Folk Art, a Field in Winter, and Other Things

Decorations on folk art.

A note to regular readers:  there will be no blog post on December 25th.  The next blog post will be on December 29th.

Painted figurine.

Like many people, I have been busy preparing for the Christmas holiday.  I usually try to spread out the shopping so that I am not caught up in the Christmas crunch of shoppers.  However, this year I was so busy working on the Shaman Staff project, trying to finish it before cold weather set in,  that I did not get any shopping or holiday preparations done.  Now I am playing catch up, and that means little to no studio time.  Because of that, and because I have been really sick as a dog with the cold that is going around, I'm blogging about past projects. Much of today's blog is about why a sense of humor is an important factor to cultivate while developing artistic skills.

So, what do you do when you have a houseful of folk art and it's time to decorate for the holidays?  I used to drag all of the usual decorative items into some back room of the house to make room for the Christmas tree and all my Christmas collectibles.  That became tiresome, so now I just try to incorporate the Christmas decorations into the existing decor.  Sometimes you have to have a sense of humor about it.  And that is why there is a Grinch riding on folk art a pig in my living room.  Sometimes you have to learn to live with folk art.

First day of winter

Christmas crafts were the starting point for my doll making skills.  A few decades ago, Victorian style Father Christmas dolls were all the rage.  At that point in life, we were a young family with four children.  Money was tight.  A three hundred dollar Father Christmas doll was not something we were planning to purchase.  As my Christmas present, my husband had purchased some resin Santa figurines and a paint set.  They were fun to paint and I had many enjoyable hours painting them.  But, they weren't the same as the velvet robed Father Christmas figures, so I purchased some books on doll making and tried my hand at it.  My first dolls were less than successful.  I had trouble with the soft sculpture on the faces.  My Mrs. Claus doll looked like someone had just goosed her.  Over time, my skills improved somewhat (The faces were still a little off: low foreheads and long noses.) and I decided to try to make a Father Christmas figure as a gift.  By this time, I had grown tired of making things in the traditional red, and green colors of Christmas figures, so I decided to try something different.  Instead of red velvet, (and also because I already had some) I decided to use blue velvet to make the robe.  Other than that, it was more or less a traditional Father Christmas doll:  bearded figure, crown of holly, carrying a pack of gifts, etc.)  I also gave him a crook staff that you see with some old world Santa depictions.  I still was not totally happy with the face, (getting the face right took a couple more years of practice) but overall, I was pleased with the work.  I had a visitor at the house and I proudly showed off my completed doll.  After a long minute of silence, the lady said, "So who is it?  Moses?"  From that I learned that not everyone is willing to think outside the box on iconic holidays.  That did not prevent me from making the casual Santa that I blogged about last blog post.  I try to learn from every situation, but when it comes to being creative, I feel that I need to do what I find interesting.  If others like it, that makes me happy, but I need to be true to my creative self rather that worry about if others like it or not.

This next part has little to do with a sense of humor, other than I can frame it as trolling a computer program.  I had blogged earlier about how the Google photo enhancement program had turned some of the still pictures of my walking stick into an animation.  They have now also changed two other pictures I put on the blog into animations as well.  I finally figured out how to get the pictures posted to the blog, so they will be the subject of my next blog post.  (Once I quit trying to overthink how to do it, the solution presented itself immediately).  I could turn the feature off, but honestly the enhancement program makes my photos look better than they really are, so I keep it turned on.  Anyway, I figured since you can't beat them, you might as well join them.  One of the features of Google Awesome Photos is that once it recognizes several photos as the same place, the program can stitch it into a panoramic landscape or turn it into an animation.  So I decided that this year I would take a picture of the field that is just down from my house about once a week.  Hopefully, over time, I will get back an animation that will show the field changing through winter, spring, summer, and autumn.  I say hopefully, because at this point they just show up as a surprise.  I did not request them. 

There will be no post on December 25th, due to the holiday.  My next blog post will be on December 29th.