My Art Work Space

This is part of it, anyway - about half.

Latest painting in progress - just the watercolor and ink under-painting so far (it will be all acrylic in the end). I keep getting these sheep with bright light behind them in the upper right hand corner. They never come out right so I have been doomed to repeat this - this is number three...

Headphones to tie up the verbal part of my brain so the rest can paint or draw in peace. Favs at the moment are The Summer Obsession, Fallout Boy, Anberlin, The Weepies, Van Halen, and the Eliza Carthy album Angels and Cigarettes.

Dunnies in evidence. Redmeg got me started on these - I find them addictive to buy, stash, dream about, and finally open. None hoarded presently. My fav so far is the latest, which my wife and youngest son picked up for my birthday - it's from the French set - and it's so obviously a Frenchman, right down to his black beret, batard and bottle of vin de table.

In the upper left, in gloom which the camera exaggerated, is my uglydoll, "Ox." He's a related obsession - you should have seen me deliberating which to buy in a cute comics and toy store on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill where they had about 30 different uglies.

Moravian tiles showing. I love these, from my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, from the Moravian tileworks in Doylestown, PA. They bought me Grapes, Wheel of Castle Acre, and Boston Harbour but mine of the last two are terracotta and green, not blue.

Bactrian camel wooden puzzle was a piece my grandfather never finished. I have several of the finished ones (a lion, an alligator). We grandkids all have some of them, and treasure them.

The mayo jar is for pencil shavings. I like to see the wavy colored edges through the glass as it fills up.

The strip of movie tickets are from the Graham Cinema, an old fashioned movie house where they never take your tickets and we sit in the balcony. These were for National Treasure 2 (which was fun).

Poetry books from two friends; in one case the friend is the poet, in the other the friend is the publisher.

Evidence of my Roman Catholic background is in the upper right (St. Therese, and St Francis).

The green and white raku pinchpot in the little shelves (to the right, under the "bling" dunny) I made in a ceramic class in art school (ECU). They are a set of three pots meant to be kept by loved ones. We have this one, my parents have one, and my brother has the other.

To the right (if the picture were just a little larger) would be the beautiful ceramic piece that I was going to take to work, but I love having it right in the middle of my artwork in progress. It's by Heather DeLisle, one of the artists who (along with 13 others and me) founded the Hillsborough Gallery of Arts.