Wednesday, November 14, 2012

New Work for Fall 2012!

New work!
I know…amazing right. I had spaces to fill up since the Common Ground Art Fair so I've been busy, busy!
This one is called 'Pond Flitter' and the original is still available. I do also have prints and notecards also.
This one below, 'Lily Pad Walker', is available in prints and notecards. 
Here's one that never made it to market as an original….destined for someone who helped me out in a big way. Thanks! It's called 'Amy's Dragonfly' and is available as a print or a notecard.
The next pieces are all new works that will be available at the Great Lakes Art Fair this weekend. There are no prints or notecards available for any of the following works. However there may be in the future, say 2013 summer.
'Summer Remanent'

'Regal Plummage'

and the long awaited colorful explosion………
'Kaliedoscope Blossoms'

All these pieces are available this weekend at the Great Lakes Art Fair…..come on down and see me!







Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Great Lakes Art Fair Info


Great Lakes Art Fair

Show Dates and Times


Friday, Nov 16, 2012 - 1:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Saturday, Nov 17, 2012 - 10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Sunday, Nov 18, 2012 - 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

Admission


$7 for Adults
Free for Children 12 & under
Strollers allowed
FREE PARKING

Location


Suburban Collection Showplace
46100 Grand River Avenue
Novi, Michigan 48374
248.348.5600
www.suburbancollectionshowplace.com

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Sat. 7/28 10-7pm
Sun. 7/29 10-5pm
I'll be there………LOVE some company! :)


Something new for this weekend's art fair in Belleville, MI.,
The Art Affair on Main.
I'll be there this weekend 
7/28 from 10-7pm 
and 7/29 from 10-5pm.
Come on by and see me! :)

Friday, July 13, 2012

Sooooo Wyandotte is proving to be a hard Art Fair for me. I like my art to be reasonable, affordable…cuz my art doesn't do me any good sitting in my stock tubs. I made it to be enjoyed by the likes of you. And because I live in the Metro Detroit area I know how bad people have it and art is the last thing they can afford. So I make sure that I have plenty of small art things, in this case bookmarks and cards, that sell for a reasonable $3. That way you can have a little bit of art even if you can't afford any of the bigger pieces. But I can't even sell those at this fair. And there are more people than you can shake a stick at walking by this at this art fair…..I just don't get it.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Reworking….new "old" artwork

Working on new art for the Wyandotte Street Art Fair in two weeks. Is is a reworking of an older drawing called "Dolores"  I also have some new bookmarks in the works and a few other things up my sleeves….  ;-) 
I am hoping to have quite a few new works done for this fair. At four days long it is, by far, the longest art fair I've done to date and I'm not to sure how to stock for it.  If dreams come true than I'll need a lot of "hole fillers" because I've sold a lot of framed originals and have to fill the voids they've left behind.  Worst case scenario is I'm stocked up on artwork for the foreseeable future….LOL. Though that doesn't seem to last that long once I've completed pieces they tend to leave me for other abodes. I guess that's a good thing that all my "little babies" get to find new homes to be loved in.
Okay…..off to create….. keep cool and enjoy art!


Thursday, June 07, 2012

A little summer fun….'Ladybug'

The Secret

Here's a new piece called "The Secret". It's called that after the Emily Dickinson poem of the same name that's lodged in the 4th ring from the center. When I had finished the piece I had those 5 spaces open and I wanted to add some text of some kind or another. I thought that a poem would work there and Emily Dickinson has a lot of 4 and 5 line poems so I got out my worn volume of her poems and leafed through it. The book practically opened itself to the page with this poem on it. I thought it worked well with the drawing. It spoke of 'things that fly" (dragonfly) and of "things that stay" (bricks, fossils, stones). The muse provides again….I couldn't have found a better poem! That synchronicity happens a lot for me….it's uncanny how often that it happens. Believe it or not I usually let my pieces tell me what their names are. I think "title?" and wait to see what answers come to me. Usually it's obvious. I hear the word(s) and they feel right. Thus the title arrives However this piece couldn't let go of the poem's title so it ended up with the same name.

Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Berkley Art Bash


Hello friends!  
Time for the Berkley Art Bash!
Come on down and find me...booth #24!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Great Lakes Art Fair

Well it's come and gone but it was fun! I met a lot of great people and a lot of wonderful artists were there. If you came by and saw me it was great to meet you! I had such a good time that I'll definitely be back this fall and NEXT spring….hope to see you then as well.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Art Fair Season!

