Workin For The Weekend Is a Blur and hey How do you store 30 years of art In a studio apartment
The finished image used on my products has been run through unsharp mask in photoshop, curves adjustment and topaz labs glow filters, set to the old fur and feathers filter settings which was my favorite. Topaz labs makes the best photo editing tools outside of photoshop. I first saw them in groups on flickr about ten years ago. Their stuff is amazing, have been using their suite for years.
So this image was taken a couple of years ago, post homeless. This of course means post driving for me. My baby sister is a most wonderous person and has been taking us out, dad and I on Saterdays since he stopped driving too a couple years ago. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer right about when I came back from my soulful sidewalk sleepin. I write about it this week because everything is changed. He moved into a studio apartment at an assisted living facility and I only see him on Saterdays now. He happens to be in the hospital this weekend. Just weak from chemo. We will visit there of course. But we love going for our Saterday drives. He is like a London Cab Driver with the county roads of Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. He would guide us all over the place. Hilly valley country roads with fresh corn and farm goods. He is fond of ice cream and custard so we stop for a cold treat nowadays. He had to get rid of 30 years of books dvds and accumalated stuff to get his new place. I was in the spirit of downsizing when I got the call. Sister: "Are there any of these drawings you want me to save?". Now hold up. before you judge her, weeks ago I had told her I was going to trash my old artwork and she said no we' could find a place for it somewhere. I shed a tear and said ok. But in the spirit of the day when so much had seen the dumpster I went with "no, it can all go." Now I had a pile 19 x 25 inches and approximately 3ft high of pastels, charcoals and pencils . Mostly they were assignments from artschool or art classes, but some were on my own. Self portraits, figure drawing classes from when I was 15. All kinds of stuff. All gone. Gone.
But wait, before you tear up for me, I am looking at moving into a studio apartment and for the better part of a year I'll be living out of a guest bedroom at my sister's. There is no room for that kind of stuff that you never really go through and use. But see, I saw this comin a mile away. About a year before my homeless escapade my dad said we had to move. Couldn't afford the house. When? About five years. Alrighty. I got to work and scanned all the europe slides at high res. photographed all the heirloom photos, and took shots of everything I cared about in that pile of artwork from the past decades. So i have good digital images of some of this stuff. I know how to edit images to make them clear for printing too. Most of it is just some stuff I'd like to show off once in awhile, not really sellable. So here I am with a graphic design degree and my most important monthly payment is to icloud for ten bucks a month I have 30 years of images. Thank god for the icloud. So maybe I will post some of the old work in this blog. Have not really decided what to do with it. Blog and write about it sounds good. That was from another lifetime ago. I was going to waitress and be in galleries maybe even make it into a River North gallery someday. yeah. What happened? Well ask my soon to be 21 year old youngest how in person school is going at Cornell. The other one works management and had the most beatuiful wedding a couple years ago. I would not have fed them well as a waitress. I did good as a mom. Bad as a wife. twice now, but they were both good at the time. No regrets right. Wouldn't change a thing. Just keep writing, and drawing, and photography-ing. So I guess look for old figure drawings a self portraits to be posted in this blog someday when I have nothing better to do. I have a commitment here to writing daily. It is important for an artist to tame her soul before she works so the flames of her darkness don't drown the audience. Thanks for stoppin by.