Dream Jobs

I have been lucky enough to have several “dream jobs” in my lifetime.  First of all, I was a teacher. I loved teaching kids and enjoyed the other people I worked with.  My first teaching jobs were in Australia and Ethiopia, which additionally gave me the chance to travel and live in “strange” environments–things I had wanted to do since very small.

I taught for ten years before finally deciding I needed to change my life to enable me to find time to write.  I then moved to Orange County, California, to live with a dear friend and spent two years studying a number of areas I felt had been neglected in my earlier education.  I would go to the library with lists of topics I wanted to know more about: art, artists, places, concepts, psychology, philosophy.

The writing of Carl Jung was of special interest and I allowed synchronicity and the unconscious to guide my life.  This took me to Los Angeles and into film school at U.C.L.A., an apprenticeship at a Hollywood agency and eventually to a job working in p.r. and publicity for Bob Hope’s production company.  It was a job where I was laid off for 5 months of each year, between shows, and this enabled me to write and travel.

After three years of working here, I married and moved northwards to the Santa Cruz area where I became a silversmith and paper maker.  For fourteen years, I traveled and did art shows with my husband.  This was as close to working for a traveling circus as I would ever come, and I loved both the studio work and the traveling.  The people we would meet in various locations across the U.S. became our friends and we slept in our motor home or van in convention center parking lots from California to Ann Arbor to Boston.

As the area of our travels narrowed to the west coast, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, I accepted a “job” as the curator of a new art center in the San Lorenzo Valley near Santa Cruz.  Although this was a volunteer position, it was both time-consuming and extremely gratifying as I met and worked with artists throughout the Santa Cruz area.  I loved coordinating and hanging eight shows a year as well as teaching classes and handling show themes, admissions, publicity and openings.  It was practically a full time job in itself,  but we continued to handle a full show schedule ourselves.  By then, in addition to my making silver and copper jewelry, Bob and I were making art lamps together. He did the stone and wood work and some of the framework for the sail like shades whereas I made the handmade washi  paper and some of the framework for shades and covered the shades.

I’ve been lucky my entire life to always have a job I enjoyed and believed in and this continues to this very day as retirement has brought time to write more and to shift my focus from jewelry and lamps to mixed media assemblage, which I continue to this day.  While at the beach, I concentrate on collages of found objects from the beach and city streets. It also gives me time to write this blog which consumes an ever-increasing amount of my time.

Here is a gallery of shots that capture, I hope, my process in  collecting, assembling and mounting found objects into my assemblages.  If you click on the first picture, it will enlarge the photos and show them to you one by one:

Prompt: Describe your dream job. https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/money-for-nothing/