Mosaic Mandalas

Artsy Stream of Consciousness on a Lazy Saturday

Our grandson has a fantastic way of telling a story - he just begins and then talks and talks and talks. His story evolves and takes surprising turns.  It can make me laugh and make me say "Matthew! Ewwww!" [He's four and a half.]  But he can let his consciousness stream along with nary a blip on the radar.

I thought for today's post I'd give it a try.  Have to post every day all month long as part of BlogHer's challenge and - it's not that I'm not wordy - but writing when the muse is asleep is hard.  So. Let's put a toe in the stream...

Yesterday went to the grocery store and in the isle where the seasonal items are was a bitty greenhouse.  It is very inexpensive [cheap?] but you can stand up inside, has on each side two shelves.  It's covered with a heavy plastic that has that netting embedded inside and a zippered front so you can close the 'door.' I'd been wanting a little greenhouse for quite awhile to grow seedlings for spring planting and maybe trying my hand at orchids.  This little structure ought to do the job.

Began my job of lifestyle change this morning.  Last post I said I'd be meeting my daughter at the gym this morning...and I did! A Gold Star for my chart. Tomorrow is a bike ride with the mister.  Speaking of bicycles, I'm old enough to remember the days of no helmuts.  I'm of 2 minds about this: yes, safety is important, so I wear a helmut.  However, I remember the freedom of riding my bike and having the breeze blow through my hair and past my face.  I loved that.  After my crash of last summer, though, I won't neglect wearing it.

Seatbelts. There's another safety-vs-annoying thing.  Yes, I always wear my seatbelt when in a vehicle; but again, I remember the days as a youngster when there weren't any.  And don't get me started on the booster seats kidlets have to sit in now. 

I think I want to spend the rest of this day finishing up a mosaic.  I'm really liking this one.  It's titled, "The Grove Mandala Mosaic" and should be ready for photographing later next week.

Ah! Ever wanted to try your hand at mosaic but were too afraid to try? Here's a little experiment.  The example at right is one I did using what I had on hand.  It's only 3 1/2" x 2 1/2", using some left over tiny ceramic tiles I had and a bit of grout.  Here's what you'll need [if you don't have mosaic supplies you can get some basic supplies at Michael's or any good craft store]:

• tesserae - you can use anything from bits of glass to beads to buttons; or buy a bag of tiles at the craft store
• support - a small square or rectangle of wood...any scrap will do
• glue - for this experiment any white glue will do; for my professional work I use Weldbond
• grout - you can get a small amount from the craft store; it is like cement that fills between the tiles

Here's what to do:

1. On your wood support draw a sketch.  Doesn't matter what you want to do, just put some kind of simple design.
2. Before glueing, lay out your tiles on your sketch so you can see where you want to put which colors and shapes.
3. Glue down your tesserae one-by-one.
4. Let the glue dry...a couple of days is good.
5. Mix up a small amount of grout [consistency of peanut butter].  Smooth it over your mosaic with a damp square of folded paper towel.  What you want to do is to have the grout fill all the spaces between the tiles.  Then clean off the surface.
6. Let the grout dry.  Another couple days.

You're done! Basically that's all there is to doing a mosaic.  You add your own creativity, imagination and skills. 

Talking about mosaicing really has me itching to get glue all over my fingers, so time to take my toe out of the consciousness stream.  Tomorrow: Afraid to Paint? Here's some help.

Seeing 'Art' in the Garden

You might have noticed that there is a new widget in the right hand column a couple of scrolls down titled 'NaBloPoMo/February 2012/Relative.'  Wonder what that is? When I noticed this strange looking word, NaBloPoMo, on BlogHer last year I wondered what it was.  Stands for National Blog Posting Month [which I guess is in November] - it's an event thing where writers post to their blog daily...every day in the month.  BlogHer decided to do a NaBloPoMo challenge every month and this month, February, I decided to join in.

Wow. A post a day for 29 Leap Year days. Can I do it? We shall see.  The theme for this month is 'relative.' Bloggers can use it to inspire their writing or not, but I decided to go with it for today.

I got to thinking about relatives and family, then art.  Then I did some mental wandering through my memory banks [I'm watching/listening through the 4 seasons of 'Enterprise' while I work this week] and asked "when did I begin to drift towards art?"  When I was a kid, my goal in life - now don't laugh - was to be an FBI agent.  Could be why I like the X-Files and Fringe so much. However I think it was while spending time in my grandmother's gardens where I began to absorb color.

My paternal grandmother had not just a green thumb, she was a walking, talking green person. Grandma could grow anything. She had prize winning roses and begonias. She had been the president of her community's garden club for many years.  She shared with me her love of flowers and garden design.  I didn't have a camera back in those days, but I would draw flowers.  When I got older is when I started to really pay attention to the fact that Grandpa was a painter! He worked in oils and painted seascapes and California missions...among other themes.  I used to sit as he painted and he'd describe his techniques. 

