killin, I am comfy with that, it's that dang maiming the tree weedbeasts may precure i fear

hermitage hunker down (commonly called cabin fever) is slowly relinquishing its hold as the out of door warms. the chill proves problematic when my studio is wholly structurally decloaked from the elements. 

for as long as I can remember, which isn't long at all, mind of a steel sieve and all, I've a need to be outside for the bulk of my day. perhaps it began when I would whine to my mom that I was bored, to which she would kindly wishfully retort, "well you may go outdoors and play OR...i've a vacuum for you."

this may explain quite a lot besides my need for the out of doors. hmmm. even when I wept the words, I dont know how to stay, it was dragged out under a treed canopy, under the blue, under the light smothered stars.

amen...not to the smothering, but that in this tick finally the day warms. sweet relief from the chill's hermitage hunker down commonly called cabin fever.

I've a freshly sharpened chained blade so I go out to play. vacuum remains securely stored awaiting the next cold day. 

hmmmm, well I did drop it where I aimed it but there must be a gravity swell pushing back because I didn't quite get it to drop to the ground. now I've a tad of a wedged pickle caught in limbo instead of a felled tree. hey, at least I didn't hit the hermitage which was a primary goal.

just need to cut a smidgen more at the base of future stump to grant her full release from the magnolia's clutches and let gravity do her trick. ropes in ready :)

STUMP THAT! depickled. secretly I had hoped the fall and clutching would take out the magnolia. not because it isn't beautiful, it is just that it is such a light hog, a total view blocker. the whole point of felling this batch of weed trees is to open the canopy and let more light in.

felling trees and hauling, cutting and stitching tubes have a similar kill and maiming risk. healthy fear is always in order.

all this killing and maiming the local weed tree is hardest on the pup. who i have leash bound because she totally goes in to full fits of hysteria as though the chainsaw was her most feared enemy. her fear may be a tad dysfunctional. so leash bound she remains for i would also be horrified if I laid a tree down on her.



i take two for the day then the cap pops off after a chain lub fill, which is indicative of user error. so I rub the residual spilled oil on my boots and plunk down for a chica muscle, mind and back break after tree number two, my fatigue limit...hence user error on oil cap securement. i can cut more but not big ones, they require focus, a readiness and that healthy smidge of fear.

the social barometer of the made or at least a twist an turn

throw back thursday on a slightly warming saturday.
PG 13 yet more moderate than a Victoria secret catalog

contemporary art lecture remembered...i show the first image and it took 15 minutes before anyone identifies how offensive my choices were. the works themselves not offensive yet offensive when combined. of course the topic was the manifestation of art from a sense of other, real and perceived oppression. as an affluent over educated white female and their professor, i had to do  some permission granting to coax them into touching on the politically incorrect offense, not even politically, just a flat out offense. finally a small population of the 90 began speaking up.  all lead by one brave she-child with the guts to point out how the specific offense related to the cow...you know who you are! good job. yay. It was a good day... relationships help us see what otherwise might go unnoticed. it allows us to see other; to see ourselves with more clarity if we dare to listen and see little truths without the gloss over of habit. comparative analysis which we partake in all day long in navigating this chair or that, this route or that, this person or that, allows us also to see culturally shifts and sameness. art as a social barometer for me is a key interest except when i just get tripped up on its trinkethood, art as product. it bores me. art as a social barometer, a barometer of self and other, a barometer of social habits unmasked, NOW that is of interest.

so i throw together images that on the surface [formally or content] seem similar...and through comparative analysis we hunt to see more than if they stood alone.

your turn. hunt and have fun with it. feel free to harvest for your own discussions and consider the images not my own but google harvested shared for educational purposes only...

there are superficial relationships, plus your current cultural baggage you bring to the analysis, but in each pairing if you do some background research (even google skimming), the similarities and differences are deep and profound. for instance many of these pairs have years, decades, some centuries, bridging their making, others span oceans, gender, the real and the made, education, affluence, margin, medium, and method...i finally started learning my geography and world history through the analysis of art which made it living and breathing enough so it enthralled.

foot plod atop forested leaf fodder

tuesday i took the pup and plunged into the near woods. chilly, but not totally debilitating if properly bundled.

it's not just a pedestrian passing with leaf fodder under foot that i need. i need the slow wheeled roll of entry. i go when the need seems indispersably dispersed. when i am off in my holding capacity and my fragments drift uncontrollably. the roll and gaited passage under thick treed canopy alters me, gathers my fragments for a moment. no. not even that, instead it allows me to let them drift without a regathering compulsion. the roll sooths the drift in the illusion of preparing for purpose. the physicality of the gaited fodder lead meandering always seems so really, so purposeful. it screams quiet whispers that this is exactly where i should be. i relax into it.

