We've had quite a bit of yellow cedar washing up on our shores this winter. Someone told me the yellow cedar trees in Southeast Alaska are afflicted with a disease that is killing them. If so, that is a sad reason for our bounty.  But the driftwood that I have been gathering is being put to use.  I have spoon carving fever, and the yellow cedar is wonderful for spoons! 
​
I use a variety of wood for spoons, including alder, red and yellow cedar, spruce and fir.  The alder and spruce I've used were green wood - much easier to carve that way.  The others have all been harvested as driftwood.  My favorite is yellow cedar.  Several long giant 'splinters' of yellow cedar I have found have been butter smooth to work.  The aroma is very different that red cedar: pungent, citrusy.  It fades after time, which is good for cooking utensils.  I love making long-handled pot-stirrers.  I did make a huge water scoop for banya out of red cedar.  That was fun - but it was the hardest piece of red cedar I have ever worked! It must have come from a root.  

Next on my plate is carving some bowls and serving platters.  As soon as the money comes from my client for my most recent commission work, I am ordering a lipped adze from Kestrel Tools - it will be a great companion to my baby gutter adze! 

The most enjoyable thing for me about working as a full time artist is that I can create my own schedule, and no matter what I am doing, it is answering my creative drive.  If I go out to the beach with my dogs, I always bring something home with me: wood for carving, rocks, bones, beach glass, sand in my pant cuffs. 

This winter, I have been exploring the book "The Organic Artist" and finding it so inspiring! I have gathered some mountain ash and alder twigs for charcoal - still seeking some willow and black birch.  I have made some drawing pens with bamboo and some of my own paint brushes already.  I am eager to make some pigments for ink and to add to beeswax for crayons.  There is something so inspiring and rewarding about making ones own tools. My friend Coral and I share that enthusiasm. I have made my own bone awl (after she showed me the one she made for basket making) - it works great!  I made another basketry tool with a rib bone and piece of spruce root. I have transferred all of my hemp twine to wooden spools made from driftwood roots and branches.  Excited by the traditional willow basketry, I gathered alder and salmonberry to try my hand at this type of basket making.  My first attempt did not work out - with the alders. They are much larger than willow. I think the salmonberry canes will work better!  

Even though these tasks are seen as "craft" - working with my hands and making my own tools or making baskets, gathering the materials - those tasks get my mind into creative mode, and it is a meditative and part of the thought process of making art.  I don't get the same pleasure from many other activities - other than cooking.  
 
Daylight hours are rapidly growing.  This time of year - spring - with the birds returning, buds ready to open, crocus blooming - it brings the sap of life into me as well.  My brain cells are alive with it!  Happy Spring!

I am spending the week at the Alyeska Resort in Girdwood. We are here to work on a strategic planning process with the Alutiiq Museum - "Incubating Innovations" . It is different to be away from my artwork and family that isn't for work. What I miss the most so far is not going outside - although the weather is fairly warm here. We are right up on the mountain, so you can watch the ski lift.

I just finished three altered books for the altered book show, and I started my commissions for a patron in New Mexico. I have plenty to keep me busy when I get home this weekend.

The New Year didn't exactly come in with a bang - but not a whimper either. My internal calendar is not functioning at full throttle.  A warm, rainy and stormy winter have probably helped keep my brain a bit foggy.  I took the dogs to the beach today - we decided on Gibson Cove, after a short visit to Buskin yesterday.  The storms have brought a lot of stuff ashore - including many more dead murres.  No explanation provided by the experts has proved satisfactory about the alarming numbers of the dead seabirds that have been found on the coast all over the island since this summer. Some have even been found on roads and far enough off of beaches to prove even more puzzling.  I couldn't let the dogs off the leash today - due to the number of dead birds.  Not only that - something had recently been gnawing on the carcasses, as indicated by the gore.  Rats or seagulls? Eagles?  My bet is on rats, since the beach is close to canneries, the fish waste processing plant, and fishing gear storage.  

There was lots of good flotsam as well - planks and wood I will have to go back for, unencumbered by the dogs.  My stick supply was depleted by all the twig trees I made for Christmas this year.  And I can always use more driftwood.  Bird's feet anyone?

