Meet Wallace Yikai Chen

Wally! Born March 1, 2012, in Brooklyn NY at 5:26 am, 6lbs 13 oz. 
Everyone is healthy, exhausted and proud as can be.

Shoebox Dreams

Very often when someone learns I live in a church, they get this sweet smitten expression, sigh and dreamily say "I have always wanted to live in a church, no really I have. It's been a life long dream". It's funny to be on the flip side of someone's dream... the grass is always greener part. The OMG heating part, the raked floor part, the ancient unholy septic system part,  and of course the part when the odd visitor stops by to see if Jesus is home. I am so blessed to have this place for the wonderful parties, projects possibilities and a place my grandson literally roller skates around the dining room table and no one notices. But what do I dream about right now? I find my mind keeps wandering to tiny places. Little shoe box houses, that have just enough drawers, tiny gardens to weed, small piles of wood to stack, and  edited, well thought out closets. Can you almost see the smitten smile I'm wearing? O.K. and maybe a nice big studio next to it would be pretty dreamy too. Some other folks thinking and talking about it-

Small Farm Life, Small House Style, The Tiny Life, Shipping Container Houses, and Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

Sunflower Crop

Raised beds + seaweed + this year's weather = amazing in my backyard.

Fifty Five Second Mile in the Snow

I was able to feed the girls this morning during the eye of the storm. Marilyn, my white Langshan is molting this week and there was a fresh crop of white feathers to greet me when I opened the door. Film by Paul from our studio.

8.10.10 Color Swatch

Pantone Swatch No.185

yes 
dear Summer has really got 
the green thing down.

but she get's a little fatigued 
by the new midori bugs, 

tender blades, blair,
acid flair and myrtle glades

with peridot twinkles.

so when august 
steams onto my emerald lawn,

satisfied Summer lets out a

celadon sigh and squeezes 

all of her verdent vim

into the happy fat fruit of 

the tomato plant.

just in time for my saturated,

grass stained painter's

peepers to say yes, yes, 

yes to red.
-Alyn Carlson

More Wedding Lids

Why I love Artists at Weddings

I love guests at a wedding that take a little chance. And I'm not talking should the guest who takes a chance with having a third Long Island Ice Tea. I fall in love with the ones who perform their toasts in character (as if they had, had that third drink), belt out an original song they wrote themselves, or wear a piece of art on their head. Artists. They do that when they sense not only permission but a little joyful nudge from the bride and groom.  Here are some samples of hat wearing joy.

Poem for Monday

I live near a river, which reminds me every day needs to be like a river. What comes by for me, what I catch, what I remember to do is what I have for this minute. Today. And that's all I need to have, to do, to be. Because if I don't catch it, remember it, do it, it will come for me again. When the time is right. But Robert Bly says it so much better.

People Like Us

by Robert Bly

for James Wright

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
     people
Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely , and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
  you're safe.

For more of my rivers you can go here.

Artist Interview with Chris Cobb by Suzanne Kleid

Recently my daughter, Hillary, a professional organizer spent 8 (yes 8 hours) going through my books shelves, cleaning and aligning them to be more user friendly and beautiful. I am a lucky mum. For a year I've been toying with the idea of taking each book from the shelf, considering it's worthiness for my collection, donating or keeping it. If I keep it then it gets covered with white paper and labeled with it's contents. Wouldn't that be beautiful? My books would bring such light to the room. Maybe I just need a team of 15 friends to do it with me some night. Volunteers? You know I'm not kidding. In researching this rainbow aesthetic I see so often in art, design, and decorating I came across something on the McSweeney site that I'd like to share. I'm a huge fan of McSweeney anything. And this interview with Chris Cobb by Suzanne Kleid is really worth a look. He rearranged a whole bookstore by color. And of course, being the wish it was all perfect, but not really, virgo that I am, the name of his project, I fell in love with.

 

There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS COBB

ON GLUE-STICK STATUARY, SPEAKING TO MASHED POTATOES, AND REARRANGING 20,000 BOOKS BY COLOR.

-SUZANNE KLEID

Q: When did you originally think of the idea for this? What made you decide to do what you're going to do?
A: I wanted to make something that I didn't think would exist anywhere, and that nobody would ever make, that I couldn't go anywhere in the world and see it.

Q: And tell us what it is that you're going to be making.
A: Well, I was thinking a lot about places I've been inside dreams, where I'm familiar with a building or a room, or like when I'm in a house in a dream and there are combinations of things in the house that don't exist in reality. So I wanted to do this project, where I have a giant bookstore full of books, and instead of them all being organized normally, they'll all be organized in rows of color. Through some kind of herculean task, some kind of massive effort, to change the entire space into something that you would see in a dream.