i go. i plod. i click, click. i sit. i post. i brush against the water cooler of the cyber realm. the dog demands i detach at least a moment from my portable tech tethering and glance about. i do. i am damn compliant. of course, she demands i detach from whatever it is i am doing no matter how noble, like napping in a meadow, hunkered down amongst the wind deflecting winter brittled blades where the sun warms this chilled moment. she demands with her lick and lather.

so though she is free to frolic, the leash a mere afterthought of forest rule compliance, she pulls it from my shouldered carriage purely to speak. let's leave now my human, let us venture on. she demands with her leash.

and so i do. for that moment the ungathered fragments hold together in the physicality of the passage. i wonder why i would think to leave, why my detethering holds such sway. my brain plows and mulls the fear that to vacate would just add to my list, would somehow discard a crucial gift. i ponder my untethered pup who so wants to be tethered not with leash but love. each day she asks me incessantly to remind her that we are tether. she demands her tethering. oh. oh. oh. i get it my pack animal pup so human in need.

the sun drops. i recall the practicality of the leave as the air drops from chill to dang cold. i make the brief powered roll to the hermitage and wait for a warmed day. in the skip of a few morns, it has not come yet. but my body is antsy with the need to make.

my materials await me. they beckon. they need. i need. i need the tether that physical making harnesses, holding me in the moment of nowness, just as the foot plod through the forrest does, just as the detethered tethering demands of my dog.

i learn to trust the untethered days. i am compelled to find peace in the making, in the writing, in the mentor ventures until my moments regather a new.

the day warms, the sun penetrates, the crystal icy snow transforms and flows in rivulets. i watch the hermitage weep from my butt plant within and am thankful for the warming. the chainsaw with sharpened blade calls knowing the winters reductions in leaf suspended fodder, biodemassed, appeals to these aging chica muscles.

Mark making, devices, movement, methods, mood, meaning

ha. perhaps it is FATE that has me rethinking, reexamining and revisiting the mark and the facilitation of its practice. perhaps. (Link to associated handouts for projects)

the mark and its exploration is not a new thing but ever beautiful and seductive.

All images are of my students' works 2007-2013

mark making isn't an exercise in scribble or field painting. instead it is an exploration in the mark, movement, method, meaning, and mood. it is about repetition and rhythm, freedom and restraint, it is about the amazing play between the occupation of space with the silence of the unoccupied. it is about the role of similarity and difference, about lulling and captivation. it mimics the breath, the dialogue. it is a way of listening. it is a translation of primal perception. it is not a damn scribbled field pinned to a wall like a child's painting or to your professor's metaphorical refrigerator. even the simplest of marks can sing of sophistication.

as our wheels roll us habitually home, our dominant hand rolls with the rhythms of writing. no cognition or recognition required, just a bundle of spacial and methodological habits. what does it take to de-rut the routine of writing in the practices of the arts, in the practice of the hand? i've found the success in at least temporarily derutting leads to an openness with other materials and methods while pursuing alternative practices.

perhaps it is not FATE that my students continuously made magnificent marks. perhaps each crew i had was a mad cluster of awesomeness. i lean toward their awesomeness.

Much of the mark making practice and the facilitations of exploration into and around i gleaned from the design professors at University of Houston ! a thousand thank yous! their design program is amazing!

Mark Making Projects have evolved from studies of hand and body movements, tools, building mark making device for mark and stand alone object, to the inclusion of story and spacial and conceptual manifestions

Projects/Practices harvested and adapted from UH design professors

1. mark making + artist book
2. mark making + device 
3. process crit guide
4. independent studies
5. mark + phrase mini posters

StoryLINE which I developed out of the concept of line, it explores sourcing of ideas, metaphorical development, creative writing, and the expression of lines in space, real or conceptual.

student storyline artifacts portfolio album

1. the story version 1
2. method for review
3. the story version 2 - rewrite
4. storyLINE ARTifact and proposal
5. pinterest album

