Category: Uncategorized

I went to Ft. Myers for my annual Florida fix. I was pooped when I arrived, getting my house ready to sell, getting the new one remodeled and added on to. One I got rested I was on a quest to see some of the things I’ve missed the past four trips.

My first trip this year was to a botanical garden in Punta Gorda called Peace River Botanical & Sculpture Gardens. The garden opened in 2017 and covers 27 acres. In addition to plantings there are a dozen or so sculptures along the walk that goes out to the Peace River. My favorite is this steel palm.

They host different events, music, plant workshops, yoga, and more. They have done a great job of labeling all the plants and have a nice selection of different kinds of palms and other plants, there is also a butterfly house. The gardens aren’t huge but it is worth a visit if you are in the area.

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Another place that was a first was Boca Grande. As the crow flies it is 24 miles from where I stay but by car its 54 miles. You have to drive all the way to North Port before going west. I’m glad I made the effort. It’s a beautiful little town with an amazing beach. The island reminds me of Sanibel but in many ways I liked it better. There is more of a town center and less traffic. There is even a little funkiness left at Whidden’s Marina which was established in 1926, I think there are some of the original items left in the store from the beginning!

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Since I got my recumbent trike last May I’ve been traveling with it and looking for trails to ride. Boca Grande has a nice one, Gasparilla-Boca Grande Rail Trail. It’s six miles long and flat, which is great for a recumbent trike since they are not great on hills.

Back in N Ft. Myers

Two streets down from where I stay is a Bonsai Nursery. I knew it was there, I’d driven by it before but you can’t see what it is from the street so I never entered. This year I rode my bike down there and wow! It is an amazing place. They are the largest Bonsai Nursery in Florida with over 150 specimen plants for sale and thousands of pre-bonsai. I had never heard of pre-bonsai but it is a plant that can become a bonsai with some tlc. I think I’m going to try it this year.

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Next I went to St Petersburg to go to the Van Gogh experience. It was interesting. My favorite parts were that the paintings were blown up so big you could see how he applied the paint, the brushstrokes, and I loved his quotes, from the letters he wrote to his brother I’m sure.

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Of his quotes, this one was my favorite.

I’m leaving some souvenir too!

I always go to the Craftsman House when I am in St Pete, they have a wonderful selection of pottery and other crafts and I always enjoy talking to the owner Jeff.

He mentioned a new glass gallery down the street (opened January 2018). So glad he did, I probably would not have gone otherwise, I couldn’t tell from the name what it was. Imagine Museum. It is the best glass museum I have ever been in. They concentrate on contemporary glass, blown, cast, fused, lamp worked, were all represented.

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Usually when I’m in St Pete I’m on my way somewhere else so don’t see everything there is to see. This year I spent the night so had more time to explore. It seems Downtown has gone through a renaissance. The St Pete Pier is all new and wonderful. It just opened in October, it’s now a real destination and there is enough to do there you could spend the day. I parked and rode my bike on the North Bay Trail to Coffee Pot Park where the trail leaves the bay. I turned around and rode back visiting every park as far as the airport, then back to the Pier. It was a wonderful 11 mile ride, off road with very few streets to cross, and where you did cross they were 4 way stops. I saw manatees, a bird rookery, beautiful stately homes, boats, birds and even a rhino!

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Central Ave has totally changed, there are all new streetscapes, business support, many new condos, lots of shops and restraurants. They have divided the street into districts, each with their own marketing, banners and focus. Some of the districts are Garden District, Grand Central, and Edge, with seven districts in total. The city has really gone all in on this and you can see the results. This evidently started in 2012, but this is the first year that I really noticed the difference. Here is a link to their economic development plan, and it’s paying off.

Like many towns now there are a lot of murals. They have been having a competition called Shine that started in 2015 and have artists from all over the world come to the city and paint murals. Since 2015, the SHINE St. Petersburg Mural Festival has created 93 world-class murals, hosted artists from 15 countries, coordinated 13 community projects, and showcased the art of more than 90 local artists. It seems I’ve been posting about a lot of murals the last couple of years, like I’ve said before its an easy way to see a lot of art, often without getting out of your car! Here are some of them.

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Stopped to check out The Morean Center for Clay (MCC) which is located in the Warehouse Arts District in St Pete and recognized this arch immediately. It’s by Peter King and Xinia Marin. About 15 years ago I went to a workshop with them at Dan Finch’s place in Wilson. They do amazing work, I’ve seen other examples like the gate at Annmarie Gardens, Solomans Island, MD.

I came home and using some of the techniques I learned and made this sculpture that I mounted at my front door at East Front.

