journal - Susie Monday

Susie Monday

Artist, maker, teacher, author, head cook and bottlewasher.

The art I make is the result of a life-long love of pattern, texture and color. How I teach is a skill honed by experience (I started teaching creative arts to younger kids when I was 12). After earning a B.A. in Studio Arts from Trinity University, I helped lead an internationally recognized educational foundation, designed curriculum exhibits for schools and other institutions, wrote and edited for a major daily newspaper, opened the San Antonio Children's Museum and then, a dozen years ago, took the scary but essential (for me) leap to become a fulltime artist and art teacher.

About This Blog

This weblog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise.

To reach me, leave a comment after a post, OR email me at susiemonday@gmail.com

Tweets by @susiemonday Tweets by @susiemonday

To receive a notice of new posts in your email, scroll down this column to the end of the page and subscribe via FEEDBLITZ or add this blog to your own subscription service. You can search the blog with any phrase or word, by typing it into the seach window below:

Subscribe .. Or Write Me!

Entries in summer (1)

Saturday

Aug292009

Back, already?

Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 04:55PM

It's a blur. Big Trip screams by in a whirl of 3 weeks. St. Petersburg buildings, too.What? You didn't notice I'd been gone. Well, that's OK. I'm sure you've been busy, too. And it's not like I haven't been back (at least in the real world) for a while.

Admittedly, I've been working some since returning home from the "big trip*" some teaching, some studio redo, another profile article for Quilting Arts magazine, sorting and clearing out, making sure the energy flows in and around El Cielo. But there's also been a good deal of lovely late summer just plain lazing around (while musing on next steps).

When I go on vacation, I REALLY go. I stopped blogging (oh, yeah, maybe you did notice); I didn't tweet but twice; I ignored FB friends; I didn't even go to "meetings." I felt as though all the batons that I'd been juggling --flinging around in the air with at least some degree of grace and style -- fell suddenly to my feet . Dropped, unloved, undone. Thank goodness for roaming and overseas data charges or I might have been tempted to keep all those lovely little flinging objects up there. But no, I spent my money on pepper grinders, handwoven linen, museum admissions and sundry souvenirs, instead.

But here I am, almost the eve of September '09, back in the virtual studio, having thought about it and decided, yes, I like this little part of my working life, this time on the page that records my studio life and the time away from the studio that informs and inspires it. Writing this blog is part of my practise as a working artist. Writing this blog is part of keeping track of what it is I'm doing and why I'm doing it. It's also a way to market my wares, be it art work, classes, workshops or ideas. Thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting. I'll try to make it worth your while.

And to get back into the swing of things, and to catch up with my own recording nature, I'll be posting a few images from travel over the next week, interspersed with a preview of the workshops we'll be hosting here at El Cielo this fall and winter. Expect a flurry of activity on this site over the next few weeks -- then, no doubt, once I have the momentum going with the juggling act, we may find time for something pithier. (how long have I been promising to do an on-line course?)

The travel photos will be arranged not by place or narratively (you'll have to come over and see the slide show in person for that), but alphabetically -- that is -- Sensory Alphabetically. Starting now, with MOVEMENT. Can you jusst imagine taking inspriation from some images to create a great zoom, a sudden start, a dance, a circling, a splash, a slippery slide, a flit or flurry of a feeling in your next work of art?

Plaster cast of Medieval carving in the V&A, LondonOn the way from London to Dover.