Happy New Year!

Wishing everyone a survivable and maybe even prolific New Year. It's been a rough ending to 2016. We are a traumatized nation and there is no end in sight. Many people (including myself), are waking up during the night and remembering that the President-elect is Donald Trump, and cannot get back to sleep after that thought lights up the cortex with fear and dread; it's like a nightmare that is real and won't go away. I know I am preaching to the choir here, but I had to get this off my chest at the start of this New Year blog entry, because there is nothing that is more at the forefront of my mind (and everyone's), than this.

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Trampus (Donald Trump terrorizes the World, your childhood nightmares come true)

So how can one continue on? Not that there is any choice but to do so. In recent years I have taken on art, meaning creativity, as my religion. What do I mean by religion? I mean something to believe in, something worth continuing to do, a drive within that when externalized, is in itself a meaningful existence. Allowing this drive and it's manifestation (creative work) to flourish, even if for no concrete or specific reason, seems imperative, especially in these terrible times. 

So how will we keep our "attitude" up and not sink down into immobility and despondency? How will we keep going? 

The weight of these times and the inevitable suffering that is about to unfold, especially among the most vulnerable of the population, make it seem wrong to even try to enjoy life, have fun, get excited about ideas and things. It's hard. And yet, more than ever we need to make the time and effort to focus on the things in life that bring joy, sometimes the smallest insignificant details like the existence of gooseberries, or trolls, or a good tuna sandwich with sweet pickles. Most of the things (and people) we love and delight in are still around us and we should take notice of them now, more than ever. Another heartening thought is that creativity remains alive and well and ideas still abound.

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Giant Stag Beetle carrying gooseberries through the snow on New Years Eve.

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How to Ring in the New Year with a Bang? (A Starlet lights her cigarette off an explosive)

Last night while waiting at a bar for a friend, I had a sudden flood of ideas for a new technique for making plates. 

Sometimes a pen and paper are the only way to take rapid fire notes and make sketches while the ideas are flowing in. Sometimes typing into your phone can be the death of these organic networks of ideas and thoughts. 

These moments of receiving thoughts, ideas, inspirations, realizations, making connections, discoveries - are not only exciting, but they are supremely reassuring. The imagination can't be co-opted, the pipeline that delivers these divine sparks to us, unbidden, and sometimes completely unexpectedly, is astonishingly un-effected by the current wertschmerz and remains somehow protected, precious, bold and strong; resilient and even oblivious in the face of everything that is going on in the world. 

And to me that is one miracle to celebrate more than ever in this New Year.

My Big Fat Craft Party

It all started with an old door. It's funny how something becomes iconic. A certain song reminds you of a certain day and a certain person and something that happened between you. A specific color brings to mind the exact shade of peach velvet you had on an armchair and the room it was in and how you felt during that period of your life, a yellow hyacinth instantly evokes the first day of midwestern spring in your childhood. Fornasetti and John Derian imagery reminds me of my favorite Uncle Stuart who was a very talented and an eccentric artist. And Raggedy Anne dolls cause me to remember that I once believed that dolls were alive.

And sometimes one thing is the beginning of something. I have had many a gargantuan crafting extravaganzas in the past but this was going to be my first-ever "Pop-up Shop" and Craft Party and I was trying to imagine how it would all work, when suddenly I remembered a 12 foot tall wood panel that was leaning against the back of the garage. It had once been a door, then a shelf and later a temporary table top. Now it was disintegrating at the edges from years of weather and yet somehow I knew this door was going to be my centerpiece, the lynchpin of my event and the beginning of everything that was going to happen. I knew I had to paint a giant peacock feather on the door.

Besides the cast-off door, it was my extraordinarily good fortune to also have a sister-in-law (Jennifer Shestack) who is a super-retail-mogul type person, and who flew out from Philadelphia --  just to help me out!  Together, Jennifer and her bestie, Meredith Feldman, made it all happen. Whereas I was like the laid back California type: “Let’s put out a few plates on the side and let people wander around and maybe bump into them”. They were like: “No one gets past us to the crafting area without spending time in the Pop-Up Shop!” It was an East Coast vs West Coast kind of thing, kind of like in a Tupac rap.  

It turned out to be one of those remember-forever kind of days, everyone made the most creative and gorgeous Art Journal covers (check them out in the video below!) and they also bought lots and lots of decoupage plates and paperweights and I was elated (and still am!).

It was an extraordinary day with lots of wonderful friends, intense crafting and strawberry sangria. People created the most amazing Art-Journal covers and they also got to see and buy my handmade decoupage-under-glass plates and paperweights. It was truly a day to remember, so much fun, so much creativity and so much inspiration.

And now I can’t wait for the next one, the Portiaelizabeth Holiday Pop-Up Shop and Craft Party – this time we’ll be making Dreidels and Christmas ornaments! If you couldn’t get to the last one, you gotta get your craft on at the next one!

Sometimes, like the old door, inspiration arrives in a flash and you know exactly what to do, as if your hand is being guided by a higher force, but other times ideas need to time to brew and slowly emerge. That’s why, even though it’s only August, I’m already starting to design my Chanukah and Christmas plates.

Yup, it's me, Portiaelizabeth the person.

FORNASETTI

Fornasetti exerted a major influence on my life as a decoupager. You may recognize this face which he re-invented hundreds of times in his wonderful silk-screened ceramic works. I first saw Fornasetti's plates at my Uncle Stuart's loft when I was a child. My Uncle Stuart was my role model: an eccentric bohemian artist living in a cool loft with a hammock bed strung between two trees that grew in the inner section of the building, where he slept with his two French poodles amidst a flock of live doves. He lived in the Old Town section of Chicago and his lifetime spanned the years between beatnik and hippy. I miss him still and I think of him often - especially when I see the work of Fornasetti. Learn more about Fornasetti at this delightful website: http://www.fornasetti.com/

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Slow Blogging - What is it?

A place to share cool art work and artists, inspirations from around my house and garden and from around the city (Los Angeles) and from my occasional travels, a place to discuss inner thoughts about creativity, it's purpose and meaning, a place to share ideas. A place to satisfy my husband's absolute conviction that an e-commerce site MUST have a blog.

The trouble with blogs is that you can't keep them fresh and meaningful anymore since social media has exploded and anything you had to say or share has already been said and shared.

This is from the incredible NY Public Library online digital image collection. Click the image to go to this amazing FREE image-finding site!

In the spirit of research, I've visited other creative people's websites, both artists and entrepreneurs, and I see their blogs were often last updated sometime last year. My conclusion: if it's breaking news, it not on a blog. With Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and others, what is left to share? One certainly doesn't want to just duplicate what is going out on those networks.

This leaves me with a challenge: how to write something and share images that are unique and interesting and not the same as what I've already posted out there already. So I decided to turn my attention to inner thoughts about art, creativity and the creative process and only write an entry when I am inspired to do so. More reflective than reflexive.

This is NOT a blog, blog! It's a Slow Blog. Don't expect breaking news or super frequent updates. You've heard of the "Slow" movement? Slow cooking, slow eating, slow sewing, slow woodworking, slow art-making, or those Norwegian TV series of logs burning in the fireplace for days... if you must, you can call this "Slow Blogging".