Paw Prints

Our home server (connected via DSL) has been turned on, and all booted up well. We need to move the rack shelving again and come up with a more sensible wiring plan for the office, so all is not back for good. We’ll have an outage at some point when X rewires everything.

We have almost completed relocating all of our stuff here. Our creative work is currently figuring out the new configurations of furniture and tools and stuff.

I did reflect some on our easel this morning in my digital journal:

In our old apartment we had a third “bedroom” that was a guest room/studio — except over the last six months it turned into a chaotic storeroom (as it had at other times, as well). It was too easy to shunt boxes and half completed projects into the room and close the door — blocking access to the easel and the sewing machine.

We don’t have that third room in this apartment, so the “studio” aspect will be integrated into our other rooms. The easel is now in the bedroom, where i can contemplate it in the dim morning light. Right now this experiment in acrylic painting is on it, unchanged from its August state. I probably need to buy a new palette as the previous one, while designed to keep paints fresh for beyond a week, probably doesn’t manage between August and March.

The easel itself is a wonderful thing. We bought it at a yard sale in Philly — right next door to our Cedar St apartment — for $35. There we carried it up to our attic which functioned as X’s studio until it too succumbed to the fate of being filled by stuff we needed to get out of the way.

In place, it’s over eighty inches tall — a convenient measurement because that is the height of the dark wood trim that wraps around the rooms. I don’t know what sort of wood it is; it’s stained dark and not polished or lacquered. It could easily hold a six foot high canvas if either X or i were to become interested in scale. “24″ is carved into the base support, “PAFA” into the bottom of the vertical support. It’s clearly from an art school — it looks nothing like the easels one can buy now. This morning i imagined lugging it to Antiques Road Show. Is it valuable merely for its utility? Or are there easel collectors, connoisseurs of easels?

For us, the easel will not disappear behind boxes and a closed door, again. It will greet us each morning — but how? I fear the easel and the sewing manikin (which flanks the opposite side of the window) will become clothes trees instead of tools. I hope that they will instead tempt both of us to create, that art will become a constant in our daily life.

PAFA and easels

The photo server will be down until we move the machine to Mountain View sometime next week. Meanwhile, the server on which this blog software resides will also be moving from one host to another, in Texas.

I’ll be notifying friends of the new address, and it’s corrected at Nervousness. ATC-HUB won’t let me correct, but i wrote the list owner.

I made this polymer clay object over four years ago — possibly eight years ago.

We’re beginning packing in preparation to move. I find this too clumsy to want to display, and decided i would throw it out after documenting it. I like the idea, but would like to execute it with a little more skill some time.

I’ve been busy with the holidays, organizing my home workspace, and thinking forward to a move to Mountain View this spring. I’ve a project i’ve been working on as a gift — it should have been simple, but i made it far more complicated of course. And then the first experimental spraying with fixitive…. Well, i won’t go on.

I’ve digital photo albums I’m working on, and i completeld an article recently for Eliza Badurina’s IN(ner) Question zine. Once the zine is published, i’ll offer a copy of the article here.