Artsy Date Night

Anchorage’s First Friday art walk was great! The sun was out, the downtown sidewalks were free of snow and full of folks who came out –many of us admitting this was our first, First Friday this winter. As we ran into several friends everyone agreed that we all were"crawling out from under our polar fleece" for the first time and First Friday is a great excuse to not only socialize but to get some much needed culture from a very long, dark winter! Daddy-O and I met friends for some “pre-function” drinks at Sack’s Café then popped over to my friend Katie Sevigny’s Studio –which was packed with artsy types of all ages. Katie's Studio is definitely the new downtown art hot spot. We ended at the “Here Comes Spring” show at Artique where we saw my “Sunflower” and “Spring Nest Topiary” sculptures had blue, sold dots on them! The photo at the top shows my large, chime and the top, left photo is of the "Sunflowers" displayed horizontally at Artique. The gallery was beautifully displayed with incredible works of art. Luckily, I had a great show because it cheered me up from receiving a rejection letter for the All Alaska Juried Exhibition show at the Anchorage Museum. Oh well, nothing that a quick package of Oreo’s didn’t cure! The juror, Michael Darling from the Seattle Art Museum (which we love to visit) chose 46 pieces of art from 28 artists for the final round. The total number of artworks submitted were 433 pieces from 124 artists –that’s the group I was in. Ironically the letter was dated April 1, but sadly I don't think it was an april Fool's joke... However, other good news is that I got a kick azz (to use a Gary Rith word) commercial sculpture commission last week which is also helping to take the sting of rejection away –I’ll be able to talk more about the new project next week…

After Daddy-O and I had our First Friday date night we grabbed the offspring and headed down to Girdwood for the Easter weekend. I remembered to add the Ukrainian egg

decorating kit to our “to-go” bag after reading a Blog post by Jim Gottuso. A couple years ago I found this new kit at the thrift store for $2(!) but kept forgetting to take it off the bookshelf at Easter to decorate our eggs –but thanks to Jim's Blog post, I remembered this year! Gus and I enjoyed playing with the hot, drippy wax just as much as we enjoyed

seeing the bright colors of dye color our eggs batik style. The art of Pysanka (pis’-ahn-kah) pl. pysanky Ukrainian Easter egg is from the Ukrainian word pysaty, “to write.” Pysanka was harder than I thought it would be. I had visions of decorating several eggs like the box's cover photo to share with our neighbors but ended up with just a few “survivors” for our own Easter table. We also had high hopes of using raw eggs as the directions recommended, but after the first two crushed eggs, I boiled up a batch for us to decorate. Here is the web site, Ukrain

ian Gift Shop of where my thrift store kit came from. The dyes that were included in the kit were so vibrant and rich that I’m storing them in containers for some future dye project. Though it's going to be a few more days of scrubbing and cleaning my finger tips to return them to normal!