Tag Archives: assemblage

Dream Jobs

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                                                                        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/

No Rest for the Wicked

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No Rest for the Wicked

Now that the art walk is finished and I no longer have to maintain a pristine home, I’ve hauled out my art materials as well as the things I’ve collected from the beach and I’m planning a few dozen new pieces. This is the fun part, with the shells and wood and other elements laid out all over the kitchen and dining room and pushing and shoving into place.  Not glued down or even fully planned, just getting the pieces assembled.

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Why We Believe

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Why We Believe

I think the reason why I believe is probably at the root of it the reason why we all believe in something.  It is just such a miracle that anything exists and that I get to be a part of it. What are the chances out of the entire universe that I would be born  at all, let alone born to the time and place and parents that I was? And what are the chances that I would be healthy and have the benefit of an education and that I would find the courage to live the life I want to and continue to have that courage into my sixties and I hope my seventies and eighties and nineties.

I can understand why it would be hard to continue to believe in the magic of life if one were ill or abused or confined or physically handicapped, yet people do continue to hold onto every scrap of existence.  Life is such an incredible thing and to not appreciate it when we have every reason to appreciate it is such a waste.

There is so much cruelty and oppression and greed and poverty and disease and sadness in this world.  Yes, we do what we can to fight it, but an additional and very important way to fight it is to be as productive and happy as we can be.  Polarity demands its opposite and the world changes for the good by holding onto as much of the positive as we can.  Living it.  Promoting it in others.  Helping each other.  Good mothers and fathers do this every minute of every day and those of use who don’t have children can do it by trying to be surrogates for those children and those adults who need our care and help.  This help may be given in an organized fashion by volunteering and donating or by the way we treat others in our every day life.  We can be observant. We can be helpful.  We can be as kind to each other as possible, given that we are human and feel anger, fatigue, frustration and hopelessness.

At the end of the day–even the worst day–we get to choose whether to give up or to continue to believe, and even if the choice is to give up, we have one more chance.  I think dreams are messages and reminders we send to ourselves–little boosts encouraging us to listen to that deep part of ourselves that will always believe, even if it has to go on without the support of our conscious minds.  It is the part we get to when we write or draw or paint or dance or sing or play an instrument.  That is the importance of the arts.  They connect us to our beliefs.

So when I find myself floundering, whatever time of the day or night, my easiest way to find a reason to keep going is to do what I’m doing now.  To write. Or to make art out of whatever I find around me.  For in this aspect, art imitates life.  It is simply looking around for what we can find around us and making the best of it.  Someone once says “It is the job of the artist to take the detritus that the world creates and to hand it back to the world as art.”  That is exactly what I do in my “found art” collages.  And this, at the end of the day, is enough for me to believe in.

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Click on any one of the images to enlarge and enter gallery.  Can you find “Lord Love a Duck,” a pheasant, frigate birds, the ballerina, puffin, a seal, a sea bird, wild pig or “Found Heart?”  I just realized I left out my favorite, so I’m going to add it below.

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The Prompt: In Reason to Believe, Bruce Springsteen sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.” What’s your reason to believe?