I took my first art classes in high school and then many art classes in college.  I learned more about color when I took a semester which only allowed us to work in black, white and shades of gray - the value scale.  Another semester was spent in an arboretum painstakingly drawing the plants there.  The weirdest and most fun was a course in 3-dimensional design.  And, of course, I loved all the art history courses.  Yes, I learned much in college.  But it was in Grandma's gardens where I began to appreciate the relationships between color and form.

I've written before that my grandfather was a representational, realistic painter for the most part.  And, even though I learned to draw that way, I have always leaned to the abstract.  If I paint a barn,  I'd rather pay attention to the colors and shape of it than the fact it's a barn.  On a trip to admire Fall foliage a couple years ago, I photographed a barn.  Then I took the picture into my Photoshop program and "painted" the building bright red! Now that's a barn!

Getting to Work with BlogHer and Starbucks

UPDATE:  If you click on this link, you'll go to the BlogHer post by Lisa Stone [one of the founders of BlogHer], you'll find it's been updated to include an audio link to a phone converstion with Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz.  I'm excited to say that  Mosaic Mandalas was mentioned about 8 minutes in because I had submitted a question.  See Lisa Stone's comment to this post below to learn more.

Why am I starting out with a video today?  And why isn't this about Fine Art?  Well, in a way, it is about the mosaic of life and art and small business which is kind of my manifesto - in other words, the aim [manifesto] of this blog Mosaic Mandalas is to have conversations about fine art, mosaic art, business of art, the art of business [my heart lies with small and tiny businesses] and the Art of Life.

I'm a member of the BlogHer community...surely you've heard of that! No? Look here.  BlogHer is a community of many thousands of bloggers who write about anything and everything.  I went to the BlogHer 2011 Conference in San Diego and was inspired that so many people are engaged in changing and shaping the world around them using such a seemingly simple thing as a blog.  For some, their blog is their small business or a window to their small business or a page on their business' website.

What I'm excited about sharing here is Creat Jobs for USA...that's what the video above is about.  As a member of the BlogHer publishing network I learned that "...The BlogHer team is proud to partner with the folks at Starbucks and Opportunity Finance Network to get the word out about CreateJobsforUSA.org...."  From the Create Jobs for USA website, here's what it is all about:

Starbucks is teaming up with Opportunity Finance Network® (OFN) to help create and sustain jobs. The Create Jobs for USA program will provide capital grants to select Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The CDFIs will provide loans to underserved community businesses, which include small businesses, microenterprises, nonprofit organizations, commercial real estate, and affordable housing. It is the goal of Create Jobs for USA to bring people and communities together to create and sustain jobs throughout America.

The Create Jobs for USA program initially will be seeded with a $5 million contribution from the Starbucks Foundation...."

What attracts me the most is the section mentioning "underserved community businesses which include small businesses" and "microenterprises."  As a fine artist I have a one-person micro-sized business.  And I know that there are millions of tiny businesses of all kinds all across the country who often are not included in programs offering money for business growth. 

Like many other people in the US, my own family has felt the negative impact of the difficult economy.  For instance, [and admittedly somewhat superficially] I'd love to have a brand new car- but am so grateful for the old one that is fully paid for and runs very well.  There is no money for a new car so I just put blinders on so I don't see the peeling paint on the trunk lid.  People who manufacture automobiles need to have people purchase cars for their livelihood...auto dealerships need people to come and buy cars for the livelihood of the sales team, service team, administrative team and owners.  Everyone kind of depends upon everyone else in a free enterprise system.  But when something throws the economic balance haywire, it all kind of falls apart.  To fix it, programs like Create Jobs for USA needs to happen.

I encourage everyone to take a moment and check ito this program and if you've got $5 to donate, do so for Create Jobs for USA.

Oh Where Oh Where Has This Blogger Been?

I sure appreciate modern technology! I'm posting this little update via my iPhone. My husband and I are going through a relocation and instead of being busy at my art work table, I've been up to my ears in boxes, boxes and more boxes! First it was to fill them, now it's to empty them. Where to put all the do-dads?

A few days to get the kitchen re-stocked and get my office set up...Internet being "on" this weekend, then it's back to work. Am nearly finished with a new mosaic. Also I'm looking forward to posting an interview with an interesting artist here at Mosaic Mandalas.

Now in which box did I put the extension cords?

