Jenny Mendes

Happy Halloween!!!

I'm in a fun show titled Interpreting the cup at Crimson Laurel Gallery .  Everything is online for you to see.  Here are a few of my favorites... Ron Meyers Michael Corney Lisa Clague Shoko Teruyama Me! Kathy King More Lisa Clague, I couldn't resisit !

That baseball game was a real thriller Thursday night, and having gone to school in St. Louis, I had to watch until the sweet end.  What a great lesson to never give up hope!!!!!!!!!!  On another note, here is yesterday's work.  These plates  aren't fired yet, but are few variations on a requested theme.......

http://tarynsimon.com/ Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. Her recent work,  A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters , will be on exhibition at Tate Modern, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.  A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters  was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which Simon travelled around the world researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. In each of the eighteen 'chapters' that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects documented by Simon include feuding families in Brazil, victims of genocide in Bosnia, the body double of Saddam Hussein's son Uday, and the living dead in India. Her collection is at once cohesive and arbitrary, mapping the relationships among chance, blood, and other components of fate. Her previous work  Contraban

I'm still slowly slogging through any bit of unfinished green/bisqueware in my studio.  Everything is fair game, including random bits friends have made and left behind.  This is a little fragment of a painting I did on a plate my friend Alice made two summers ago!  I suspect it may look better now before it gets fired, and densities of color  change, so I thought I'd share the unfinished results.  It was fun to work on someone else's surface, responding to another's marks.  I'm curious to know how it will end up?

Just thought I would share this.  My brother is teaching his 4th grade class about recycling, and trying to have as little impact as possible on the earth. Early consciousness is key.  I was so happy to see this, and I think they really get it.  I'm going to try harder too going forward, I know there is so much more that I personally can do.  Spread the word Joe!! More compost!! Here is the full story!!!

I'm still finishing off old greenware.  Also, listening to Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand this week.  Amazing true story and history lesson.    

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo . Yesterday was not a good work day for me.  Actually it was terrible.  Everything looked bad, still I kept working, and still it looked pretty bad, and even worse than that.  I wonder if it will still look so bad tomorrow.  Even if it doesn't, this video is a helpful reminder to be patient, and keep working.

I was thinking to try and use as my this color palette today. It is so beautiful now, even when it's raining.

I've been listening to Philip Roth books all week, finished My Life as a Man, Deception, and now I'm half way into Letting Go.   Random selections that were available at the Library.  These books have been good to work by,  and  listening is helping me focus on my work, even though I'd really rather be doing almost anything else.  Thank you books on tape!

I watched Mark try and fix the bridge that was all twisted from the flood.   He says it is ok to walk on now... I had no idea what exactly he was doing, but it looked serious! I admired my garden, that I had recently spent a week plus completely digging up....you can see an old friend of mine that got way overfired and warped who lives here now... Found this thing washed up in one of the major rains, and it has become a garden goddess of sorts.... threw the cat outside to enjoy the last days of sun...she looks a bit vexed?! and admired my darling teenage dog, who needed his little nap, as he is nearly 1 years old!! and lastly, made myself work on this old thing, one of many I'm trying to finish up in the my studio of  work left unfinished.    Interestingly after looking at it here, I can see it needs something more.  Some leaf shapes maybe.  Sometimes you need a more far away eye to witness the obvious.    Not too productive today, but I did enjoy

I've had these little pieces around for ages.... finally today I figure them out!    Two little bi-lobed pinch pots that my friend Jane made years ago when I was at Penland......