Sundays sketches- wood art and civil war reenactment

Hi all at Sunday sketches!

First i want to share a piece we recently finished, made out of wood.

The message says "outside the homo sapiens ambit, predators strike almost exclusively to feed or to mate, or to assert related, limited, well defined dominion,: only humans eviscerate for vengeance,  ego, or sport , from an unquenchable thirst to acquire everything - especially now,  we must ponder how to view,  and act toward, such uselessly,  even harmfully excessive acquisitive behavior. "

Speaking of violent, acquisitive behavior, in the town we sell art in,they have a civil war reenactment twice a year. I wonder if any of you ever see stuff like that where you live?

Here are some fun pics

Have a great Sunday!

PFF & SS - Stool, more art, & ebook launch

Hello to all my friends at Paint Party Friday and Sunday Sketches!

I wanted to share some art and the inauguration or the ebook store we launched.

Jim's birthday is May 24th and all he really wanted was for the ebook/kindle store to be launched - which is what I have done, with 13 titles and more coming.

In order to launch it I have been writing people and letting them know these ebooks are available, either for folks to read or to buy for other people as gifts. Some as cheap as $1 and short as a few pages - others way longer.

So far all the writing is his, and I assist in graphic layout, and cover design. I have some book ideas of my own, but for now it is his writings I am sharing about.

Things he writes are anything from short fiction to exploratory biographical essays about folks involved in the renewable energy field. They range from $1 to $6. Many more are coming. 

The book I'm particularly excited about is the one shown on the cover here, Homily Sticks... etc - this book contains all the poems/verses we have put into wood art - and contains a fine collection of all the wood art - some examples of which I have posted here over the past few weeks/months.

It has been in any event a great winter project, that hopefully will continue. I especially enjoyed putting the Homily Sticks book together, which required a great deal of Photoshopping! It gave me a good excuse to document the pieces we have made. I not only have been able to edit the pieces to account for a bad camera, but I've been able to put a groovy background on the pieces, and show all sides of the things. That's what happens when you have 3D work - all sides are important

So there you go! Please feel free to share the link to our Amazon store with anyone who might be interested. "feel free to purchase one if you fancy one" goes without saying :D

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1?_encoding=UTF8&field-author=James%20L%20Hickey&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank

Also am sharing pics of a stool we have been working on. This is the first time we take on a big furniture piece, and it has been rewarding. Our good friend John Behr out of Tennessee built it, and we have been decorating it. This is only 1/2 finished, as can be seen.

thanks for stopping by! Have an awesome weekend!

paint party friday - cleaning triumph & more wood art

Hi everyone at Paint Party Friday! Coming pretty late to the party, but wanted to share a few things regardless.

Here is my greatest artistic triumph of the week - possibly of the year - yes, it is a shower stall! The thing is, the horrid thing had not been sparkling pretty much ever. Sure, I cleaned, but I had never gotten it to be pure white for some reason. Then I learned of a new technique to get things going, and there it is - white.

I ended up at one point watching a cool British show called How Clean is Your House where they recommended you soak rags or paper towels in bleach solution, and essentially wallpaper the shower stall. Then, to leave it there for some time, and scrub it all off. Now.... I have as stated tried & tried to scrub it off in the past, to no avail - so I was excited to find out this worked.

But since this is not a blog about cleaning, and it is a blog about art, I am sharing one of the newest pieces we have finished. Here are both sides of the piece. As can be seen, on one side is a mask, and on another people who are fighting, plus symbols.
Hoping everyone has a great weekend!

PFF - SS - Love Commemoration

Radical Love Revolutionizes Everything

Yeah, I don't blog anymore so sad :( I unfortunately am not one of those people who can have many long-term commitments, or, too many things in my mind at once - mind like a sieve no doubt!

However today I want to commemorate love, not only bc it's so close to V Day, but because the 24th is the anniversary of the date that I met my own husband, exactly 9 years ago. So... my love to him always! We both made the above wood. Actual wedding anniversary would be May, but the day we met was special, clearly! We have had many adventures in the short yet long time we've had together, and I only pray we have many more still.

Speaking of love - every couple of months, though I've quite abandoned the enterprise, I have a hankering to go back to the old haunts, and the 3 that I always took to the best were Sunday Sketches, Creative Tuesdays, and Paint Party Fridays. So I went snooping the other day.

So I find out that not only has "Mr Toast" at Creative Tuesdays closed up shop, but he has joined forces with Alexandra from Sunday Sketches!

Wow.. the things you miss when you're away!!

Their lovely union weirdly means a lot to me because, even through the roughly year and 1/2 that I DID commit to participating, I came to know both of them fairly well - just through their work, their art, and their own committment to their blogs. And though I didn't know them in person, and didn't exactly intuit it, somehow mysteriously, after I found out about it, it seemed PERFECT. Both are very dear people, sensitive, creative, hard working and disciplined - you can just tell. And both are very good looking too, so there you go! Luck all the way around. 

