Some friends of mine are involved in The Cradle Project and are looking for artists to participate and help make this fundraising project a success. Please visit the url below  and send it on to anyone you know who may be interested in either participating as an artist or sponsoring a cradle.

http://www.thecradleproject.org/index.aspx

Thanks for taking the time to consider this!

Phyllis

Speaking of fall...if you're in the neighborhood this weekend, visit the Corrales Harvest Festival, take a hay ride and stop by the Third Moon Gallery! They're having a "clothesline" sale and lots of art will be offered for really good prices.

I will have a number of pieces from my online collections for sale, as will the other artists from Third Moon Gallery.

This is a kid-friendly event, and a wonderful way to celebrate harvest-time! For more info about this quaint village just on the outskirts of Albuquerque see www.visitcorrales.com.

Hope to see you there. If you're too far to make it in time, hope you enjoy your own harvest celebration this weekend!

Right on cue, the weather has changed and it feels and smells like fall, say amen! Isn’t it wonderful, that just as you’ve had absolutely enough of the season at hand, a new one takes over?

Here in New Mexico fall means fresh roasted chiles, and you can hardly go anywhere without that heavy, pungent smell as they turn and toast slowly in the hopper. Today I will buy a bushel, package the freshly roasted peppers in small bags and freeze them to have during the coming year.

State Fair is over, Balloon Fiesta is coming up, and in general this is a time of renewed enthusiasm and creativity for me. It’s a funny thing, that just when many living things in this part of the world are preparing for rest and hibernation, I’m getting all revved up, energetic and creative.

So please join me in welcoming autumn back once again: hooray for apples, pumpkins, roasting chiles and the rest of the harvest; red and orange and gold hues along the river just weeks away; clear, crisp, invigorating morning air, and a special hooray to creative types everywhere, may sparks fly and gears crank and colors and shapes and words and notes and movement unfettered spew forth in celebration of the season.

I finally got myself organized enough to begin offering these beautiful art cards. They are printed on Crane Museo with archival inks. I love this paper- it feels so substantial and rich. If you've never used it or purchased a card printed on it, check out their web site at http://www.crane.com/museo/aboutmuseo.aspx.

(No, I don't get a kickback, I just love good-quality materials).

Send one and the recipient can frame it after reading your incredibly brilliant and witty remarks on the inside. Send a set of 3 or 5 cards as a great gift for an art-lover. 

For now, I'm offering to print any image in my galleries; this may or may not last, depending on several factors. I'll just have to play it by ear for a bit and see how it develops.

Stay tuned for card updates (if I have any).

I've been listening to Wynton Marsalis' show on XM Radio's Real Jazz channel, and it's really great to hear the live jazz and interviews with the musicians. It offers insight into the creative process and how a piece ends up going where it does. I love the combination of intellectual and visceral that ultimately makes a great jazz piece.

I always come back to jazz when I try to explain how I create my art. There's a basic theme I may start with. The theme may revolve around color, composition, a particular mark or shape, a concept or a feeling. I develop variations on that theme as I build with color, texture and marks. While I'm working on a piece I really do get lost in it, and the process of making the art is like making music to me. And when the music is finally finished I have my own record of the process - the actual piece of art. And that's really what my monoprints are - records of a jam session where I played all the instruments.

I've been reading science fiction books for years, and at some point I think it all got hard-wired in my brain so that it's hard to tell what's real and what's fiction. I don't think I'm the only one this happens to. For instance, if you spent years watching Star Trek on TV, there's probably a place in your mind that believes that Vulcans DO exist. But I'm digressing. What I really want to talk about is how many of my monotypes are inspired by science fiction.

Although I don't start out creating "science fiction" monotypes, at some point during the process the image I'm working on often begins to look other-worldly; I may see a landscape, or feel some kind of energy in the piece - something that reminds me of a terrain I'm familiar with in some way, but not here on Earth. OK, stay with me - I'm not getting New Age-y on you. What I'm trying to say is that because of the tremendous exposure I've had to science fiction over the years, there are places and experiences hard-wired into my brain that come from books; stories I've read over the years about Mars, about Charlie Stross' Festival, etc., are SO REAL that it's like reading history books. When I read Singularity Sky, I really got sucked into the story, and by the time I finished, The Festival was very real to me.

Could be I belong in a loony bin, but humor me. Take another  look at some of the pieces I've uploaded and see for yourself - I can't be the ONLY one who recognizes a Mars landscapes or The Festival.

Over thirty years ago, one of my pet projects was working on a written alphabet based on a five-pointed star. As the letter forms developed, so did the imaginary culture associate with the language, and before I knew it, I'd developed an entire society - the Star People. Eventually, I not only had an entire alphabet - I had a mathematical system, societal laws, a historical context - you name it. I loved the calligraphic feel of the letter forms and the ancient scroll-like feel of the "historical documents" I was developing.

This project continued on and off for years; every time I pulled out the Star Language documents, I found inspiration to continue working on them. One day, I sat down and wrote an entire letter in Star Language and mailed it off to my friend Bruce just for fun. Imagine my surprise and excitement when a week later I found a letter in my mailbox from Bruce - who had cracked the code and sent a 2-page reply letter in Star Language!

A few years ago, when I went back to my printmaking roots and started doing monotypes, I dug through piles of old work and unearthed a huge folder of Star Language pieces, which are just as intriguing to me now as they were when I first developed them over thirty years ago. I pulled some of the choice pieces out, scanned them, and started ripping, tearing and adding them to some of the monotypes I was working on.

All of the pieces in my Monoypes with Collage Elements gallery have bits and pieces of the Star Language documents incorporated in them, including parts of Bruce's original reply letter. These are some of my favorite pieces, and it's great to give a nod to my younger, weirder self who spent all that time working on such a strange project. She saved all that stuff, somehow knowing that some time in the future they'd surface again.

Hope you enjoy those pieces!