 |
|
|
|
|
|
. : About me : .
 Name::Sapphire Dakini From::Santa Fe, NM, United States "The secret of life is in art." - Oscar Wilde View My Profile . : Artist Statement : .
My art is an exploration of the importance of change and releasing the past, especially the people and situations
that hinder personal growth, empowerment and transformation. The utilization of mythic figures, archetypes, motifs
and themes allows me to explore letting go of the familiar, safe and secure in order to travel to the dark, often
frightening, places of the soul. In this way, I've learned to trust my inner voice and honor my soul's need for
expression and challenge. . : Recent Posts : .
Words of Wisdom from the Daily Om . : Archives : .
May 2005 . :Blog Rings : .
 |
. : Social Media : . . : Daily Om : .
. : Portfolio : .
www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Sapphire_Dakini. Make your own badge here.
. : Printmaking : .
. : Masks : .
. : Memberships : .
Artists Foundation . : Yahoo Groups : .
Art Dollz . : Blogrolls : .
|
|||||||
Thursday, May 31, 2007What I'm Reading "In the ethereal world of dreams, there are champions who fight to protect the dreamer & there are demons who prey on them...Arik is such a predator. Condemned by the gods to live eternity without emotions, Arik can only feel when he’s in the dreams of others. For thousands of years, he’s drifted through the human unconscious, searching for sensation. Now he’s finally found a dreamer whose vivid mind can fill his emptiness. Dr. Megeara Kafieri watched her father ruin himself & his reputation as he searched to prove Atlantis was real. Her deathbed promise to him to salvage his reputation has now brought her to Greece where she intends to prove once & for all that the fabled island is right where her father said it was. But frustration & bad luck dog her every step. Especially the day they find a stranger floating in the sea. His is a face she’s seen many times.... in her dreams. What she doesn’t know is that Arik holds more than the ancient secrets that can help her find the mythical isle of Atlantis. He has made a pact with the god Hades: In exchange for 2 weeks as a mortal man, he must return to Olympus with a human soul. Megeara’s soul. With a secret society out to ruin her expedition, & mysterious accidents that keep threatening her life, Megeara refuses to quit. She knows she’s getting closer to Atlantis & as she does, she stumbles onto the truth of what Arik really is. For Arik his quest is no longer simple. No human can know of a Dream-Hunter’s existence. His dream of being mortal has quickly turned into his own nightmare & the only way to save himself will be to sacrificethe very thing he wanted to be human for. The only question is, will he?" Labels: books 
Wednesday, May 30, 2007500 Years of Female Portraits in Western ArtThis piece by eggman913 on YouTube is really amazing. Labels: art history, YouTube
Sunday, May 27, 2007What I'm Reading "Biographer Margaret Lea returns 1 night to her apartment above her father's antiquarian bookshop. On her steps she finds a letter. It is a hand-written request from one of Britain’s most prolific & well-loved novelists. Vida Winter, gravely ill, wants to recount her life story before it is too late, & she wants Margaret to capture her history. The request takes Margaret by surprise -- she doesn’t know the author, nor has she read any of Miss Winter’s dozens of novels. Late 1 night, while pondering whether to accept the task of recording Miss Winter’s personal story, Margaret begins to read her father’s rare copy of Miss Winter’s Thirteen Tales of Change & Desperation. She is spellbound by the stories & confused when she realizes the book only contains 12 stories. Where is the 13th tale? Intrigued, Margaret agrees to meet Miss Winter & act as her biographer. As Vida Winter unfolds her story, she shares with Margaret the dark family secrets that she has long kept hidden as she remembers her days at Angelfield, the now burnt-out estate that was her childhood home. Margaret carefully records Miss Winter’s account & finds herself more & more deeply immersed in the strange & troubling story. In the end, both women have to confront their pasts & the weight of family secrets. As well as the ghosts that haunt them still."Labels: books
Thursday, May 24, 2007Twilight Meet Twilight, the latest addition to the mask collages. So that you can get a feel for the dimensions of the piece, as well as the other 2 mask collages, the mask is sized so that an adult could wear it. I never could get the crackle medium to crackle so I ended up just sponge painting the mask. I'm using up some old bottles of acrylic paint so maybe the paint is just too thick for the crackle medium to react with. I'll try again later when I open the new acrylics. Collage elements include dyed cheesecloth, velvet leaves, dichroic glass cabs, #11 seedbeads in a variety of colors, gold foiling, gold mica acrylic medium & the necklace that I beaded last weekend. I'm going to spend the weekend working on a couple of collages to enter in the National Collage Society's 23rd Annual Juried Exhibit. The deadline is in July so I have enough time to get together some pieces that I'm really happy with.