through it with picnic benches alongside of it. A great day trip if you live in the northern New Mexico zone! And then, there is the Glass Graveyard here in Albuquerque...more on that in an up coming future post!