Q: So you are going to actually be doing this, you're going to be rearranging every book on the shelves in this bookstore.
A: Yeah, I had originally thought that I could do it by myself. A friend of mine owns a bookstore and after a year of negotiating back and forth he finally allowed me to take over his store for a week, and to allow me to bring in my whole team of like 15 people, which is what I estimate it'll take, maybe 20, and in one night—I've planned it out—if we stick to the guidelines, we can completely change the store. With Andrew [McKinley, the owner of Adobe Bookshop], it took a year of me being around and gaining his trust before I could get to this point, where he would allow this to happen.

Q: Which is pretty crazy, when you think about it.
A: Or inspired. One person's crazy is another person's inspiration.

Q: So you think you can do this all in one night? How are you going to do it?
A: I'm really grateful for the fact that when the bookstore was organized, all of the shelves along the walls are exactly the same. I think there's seven shelves in every unit. So you can estimate the number of books pretty accurately. It's around 20,000 books. Because of how they're positioned, I can map them out and give coordinates for every book. It'll be, like, shelf 3, row 1. Each book will be given its own designation, so that after they're all taken out and rearranged by color, when it comes time to put them back I can just go back to shelf 3, row 1, or whatever, and I'll know exactly where they go.

Q: Because it's a piece of public art and because you're just rearranging books, there isn't a thing you're producing that can be sold, you know? You're doing this incredibly complex, time-consuming thing and it's only going to exist just to look nice.
A: Well, there are elements of the sublime and elements of beauty involved here that do more than "look nice." The fact that it's something you wouldn't see anywhere has the potential to make it a transgressive experience for some people. People who can appreciate imaginary things or imaginary places, and the power that those places have. Also, there's a lot about ceremony, I think, and ritual. Ritualistic acts. In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is transformed through your dreaming. Then it has this special power that it wouldn't normally have, and this is kind of like that same place, maybe.

Q: Because you're going to be transforming the bookstore overnight, right? You and the team are going to go in after closing, and by the time the store opens the next day it's all going to be changed.
A: Yeah, exactly. It'll be like in a dream. One day it'll be like how it is, and the next day when the store opens it'll be completely transformed.

Q: Your art in the past has been made out of materials that you wouldn't normally associate with art. You're working with books this time, but in the past you've made sculptures out of glue sticks and you've made sculptures out of mashed potato. What else have you done?
A: Napkins. Torn-up napkins. Recordings of streets.

Q: With the glue sticks, you carved them into copies of Greek sculptures, correct?
A: Yeah, there's the Laocoön and the Nike of Samothrace, and Roman and Greek votive sculptures that I made in glue stick.

Q: You made faces out of the mashed potato.
A: Yeah, I had some mashed potatoes with garlic and peppers in it that I was making, and I thought I saw a face, or a potential face. I started playing with my food—I've always played with my food, I like to play with food—and I started to think, well, maybe I could make these mashed potatoes into sculpture. So I did. The things that came out of that idea were that maybe the mashed potatoes are talking to me, you know? And if they were talking to me they'd have to have a face. Those are called "Oracle." If you saw a face emerge out of your mashed potatoes, of course it would have to say something really incredible to you. Probably like foretell your future or your past. Tell your fortune. (softly) I don't know—I shouldn't talk about the Red Alert thing, huh?

Q: Why not?
A: It might sound too crazy.

Q: No.
A: OK. So, with another recent project, I was thinking about what chaos I could create just by using the color red. I looked around town and I realized that there are red curbs all over the city. I wondered, what would happen if I extended the red curbs and made them go down a whole block or a whole street? Where normally you could park, but instead I covered it all in red? Then you couldn't park. It symbolically extended the authority of the police, quietly. One night, I went out and covered up the curb, down one whole block, so it was all red. I took a photograph first, when the cars were parked there, and the morning after putting the red on the curb, I took another photo showing that the cars weren't parking there anymore. Just that little bit of red changed the whole order of the block.

Q: And it was red tape, which is symbolic also.
A: Yeah, if you painted it red you'd probably go to jail, but I felt I could get away with using the red tape. And it's also a silly metaphor for bureaucracy.

Q: How long was it there?
A: Two weeks.

Q: And nobody noticed that it wasn't a real red zone?
A: Not a single person seemed to notice, and nobody parked in the red zone. My red zone. I'm just glad I wasn't someone that had to park there. But it would be nice if everybody would get out red tape and cover up all the curbs so nobody could park anywhere.

Q: You have used the phrase "utopian gesture" before in describing this new book-rearrangement project. What does that mean?
A: The title of the project is There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World. "Utopian" is kind of a loaded word, I guess, but my basic take on that whole concept is that—you know, it's good to pretend like things are gonna be OK. And it's good to pretend that things'll go well ultimately. Because in a lot of ways, you don't really have any choice. And if you can reconcile the fact that there's really no other choice than to believe that things will eventually work themselves out, you know, if you can understand that really that's the best way to be, then a lot of things can fall into place, and a lot of possibilities open up for you.

