Lee Thomson

I find I am missing the creativity and discipline of making something every day. The last time I did was in 2007 (the birth of this blog in fact, which makes this a five year anniversary of sorts) and it is high time to do it again. The biggest issue in committing to something like this is to decide what I can make more than 300 of. I mean, I still have postcards from 2007 languishing around the house. But the knowledge and skills I gained are worth a lot, and I think it is high time to do it again. 

So: a circle a day, for 2012.

The rules:

• Circles will fit into the Trader Joe's tins (about 3" in diameter) and be attached to ribbons for each month.
• Each circle must have a front, back and finished edge. 
• Each month will have a color, and a second constraint to be determined. 
• When the family goes on vacation, so do I.

Month colors, and second theme if I know:

• January – red & thread
• February – PINK
• March – black and gray
• April – yellow
• May – green
• June – orange
• July – anything & ocean
• August – blue & feather
• September – brown & leaf
• October – purple & scary
• November – metallics 
• December - white & old

Other goals for 2012? Call my mother more, ride more horses, tell people more often how fond of them I am. Those should all contribute to the general happiness quotient. 

Out with 2011, in with 2012! let's see what we can make of it!

A broader array of things than I remembered. 

I was thinking about things I have accomplished this year. The list feels short, but there were some good milestones. 

The biggest ones had to do with getting better at selling my work. I was accepted into an art show and sale for the Trustees of Reservations, met a gallery owner I need to communicate with, and participated in two craft fairs just before Christmas. I executed commissioned work (portraits of two Chickens for Bob), and talked with another person about the possiblity of commissioning a piece. 

Artistically speaking, I had a gloriously fevered month working with my feelings about and reactions to the El Anatsui exhibit that I visited and revisited. I had a different but equally glorious month working on various chickens, feeling out the ways I could depict feathers and mass on a surface. I got a chance to actually make the first few of a series I have been thinking about for ages – the pond pictures across the seasons of a year. 

For stuff that I didn't do so well: I missed a couple opportunities to sell myself and my work, and I think I should work harder on that next year. I need to get better at finding venues, organizing myself, and telling a story about myself and my work. Mounting and framing work needs more refinement. While I did well enough producing work steadily, I could use more time in the studio. I also did better with this blog, talking to you all more regularly than in some previous years, but that still leaves room for improvement!

If I were to grade myself, it would be as follows: 

artistic endeavors: A+

taking advantage of sales opportunities: B+

steady presence in studio: B+

ongoing education: A

Year overall: A-

Aerin is working away on college essays (working well to deadline, as we say in this family) all of which are due before midnight December 31st. She started writing about the hole in the ceiling of the kitchen, and the more we talked about it, the more I realized it was a connection between the important parts of my life, as well as a kind of magic portal in hers. 

This hole is there by design, not accident. It is meant to let heat rise into the second floor, from an era when there were no radiators there. It has provided the children years of pleasurable gravity testing, dropping things on my head, or onto the floor to be retrieved and dropped again. (The pompoms were substantially less painful than the rain of legos.) It allowed me to talk to Alice, when she inhabited that room, and I was required in the kitchen to produce food.

But now it connects my art space with my cooking space. I can put something in the oven and retreat upstairs sure in the knowledge that the smells coming through the hole will warn me when it is done. I can eavesdrop on people in the kitchen, which I tend not to do except to listen for tone of voice. People there can ask questions of me while I work on my art, and I can answer them without leaving a particularly finicky bit of stitching. 

The hole in the ceiling connects the two most important parts of the house where I work; the kitchen, where I work for the health and amusement of the family, and my studio, where I work for my pleasure and sanity. 

While I know, intellectually, that the earth spins on its axis daily, and rolls around the sun on an annual basis, it feels as though the sun swings, back and forth across the equator, forming seasons. There is the elegant knowledge of the tilt of the earth's axis, demonstrated over and over on the equinoxes and solstices at the Sunwheel in Amherst, and there is my own certain caveman knowledge that we need to light candles to make the sun return. It is a curious, binocular vision through which it view the world.

In a valiant effort to come to grips with this, I've written dozens of attempts at poetry. But they all come down to this:

hover, and swing
hover, and swing

the sun swings again across the equator to
hover, breathless in the heat of summer
we wait to exhale and then
we are tumbling down, across the shortening days
swinging across the equator again
to hover, cold and shivering in the dark
we band together, candles lit, singing
to call again to spring
the lengthening days, the brightening sun
the fast swing across the equinox and then we come again

to hover
and swing

Aerin tells me this is a peculiarly adult way to see it. She can remember when seasons lasted so long it wasn't really possible to remember when it had been different. And then they started to speed up. But this is how it feels to me.

So:

Happy MidWinter Hover of the Sun, and may the returning of the light bring all possible joy to you.