----------------------

it is always ego nice to see systems, projects, crit and teaching practices i've developed and implemented, refined, and modeled, put into practice and promoted by other educators because they work. they do. In this case the initial explorations into the visceral mark making, movement, methods was harvested and adapted over time from my uh design professors. Thank you

gnarled trees, red dragons contained and in tow

i bite into the most fertile of a sam's club globular red dragon. an explosion of spring expands in my mouth prematurely as i roll out amongst the dormant grasses and gnarled trees, red dragons contained and in tow. how is it that these spherical dragon orbs are consistently so so very perfect, round, blemish free? well, until my teeth and tongue find with the desiccated crunch of autumn leaf fodder under foot those wicked seeds in threes! a thousand curses for not buying seedless. i wrap and wrap my brain round its pleasure seeking undeseeded globular sweet vice! must reframe, sooo with a heft, the plastered on positive reminds, I do want seeds sans the overtly genetically manipulated and mutated. I do want plants that self propagate, that have a sex life. I text myself promises and platitudes that the seeds are not some feral invasive globular grape vineyard that will over take my gut before the sun clicks past to create the next moon. I babble on how happy my septic field will be with this off cast plethora of propagating pits. I draw close and whisper in my own ear it's good to have some form of fertility to pass through the barren wasteland of my female frame because I find all kinds of pithy pleasure in mocking my waning womanhood. all this passes through my head in that very fleeting desiccated crunch moment, I laugh almost aloud and remember this is why I am glad I am me.

experimental reduction [of financial merged with sports column]

one                 one chance

the most    one chance

                               only to upset

                                     reliable

         until and                    that is if

              the day     easily

                                      backs

                           extraordinary     

                              after the amazing remained

                        that is the talk you hear

                                 despite the unusual results

                                                       not so

                                                          if hopeful of gain

                                     because to move within one

                                         of an unbreakable 

                                                                       two

                            we don't have space

it is the problem with writing no matter what is penned to the page an unimagined selfie emerges. the single click image allows for deeply masked lies.

there is a space in me

dark and dank

it is not a real space

instead it is one of negative imaginings

echoing with words both real and inferred 

that I've wrapped and wrapped 

hidden away

i fight to stay two planes up

from this mawing archive

but too many consecutive depeopled days

residing in my woods

i slip into to these mawing archived imaginings

which unwrap and ravel how badly I suck

if I avoid the unsightly, the inappropriate, that negates the bulk ofmy living and leaves me straining in falsetto. damn the unseemly, but iwrite.

i get stuck. the only way i know to unstick is to approach the very moment in which i reside. i do.

george is here, sitting with me in my mom's chair. i rock wedged between the big open windows of the hermitage and its fireplace. his presence, not that comfy. with his added weight, the wicker bites ridiculous patterns into my rump as i wait his leave. i hate his visits. i distract myself with the thumbing of my keypad and the muffled thrumbing morning rain on the metal roof. from here, i see that the leaves are begining to clump, cling and matt. i rock; it drizzles; i bemoan the visit. still hunting for distraction, i damn yesterday's rotten log with its belt busting force decommissioning my tractor's mulching blade. now i will have to work up the words to ask mr. bushee for a lesson in belting my banged up red babe. i am hard on my tools and toys, haranguing them to work in irregular ways. as a she-child, i did not get the useful learned lessons in machined mechanisms or their care. frankly even now, the store bought fixetties leave me wanting. the red bladed beast has returned from the shop more broken than not. huh? i paid work earned money. they alleviate her nonfunctionalness, but bang and break something new every fricking time--broken fender, dangling head light, sliced tire wall. grrrrr. superfical i suppose, but my hard wear excaberates the breaks -- front face plate recently gone as the broken fender caught hold and ripped free from a limbed clutch. admittedly i only forked over a hundred bucks for her, my divorce trophy of some poor souls' split.

my mind wanders back to george. how can it not, as he asserts himself with a fierce, unforgiving force. bastard. try as i might to avoid his impinging, he arrives with foreseeable frequence. only now has he begun to slow, stutter, and wane with the wear of age. why must he come for these excavations with his little cutting, barbaric detissuing knives? i bleed each visit. damn bastard. a week early from his habit, he sits with me in this chair. sit still or rock, he cramps me. this fall he has toyed, failing, fluttering and fluctuating in his visits, as though to leave me. i am ready for him to be gone. i yearn for the flat lake calm that will settle with the absence of his hormonally driven storms. perhaps i will be less of a woman in his wake. i've premourned his leaving for sometime -- fretting my fading femininity. he has had his damn stay for near thirty nine and three quarter years! i am ready for him to be gone. bastard.