The Art of a (Contagion) Movie Review

Contagion. Scary word. Frightening idea. Horrifying reality in world history.   The human population of the planet has gone through:

• Bubonic Plague - the very name of this one sends shivers down the spine
• Smallpox - killed millions
• Polio [my maternal grandfather survived polio]
• Measels [I had this as a child - can remember my mom and dad taking turns being home from work to care for me]
• Yellow Fever, Scarlet Fever, Typhoid, Cholera
• Flu - the 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed tens of millions
• in modern times: SARS, Aids, H-1-N-1

And what about scary special pathogens like Ebola, Lassa, Marburg and others? Makes me never want to go into a cave in the heart of Africa, ever.

So. Why did I go see the new movie "Contagion?"  It has to do with my enjoyment of the thriller/mystery novel genre.  In 1995 an exciting and terrifying book came out: The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston.  From the  website:

"...The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story in depth, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their outbreaks in the human race. From a remote African cave hot with Ebola virus, to an airplane over Africa that is carrying a sick passenger who dissolves into a human virus bomb, to the confines of a Biosafety Level 4 military lab where scientists risk their lives studying lethal substances that could kill them quickly and horribly, The Hot Zone describes situations that a few years ago would have been taken for science fiction...."

Wouldn't you want to read this if you were a fan of thrilling adventure and dangerous human endeavors?  I've since read it many times and constantly hope it never, ever comes to pass again.

So, when I came across the movie, "Outbreak," starring Dustin Hoffman, Renee Russo, Morgan Freeman, Donald Sutherland and others, I just had to see it and add it to my collection.  Yes it's a rather simple story but the actors made it enjoyable "thriller" entertainment.  It again was the whole idea of global pandemic but this time made into a bottle show by isolating it in a small coastal California town.  It had drama and action and I even loved the bit of improv [that's what I read somewhere] Hoffman did in the scene with the little girl about his nose.  Oh and there was witty dialogue too.  In other words, it was a complete story.

Now to my movie review of Contagion.  Saw it yesterday and came away dissatisfied.  It also has a big cast including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law and others.  This one was not a bottle show because the killer microbe began to circle the globe and casualties began to climb quite high.  However this movie was not a complete story.  It's my opinion as a viewer that the writer and director weren't quite sure whether they were going for a thriller movie or a pseudo-documentory.

The story is told in bits and pieces.  And it doesn't finish certain story lines and doesn't give enough information about others.  And it gives a pretty inaccurate view of bloggers and blogging.  Again, just my opinion as a viewer.  On that point, do I think that a blog can be "journalistic?"  Of course.  The Huffington Post is a blog and there are bloggers out there who do what I did as an actual journalist when I worked at a newspaper and was paid to write:

1. have an idea for an article
2. do research and investigation
3. write the article either as objectively as possible, or write it as an opinion piece

Difference is that bloggers [normally] aren't paid.  However, in this movie I found  the emphasis on the crooked blogger [that's how this character came across to me] to be unbalanced.

What happened to the Kate Winslet character, Dr. Erin Mears of the CDC?  It was kind of unclear as to whether she had THE virus or a really bad case of the flu [after all the blogger guy didn't have it]...and did she die or get better?  Also, where did that kidnapping in China storyline originate? That happened too quickly without enough story around it. 

So why are folks going to see this movie? I think people are interested in stories like this because of the whole "what if" thing: what if a new virus were to break out? What if it went global? What would happen?

There were no stellar preformances in this movie and no witty dialogue.  One of my favorite actors, Laurence Fishburne, was wasted in this role.  Many of the roles were very one dimensional which was too bad.  Okay, drumroll:  how many stars do I give it?  Out of 5 I give it a 2.5.  I will not be purchasing this one to add to my collection [I only add to my collections those that hit at least a 3 - the writers, directors and producers need to make me care about the story as a whole]. 

Vacation's over, now back to Work

I fell in love on my vacation. I fell in love with Beluga Whales. Actually I love whales of all kinds: humpbacks - saw some extraordinary displays of breaching in Hawaii some years ago; blue whales - saw them this vacation off the California coast around Newport Beach; saw the California Gray Whale a few years back out of Morrow Bay; and now the Beluga at Sea World (San Diego).  Yes, we watched the killer whale show..."One Ocean" with Shamu and friends. They, too, are very cool. 

There was something special about the Beluga whales...I don't know what. I was entranced by them.  Sea World offers back stage experiences with several of their exhibits and I saw small groups of people outfitted in wetsuits in the 'lagoon' with the Belugas.  I'll bet that was memorable.  They are a bit big for me to attempt that.  However, I did get to do a back stage experience with penguins.  Readers of Mosaic Mandalas know my husband and I are the family flock for an Amazon Double-Yellow Head Parrot named George and a yellow parakeet named Pippin...so I love birds. 

Remember the movie March of the Penquins that came out in 2005? It chronicled the annual trek of the Emperor penguins as they live their lives in just about the harshest living conditions on the planet.  I loved it, cried with it and admire the heck out of Nature.  When the cute movie Happy Feet came out...yeh, I loved it too. [There will be a Happy Feet Two coming out this November] I think penguins are fascinating.  Well. Here's the thing: I got to pet penguins. How cool is that? 