     Well it's Art Fair Season and I haven't been keeping up here and I feel a bit bad about that. I had a bad summer/fall health wise last year and it's taken awhile to get my back on my feet. In June one day before the Berkley Art Bash I found myself suffering from Vertigo. Now I have always had problems with very bad motion sickness my whole life but this was a whole other level of horribleness I had yet to encounter. I went to the doctor and got meds and tests to see why.
     Turns out that my water drinking habit of 96 + oz. of water a day tended to wash electrolytes out of my body and managed to dislodge the crystals in the inner ear that help with balance…..who knew? So I wobbled around at the Berkley Art Bash with vertigo and still had a great day. Spent the weekend awash in Powerade and about a week later I was feeling better. But that just gave the tests the doc did time to come back.  And his office called and told me I needed to come back in. :(
      Apparently my liver enzymes were elevated abnormally (slightly) so he ordered me off to get an ultrasound. Did I mention we don't have insurance? Well we've got major medical but that has a $10,000 deductible and won't cover this kind of stuff. So off I go to get the ultrasound to the tune of $300 and then I wait a week to go in for the results. While I'm waiting the office calls again to say I need to come in again. WTF? So I tell them I'll come in on Friday when my ultrasound results come in. When I get there
he looks over the results like he's just seeing them for the 1st time (again WTF?) and tells me it's all clear. Amazingly there is nothing to be seen in any of the vital organs, no stones or spots or masses (whew!) and while I'm breathing easy for the 1st time he uses that time to slam me with the information that I've managed to "tip into the range" that developes Type II Diabetes…..nice…..no wonder I've been so EXTREMELY tired for the last year and a half.
    Always tactful, the doc tells me if I loose some weight I could tip back out of the range and get rid of the diabetes. " I want you to walk for 30 minutes everyday" he tells me. Okay now….I've been walking a lot anyways and have been on Weight Watchers for the past 3 or so years trying to lose weight. Not a lot of it has shifted. The only thing I've really lost is my tolerance for carrots….blech! It's hard to loose weight when you're 50. It's hard to lose weight when you have a baby at 41 and that baby kicks you right into menopause. It's hard to lose weight when you have 2 jobs, a business of your own, and a family including elderly parents and kids to look after…..personal time, exercise time….they're myths…right?  Stack those things up together and you've got a perfect storm of "hard to lose" conditions. But I gave it a shot anyways. My neighbor said she'd walk with me and my other neighbor watched the kid for me so we could walk without the usual symphony of whining….from the kid, not me….though I was tempted.
     After a couple of weeks of walking I thought it was going along fine when one evening I managed to roll my ankle and fall straight forward, face first. Couple things about my feet: my big toes have what some have called bunions but they are more like a cartilage build up in the base joint of the big toe. My right foot is so bad that the toe does not bend or bends only slightly at that joint. Hence that fact that when I walk my right foot I tend to "roll" along the outside edge of the foot. Well I "rolled" my foot on the edge of the pavement where the grass didn't come up to meet it. Ankle folded, I went down.
     When I went down I fell face first. In order to not have my face fit the ground I bent my arms and locked my elbows so that I landed on them and my face and head did not hit the pavement. It was still painful nevertheless and my right ankle and left shin were in great pain. I figured I sprained my ankle and my left shin was hurting where I had damaged it from a fall in 2010 when I slipped on some ice. It came away from that fall with nerve damage right below my knee which was hypersensitive to any pressure. The fall had reawakened the nerve damage, I could feel the burning and tingling. Lucky for me a passing car screeched to a stop and two women jumped out and said "We're first responders can we help you?" No, really, that's EXACTLY what they said…..how lucky can you get? They gave us a ride home. As my ankle only hurt when I tried to turn it sideways or walked on an incline I was sure the ankle was sprained so I just wrapped it and carried on. As long as I walked normally and didn't turn my foot I was in no pain.
          Three days later I was off to Traverse City to do an out door art fair. Two weeks later when it wasn't any better I went back to the doctor. "Look what exercising gets you." I said. "Everything always happens to you!" he said and then went on to explain that I had a chip fracture of the ankle and put me in an air cast ($91.00…not including office visit).
        So no walking for 8-10 weeks. Fine with me, just give me an excuse to sit around and I'll do it.  And I did just that. That was August 13th. I figured I'd get a lot of artwork done in that time. I had the Funky Ferndale Art Fair in Sept and then I would be done for the season. I started to get some work done but I kept getting headaches, which I took to be sinuses. I also was getting a pain in my arm around the elbow that gradually worked it's way up my arm, into my neck and the base of my skull. It made it hard to concentrate on my work. The headaches were worse at night which is the time I have to do my artwork. One thing lead to another and when I realized that I had had a continuous headache for 10 weeks I finally went to see my friend the Dr.
     "Everything always happens to you!" said Dr. Broken-Record while he explained to me that when my elbow hit that pavement I did damage to the nerve that runs from the elbow to the base of the skull. (Great…more nerve damage).  He put me on Vicodin and muscle relaxers and sent me off to heal.
     That was October….I spent the next couple of months on the meds which put me to sleep at the drop of a hat. All I did was take meds, work a few hours during the day, nap, eat dinner, take meds, fall asleep on the sofa, wake up, take meds, go to bed and then start all over again the next day. I got NOTHING done….art or otherwise. It took until January for me to start feeling better. Where does this lead to? That's right it's the beginning of Art Fair Season…and I'm not half as prepared as I'd like to be.
     Now I'm trying to make up for lost time. My 1st show of the season was the Royal Oak Artist Market on March 3-4 in the Royal Oak Farmer's Market. What a great little show! I sold two framed pieces. "David' and a new piece called 'Steampunk Crow' shown above. I also sold a lot of a new item I was trying out…bookmarks. They were well received and make a good addition to the cards I've been doing. I did well and am raring to go!
      Next up is the Great Lakes Art Fair in Novi on April 13-15th. I've got to get about 6-8 more pieces done and I'll feel ready. In May I'll be doing Art Birmingham at Shane Park. It's the start of a good season. I hope I can put all this health stuff behind me this year and really have a good season. And I hope that I'll see you at one of my venues! Keep your eyes on the blog for further notice of Art Fairs to come!
Ciao,
Maria