I'm off to Atlanta tomorrow to slip back into the comfort of friends, familiar sights and smells, and the treat of teaching drawing. I escaped yesterday into Marjane Strapani's Persepolis (magic reading, sad and honest, funny and strong), and will escape tomorrow into my sketchbook. Drawing on planes is one of my favorite things.
Here's hoping that the show invite is viewable on your screen but if not, the story is: Lisa Alembik & Rachael Baldanza call Show & Tell (an art party, an open studio, a show & tell really) Saturday June 11, Art Exchange Gallery Atlanta, from 6 to 9. Will be plenty of fun and you oughtta bring your friends.
Gotta go pack those bags... take good care,
Rachael

Email me and I'll send you the directions. This will be fun.
take care,
Rachael

A year ago I was working on my exit strategy. Cleaning up this mess of a (productive) studio and sorting through all my crap so we could move to a new blank slate in a new (old) city.

Today I couldn't help but compare recent past as a working artist in the South and my current situation working in the arts in the Northeast. I guess I am still a working artist, I do still make art but my output now isn't as large as it was. And it has changed.

Atlanta was a fine place for me to come to my skills and confidence as a painter, a place to teach, live, love and eat well. Fine people, fine music.

Today I fell asleep reading in the backyard. Yesterday we played with the baby niece. I walk around this city with a comfort it took me many years to find in the South.

I've noticed that the art I make here is...different. I'm still getting my sea-legs for sure, I don't exactly have a full-on studio set-up, the clay obsession is really fun and I have less to prove and more to...say? I don't know. Something is different about the voice I use here and the tone I had a year ago. I'll share more I guess when I figure it out. Maybe when the recent paintings and drawings are up in Atlanta will I be able to articulate it. Or maybe the articulation isn't as important as regaining the confidence and the disipline with which I worked before I left. And that may simply take time and more work.

Never easy to assess where you are or where you've been, but I do know that where I'm going is to bed. Peace and take care,
Rachael

I spent some time in the clay studio today. Just me and what remains of my bag of clay (went and bought myself another, even). I've been trimming pots all week (OK, this is hard when everything is awkward and slightly off center) and glazing and today I tried my hand at pinch pots and slabrolling and coil construction and slipping and scoring.

The newness of clay for me is a such a fun thing. I wonder how as we grow conditioned to one set of ways of working (I draw, I paint, I write, that's what I do) we close off others. It took me a good half a year of watching the potters and noticing that the ceramics studio always draws someone to quietly, carefully work the wet mud, before I signed up for my beginners class. My teacher told me I was 'cleared' for intermediate next go-round if I want it. And I think I do. My cylinders are getting taller and that slipping and scoring seems quite promising.

I slip.
I score.
I will return to the site of my last adventures. Yep, in less than a short week I'll spend a long week in Atlanta where my husband and I lived for many years up until last July. We skipped town for a laundry list of reasons, not least of which was that the pace felt wrong, we couldn't save a dime and we missed our families. Of course, we'd formed new families through a network of friends and the live fast, spend freely life is fun for a vacation. I've custom fit my vacation, actually. It's work, it's play, catch-up, nostalgia and new adventure. I'll teach, I'll treat my friends to stories of our new life up north and I plan to draw again. Maybe I'll finally check out Mudfire or spend a big chunk of time watching my great friends great kids run around like they have no worries. It's sunny and seventy. What's to worry about?

For those of you in Atlanta, news will follow shortly about a fabulous art party and for those of you about to rock, well, I salute you.

Sorry. I slip. I lose points.
Ok, take care,
Rachael

I'm hooked on this pottery thing. Today I learned how to glaze a bit and got a huge kick out of the mystery of which color would appear when the pieces come out of the kiln. I won't know for a week or two. I dipped my pots into vats of color (yellow-green, blue, maroon, clear, you name it) and then let the glaze dry and dipped again. Glazing will be about trusting the bit of knowledge I gleaned from the test tiles and from asking other folks in the studio ("should the clear be so thick?") and my own gut instincts about color (my hopes are high for the red-green) and learning from the results.


Come to think of it, that's much what painting is (or writing). The more sketchbooks I filled as a teen, then an art student, then a student, then a temp, then a you-name-it...the more I felt confident to draw, sketch, doodle, write and otherwise catch ideas in a net that is a small book brought with me daily. Somedays the images in the book are about looking (like those Oxalis) and somedays they are about processing experience.



I was talking to a stranger on the phone the other day and I suggested she try something simple, she sighed heavily and said "I'm so stressed!". I found a plan B for her and realized that the whole time, my calm and my strategy was helped by the little circles I drew on an index card. On a day of high stress for me I make messy pages in my book like the one below. Sure I might feel like I have to be all things to all people but then I can go glaze and be the beginner potter, the master dripper and spiller (yeah right) and the goofball giggling in the studio when the pot falls out of the tongs, drops to the bottom and has to be fished out.
Making art or making messes or making messes on the path and in the hope of making art may not be the path for all people, I would be willing to admit that. But it works for me. At least today.


Take care,

Rachael