A New Years Message from Oliver

Transcribed verbatim:

Oliver's humans wish you all renewal, fresh starts, and exciting change this New Year. He's right, we really do believe in all of that. But if you have an ideal perch, (and we do too), we hope it remains the perfect spot in 2012. Happy New Year All!

Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler died today-strange how I was looking at these wonderful photographs very early this morning - she's in her studio, in 1957, painting with her slippers, and with her hands.

Images found on I'm Not a Person in This Dream - I'm a Place

A little joy

To all my friends, going through this hurried holiday week, I wish you happiness, warmth, fun, hope, and peace, from my doll house to your house.

Interior World

I've been completely preoccupied with an upcoming show, my first two-person, at Artspace Raleigh, in February. So the outside world has receded. Actually, it's receded way into the distance, and the studio has ballooned, filled up with ticking time, straight pins, stained fingertips, hope, doubt, logistics, travel plans, spinning thoughts trying to merge together into intelligible stories.  There's much less outside, day trips, no time for serendipity, chance, or  accidents. Much less time for blogging, and reading my friends' blogs, which explains, though doesn't excuse, my recent absence from their beautiful, thoughtful worlds. The whole world, right now, is in this room.  It feels small and large all at the same time, the way things seem when you're threading a needle.

Coffee table reading

I sometimes daydream about having an extra room to call the library, with floor to ceiling bookshelves, with a ladder on tracks, with a long table in the center wired with reading lamps, with an overstuffed chair near the window, wait, no - with a window seat stuffed with pillows, with an antique card catalogue that still holds dog-eared typed up cards from a library renovated long ago, with...You get the idea. Books in my homes have always shared space in dining rooms, in bedrooms, in living rooms. They sprawl, they pile up, they topple. I haven't yet been able to say, in reply to an inquiry about the whereabouts of a family member, "he's in the Library" with a pretentious faux accent designed to prove that I really know how pretentious that sounds, (though secretly digging it). So coffee tables have always stood in for the library, and in a way, that's good - the books of the moment aren't tucked away neatly, and when finished, they make way for the newer ones, forming that towering stack of words and photographs and essays and articles and illustrations that tilt and topple and color in your internal life.

Studio Visit

Working in my studio last night, I looked down, and discovered that Oliver had made a bed out of my fabric bin.

He's not a studio cat-he comes in only occasionally, to watch cars go past the window, or to steal a pompom, to beg for supper, or nurse his paws into a shopping bag full of brown fleece-(mother, mother, is that you? we imagine him saying). But this night he chose the bin of scraps, making a nest of felt, cotton swatches, black velvet, an embroidery of mushrooms and bees.

Every time I looked up from my work, he was expanding the boundaries of cuteness, testing the limits of what one poor human can absorb-

until he decided it would no longer do, and he was gone.