It's A Comedy Of Errors!

 

Last weekend, I decided to go on a short jaunt and take a look around New Brunswick, Canada, just because I can...  I had a place to stay for a couple of nights in Fredericton, my friend Donna and I had been in the military together in the eighties and had stayed in touch over the years, so I was all set.  Or so I thought...

Now there is one little thing about me that is really relevant to know before you read the post, I literally have no natural sense of direction.  I could get lost in a shopping mall and have! But that's never kept me from driving around looking at scenery... I tend to think it just adds to the mystery of a trip if you don't really know where you are and how to get there.  But I've become very good with maps in compensation...

Well, I've done the road trip from Halifax to Fredericton quite a number of times, so you'd think it would be a no-brainer.  But I sometimes get inventive and veer off on weird tangents. 

And what they say about artists is true, they are eccentric, no way around it!  In some way or another, you're going to feel a twilight zone around at times when dealing with them...  And I'm no exception.

On the spur of the moment,  I figured out I was bored with the old route and decided to drive down the west coast of Nova Scotia and maybe take the Digby ferry across to Saint John, NB.

What the heck, I'd do it different this time.  Didn't check any schedules, as that would be a copout, sigh....  By the time I got there, it was just before noon and I found that the ferry didn't leave until four and it was an exhorbitant price. If I turned back around and continued driving back up the coastline, I could beat the ferry and get into Freddy Beach at the same time anyway. 

Not a problem, right?  Except I got lost going back up the coast around the bay of Fundy and ended up losing a couple of hours going in circles. It was beautiful, but by the time I figured it out, (I had to break down and actually check a map) I had added a couple of hours on to my trip.  Happens. 

I guess I could be the poster girl for GPS if I applied, but I hate being told what to do (pigheaded and five years in the military!) so I actually have one that I have never used.  Just couldn't bring myself to download that software and call myself lame at navigating! (No offense meant to Donna and others who swear by their GPS's)...

But I made it and saw some very beautiful and artistically inspiring scenery, not to mention sunsets, and I was very happy to arrive...

The next day, we all got up and went on our originally scheduled tour down to St. Martins, New Brunswick...  Or we tried.  On the way, just an hour outside of Fredericton, we heard a snap, clang and a crash and the muffler was dragging.

Oh this was hilarious!  I was so glad I wasn't driving this time, I'd just taken ribbing the night before on how I was pretty good at extending a short trip with inventive driving and unusual circumstances and this time, I wasn't in the driver's seat!  After I stopped laughing, we got out and looked at the problem. 

I looked at her trunk and really stopped laughing, booster cables, one screwdriver, no rope or wires, and one very sad emergency kit that was aimed toward first aid!  How could people drive around like this?  Ah well, not everyone is mechanically inclined, and she's not an ex-technician but an ex-finance clerk, so I guess it makes sense.  If I need help with financials, I'll call Donna, but not for anything like mechanics or practical things that require some type of tools...

So she called a garage and we found out that it would cost, cost, cost to tow, and while she was doing that, I found the muffler clamp so it could be wired up to get to a garage, saving her money...  It would still take 45 minutes and cost over a hundred bucks as it was. Yuck!  I'm sitting there, thinking it over, and decided I couldn't take it anymore... I asked her how much were her booster cables worth.  Ten bucks on sale... Alright!  Now we're talking!

I stripped the cables, jury rigged the muffler clamp back into place and she called off the towing guy.  She told him her friend was a former technician and mentioned my solution.  He laughed, called me 'inventive' and told it should work fine for a short jaunt.

We made it to a gas station and I bought what I could find, brass snare wires of all things, and wired it up tighter and it sounded better than ever!  So we decided to continue on to St. Martins.  No guts, no glory, right?  And it worked out fine, it was hot and sunny, I think we used up our set of weird things to go wrong by then and were due for a break...  If you want to take a look at the caves of St. Martins, which are well worth the trip, muffler or no muffler trouble, you can follow this facebook link and look at my shots of it.

After we'd worn out St. Martins, the T-shirt lady showed us the latest area attraction, the literature on the Fundy Trail... 

Ah well, onwards we go!  It was also beautiful, but I want to go back again to see that with the tide out next time. Here's a public Facebook link on that one as well if you want to take a look...