At least we are on the downhill slope for the daylight hours growing.  The mild winter is a mixed bag: pleasant to go out in, not much ice to keep me off the trails, and helps keep the heating bill low.  But lack of snowpack on the mountains will lead to continued strain on the salmon runs come summer. I don't know that we can take another year like last year on the fishery. 

Let's focus our intentions on good outcomes from the World Global Warming Summit, that the ugliness of the political climate in the US will grow into a swan, and for an ease to the dark financial clouds sweeping over Europe and the East.  

In early November, I spent 5 days at a friend's remote lodge in Uyak Bay, on the West Side of Kodiak Island.  My friend Vicki's boyfriend Steele owns and runs the lodge, accessible only by boat or float plane.  I took a small plane-the 'mail plane' to the village of Larsen Bay, where Steele & Vicki met me at the gravel airstrip. His boat was moored temporarily at the cannery dock.  It was low tide, so we had to descend an old barnacle-encrusted rebar ladder about 12 feet down to the boat. It was a 45 minute ride to the the old cannery where Steele's lodge is - down at the head of the bay. 

Home for Steele is a little cabin in the midst of the huge metal buildings and docks of the former Parks Cannery.  He has carved out a couple of bedrooms, kitchen/living/dining room, with a flush toilet in a windowed closet on the left of the kitchen, and another windowed closet on the right of the kitchen houses a shower.  Down the hall past the two sleeping rooms is a cold passage containing laundry and then a substantial pantry and fridge.  All of the guests who come through during fishing, hunting and sightseeing season leave foodstuffs behind, so there is no shortage of goods - though some of it has been there a number of years. 

Steele's cabin and the other buildings are supplied with running water and electricity generated by a hydro electric plant in the main cannery building.  The hydro power source is a stream that gushes down the mountainside, fed through a heavy plastic pipe.  Steele replaced the original wooden culvert a few years ago.  

The mountain extends up behind the cannery, with mountain goats high above keeping watch. The cabin is just yards from a gravel beach. We spent lots of time looking out the big picture windows watching the winds, murres bobbing on the whitecaps, river otter playing and diving in the surf, and whales spouting across the bay over near Amook Island.  

The weather was not conducive to taking a trip by boat anywhere, with gale force winds blowing the rain sideways for most of the days.  Vicki and I did venture out one day for a hike up the water line.  We stopped at the dam where the water pipe ends.  It was a good scramble through alder - good places for bears to hide. We made lots of noisy conversation.  At the dam, we counted 7 mountain goats on either side of a rock slide high above us.

We also passed time touring the old cannery where I shot lots of pictures. We read, visited, prepared meals, watched old MASH tv show episodes in the evenings, kept the wood stove stoked. Most of this was done in the total absence of cell phone connection, and limited wi-fi access.  Steele has internet, he just chooses to turn it off much of the time, so clients get the full experience of life slowed down, the way it used to be everywhere.  Or at least all over Kodiak. It is still that way to a degree - although Purists would argue that TV and the Internet have sullied that way of life, even in the villages or remote sites.  I did not miss the constant interruption of e-mail, FB posts and all that electronic communication has brought to our lives. It was a quiet, slow 5 days.  My mind and soul were refreshed by the vacation.  It was good to pass time visiting with my friend and preparing meals together.

On my last day, Monday, the weather broke and Steele took us beach combing to Flamingo Beach, down the Bay.  We hauled a good load of cottonwood bark and other driftwood onto the boat in an empty halibut tub and quarter of a 55-gallon drum sawed down, pulling them along the beach with ropes.  We stopped at Amook Island, in a little cove where Steele's other guest cabin is located, and the "Bluff House" - his first cabin out in Uyak Bay.  Both cabins are served by a quaint outhouse fashioned out of two boats sawed in half, then joined together.  A crescent moon window lets in a tiny arc of light.  These cabins don't have the luxuries that the cannery guest lodge does.  Surrounded by tall wild rose bushes now burdened with orange hips, black birch and cottonwood trees, the cabin on the bluff looks out across Uyak Bay to the 'mainland' of Kodiak.  It would make an awesome writer's cabin!  I shared this with Steele, and he said he'd welcome a guest who wanted to hole up for a month or more and write.  I talked about Annie Dillard's book, where she describes living in a cabin on a deserted island in the San Juans of Washington State.  This is way more remote that her experience.  I fleetingly pictured myself as that writer - sequestered in the Bluff House, taking in that view, feeding the wood stove, getting clean in a banya or steam bath, trekking to the outhouse.  