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007Pottery Workshop at BCAEThe Independent Pottery Workshop that I enrolled in at the Boston Center for Adult Education (BCAE) started tonight. No raku pit, no commercial glazes allowed... only what they provide, no additions of miscellaneous materials like dichroic glass, etc. fired on the pieces. Apparently, it's all about the "no" there. Hmmm... need to re-think the work I was planning to execute over the next 6 weeks. Maybe the restrictions will cause me to work differently & will make me stretch. Or maybe it will just annoy me. Who knows. It's only 6 weeks. The last time I took a pottery class was when I was in art school & the only rule was "try not to blow anything up or set fire to the studio". Also, the studio space is pretty small. To be honest, I'm not used to working that closely with people in a studio & I'm not all that social when I'm working. I usually try to get to class early, find a quiet corner where I can work with my headphones on. There aren't any quiet corners. I tend to use classes to experiment & can frequently be found staring at the wall as I visualize what I'm trying to do. I need to tell the instructor that this isn't an indication that I'm stuck or need help but just that I'm thinking. The other students all seem to know each other & have apparently been taking the workshop for quite a while. And they all appear to be making bowls & planters. I spent the evening making flat textured elements that I'll be able to incorporate into collages. Yes, I'm the "odd duck". Next week I'll start on the "Icon" series since I have a better idea now what my restrictions are. I don't know if the masks are going to happen this time around. We'll have to see how things go. Labels: life
Monday, May 21, 2007Just Call Me Uber Geek A posting at Mindtracks over the weekend reminded me that I had registered at Second Life back in March based on an article I had read in the American Marketing Association's publication, Marketing News, regarding the effectiveness of the site as a marketing tool. (Wow, that was a really long sentence.) Since this was during my "dark nights of the soul" period, I hadn't downloaded & installed the software yet so I took care of that first thing this morning then spent way too many hours modifying my avatar (Yes, I'm having a bit of a bad hair day.) & learning my way around the system. (Yep, another really long sentence. Really, I do understand the concept of punctuation.) It's wicked, wicked cool! The downside is that it's a resource hog so I can't multi-task (I'm all about the multi-tasking.) & when I logout I have to re-boot my laptop.If you haven't heard about it, Second Life describes itself as "a 3-D virtual world entirely built & owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively & today is inhabited by a total of 6,593,655 people from around the globe." In addition to their website, there is also some great information about the site at Wikipedia. I'm still not sure about the viability of the site as a marketing tool. (Of course, people probably said that about blogs a few years ago.) I thought I would spend some time tomorrow checking out the artistic community there. If you're ever in-world, look for Sapphire Catteneo (Yes, I know it sounds like an Italian hooker.) & say "hi". Labels: Second Life
Sunday, May 20, 2007Schizo Sunday It's been one of those "random projects" days that I need every once in a while to get my life back in order.I beaded this necklace which will be incorporated into the mask collage, Twilight, that I'm currently working on. The mask has been painted but the experiment with the crackle medium was a bit of a disaster. It didn't crackle but blistered so I think the mask is going to have to be re-painted in order to be salvaged. I haven't had this problem in the past but it's a new brand of crackle medium so maybe I just need to experiment with it a little longer. I dyed a couple batches of cheesecloth for use in the mask collages so I now have cheesecloth hanging everywhere drying. I love cheesecloth for some reason. I have no idea why. While paints, crackle medium, glues, etc. were drying, I cleaned up the studio. I was starting to fall over things again & every time I turned around, I managed to knock something off of a surface. So, storage bins & shelves were rearranged & all of the "stuff" has been put away yet again. I really need to be better about putting things away at the end of each day unless I know I'm going to be working with it the next day. Then there is the on-going battle with the books & magazines which seem to crawl off the shelves at night when I'm sleeping & arrange themselves in piles where I will, yes, you got it, either fall over them or knock them over. I'm a bit behind in my reading right now so I guess I'm going to have to live with the piles for a while longer. Maybe with a little concentrated effort I'll be able to get through the backlog this week. Timing is everything. My inkjet printer gave up the ghost last week when I was printing a batch of Lazertran Decals so I had to buy a new one. Wasn't happy about that but I really can't complain since the printer was a freebie when I bought my laptop from Dell & it lasted almost 2 years with heavy use. So, the new printer has been unpacked & installed. This one came with a wireless adapter which is great. Now I'll be able to print & scan without having to sit on the floor in front of the printer with the laptop connected via a cable. It doesn't take much to make me happy sometimes. During a coffee break, I updated my blogroll with lots of great new blogs that I discovered this week. I've been working on expanding my universe so most of the additions are mixed media artists, collage artists, painters, surreal artists, ceramicists, & polymer clay artists. I deleted a number of blogs that appear to be abandoned. I also removed a number of blogs where the posts used to be about art but now the focus has shifted to their kids. Although I do stray off-topic once in awhile, usually with a brief Paul Stanley binge, I generally try to keep the postings art- or book-related. I do love when people post pictures of the trips they've taken though. Especially the European bloggers. Some of the scenery is absolutely amazing. Labels: life
