RIVA!!

well, here she is!!!!! My friends Amy, Jill+ Lindsey found her in their parking lot and came to us looking for a home................... I of course fell in love and now she's ours + so incredibly sweet. Oliver adores her and will hopefully inherit some of her slightly more grown up doggie twendencies!

School is now in full swing, and I'm having a pretty good time creating a routine with enough space to breathe in it. I think that one really grand thing about art school is that as you progress and do more and more focused work, that work becomes your own and not just an isolated assignment. I'm really enjoying the taking posession part, of everything that I make now. Yesterday, I cast the first of the beat and rutabegga bowls and they came out really neat, bumpy and looking a lot like beats and rutabegga! I'm starting to think about glaze colors and any patterns/surface design that I might add. to make it less scarry and new; trying to figure out what I want to draw in the clay, because that's really all it is. I think that in every new and potentionally intimidating situation there is a point in which you can make it your own and do, from that place on, in your own terms. Simmilarly, I have suspended the need for straight lines. I always feel all this pressure to draw clean grids and create immaculate sketchbooks and finally, I just realized that there is no reason to create and be something that I am not. This is a good sentiment, one that applies to all aspects of everything that we do. I got a postcard from Elena with a beautiful Inuit painting of an owl and a seal in a boat on it. The name of the painting is Following the Route. Elena wrote this on the back : the name seems to suggest so many things, like birds migrating the same route every year and just knowing the way intuitively. Also, maybe that we all have an intuitive route-- some direction that we naturally head.....

I guess that if at the end of the day we can think back on it all and know that we're somehow on that right road, then there is nothing more we could really want.