At night, I marveled at the sheer soup of stars overhead.  Without ambient light to interfere, we would stand out on the beach in front of Steele's cabin, using my iPod app to identify the constellations.  We watched the Northern Lights play out near the entrance of the bay, seemingly over Shelikof Straights.  The Milky Way  led a hazy river through the night sky.  The surf tinkled the gravel, and lulled me to sleep.  Wind lashed the corrugated metal roof and rain dumped down in sheets.  We nestled safely, sheltered and warm far away from the 21st Century.  

With the SuperMoon and full lunar eclipse this past week, and putting the final touches on new art for the current group show in Kodiak, I couldn't help but be influenced by the Moon's pull. Women are cyclical beings, and anyone who has lived with other women may have experienced, our monthly cycles often fall in sync with the Moon and her cycles, and our sisters living with us.  

My final piece for the show was this: Mask to Wear During A Full Moon: the Moon's silver-blue face against an indigo back drop, surrounded by appendages illustrating the moon's cycle.  The piece is 38 inches tall by 17 inches wide. I worked until the wee hours, as the other artists and I had agreed to meet and hang the show at 8:30 Friday morning. Fittingly, my blood was spilled when I snipped my left middle finger with my mother's old - and very sharp - black-handled steel Wiss scissors. A quick patch with a butterfly bandage only set my work back 5 minutes or so. 

The work is hung, the opening was well attended, and now I am on to my next projects. An endless cycle - like the Moon.

Mask to Wear During A Full Moon - detail. 

Changing colors, morning frost, snow on the higher inland mountains, and a chill in the air - those indications are clear that fall is here.  The speedily waning daylight hours take getting used to.  But continued clear weather leads to starry nights and the Aurora, so there is consolation.  High bush cranberries and lingonberries are ripe.  Lack of rainfall has led to the streams and rivers drying up, and the salmon-choked waterways are preventing the salmon from spawning. There is a glut of food for the gulls, eagles and bears - which is at least some good from this strange warm dry summer. 

I am eager to finish my Alutiiq drum!  All of the components are complete: rim, painted ochre red, the handle - a fine sturdy section of elk antler - awaits to be attached; the drumskin is a sea-mammal stomach, and has been stretched and dried.  My excitement at putting all of the components together and hearing the voice of my drum are making me impatient.  "All in good time," the Mother reminds me. "In good time. Her voice will wait."

I finished another commission piece last night, and said farewell to a friend. Took photos of my completed piece today between rain showers and sun breaks.  We had such warm dry summer, even into August, it seemed it would never end. But now our late summer/fall weather is here.  Fall always feel like a new beginning. A time for "Always Getting Ready" as they say further up North.  

So now I move on to other projects awaiting me on my workbench. Blueberries all blew off the bushes during our windstorm last weekend.  High bush cranberries and lingonberries await a frost to ripen them. Pink salmon lay decomposing and dying along the riverbanks.  Bears fatten up. Hunters prepare to go out to   fill their families' freezers.  Logs are split, firewood is stacked. It is a time to brace for winter, stock the larders, insulate ourselves for the cold and dark that is to come. 

Winter can be a time of isolation. But it can also be a time of gathering, coming in from the storm, hunkering up to the fire, listening to the stories and songs. Gather, gather in. Let's get ready.

In July, I started an exercise that called for making an intuitive watercolor a day for a month.  My work always felt somewhat intuitive, but not as this directive explained it. It was very freeing, and really felt like a meditative exercise. I did not sit down with a preconceived idea of what I was going to paint, or what colors I was going to use. I just painted. The Art Therapist who posted the exercise can be found here: 
Expressive Art Inspirations


My month's+ of paintings is shared here. Some of them are at a worksite where I have been working on two large 6 ft. x 3 ft. panels for a commission at my Life Partner's office.I'll add those later.

Some days I feel like Alice after she tumbled down the Rabbit Hole, or fell through the Looking-Glass. But then I come to my senselessness, and realize I made this choice to Live My Passion!  And I ended an almost 30 year career to finally realize my love and dream of being a working Artist.  I started this new phase of life May 30, 2015. Please join me in my ride!