Saturday, May 19, 2007Insight Wikipedia defines "insight" as:
After all the months of navel-gazing, I'm starting to see some very definite themes emerging in the sketches for my new work. These first 2 mask collages were experiments in new materials.
Friday, May 18, 2007The Artist's Muse - Challenge 2 The Chapter 2 challenge in The Artist's Muse is to create a wet-into-wet painting of flowers. Ummmm, okay... I don't normally paint because that isn't really how I "see" things & I'm definitely not a "paint pretty flowers" type of person so this was a bit of a stretch for me. But, here it is... watercolor flowers.Labels: The Artist's Muse, watercolor
Thursday, May 17, 2007What I'm Reading "When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned & suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, & misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her."Labels: books
Monday, May 14, 2007Sometimes You Just Need a Theme Song...... for those all-nighters in the studio. My creative "slump" seems to have finally come to an end & now I can't seem to work fast enough to capture all of the ideas. Labels: life
Sunday, May 13, 2007The Artist's Muse - Challenge 1 Here's my mandala for the Chapter 1 challenge in The Artist's Muse. I decided to combine a traditional mandala design with celtic knots. Black, red & gold is one of my favorite color combinations to design with, especially when doing beadwork. Labels: mandala, The Artist's Muse
Saturday, May 12, 2007Meet Aurora "Once more the old mysterious glimmer stealsFrom thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure, And bosom beating with a heart renewed. Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine, Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise, And shake the darkness from their loosened manes, And beat the twilight into flakes of a fire" - Lord Alfred Tennyson It was a good week in the studio. Meet Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn. I think she's pretty fabulous! Labels: collage, mask making, masks
Friday, May 11, 2007The Artist's Muse One morning as I was catching up on blogs, I came across a post about a new Yahoo Group, The Artist's Muse, moderated by Sue Bleiweiss. It's a discussion group for The Artist's Muse by Betsy Dillard Stroud. What really piqued my interest was the fact that the group was talking about creating mandalas. I studied mandalas when I lived in Santa Fe & have always thought they were fascinating as a meditation aid. Since I was in a bit of an artistic slump I decided to join the group.Well, I received my copy of The Artist's Muse last week & finally had a few minutes today to sit down & start reading it. As mentioned, the challenge for Chapter 1 is to create a mandala so I thought I would do a bit of research first. Thanks to Google, I discovered the artwork of Paul Heussenstamm. His mandalas are absolutely amazing. As usual, I'm a bit behind as I believe the group has started working on the Chaper 2 challenge of painting flowers but I should be able to finish my mandala this weekend. Labels: art books, The Artist's Muse
Thursday, May 10, 2007What I'm Reading "The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers -- creative & holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead & who doesn't. Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the 6 fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success & personal fulfillment & reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place -- a provocative & necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here."Labels: books
Wednesday, May 09, 2007What I'm Listening To "In a series of vividly told vignettes, critic & poet Robert Long (Blue) illustrates how the East End of Long Island indelibly etched a mark on the style & work processes of the abstract impressionists & their artistically minded friends. For artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning & their respective wives, Lee Krasner & Elaine, the Hamptons were a creative playground in the 1950s. Long reimagines their lives there in stories told from the artists' points of view. Pollock, aka Jack the Dripper, & Krasner moved to the East End in 1945 in an attempt to curb the infamous inebriate's drinking & stimulate his talent. Long cleverly narrates Pollock's artistic methods. When the artist "unleashed screaming ribbons of cadmium yellow, it was like a hot trumpet solo" Long writes, likening his painting process to jazz improvisations. Former MoMA curator Frank O'Hara, Fairfield Porter, Jean Stafford & New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg receive similarly poetic treatment, but it's with titans like Pollock & de Kooning that Long best captures the spirit of modernism as filtered through New York's rural past."Labels: audiobooks
