My name is Pam, and I am in a Bad Mood.
If you’ve read Sex in the Fifties, you’re probably aware that I’ve been in a Bad Mood since that first hot flash in June 2006. I’ve heard that hot flashes can continue for 10 years. A very bad mood indeed. Continue reading
I’ve just returned from a visit with my sister in Virginia, and the October slant of the sun is currently pickling even the lowliest subject matter into a sparkling celebrity in Fall’s Five Minutes of Fame. I’m a snap and run kinda girl, not by nature but by practice, stealing as many shots as I can while companions wait with varying degrees of patience ten paces ahead.
Not every face is lovely, but this one is Beyond Beautiful. Ancient Indian elephant, Wise Woman, patterns of dew-starved earth? Fall colors steal the show, but I’ve always been a sucker for the overlooked.
Ciel Gallery’s exhibition entitled The War Against Peace presents the responses of artists across the nation as they ponder the question of why we continue to cry for peace and simultaneously continue to wage war. Best of Show winner Janet Kozachek, whose Fallen Floyd is pictured above, illustrates the emotional and physical torture of war in stone and handmade ceramic. