05 April

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!

8 comments:

Cindy Powers said...

Sorry about that April fools letter:( Your eggs turned out great. I have tried it before and it is harder than it looks.

Orion Designs said...

Congrats on those sales and the new commission! It's amazing what a pack of oreos (or m&m's, jelly bellies, etc.) will do for a bruised ego ;)
V

Gary's third pottery blog said...

golly those are PERFECTLY gorgeous eggs!

Linda Starr said...

Congrats on the sales and the commission; the eggs you made are super; I love the bright colors; can't wait to hear about the commission.

Christine B. said...

Stopped by Artique and saw your sunflowers (with the blue dot): congrats! I couldn't find a place to park and so had to get dropped off. I told my ride to give me five minutes for a quick lap around the gallery. Missed Katie's show...I'll have to look up where her gallery is.

Christine in Anchorage

Anonymous said...

OMG! THAT is how I wanted to dye eggs! THANK YOU! I wanted art not crappy food coloring. Very Cool.

Julia said...

What gorgeous eggs!

Anonymous said...

hi cindy, good to see you did some pysanky... it's a lot of fun! looks like a bunch of nice eggs too. i'm always amazed when we do it that i go up the learning curve from one egg to the next. i usually can't wait to finish one to try what i think i learned on the one i still decorating.