Tuesday, May 08, 2007Synchronicity One of my favorite movies of all time, Shirley Valentine, has just been released on DVD. It's about a middle-aged housewife who decides that there's more to life than stifling domesticity. An unplanned trip to Greece with a friend expands her horizons in ways she could never have predicted, allowing her to fall in love again beyond the bounds of marriage, find herself & grab the reins of her future. (Yes, Anwar, it's a chick flick.)Greece seems to be a recurring theme lately. One of the sessions I attended at the International Opportunities for Artists Conference a couple of weeks ago was given by Dirk Drijbooms from the Apothiki Art Center on the island of Paros. I'm usually more of a mountain than a beach person but the art center & the island are absolutely gorgeous so I'll definitely be applying for a residency in 2008. Anyone who has been reading my blog lately knows that I've been struggling the past few months with the question "What do I want to be when I grow up?". A little background... I started out as an accountant & worked in that field for 15 years before making a mid-life career change to marketing. I've spent the past 10 years marketing for high-tech companies so I'm technologically adept to say the least. I didn't begin doing anything that would be considered creative until I moved to Denver when I was 30 & decided to take some art classes (drawing, oil painting, ceramics, & spirit dolls) at the community center. These art classes led me to going back to art school. So, I'm 1 of those odd people who is equally left-brained & right-brained. For some reason, this seems to be extremely confusing to the people that I've been interviewing with lately. They don't quite know which "box" to put me in. I don't actually believe I belong in a "box" but that's a much larger conversation for another day. A couple of my friends are also evaluating where they're at with their lives & what direction they want to move in so we've been talking alot about the types of companies that would be a good fit for us, graduate schools, freelancing vs. corporate, etc. Then last weekend there was a posting, A Whole New Mind: Right-Brainers to Rule, at Ragged Cloth Cafe discussing the fact that an MFA is the new MBA & the book, A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink. My copy just arrived today from Barnes & Noble. I'm hoping that it will give me a new perspective on things. Labels: life
Monday, May 07, 2007Spring Facelift As you can see, I'm playing around with the blog's color scheme again. I decided to create a new header using a piece of fabric that I painted in Susan Sorrell's Monoprinting class last year. Or maybe it was the year before. Anyway, this was 1 of the glue print pieces created using washable glue, Pebeo Setacolor Shimmer paints & gold ink applied with a sponge.Labels: surface design
Saturday, May 05, 2007It's All About the Maintenance Today was all about maintenance. First there was life maintenance... cleaning the loft, paying bills, getting books back on the appropriate shelves & magazines sorted out, updating my resume, ordering groceries, updating my NetFlix queue, etc.Then it was on to computer maintenance... cleaning up the code for the sidebars on the blog, deleting the blogs that haven't had any new postings in 2007 from my blogroll, experimenting with WordPress & Live Journal to see if there is any advantage to converting, defragmenting & backing up my hard drive, filing & deleting old emails, updating the audiobooks on the iPod, etc. Then there was 2 hours on the phone with my mom talking about the best options for marketing her artwork. Then it was on to the studio... My masks weren't dry enough to start painting so I decided to torture this poor collage, Time in a Bottle, that's been sitting on my easel for more than 2 years. It's a 16x20 canvas. I'm finally happy with the direction that it's going in. I especially like the bottle with the nude figure on it. You have no idea how many things have been added then removed from this piece. My ceramics class that was scheduled to start on 5/1 was cancelled because they didn't have enough people to register. Fortunately there was enough space in the class starting on 5/23 for them to move me to that class. Hopefully that class won't be cancelled also. I was disappointed until I realized that I really needed the additional 3 weeks to catch up on some other things. So everything worked out for the best in the long run. I'm just going to have to make do with plastercast & papier mache masks until the class starts. There was also extensive bubblebath time devoted to The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. The book is totally amazing. It's the best book I've read about maintaining a creative life. I highly recommend it to anyone who is feeling blocked. For some reason, I haven't been sleeping well lately. I'm no more stressed out than I usually am so I don't think that's the problem. I've been having the strangest dreams. If I wake up in the middle of the night, then fall back asleep again, the dream picks up where it left off. I've never experienced that before. My subconscious is trying to tell me something & I guess I'm just not getting the message.
