Pottery, Paintings, iPhones, and Almost Eaten by a Bulldog

Okay, it's spring......again. We had spring, and it ran away, and we went back to winter clothes, and now it's here with a vengeance, rain, storms, hail, and near 90 degrees a couple of days.

Marley hurt his foot (we still don't know how), but I took him to the vet, and now it's all better. I was a basket case, though, almost as much as when Dave used to get sick or hurt, and when I told a couple of friends afterwards about the ordeal, complete with an American bulldog that kept lunging at us (for 2 hours) while its skinny owner thought it was funny that she had no control over him chatted happily and preened herself in her spike heels and jeans with the knees blown out, Colleen said I should have taken pics for my blog........she was right. But I do have some things to share with you.

I've been going to pottery class at the Arkansas Arts Center for 3 weeks! It's just as interesting as I thought it would be but painfully slow at getting to the exciting stuff like using the wheel (which won't come till next semester) and glazing and using the kilns, which we're (hopefully) doing next week. My first impressions are that this is an art you'll probably be good at if you like it, but of course people who have been doing it for years are better than us newbies, by far. My humble little pinch pots, coil pots and slab pots are not things of beauty, but I'll show them to you once they're glazed. Three weeks and not one finished piece yet........sigh.

But I think these pieces of pottery showing glazes and colors do look like art.

This is Jane showing us how to wrap a slab around PVC and newspaper for support. She's a good teacher and knows her stuff.

This is a painting within a collage that I finished for my kitchen. I'm probably the only one who likes it, but sometimes that's enough. Those are pear leaves sprayed gold, and the driftwood came from the Oregon Coast, my real home I've been longing for since I was 2 years old; I dyed a piece of cheese cloth for it, and that's a piece of iridescent stained glass that I cut in that little square. I wanted a finished edge for this collage and the other 2 I showed you earlier, but I couldn't find the edging I wanted at Home Depot, so Jim made it for me. What would I do without him? Collages on wood just look sooooo much more finished with an edge.

This is a peek at the painting that's been dragging on for a while. It's not there yet, and I may just paint over it. I'm more interested in playing with clay right now.

And I've also been playing LOTS with my new iPhone. It's the second best birthday gift I've ever gotten, Marley being first, of course. But who knew I'd like it so much? I love apps, and there's literally one for everything. I even like the camera, and I have an app that gives some really fun photo effects. Of course you can do those in PhotoShop, but it's more fun to see the effects as you're shooting. Camera phones have come a long way, Baby, since my first one. The first photo at the top looks a little like infrared photography.

This effect is unpredictable but colorful.

And this is an abstract, posterized, pic of Marley. He's on the left side, looking right, and you can see his little nose sticking up.

Next time I'll share some more effects as well as some of my pottery. Thanks very much for stopping by!
Love,
Cat & Marley