Amanda Faith Art

Living in the kind of time famine that seems to be a common First World problem is making every creative act extra sacrosanct. I doodled during the homeschool art class I teach last week. Ooooooooo.

Being a new mom and wife means my creativity comes out in how I juggle laundry and a smile on my face. I bet the rest of you are nodding your heads, saying, well it’s about time she realized real life instead of hopping across oceans and all that.

I’ll be traveling up to Fairbanks to set up art camp in the Carlson Center for a looooong weekend. Baby M is coming. Wayne Johnson, guardian of thousands of northern lights images, has let us tag along in his caravan. It’s not going to be the fine art gallery showcase, it’s more of a budget shopping tent city. But that’s okay. I will persevere and find some way to shine out ART!!! Dime store art!

I first spread my post-college artistic flight feathers down by the sea in Homer, Alaska. Here the ocean is a different shade each day. The rest of the land seems coated in the blue gauze it seems to throw over everything by it. Except the brilliant fireweed and juicy red raspberries perhaps.

So I’m back here again searching out artistic inspiration and a breath of calm after an especially momentous week. The ocean is the lightest of celestial blues today. There was a hint of that shade in the eyes of someone I recognized at the bakery, the only person from my old circle of friends that I’ve seen here this time around the circle.

I dropped off some pieces at Fireweed Gallery along Pioneer Street. It’s a bright gallery space, like very clean laundry hanging on an outdoor line. They have the a nice mix of prints, originals and accessories. I’m excited that my artistic journey has made a loop through here, because when I was first starting out, it was awfully hard to see that I’d make it this far.

I went to the wrong polling place, and was thus saved from my aforementioned civic delimma.

Now that I’m back in my hometown, my civic duties have expanded to things other than voting in U.S. presidential elections. I’m picking up trash [in Switzerland meek looking men in green suits or driving machines with baleen-like sweeper brushes cleaned the streets.]  I’m volunteering for municipal organizations ["experts" take of much of that work in Europe.] What duty just snuck up on me are the municipal elections however. I’m rushing around the web doing research now, so I don’t make a lame party-line only decision behind the voting curtain.

The two candidates in my mid-town district are almost charicatures of polar opposites. Neither spoke of things artistic in their KTUU Candidate interviews. Oddly enough both sounded out for lower property taxes. One however showed a record of voting for spending increases, while the other sounded out against anything but spending cuts, in broken record fashion. I searched in vain for a candidate standing in the middle ground – someone who didn’t mind keeping important programs fully funded, but also advocated more private involvement in civic life. By that I mean, not getting tunnel vision on taxes. Not seeing it as the best way to fund many social programs. I’ve seen personally how individuals giving to charities can help so many more people in certain cases than government agencies can.

Hmm, that rant still doesn’t answer the question of who to vote for! Sigh.

Doesn’t their photos show their oppositional positions? Bronson and Gray-Jackson

I’m trying to get dirt out of the grout lines and from underneath my fingernails. Totally worth it though, thinking that I have finally followed through on starting some seedlings. As I get older I time seems to stretch like a balloon. The distance to getting a task done well is something I can stretch out farther ahead of time. Probably living in plan-ahead Switzerland/Germany helped. The spring there is such an early event, I saw people preparing for it the whole winter long.

“What kind of art do you do?” the doctor at dinner asked me last night. Thanks to a long art-heart walk/talk with my ever encouraging finacee that afternoon, I felt hopeful about answering that oft-answered question. Sometimes I don’t know what to say because sometimes my art either feels like ghosts from my past, unfinished projects from the present, or unrealized dreams of the future. I love to design things, redesign things, paint in front of mountains and flowers, doodle people, sketch ideas. How do I summarize that?

“I’m trained in classical art so I have oil paintings and figure drawings around the house,” I said, and even now as I type this I find it funny that I felt compelled to describe my oeuvre chronologically. “That gave me a good eye for design and composition so now I’m trying to make more mixed media, accessible artwork.”

He said his exwife did mixed media art on the same basis. I was relieved; that meant he knew the jargon and what I was really trying to get at. Combine all this flotsam and jetsam of our posh first world life into artful arrangements.

Maybe that’s what the “Common Space” symposium with the Alaska Design Forum is about. Artful arrangements of our contemporary accessories. I need to find some brainstorm partners for a proposal…anyone???

I remember going to the Alaska Zoo as a kid and seeing in the gift shop paintings from the poor out-of-place elephant there. A few brushes of color across a canvas that were yes, light and refreshing, but obviously heavily supervised by a staff member.

So when the aforementioned creative partner announces that a painting by a sea lion sold for $45OO at a benefit auction he was playing at, my mouth dropped open. Not that I was as much surprised at the novelty of an animal painting as by the price tag its work sold for.

My stash of little framed originals seemed like basement bargains. Painted by a live female homo sapien! Without the aid of a trainer! All proceeds go towards supporting her existence and that of her family!

I think I will do a portrait of a sea lion next, now that this one of a howler monkey playing in his food is finished. Here’s some images of it progressing along. It’s for sale, whoopy!

Houseplants gave me some much needed cheerleading along the way. I was painting a tropical scene in the middle of Alaskan January. I worked from an oil pastel drawing that I did onsite in Costa Rica.

These are the new fangled oil paints that I’ve been using. I highly recommend them, if you’re into new fangled speedy things. The colors are just as juicy, but I can get them to dry to the touch in a day or two. I use linguin and fast-drying linseed oil to help the process along.

Summer 09

If you’d like to pick up either of the two prints below right in the Wasilla area, swing by the beautiful jewel box that is the Town Square Art Gallery, nextdoor to the Carrs mall area Kaladi Brothers in Wasilla, Alaska. (907) 376-0123

Some of my silks available there as well.