In the photo is a Macaroni Penguin - he has a yellow crest of feathers on the sides of his head.  Remember in the Happy Feet movie, the fat guru guy? He was a Macaroni Penguin.  The trainer/penguin keeper let us pet this fellow - I was intrigued to discover how different than my George's feathers were this ones'.  Very.  Penguins' feathers are very dense - have to be to keep warm.  My George's feathers are airy, both to keep him cool and to allow him to fly. Penguins' bones are dense to aid in swimming; George's bones are hollow to aid in flying.  But Macaroni's feathers were indeed soft. 

We also got to go into the penguin enclosure [oh, my, but it was cold in there!] and got to pet a King Penguin, next size down from the Emperor.

I wrote previously about the early parts of our vacation...we just about had so much fun I thought I'd need a stay-cation at a foot hospital! :)  However.  Undaunted I concluded my part of our vacation with two days at the BlogHer 2011 Conference in San Diego.  My husband spent time with his brother and nephew doing such manly summer pursuits as water balloon fights, nerf gun wars and building Lego trains.

If you can stay with me, I'd like to touch on the highlights [for me] of this incredible blogging conference - well over 3,000 in attendance.  I wrote a post on the BlogHer site about my experience with the final session I attended on the second day - you can read that here. 

First, I'm impressed hugely with the San Diego Convention Center! Not just the facilities, but the people.  Comic Con 2011 preceeded BlogHer by just a little and I'm amazed at the cleanliness, orderliness and efficiency with which the Center is maintained and managed.  And...of interest to women everywhere...there are enough bathrooms! 

**I want to say a special THANK YOU to all the service people at every venue I visited during this vacation.  The people who work at Disneyland are 90% of what make the experience so special.  A big thank you to the crew of the whale watching boat on the Tuesday of our trip.  Huge thanks to the people at Sea World San Diego who keep the lines moving, keep the tables clean and helped to make our day so very enjoyable.  Many thanks to the waitress, hostess and gift shop clerk at The Rainforest Cafe in Disney Downtown for making our two breakfast visits so much fun.  And Thanks to all the silent, efficient people at the San Diego Convention Center during BlogHer who did everything from clear dining tables to keeping toilet paper stocked.  THANK YOU.

There were so many sessions to choose from at this conference. Here's what my schedule looked like:

Day One: Newbie Breakfast; Opening Welcome; session "Leveraging Your Blog to Build E-Products for Sale;" Lunch [geez I was starving!]; session "Success on Our Own Terms: A Discussion with Huffington Post Women;" and then spending time touring through the over 100 vendor exhibits. [talk about swag! I brought home a whole bag of souviners for my grandson.]

Day Two: Breakfast; session "Your Blog Can Make You a Social Media Marketer;" Lunch Keynote:

The Lunch Keynote was "Exploring Inspiration and Leadership with Indra Nooyi." I was so impressed with her; she is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo. I made some notes during her talk: "...70% of buying decisions are made by women...the future of the world rests with women...the maturation of (digital) conversations democratized to change world [re: blogs]...(women have) 'can do' sense, 'must do' sensitivity..." I found Indra Nooyi's remarks to be inspirational and motivational. [I hope fellas who are reading this will realize that the audience was 99% women.]

After the Lunch Keynote I attended the session "Putting the 'Professional' in Professional Blogging" and my last session choice of "Owning Your Beauty."  This was followed by the closing Keynote "Women in the Media. Women Making Media" and it featured Carol Jenkins, Fatemeh Fakhraie and Ricki Lake.  All three had cogent things to say but what has stuck in my mind from this closing event was a question asked by a young woman blogger who had travelled all the way from Brazil.  She wanted to know how to encourage more mature women in her country to blog and to encourage more mature writing - not just about fashion.  I was disappointed in the response the panel gave her.  In fact, I think her question has great global validity and hope that BlogHer will address it next year.  Of course, much praise should be heaped on the people of BlogHer central who put together this amazing conference.

Yes, it's been a wee bit over a week since the conference but it's taken me time to process...and will continue to.  I was asked by someone just this past weekend regarding the post I wrote on BlogHer about the conference session I mentioned above - he wanted to know if I was going to pursue that topic.  My answer was no.  My writing here at Mosaic Mandala is primarily to give voice to Art and Artists.  And, because it is my voice, I will do as I did as a Lifestyle newspaper reporter years ago, I will write from time-to-time on vacations, food and the general Art of joie de vivre. 

And, yes, it's now time to get back to work. My next post will be an interview with a fascinating artist who creates gorgeous tapestries.