The next day, I was going to drive straight back to Halifax as I'd promised Donna I would!  But well, I tried, but ended up taking a side trip up to the Miramichi en route just to see if it still looked the same... It did, and then I went home!  Can't be too predictable now, can I?

Images (photos and paintings by Teresa Young):

1. Unnamed abstract - Oct.2003,  2. Map of Maritimes, courtesy of Google,  3. Covered bridge near St. John, NB,  4. Sunken Treasure - Jun.2001,  5. Blue Emotions - Jul.2002,  6. Caves of St.Martins, NB,  7 and 8. Fundy Trail, NB.

When You Have No Choice

 

I know it sounds strange, but for me, art can occur in many ways.

Sometimes, it just feels like a tap that I open and the creativity flows out through me into the artwork, something like a stream of conciousness thing...

The pieces surrounding this paragraph occurred this way... 

Sometimes, an idea occurs to me that I want to experiment with just to see how it would work out. 

After a family vacation where I drove down through Washington and Oregon, I was fascinated by the patterns in the shells I saw and wanted to see if I could incorporate them into paintings... 

I still really like that idea and I might go back to it and try again, who knows....
I saved some shells, and I think I could probably do more with it than I did...

Anyway, back to my point here.  I have some paintings that don't seem to want to be completed, and they can sometimes work out very well, or die an early death (in my eyes, anyway!).  Some of my own paintings I don't like, just like anyone else, I have favourites.  I have been known to give up on certain paintings and just paint over them and try something else.

Some pieces can change quite dramatically as they metamorphisize into something other than what they started out to be.  There are wishy washy paintings, and then there's another group that is very different.  They are images that pop into my head and just keep coming back to me like they won't be dismissed.

This is fairly rare, actually, I'll know an image wants to be created if it keeps coming back like a repeating dream.  I can count these images and they generally stand out for me.

 

In the last few days, It's happened again, and I literally had to do some research into anatomy and musculature in order to execute a rendition of the image that keeps appearing in my brain!

I've managed to do a first run at it, and I'm pretty happy with how it looks, but it's not finished.  I've reached that point where there's a freshness and power to it that I could lose if I overwork it.  Sigh.  You see what I mean, I like it the way it is (see below), but I think I'll leave it alone until I figure out whether I want to elaborate on it or not...

 

Images by Teresa Young:

1. Flight of the Humblebee - April 2002,  2. Blue Abstract - June 2002,  3. Oregon Coast - August 2002,  4. Blue Emotions- July 2002,  5. Flight of Fantastic - November 2001,  6. Queen of Thorns - August 2009,  7. Emergence - September 1998,  8. Exposing Your Inner Child - in progress.   

When Things Don't Go As Planned

 

I've been trying to capture my new direction of painting on glass digitally and have met with all sorts of problems.  So this has become my new 'thing' or quest for lack of a better term...

In trying different approaches, I find I get mixed results.  A white background allows me to eliminate some of the contrast issues, but I lose some of the depth, luminousity and texturized feel that so adds to the effect of the artworks on glass...

I would like to do it justice, so I did some research and I don't think that this is a new problem at all.  Even in books and articles I've seen on the internet it appears that a lot of detail is lost due to the high constract inherent in glass art. 

The human eye appears to adjust to it automatically seem to see the piece bettter than a camera can capture it!

And somehow, even when I get darks and shadows in the clearer parts of the pieces, it seems to have more depth than the ones with the flat backgrounds...

So, I'm adding a small gallery here of what I've been experimenting with lately with in painting directly on glass for your viewing pleasure!

 

The four pieces below actually inspired the title of this blogpost, I was trying to change a frame on a large piece I did in May and cracked the glass, so I found out that if I was very careful, I can peel the art off of the glass, prepare new glass to adhere the piece to and refinish the piece.  Essentially, I cut this one into four sections because the painting got cut by the glass breaking in the first place.  Four for one, not a bad trade in my mind!

Here's the original piece, which no longer exists in the larger form:

 Images by Teresa Young:

1. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 22 June 2010;  2. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 23 June 2010;  3. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 18 June 2010;  4. Fauvist Fantasy - 8"x10" - 21 June 2010;  5. Serenity - 12"x14" - 16 May 2010;  6. Untitled Glass Art - 20"x24" - 2 May 2010;  7, 8, 9 & 10.  Final Glass Fragments - 8"x10".