I write a lot about what I see in an urban setting but I love the birds, flora, and fauna as well. When we first moved to New Bern most of the work I was doing at the time was drawings of birds. Last years trip to Fort Myers inspired two new design ideas for my pottery. A nature series and what I call a dark series, flowers and birds with a black background.

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Love the foot sticking out! I’ve written about this before in a previous blog post but Cape Coral is a haven for Burrowing Owls. And Florida has its share of Carnivorous plants, bottom right is a sundew.

A boat trip to see manatee, a walk in Six Mile Cypress, and many trips to Babcock, yielded seeing lots of wildlife. The bottom center photo isn’t sharp, it’s a bald eagle and it was a long way away.

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In addition to riding the trail in St Pete I rode trails on Sanibel, John Yarborough Trail in Ft Myers, in Cape Coral, Venice and in North Fort Myers.

I got home on April 8 and turned around and went back on a 10 day camping trip on May 8. I’ll write about that in my next blog post.

I’ve never been told to evacuate before. It was odd (after trying to move stuff out of the way of flooding) that as I looked around as to what I needed to take with me, I thought, it’s all just stuff. An interesting feeling. I didn’t want to leave but didn’t know what else to do. So headed north.

I-95 was busy but traffic moving well to Richmond. Stopped for a break at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden (which is on my list for a potty break every time I pass through). Was just going to peek out the window, check out the gift shop, and then be on my way. Noticed there was an interesting looking garden sculpture, looked like origami, metal sculptures by Kevin Box, my friend stopped at the desk and asked about them. She also mentioned that we were evacuees and one of them gave us free passes and said, “go in an take a look” – wow!

These gardens are in my top 5 favorite Botanical Gardens in the country.

The show “Origami in the Garden” was fabulous, as were the flowers. Here’s a link and here are some of my photos.

We continued on our trek north and stopped for gas. I searched for my wallet, fortunately I had a credit card and some cash stuffed in my pockets (a bad habit I have but as my friend IB says, it is what it is), I was glad this time! I realized I left it at a Wendy’s in Stony Creek, I called and of course they did not find it. So spent the next hour calling cc companies and cancelling cards. As the afternoon went on I realized I had other cards I needed to replace. Ugh.

We arrived exhausted at our destination near Columbia, MD, took a sleeping aide, and slept all night not thinking about Florence at all (or trying not to).

Of course the next morning we obsessed about Florence all day, not being able to take our eyes off the tv. Started working on a painting for my 2019 calendar. The painting I’m working on is the new “The Jarvis at 220” which is in my block, and the Pollock Street Pub & Oyster Bar also on my block. It turns out the Jarvis had water in the basement, the Pollock Street Pub & Oyster Bar, like my house, had water inside their first floor.

Since I was so close to Philadelphia (120 miles) I decided to go to pick up my sculpture, the rabbit I made this summer. This is the first I’ve seen it since it was fired.

On our way to Philadelphia we stopped to eat. I was on the phone with my sister telling her about the flooding, after I hung up this little old lady spoke up and said “You can come to my house – I live alone and I have lots of room!” People can be so kind.

We stopped at the best Ceramic supply store I’ve ever been in at Norristown to pick up stuff. Even though I knew my pottery studio was flooded I knew I had work to make for people. If my electric is compromised I’ll see if I can have someone fire for me. It’s the ceramic shop, http://www.theceramicshop.com.

Of course I can’t go to Philadelphia with out going to the Reading Terminal and eating at The Dutch Eating Place. It was a tradition for Michael and I every time we went to Philadelphia, wish he was there with me.

We cruised South Street to look at Isiah’s mosiacs.

Then started shopping for cleaning supplies to take home.

We spent the weekend glued to the tv watching the aftermath of Florence and seeing horrible photos of what she had done to our town. I knew I had a lot of water in my house so at this point my biggest concern was that the house was secure, were my doors caved in? Were there walls caved in?  I was able to connect with some people via Facebook and asked them to let me know. They did and the house was secure. This is one of the photos I was sent.

I could see the high water mark on the wall, 4′ up. And that bench in the foreground weighs over 100 pounds, amazing how much power water has to move things.

One of the things we hate when they talk about evacuation is that often you can’t get back, in your town the water might have receded but inland the water is just rising flooding the roads we need to take back in.

We drove home on Monday and it was pretty spooky seeing the signs saying I-95 closed.

We got off on 64 headed east, by the time we got to Washington we started seeing signs of hurricane damage. But we were able to drive right in.

Next post – what I found when I got home……

 

The clay workshop with Lisa Naples was very inspiring.

I choose a rabbit as my piece for the week. I also learned as much from watching others as I did from working on my own piece.

