by Linda | Aug 30, 2024 | Artwork, Celebrations, Community, Earthsongs Studio, Linda, Process, Relationships
Those considerations are different for each artist. For some, it may mean that their work actually equates to an income that is a living wage. For others, it may simply mean that their work brings them a degree of notoriety, often short-lived, but something to give them a professional boost. But for most, I don’t think it is even a part of the artist’s early vocabulary and thinking…just having the opportunity to work is accomplishment enough.
Having my work recognized and commissioned by clients to be installed in homes or businesses has certainly been overwhelming…that individuals and families want to live with my work everyday in their most private of spaces. That is powerful. And, at its core what that has done has given me the ability to continue to create, because for me, that is what I understand the work of the artist to be about.
For most of my forty years in clay, I have felt driven to not only be a maker but to share the experience of engaging with this most captivating medium, to help others come to know the healing and delight of the responsiveness of clay. And I have shared with children and adults how creating with clay is a collaborative experience where you and sister earth create together. In these past few years, however, I have come to recognize that my relationship with the medium needed to deepen and, as with any relationship, more alone time together was needed. And with that realization, I ended nearly a half century of leading others in the way of making with clay to focus on creating my own work…creating what sister earth and I need to say together, beyond what I was specifically invited to create for others.
In doing that, in taking that step, I have found continuing acknowledgement of the quality of my work not only by clients, new and ongoing, but also now by my peers, those sister and brother artists who are responsible for recognizing excellence in the arts and calling it out. The invitation to mount a solo exhibit, a retrospective of my work, has created such a moment for me, in essence saying, “Don’t create anything new…just stop for a bit and look back…show us some of what you’ve been about for these past forty years.” It is a profound moment for an artist to be invited to do that. And after that pause, to recognize with tremendous gratitude that the real accomplishment is to just be able to continue working.
by Linda | Apr 27, 2023 | Anniversary, Artwork, Celebrations, Ceramic Tile, Clay, Community, Earthsongs Studio, Events, Fundraiser for Ukraine, Linda, Murals, Studio
Earthsongs Ceramic Studio is celebrating its Thirtieth Anniversary with a full year of celebration…EVERYONE IS WELCOME!
Earthsongs is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, with a full year of celebration, beginning June 24, 2023 through June, 2024. It is a wonderful thing to have been able to remain here creating art and adding to the life of the Borough for these years. I am so grateful to all those who have been part of the Studio and made it possible for me to create in clay:
- To clients who commissioned work for installation as well as those who purchased moveable work for their home and as gifts
- To those who attended the myriad workshops and classes I offered
- To those who participated in the public art projects I led
- To the other Metuchen businesses who carry and carried my work: Marafiki, Gardenia, and especially Papillon.
- To the Metuchen Inn who continues to showcase my work and donate food for Gallery Openings and other special events
- I am most grateful for your continuing support of the studio.
Because of what I have always seen as the mission and role of the studio:
Yes, creating art from clay, but about making an impact on the community and bringing people together through the arts,
it seems most appropriate that the thirty-year anniversary celebration, June 24, reflect that mission. As I envision the Anniversary Celebration, we will recognize the day by installing the Community Peace Mural (created August, 2022, by nearly 50 people during CLAY DAYS in METUCHEN) which speaks to peace around the world, but with a special eye to Ukraine. Hence, my hope is to create a celebratory event through this Anniversary that will not only be festive for all those who can be at Earthsongs that day, but raise funds specifically for the people of Ukraine.
SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 2023, 1-4pm
- 1pm | All are welcome to Earthsongs, visit the gardens and pond, enjoy some appetizer munchies. (The mural will be covered.)
- 1:30pm | The first 50 who donated $100 to Ukraine, will then be invited to a meal, completely donated by Hailey’s Harp and Pub, at tables on the closed street of Bissette Place to enjoy with friends and neighbors.
- 2:30-3:00pm | Diners will be encouraged to return to Earthsongs
- 3:00pm | Unveiling of the Community Peace Mural, entertainment, desserts prepared by local residents from Ukraine.
How can you participate?
First, everyone is welcome! Feel free to bring friends!
The meal will be limited to the first 50 people who choose to donate $100 to the people of Ukraine.
All others are welcome to spend time in the gardens at Earthsongs, enjoy the snacks there, and, if you choose, offer whatever donation you wish to this cause.
Essentially meal choices will include: Hailey’s special beef dish (Shepherds Pie), Hailey’s famous chicken dish (Chicken Francese), and the Pub’s so appreciated vegan dish (a Healthy Stew).