I also just really enjoy the whole meta narrative of it - art blogs, blogging co-ops, together in cyberland, together through art, and then in person.....and all the people who knew and followed them without necesarily knowing that THEY knew each other... and am just madly curious - how did it all come about? When did they meet? Had they always lived in Colorado together and one day ran into each other at Starbucks and said "HEY@! I Know you!!!" Or did wily fate make one move across the country to the proximity of the other? Did they meet because of the blogging, or was that just some bizarre accident, and proof of synchronicity? Enquiring minds would like to know ....

So I commemorate their union as well and congratulate them with this image of a recent art piece of ours "radical love revolutionizes everything". More images can be found at our facebook page, and I invite all who care to to stop by and say HI.

-- linking to Paint Party Friday & Sunday Sketches

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PPF - sleeping piece

Hi all at PPF! Here is another of the pieces Jimbo and I do - as usual, I draw the image with a woodburning tool, and he paints it. It is a collaborative process!

As can be seen, there are many shapes and drawings, as such the piece is hard to mount.

There's also a verse, though I forget exactly what the verse is at the moment. But this one also sold. In fact, this is a photo of it before it was carted away. THis one was actually one of my fave pieces - I really liked how the moon came out! I remember I was watching Twin Peaks on Netflix while I was drawing the moon. I'd never seen it before!

I want to thank everyone who went to visit my brother's silent auction last week! They were very excited about all the traffic they received. As well, they have raised a whopping $26,000!!

I myself got in on the action, by pledging for 3 pairs of toe socks and a lovely polymer clay rose brooch that apparently retails for $50, which I was able to get for $10.

Hope all have a great day!

PPF - sharing some wood pieces + silent auction announcement

Hey everybody at Paint Party Friday!! I haven't come to the party for a while, so I thought I'd stop by :D This is a brief example of some of the wood pieces that Jimbo and I make. The turnover is somewhat quick, so this one was briefly photoed before being whisked off by its new owner! We prefer it that way...

Also briefly wanted to share about a silent auction my brother and his wife have organized, expiring August 5th. They are raising $30,000 to adopt 2 orphans from Eastern Europe. This decision fills me with great pride, for I have always sustained that the value of the world will increase exponentially the more we take care of lonely, unloved children. I feel fortunate to know someone close who can do such a generous thing.

 Thus, I am happy to assist by donating 2 items to their silent auction. One is a print of a beautiful waterfall, the other is one of our many wooden sculptures. This is one of many products that we sell for $50 generally, but here it can be had for as little as $10! 100% of proceeds go to the adoption fees. Many other items being auctioned as well.

Auction live until August 5th!!

Please take a look if you're interested in acquiring some art for cheap + a good cause. In general, information on the adoption and other ways to become involved show up on the website, including a breakdown of the costs.

 Nice to see everyone again!

PFF - Updates on previous piece

Hi all at paint party friday!

Here it is, then, the 2nd Friday in January. Hope the new year is being great for everyone!

Just wished to do a quick update on the woodpieces I posted last week. Our process here is that I do the drawings (as shown last week) and that Jim does all the colouring/painting - and that's what you see here.

Can't wait to start on my painting project for reals! Feels like I've been working on these wooden relics and set aside painting for a while.

some very exciting news for anyone who likes to work with illustrator/photoshop, or would like to but hasn't been able to afford it:

Adobe is giving away free downloads of the entire Creative Suite, version CS2.

Amazing but true! Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, all for absolutely free. It's an old version, but it's one I still have on another machine (a mac) which I purchased in 2005 for like $700 (and that was the student version, LOL). I was excited to find this link through a friend who hangs out in Linked In forums. Now I have the creative suite on my PC as well as my Mac :D

I downloaded it - the Photoshop seems absolutely fine, the Illustrator makes my screen look odd but otherwise seems to work. Would be interested in knowing if others do download it, and what their experiences are.

No idea how long Adobe will feel generous for, but here's the link: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

have a great week and thanks for stopping by!

PPF - Round Wood

Hi all!! Glad to be back in PFF! Some technology updates are allowing me to blog once again now that I am away from home more...

THis is a piece I have been particularly fond of, but which sold last weekend in Hot Springs. I was very happy it sold because it seemed to belong to someone, but also am sort of sorry to see it go!

 Speaking of Hot Springs, there actually was a Civil War reenactment! It was an amazing thing - men in costumes shooting at each other. I know that in the South where I live this sort of thing takes place, but I had never been even within shouting distance of one in the past, regardless of my curiousity about it. I mean, do they reenact battles just as they appear? Do they make wishful-thinking battles where the South really won?

Speaking of U.S. politics (after a fashion) today was the election and I, thus far at 1:07am Nov 7th, have no idea who became president of the U.S. Possibly nobody else does either --- but I certainly don't! I am playing a little game whereby I try to see how long I can go without finding out. I have told Jim not to tell me and am sort of eschewing YouTube, email, etc - anything that might tell me. For no good reason other than curiosity. How long can one go without knowing? Not terribly long, I expect...

