carol j watson

Cooking is a lot like art, especially for me. I cook like I paint, adding a dash of this, a bit of that, until whatever I am concocting is just right.

I’ve been slow to ramp up this summer in the art department, but our garden has made it possible, even necessary, for constant creativity in the kitchen. The most exciting thing in our garden this year is our San Marzano tomatoes. I ordered seed from Seeds of Change, and planted the little seedling trays in January of this year. An heirloom variety known for making a delicious paste, these plants are the big-daddy-behemoths of our garden. A couple of these plants are taller than I am!

I’ve been harvesting and saving the San Marzano tomatoes for about a week now, and decided today they were ready to be used for homemade pasta sauce. Using oregano, basil, bay, onions, and tomatoes from our garden (plus a gigantic elephant bulb garlic from the farmer’s market), I created our first ever homemade pasta sauce. It turned out great, and was fun to photograph.

I made just enough -two pints- to eat with various dishes in the next week or so. I may make a much bigger batch later in the summer, and can or freeze it so we can enjoy the fruits of our labor year round!

Asked what I’d like for Mother’s Day, I responded, “Let’s make garden gnomes!”

So that’s what we did. Down we sat, clay and tools in hand, in a sunny yellow kitchen overlooking our beloved garden. Armed with imagination, a few handy hand-building techniques, and a sense of humor, we all managed to create a gnome worthy of a garden.

It was a great day of art, indeed.

My husband, Arden, and I had an opportunity to attend a recent retreat for board members and volunteers of a wonderful and local non-profit organization called Georgetown Art Works. Our goals were simple: Clarify our vision as an organization, write (or at the very least agree upon the basics of) a mission statement, work on our 2009 calendar, and designate specific responsibilities and opportunities for each of us in attendance. We had an incredible facilitator, a dedicated board president, plenty of food, great ideas, and most importantly, a creative outlet. We made incredible progress.

The creative outlet, which was strictly optional, was to design a chair made from various materials: pipe cleaners, wire, beads, and imagination. As we listened, ate, talked, prioritized, laughed, and became better acquainted with one another, we also created a chair representative of us and our task at hand of “chairing” some event or task.

By the end of the retreat, several completed chairs were passed around for oohs and ahhhs…Oh, how I wished I had brought my camera! Each chair was indeed unique, representative of its creator, and just spilling over with artistic genius! The funniest, and certainly most endearing, moment was when my husband and I placed our chairs side by side. If you know us, you’ll love this picture (I snapped this picture at home):

While mine was, well, what you might expect from me, Arden’s was delightfully sturdy, stable, well-made…also what you would expect from him. I love the contrast the two chairs created, but it wasn’t until we showed the chairs to our son, Carter, when he commented on their scale. The way he put it was something like this, ” Whoever can fit into one chair can also fit into the other, isn’t that cool?” Pretty astute for a 13 year old, I think. What he hit upon is that our chairs shared the same scale. And in that moment I realized that our chairs were a perfect snapshot of our life together, me and Arden. Some similarities, some differences…well, maybe a lot of differences to those who only look at the outside, but we live our lives in scale with one another.

Perhaps that accounts for the harmony we so often experience in our household, even in these tumultuous times.

At any rate, this art activity ran deep and wide for me…I learned a lot that day of the retreat, but even more about myself, my love, and our life together later on.

Art is like that. It mirrors your reality, makes things clearer, gives voice to your life and times.

Art is worth doing.

I love working with blue/brown glass combinations. Doing so is the lampworking equivalent of jeans and a soft turtleneck sweater on a rainy day. There’s something so maternal and genuine in this combination, perhaps because they are the essence of earth and air, soil and sky. Visually, these beads are versatile in terms of fashion and jewelry design applications. This beadset features moretti glass of cobalt, blue, periwinkle, sky blue, blue aventurine, brown, topaz, taupe, and ivory. Transparent light blue and topaz lend three dimensionality to many of the beads, and a variety of shapes and designs are highlighted in this set.