[perimenapausal dark humor...in case i was unclear]

Spring 2014 Workshops with Kathy Kelley

Listening in the Gaps: Writing Workshop +
Artist Way Workshop
Begin NEXT week, January 8/9, 2014 Register today
@ kk.creativehabit [at] gmail.com

Listening in the Gaps: Writing Workshop
Kathryn Kelley
Open to non-writers and writers [adults]
Thursdays, 10:00 am - noon
Begins January 9 (8 weeks)

Chapelwood UMC, room tba
Group size max 12
Text: Writing down the bones [Natalie Goldberg]

"There’s a gap between who we think we are and who we really are. In writing, there’s a gap between what we think we wrote and what we actually write. Practice closes the gap.” Natalie Goldberg

Writing is a deep act of vulnerability giving us access to listen into the gaps of our armor, of our lived experiences, and God’s* quiet movements. It is an intentional, particular, inner act. It can make us laugh, cry, blush, remember. It can open us to our anger, grief, joy and forgiveness. It is a way of waking up, a step into prayer. In this workshop we will create a guided nonjudgmental space to write, write, write—keeping our hand moving, not worrying about crossing out, spelling, punctuation, or grammar. We will follow the writing where it takes us, trusting God to enter the page with us.

“I reach writing through an act of waiting and listening; I make false starts; I get in my own way; I try again. Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.” Pat Schneider

Weekly various prompts will be provided to open us into this writing practice both for warm ups and longer writings. As Jerry Webber encourages, we will “chase the image.” Writing through metaphor, memory, hope, and sensory experience, each in our own way, finding our own voice, our own pace. There will be opportunities for short nonjudgmental sharing [optional] of what we are finding in our own writing—surprises, hurts, healings, and chuckles that arise in word, phrase or story. During the week we will read excerpts from Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing down the bones, as well as, explore journal writing through free writes [to be explained], development of a word, phrase or idea that emerged during the workshop, and note God’s movement in our practice. We will experiment with various avenues of writing—prose, fiction and non, poetry, journaling, and letter writing. We will explore this practice in a safe community.

What you will need: a fast pen, a cheap notebook [iPad sized or larger], the book Writing down the bones [Natalie Goldberg], courage to approach the small truths of your lived experiences, openness to put your inner critic on hold, willingness to show up pushing pen to page.

"Why don't you making writing your practice [a practice of meditation, of prayer], it will take you everyplace.” Natalie Goldberg

*God - I use this word, this name, to approach certain mysteries, you may approach differently -- whether higher power, mystery, another name, blind luck, or a good pair of bootstraps on which to pull, come as you are and come as you belief. 

The Artist Way Workshop
Kathryn Kelley
All levels [adults]
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
Begins January 8 (10 weeks)
Chapelwood UMC, room LC 204
Group size max 9
Text: The Artist Way [Julia Cameron]

In this workshop, we will function as a creative cluster in which to begin stepping past the internal and external habits that have kept our creative impulse on the back burner. Joining this cluster will be to fulfill a yearning to bring our creative impulse to the front burner. Reading and test running the exercises from Julia Cameron's book, The Artist Way, we will excavate habits and thinking that may have kept us blocked and cultivate ones that support our impulse to create, to express. You will be challenged to explore methods from the text each week—writing morning artist pages, an artist date, and other exercises. This course is based on the premise that each of us is by nature creative and that in a supportive community we can more easily begin moving from the fantasy of doing to actually doing. Whether your urge has been to write, paint, build, sculpt, cook, arrange, or plant, this group is for you and is genre independent.

Facilitator: Kathy Kelley is a professional practicing visual artist, writer and has been a Professor of Art in an interdisciplinary art foundations program. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Texas, participated in artist residencies nationally, and is the founding president of the nonprofit BOX 13 ArtSpace. She holds her MFA from UH. She has a passion for the creative process, the connection and parallels between the creative process and spirituality, and life patterns of artists that exercise their creative practice throughout their life span. Kathy formerly worked at Chapelwood in both the youth and communication ministries.

Registration: register by January 6, 2014 with Kathy Kelley via email kk.creativehabit @ gmail.com

You may register for either Listening in the Gaps: Writing Workshop or The Artist Way Workshop. Due to limited space, please do not sign up for both. Register ASAP, people registering after the workshops fill will be added to a wait list.

Location:
Chapelwood UMC
11140 Greenbay
Houston, TX 77024

the four legged beast plunges off course

and the leafy fodder rustles
freeing from the moisture's cling
and the wind catches the loose tendrils
escaping the warming of my hood
the rhythm of each swung gait
a slowing pendulum
when the crisp breath of morning whispers
would you turn
would you come
if called a name not your own