Jail Time!

I'm going to jail tomorrow morning with Adrian Hinton, the Horticulture Agent for Utah County. He's granted me an interview at Utah County Jail gardens! The inmates grow vegetables! I think this is a very cool program. Stay tuned...

I'm so excited!!

signed,
i just gave O'lover a heart attack when i instant messaged him that i was going to jail. one of our first dates was him bailing me out of the very facility i'll be visiting tomorrow. sorry Ollie!

All in a Day's Play

While some people are earth plastering the inside of the greenhouse,
some people are installing windows in the treehouse,and i'm in the kitchen turning this harvest
into this meal.

be scene

good times & good people. thank you to the proprietors of coal umbrella & to everyone who came to my opening!

hundreds of people filed through. gallery stroll records may have been broken. i thought i was camera badgering people (lo siento!) but now i realize i didn't capture a tenth of the evening.

and my paintings? they were dripping wet. i painted 12 pieces in less than two weeks. the special high gloss medium i used (for the first time) was a polymerized linseed oil called stand oil, a misnomer if i've heard one! when we hung the show those oils did not stand, they ran...nay they cavorted...across my paintings in big sloppy drips. O'lover came to the rescue when he offered to play fortune teller by providing spectators psychic readings of the drips (much like reading tea leaves).

I like my paintings, even when they misbehave. Yet i reserve the right to never ever ever ever show wet work ever again. Never! ever. NEVER.

Have you ever had a disaster while everyone was looking? i offer you empathy.

p.s. this is a link to the mandatorily cool gallery stroll blog (add it to your subscriptions!) ryan & beccy neely will have september's photos up soon.

preview

detail of "winter creeps in"

the exhibit represents a departure from my normal subject matter (people) and media (mixed).

this time around i was thinking about the built, the cultivated, and the wild and used oils (almost strictly.)

more risky business

does this photo look strangely familiar? well it's not the same pic as yesterdays but still applies as i've been wearing the same painting outfit for the last five days and the painting you see me working on is the problematic one that i'm still working out.

today.

the day i'd like to be hanging the show.

the show which you're invited to. the exhibit opens tomorrow from 6-9 at 157 north university ave, provo. don't touch the paintings. they're wet. i'll be the girl huffing and puffing and blowing the art dry. and i'd love to meet you.

commemoration

The other day someone had left a stack of zucchini at our front door.

i was in utter disbelief at the rudeness.

and was complaining to my mum-in-law when she told me. that's your zucchini. i picked it for you.

oh. haha.

well, maybe i won't plant so many zuchs next year.

what i did plant this year- 3 dwarf peach trees, a chinese sweet pit apricot, 2 plums, 2 walnuts that we will keep pruned short, and we'd ordered pears but they never came in and the nursery finally sent us an explanation & apology. we also planted a fig tree which O'lover will be transplanting to a spot in our greenhouse along with a banana tree and dwarf lime.

see the fruit on the dwarf peach? i plucked most of the blossoms off so the tree could concentrate on its roots.

the ladies are happy in their pen eating their daily allotment of watermelon from their gracious fairy god mother of high quality kitchen scraps (mum-in-law).

the sweet potatoes are flourishing but need a long season...hopefully they'll get it.fall crop of detroit beets, rainbow chard, golden chard, etc are coming in and need to be thinned into our salads.
when the bugs eat we call it paying tithing. some of the garden needs to go back to the creatures that live there, besides us. and this chinese cabbage has paid tithing.
For next year: the biggest realization this year has been how shady our yard is. We've opened up a lot of our garden by cutting down a wall of tall junipers and pruning Hagrid but it's still so shady. Also, it's been a short season with a long cool spring which delayed soil temps, stunting the eggplants and slowing down everything else. next year i'll pull out most of the volunteer sunflowers as they create way too much shade. We're also considering getting that permeable black fabric to help heat up the soil.

Anyone have any other ideas?

risky business

Painting Update:

the paintings are still underway but there's a clear theme: transition, possibilities...