Donations can be made by check sent directly to Earthsongs, or via a Venmo.
Final date to reserve a space at the meal will be June 4.
We hope you will plan to join us for whatever parts of the celebration fit your interest and schedule.
by Linda | Mar 23, 2022 | Community, Life in General, Relationships
As humans I believe we live in a mosh of inconsistencies, incongruities, incompatibilities. We are born into them. They surround us always. We learn to cope with them. But they are most often manageable, often purely personal annoyances, small on the scale of life.
Today in Central New Jersey, in our small town of Metuchen, we are enveloped in the gentle images of early Spring: hyacinths and hellebores, daffodils and crocuses, redbuds and cherry blossoms dot lawns and gardens everywhere. Bright, exquisite, signs of such hope that uplift our spirits. Beyond that, our small conversations here center on properties being reclaimed for the common good, new large tracts being set aside as wildlife preserves…all so positive and optimistic.
And yet…
Living today in our wired, media-drenched world, we are faced with words and images of horror, not from another age, not out of history books. But at this same moment that the hellebore stands before me in her delicate beauty, violent nightmares are taking place. Bombs are ripping through neighborhoods, neighborhoods with their own daffodils blooming; millions of ordinary people are fleeing for their lives; a whole civilization is being laid waste…while our crocuses spread color and we speak of preserving our land. This is antithetical on a grand scale.
The writer Kayla Craig, has written: “O God of peace…our brains can barely keep up with the breaking news…we don’t know the words to pray…we know that you are a God of peace and we cannot bomb our way to shalom…”
As humans, we are born to manage inconsistencies. But for me, this stretches my own ability to a breaking point…I, too, “don’t know what words to pray” and so sit in silent pleading to our God of peace.
by Linda | Sep 29, 2021 | Community, Life in General, Relationships
This is my contemporary version of the Medieval “Canticle of the Creatures”
With joy we greet you Brother Sun and Blue Sky!
You brighten and enliven all.
Ah, Sister Moon, such a comfort,
your soft glow companions us, and with the stars twinkling by your side,
you give us hope when life is darkest.
While the Weathers, fierce creatures that you are,
swirling rain and snow, winds and heat,
swaddle us in your wild caresses.
Ah, Sister Water, so soothing, refreshing, invigorating, playful,
and Brother Fire, cozy, bright, enlightening, ardent,
both of you so useful.
You teach us how to be truly helpful
singing and dancing and making merry even as you serve.
O dear Earth, you are surely our Mother,
nourishing us with every good and delicious thing,
surrounding us with beautiful and engaging things,
providing us with furred and finned and feathered ones,
friends to enrich and enchant us.
But you are also most surely our Sister,
created by the hand of the same Mother/Father God;
we are born of the same with destinies linked.
Having been cared for all this time by you, our older Sister,
we now recognize that to go forward, we must walk hand-in-hand, conscious of each other’s needs.
And most fondly of all, we embrace the humanity of all humanity…the whole of what it means to be a human creature, spirit-embodied, both beautiful and disfigured, both charming and crude, both creatively boundless and yet utterly limited,
And we rejoice most especially when we can clasp the reality of all of that, and become a source of forgiveness and pardon and love to ourselves and others.
Finally, deeply encoded in our humanity, our continuing companion, Death, we call you Sister as well
…even as we name the nurturing creatures of Earth herself and Water and the Moon…
who, in your way, completes each of our bodily lives as we know them and frees our spirit from those confines.
by Linda | Aug 22, 2021 | Life in General, Process, Studio
You know the saying, “to do a job well, you need the right tool.”
After searching for a number of years for just that ‘right tool’ for one specific studio process, something unique to my way of hanging my tiles and moveable sculpture, I ordered one that looked very different from the one I have just about worn out. I only had half a hope it would fill the bill. It looked quite different on line from the one I always used.
It came the other day…and Wow! it is not only ‘perfect’ but better than the one I’ve been using for decades. The tip is angled to make the work easier; the handle is thicker to make it more comfortable for my somewhat arthritic hands to hold and manipulate. What a delight!
I didn’t realize how improved my process would be until I had the courage to purchase that rather expensive, new, seemingly different object. But now I rejoice in the way the designer of that tool has improved my life in the studio.
It’s the little things, right?
Getting that tool made me realize how we are all sculpting away at our individual lives, each of us pretty much using tools that may have worked splendidly early on…but may have gotten worn down and are no longer really useful.
COVID has and continues to bring all of us to re-assessing the way much of our lives work, but to actually make the change, that’s what takes the real courage…even in little things.
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