Friday, May 04, 2007Fort Point Arts Community - Spring 2007 Art Walk If you're in the Boston area this weekend, please join the 60+ artists in the Fort Point Arts Community, New England's largest arts community, as they open their studios for Art Walk 2007. Explore the studios of a variety of artists including painters, ceramicists, sculptors, jewelers, textile artists, photographers, printmakers, collage artists & more. Maps will be available at 249 A Street, 300 Summer Street, 15 Channel Center Street & other participating buildings. Labels: Art Walk, Fort Point Arts Community
Thursday, May 03, 2007I'm a Technology Whore Thanks to VerizonWireless, I can upgrade my cellphone every 2 years at no cost so I decided to upgrade to this lovely little piece of equipment which arrived today. This uncontrollable urge was driven by nothing other than the need to have a KISS MP3 ringtone. Yes, I may have to seek professional help for my sudden Paul Stanley addiction. I have no rational explanation. (hanging her head in shame) The phone does everything but the dishes. There's mobile web (because I don't spend nearly enough time online already), text messaging, instant messaging, music, a camera, & video. I haven't even begun to experiment with it yet. I managed to get my contacts input then decided to call it a day.As I was trying to get out the door to the conference at some ungodly hour on Saturday morning, it dawned on me just how much hardware travels around with me on a daily basis... a laptop (sometimes 2), a cellphone, a Blackberry, an iPod, a digital camera & an ever-increasing number of flash drives. When did this happen? Labels: life
Wednesday, May 02, 2007Addition to My Art Library "Creativity is not a gift from the gods, says Twyla Tharp, bestowed by some divine & mystical spark. It is the product of preparation & effort, & it's within reach of everyone who wants to achieve it. All it takes is the willingness to make creativity a habit, an integral part of your life. In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative. In The Creative Habit, Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable 35-year career & shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow -- whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew.When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, & The Creative Habit contains more than 30 of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning & to open the mind to new possibilities. Tharp's exercises are practical & immediately doable -- for the novice or expert. In "Where's Your Pencil?" she reminds us to observe the world -- & get it down on paper. In "Coins & Chaos," she provides the simplest of mental games to restore order & peace. In "Do a Verb," she turns your mind & body into coworkers. In "Build a Bridge to the Next Day," she shows how to clean your cluttered mind overnight. To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, & organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, & getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. An empty room, a bare desk, a blank canvas can be energizing, not demoralizing. In this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath & begin!" I've heard so many great things about this book from a variety of artists that I finally decided to add it to my library. Labels: art books
Tuesday, May 01, 2007International Opportunities for Artists ConferenceThe International Opportunities for Artists Conference was held in Boston this past weekend & based on the survey responses & verbal feedback that we've received so far from speakers & attendees, it appears to have been a huge success. First year conferences are always unsettling because you never know what to expect. But, the opening reception held at Northeastern University on Friday evening was well attended & gave everyone a chance to meet each other & start networking... the dinners held Friday evening at Northeastern University & Saturday evening at MassArt were filled to capacity... & all of the sessions on Saturday & Sunday were well-attended by artists who were anxious to learn more about the residency programs being offered. We're beginning to collect the press clippings & Berkshire Fine Arts has posted 2 very interesting articles including pictures by Astrid Hiemer & Charles Giuliano. Because I was working the conference, I didn't have a chance to attend as many of the sessions as I wanted to but at least I was able to get an overview of the different types of programs & opportunities that are available to artists. I also had a chance to talk to a number of the artists that were attending the conference. As a result, I'm heading back into my studio this week with an increased level of excitement about my work, a clearer focus & much better defined goals. Labels: TransCultural Exchange
|