I hadn’t realized how tall and big  it was reasonable to build with coils, I always tried, and struggled, with slabs. I hadn’t done any coil building or pinch pots since college in the 70s, until the past two week. So now I’m excited to try big totem bases with coils.

Here is the rabbit piece as it went together.

 

Using a dry brush method for glazing, I glazed the rabbit before adding the ears, otherwise it would be difficult to get her covered.

 

One day we went to a flea market to find found objects to use with our sculptures, I found some things for future pieces and found this neat compass.

The rabbit is ready to be fired! I hope it will turn out but won’t know for a few weeks. We worked on the sculpture all week and kept adding wet clay to leather hard, then covering the whole thing up tightly to distribute the moisture. Lisa said she has worked on a piece then let it sit for months before finishing by keeping it wrapped tightly.

 

At the beginning of the workshop we did do 2 minute sculptures, like gesture drawings. The inspiration for my big rabbit came from this one on the left!

With her method of glazing using colored slips, you work on leather hard clay.

I can’t wait to see the finished piece.

 

 

On my way to my clay workshop with Lisa Naples I took at a couple extra days to do some sightseeing. I had been to the Brandywine River Museum, YEARS ago. So long ago that you could still see all the front of the mill building. Now it’s so grown up you can just see bits of it through the trees.

It was interesting to see the artwork of so many of the Wyeth family members. And the detail of Andrew Wyeth’s egg tempera paintings, as you can see in the painting of the hair above was remarkable.

Then we had the chance to go visit his studio.

As I looked around the building I could see my photos translated into his style of painting.

Winterthur was interesting too, I had never been there before, DuPont collected over 90,000 American made objects that dated between the years of 1630 and 1860. As he added onto the house (now it has 175 rooms) he knew it was going to be a museum someday so built it accordingly. They have a great collection of soup tureens that gave me some ideas for sculpture!

And you can’t be in that area without visiting Longwood Gardens.

During the week of the workshop we were in session from 10-4:30 each day so didn’t have much time for sight seeing. But did get a few shots of architecture around Doylestown.

One day at lunch I ran over to Fonthill and the Moravian Tileworks, both very interesting!

They were built by Henry Chapman Mercer, who was an archeologist and tile-maker among other things. He built Fonthill and the Tileworks out of poured concrete. I had toured Fonthill years ago so this time took the tour of the tile works.

I did get up at 5:30 one day to take one of my favorite drives in the country, along the Delaware north of New Hope.

I can see a couple of these photos becoming paintings, if I ever sit still long enough to do any.

Speaking of favorite drives. Here are a few that are on my list in addition to River Road
– the Tunnel of Trees in Northern Michigan
– driving down the Florida Keys
– Independence Pass Colorado
– Front Street to the stand of live oaks, Beaufort, NC
– Frankfort Pike west from Midway, KY
– around Devils and Round Lakes in Lenawee County, Michigan

The week I studied with Lisa Naples in Doylestown was pretty transformative for me. Instead of thinking of my pieces of sculpture as just pieces of sculpture she encouraged us to think about them as telling a story. That changes everything!

This is some of her work.

In the next post I will post my sculpture as I constructed it. In contrast to the sculptures I did a couple weeks ago with Barry Gregg,  which were pretty fast to do (we did at least 2 each day – plus they were small) – this weeks sculpture took all week, was quite detailed, and 14″ tall. The techniques we learned allow us to built as big as we want. Look for photos in my next post along with work by others at the workshop.

I recently switched my blog from blogger to wordpress – and you might ask why blog at all? When I owned Carolina Creations it was to keep customers informed of our upcoming events, what our artists were creating, what I was doing with my art, and I threw in some personal things as well.

I don’t have Carolina Creations anymore but I am still doing my own artwork. I’m traveling a lot (doing it while I still can), and I like to take photos and write a little.

It’s really a journal of my life, what I’m doing and what I care about.

A friend told me that she switched her blog from one host to another and she lost the whole thing (always backup!!). So years ago I started printing it every year or two. Since people don’t print photos like they used to they can disappear with a computer crash or like my friends blog did. And besides if you don’t print photos – in the future our kids or relatives will never know you existed or at least what you looked like!

I use blog2print which is an online platform that is so easy to use.

Probably because of my age I like flipping through the pages and holding a book in my hands.

So I can see myself continuing to blog for the foreseeable future – right now it’s more about my traveling than anything else – but one of these days I’ll be content to stay at home again in my studio and create, then it will go back to being more about art. I really do it for myself but I’m pleased that other people read it and enjoy it.

Thank you for reading!