And [the book project] is going to happen after the election. Right now while we're talking, we don't know who's going to win the presidential election. Or who's going to win in the Senate or the House. And so we could easily go into a tragic direction, you know. But still, either way, you have to act like things will go OK.

"Mippy, let's try and make this a YES! visit, all right?"

-Levi 

A big spool of thread and roll of tape. That's it. Usually all it takes to keep the busiest boy in the universe content. When my grandson, Levi is here for a visit it can exhaust both of us to negotiate what we should do for the day. He's just been allowed, with adult supervision, to strike a match to build a fire outside or light a candle. And Paul is right- "Give a boy a stick and he's happy. Give a boy fire on the end of that stick and he's incredibly happy" So after a swing on the swing or slide down the fireman's pole it begins.."kind of cold don't you think, Mippy, we could use a fire... wouldn't you like a nice toasted marsh-mellow.... still have those old sparkling birthday candles?" So my fail safe fallbacks of thread and tape are just handed to him and he begins. Focussed for at least 45 minutes while a wild all encompassing "turaptsion" is constructed on one side of the living room, a plan to ensnare his unsuspecting mother when she arrives is hatched. We've added to the short list of easy yeses the paper castle project. Some left over card stock from a printing job 15 years ago and 4 basic construction methods. Slotting. Folding. Curling. Stapling. He's getting them all down. Sometimes Levi does the construction, sometimes he just supervises and sometimes he improvises the script that moves the bad and good guys around the castle. I keep the little mess up behind the sofa, the goal being it eventually reaches 6 foot high. It keeps the yeses coming for awhile. "Then maybe a little s'more cooking in the fireplace?... Mippy, puleeese?"

"In order to survive as an artist you must have three things- the skin of a rhino. the tenacity of a bulldog, and a nice home to come home to" -Stella Adler
I was tickled pink when I saw the nice posting Christine did on my house church on Etsy today. And really touched by the comments people made. The same with when Amy on Design Sponge posted us in a sneak peek last August. There's something about living in a church or school or firehouse that seems to appeal to many folks. It's been a gift having the church as a home and studio and gathering place for all the wonderful artists, writers, musicians, performers, and chefs in my life. It seems to be every artist's dream.  A dream that at times has made me cry, giggle, grow as an artist, get unbelievably frustrated and ready to scream uncle. Not for sissies. So I've been testing out an idea with friends and I think today is the official launch day of a new project. Church Membership. I hope this doesn't offend because I am really respectful and loving of all things spiritual. I know the difference between the Church and my church. The offer is, for the annual fee of $100 you can buy a membership to my church. The money will go towards, yup, keeping this place afloat and me making art. Each year it'll vary a little, but with your yearly membership you'll get A.) a fabulous paper hat made just for you that is guaranteed to change your thinking. Wearing it will make you a little happier and less serious. B.) A c.d. of sounds Paul's recorded here at the church that will do the same, crickets, the peepers out back, my chickens saying good morning, chopping wood, friend's laughing, growing grass... in a case with a few beautiful photos and original art tucked in. C.) An invite to a potluck church supper in the meadow behind the church. This event will happen annually in the back meadow with lots of art, poetry, puppets, idea swapping and most likely my friend, Morgan's hot air balloon tethered nearby. I'm shooting for 1000 members yearly. Think this is doable? Wanna be part of Alice's Restaurant?  

Some of the feathers I've collected through the years. I might try some quill making this winter.

"I don't want reality, I want magic"

-Blanche DuBois from Street Car Named Desire

As always Tennessee William's characters can explain the meaning of life in one short line. When we get dead tired, weary and overwhelmed, all we want is a little sparkle. Some fairy dust, a whisper of an escape is sometimes all it takes. Hmmmm...white. I want it. Bad. I know, I know I'm always harping about color. Be brave, jump! Do it! Wear the pink and orange. Don't even look at the beige swatches the boyfriend feels comfortable in. But so much of what I crave right now is white. Beautiful empty white. Is it because I flipped my life upside down a few years ago? Reinvented myself in so many ways it's hard to count? I can go in so many different directions at once my to-do list makes my friends scream. Outloud. This church I live in has been a lab for some pretty crazy combos through the years and slowly but surely the light is leaking around each corner. Maybe because I have so much color in my art, my design, the relief of the white is what frames and settles it all. And white is never white. It's pearl, and chalk and kisses, blinks of pink and yellow and blue. Just makes me breathe bigger, deeper. Sigh. Magic.