This set features variations of brown, taupe, topaz, red, yellow, and ivory. I used both opaque and transparent glass, the latter of which creates the layered look in several of the beads. This was a new color combination for me, and I enjoyed working with it. Warm, organic, and honeyed, the end results are reminiscent of harvest time. Beyond that, the red glass brings out something primal and corporeal in the color combinations.

Blood and Honey.

I am working with jewelry designer/metalsmith extraordinaire, Jane Estes, on the International Society of Glass Beadmakers’ Convergence Project. The fundamentals of this competition are that two artists are paired, a lampworker (that’s me) and a jewelry designer (that’s Jane), to created a wearable object of art that is inspired by the four elements of water, air, earth, and/or fire.

We’ve been planning, brainstorming, sketching in our notebooks, and visiting each other’s studios in order to learn more about one another’s style, ideas, art form, and expectations. It has been exciting to collaborate with another artist on a project, and we have gotten off to an incredible start, despite one hip replacement surgery (me) and 4-year old twins (Jane)! I have found Jane to be a fountain of inspiration, with an incredible eye for style and design. My most memorable moment so far has been watching Jane play with and pick out colors from my glass inventory, creating a palette from which I would create glass beads. Pulling out the pretty rods of glass is sort of like opening a brand new box of crayons, but without the fabulous smell. It’s good.

So far, I’ve experimented with nails and screws in glass beads (see last month’s posts), and I’ve really enjoyed creating the most recent Earth and Water inspired bead set, which I will feature below. Next, I am going to focus on truly Earthen tones, and see what inspiration is derived therein.

As most people who have looked at this humble blog probably already know, I will be going into the hospital this week for a much needed hip replacement. At 39, this is an unusual thing, so I expect to turn a few heads in the joint replacement ward. But, it is what it is. I feel thankful to live in a time when my ailment is so easily corrected. I look forward to being able to walk normally again, without a cane, and my students (many of whom have only known me this school year and with a cane) had better get ready for the new and improved Mrs. Watson when I return! I also must acknowledge my supportive and loving family, especially my husband and son who have waited on me hand and foot, patiently walked with me while I hobbled to and fro, and in general have made it possible for me to keep working up until this point. I couldn’t ask for more supportive family and friends.

With all that said, let’s talk about ART! Specifically, let’s talk about the art I have been thinking I will do during my recovery period, and how this recovery period will affect my art and the creative process. Already, I have been planning some specific art projects, and they’ve been defined by what I think will be limiting circumstances: limited mobility, limited ability to sit (at first), and obviously, limited standing/walking ability (also at first). Working with clay, at least as I’ve done in the past, is out. Standing at an easel, probably also out. Sitting at the torch, making beads, well that I might be able to do in a couple of weeks. So, that leaves me some promising outlets including drawing, small object painting, and jewelry making.

I love to make pocketbook/matchbook shrines, and I have been gathering supplies for that: miniature objects and ephemera, papers for collage, pastels, varnish, and paints. I think I will work with those objects first, but as to what I will use as my subjects or inspiration, I cannot say. That hopefully will work itself out in the next week or so.

Once I am more mobile, I plan to do some lampwork. I am very excited about this, and even on this blog you can see I’ve been feeling very experimental lately. I am collaborating with jewelry designer Jane Estes on the ISGB Convergence Project and Competition, and I hope to get some work done on that project during my recovery period as well.

Lastly, I hope to make some lampwork jewelry from my finished beads. I have been particularly fond of making pendants during the last year or so, and quite averse to earrings. Maybe that will change and I will get some earrings made. I would like to include found objects in my designs, so that will be a challenge to my creativity as I work in this category.

So, give me a week or two to get it together after surgery, and I hope to post again before you know it. Time flies when you’re having fun, and I intend to have a blast with this new experience. I can’t wait to see its reflection -and expression- in my art.