Hope all are having a great day!

Homily Sticks - Alicia Jimbo Collaboration

Not often in a course of a day, week, or year, upon participating in an art fair or event, does one so consistently hear “I have never seen anything like this before!” So it was with Jim’s Homily Sticks and Ponder Panels which, though met with some reserve, garnered enough of an interest from a Snow Bird New Orleans couple at the local BRACA art fair we attended some weeks ago that they purchased three.

Homily Sticks comes from marrying two of Jim’s favourite things: words and wood. His artistic statement regarding this nascent art/craft form follows:

In the course of its tumbling meander toward the sea, the rivers hereabouts cast up a practically limitless amount of cast-off wood, frequently as one sort or another of wooden needle. Beaver-bitten, human-hewn, or merely shaped by calamity and gravity and wind and water and stone into the classic shapes of daggers and handles of one sort or another, these forms are not what most passers-by would consider prepossessing. Often stuck in muck, covered with dirt and detritus, or moldy and buggy on the surface, these examples of nature’s short-swords often appear both common and homely.

Jim Hickey begs to differ. For many decades, he has collected samples of such items. Recently, he has begun to work the wood: cleaning it, sanding it, shaving it, developing the faces of the sticks so as to be more presentable.

He then lets the pieces sit, listening for what each one has to say until a semblance of sense emerges from a piece. After writing down and shaping these words, he burns them into the sticks: inevitably, some element of philosophy, morality, or intellectual investigation is what emerges, since even though he’s listening to the wood, the message is going through the ‘Jimbo Translator,’ which cannot help but bear the imprint of someone in love with words and ideas.

Alicia will often add touches of artistry to the words. Jim provides color and, as a final step, stains and finishes each piece according to what will both enhance and preserve a particular stick.

Although many of the sticks have holes and wire attached, adding potential functionality to the conceptual or aesthetic presence, others are freestanding or appear on finished bases. They all proffer some message—hence the ‘homily’—but mainly they are beautiful, natural sculptures that invite an appreciation for the infinite number of ways that time and tide craft gorgeous material for our contemplation.

We plan to develop this medium further. Meanwhile, Marshall Arts, in whatever form it takes, as well as local fairs and tailgate markets of all stripes in the WNC area will see these sticks come to life. They can also be seen in Marshall Arts’ Etsy store.

Revisiting old works: Atacama then and now

Back in 2006 I cobbled the following painting together, and called it Atacama, a place I've only, alas, gotten to see the mere outlines of, thanks to a random outing to the city of Copiapo with family members 10 years before the creation of this work. I was not particularly remembering that particular outing, which involved hunting clams by the seashore on our way north, a storied and hilarious journey inside a creaky winnebago accompanied by step sibling Francisco (recently married... how time goes by...) the youngsters (one now completing passage at the Naval Academy ... time does go by indeed!), and Los Tres (tape deck.. no MP3s!! Ancient!!) , and plenty of cachaça and.. of course... red wine. Rather, something of the arid colours of the piece itself reminded me of the Northern Chile desert. I hadn't even thought about any of the other aspects of that trip until I sat down to relate this.

In any event, this 3 foot x 3 foot landscape begun as a school project for a Tim Flowers drawing class. Random driftwood was the subject matter, or, to be more exact, the picking of a subject matter and developing it across a whole semester. Anyone who know anything about me and Jim, it's that WE HAVE US SOME WOOD. This is part of the reason we are developing the concept of the Homily Stick, among other things - but I digress.* The drawing part (floating woods in a yellow-blue background) was something of a culmination of a semester's work - possibly uninteresting and unremarkable in itself as an artwork, but OK enough for a harried last-minute effort. The piece since then evolved when I affixed the finished, coloured drawing onto an abandoned canvas found on the side of the road of the never-forgotten Oakhurst neighborhood of Decatur.

The piece lived on in this way for years until a sudden impulse of late led me to affix all sorts of whimsical details, glitter, fabric, decoupaging of all sorts. I was revisiting lots of old pieces - some which were frankly unresolved, some which required minor tweaking, others which I randomly decided needed revisiting, such as this one.

Part of the impetus was finally unearthing a lot of the random playing cards, bits of ribbon, old-timey Victorian calendars and other assorted hodgepodge that artists tend to acquire in hopes that someday they will fit onto a piece - and the truth is, the original image always looked a bit plain, a bit severe to me. I feel I managed to integrate more of the background with the foreground, and added a bit of zip, zap and zing. I like the way the foreground was extended in the yellows, grounding the drawing more onto the wacky outer space quality of the original discarded canvas.

The last thing I want to do, as soon as I get some funds, is encase the whole thing in a layer of EnviroTek epoxy resin, though I balk at this seeing as the interaction of chemicals and elements can change things in unexpected - and sometimes undesirable - ways.

In any event, the new and improved version can be seen here.

*everyone forgive my trucculent and spacey prose - I must be undergoing an unfortunate Mercury transit.