Perspective

It's Fall in the mountains and I am completely inspired by the beauty around me.  I have had a love affair with Colorado from the minute I layed my eyes on her in 1991.  It took me 2 years to save up and move.  I moved to Boulder Colorado in the Fall of 1993. I moved with 3 other great girls all of us with high hopes of the future and the idealism that only someone under 30 can have.  My dream then wasn't to be an artist but to be a vegetarian chef.  I got a job fairly quickly and started to pursue that dream.  It was going along smoothly but then I met a cute boy that changed everything.  He lived at 10,400 ft in a cabin with no running water and 4 dogs.  He introduced me to true mountain living and I haven't been able to get it out of my system since.

We eventually married, I started eating meat, and we now have a house with running water and quite a view.  The 1st picture on this blog was taken from my deck just 2 days ago.  If you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see pictures of the surrounding area and my back yard.  Yes this is where I live and I am so lucky.  It's not just because of the beauty but also about what it does for your soul.  Mountain living makes you a better person.  When you are amongst beauty like this every day it makes you breathe in and appreciate what you have and always remember what is important.   There is truth in "Rocky mountain high" after you have climbed a mountain and are breathing so hard you are out of breath but then through the trees you can see the top.  The view opens up into a breathtaking scenery beyond words.  You feel "high" and everything is "all good"

The piece that I am working on is inspired by Fall and that feeling of perspective after you spend your day hiking.  Hence the title "Perspective".  It started from a picture of my husband Pat standing on a rock on a trip we took to Taos NM.  I have kind of changed the picture completely because I wanted to add aspens  and scrub oak for the beautiful colors.  In the original picture there were only pines because we were too high up in elevation.  The only part that remains from the picture is Pat.  So the whole entire scenery I am just creating from my head as I study all of the foliage on my morning hikes.  You can see already how this piece has changed from the beginning to where I am now.  I know it will change even more as I go along.

I love creating landscapes.  It takes me back to being a kid.  I played with Barbies but not how most girls did.  I didn't care about Barbie houses.  I wanted to build the houses myself along with all of the furniture.  I liked to play outside  with them and create lakes that she would swim in with bridges going across them and houses made out of rocks and I would landscape her front lawn.  Yikes!  I guess you get the picture.  So as I do a landscape in mosaics it takes me back to that child like feel of creating your own world.

Thanks for stopping by to say hello!  You can check out the daily process of this piece on macmosaics.com  just click on "What I'm Working on now"

Just a reminder that I will be in the exhibit Cutting Edges at the 910 Arts Gallery in Denver Co running Nov 4 - Dec 17  My pieces Old Blue Eyes & Shades of Grey will be in that exhibit

Sometimes it is better when the path goes around the plan

I finished with "I Dreamt of Africa".  You can see that I wound up in a different place than where I started.  I suppose that's a little bit of a parallel with my life.  I started out with a plan when I was younger but so many twists and turns in the world and here I am living in the middle of no where in Colorado when I grew up in western Pa.  I  love the way things turned out rather than that sterile plan I had at such a young and inexperienced age. 

I learn that way through art as well.  I was once asked "What do you want your art to say?"  My answer was "It speaks to me"  In the beginning of creating a piece I will have a basic idea of what I want to do but then I get lost in the flow of creating and the piece just starts to come alive and suggest other avenues that I should explore. In the 1st version that I sketched I had the background very literal.  As I was working on it "literal" was just not what I was feeling.  I wanted the black & white of the zebras to pop against a more abstract version of a sunset.   (If you scroll down all of the way you will see the pics)

2 of my pieces will be part of the exhibition Mosaics: Cutting edges at the 910 Arts Gallery in Denver CO Nov 4 - Dec 12  "Old Blue Eyes" & "Shades of Grey"  I will be there opening night & possibly Nov 18 (3rd Friday)  Hopefully I will see some of you there!

The leaves this year in Southern Colorado are just gorgeous!  This is a bold statement but in all of my 18 years in Colorado I'm pretty sure that this is the most spectacular fall that I have seen!  I had to add a few pics so you could see it too!

I will leave you with this quote because the older I get the more I realize how true it is!

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because sometimes life goes away too quickly  -- Andy Warhol

Thank you for stopping by !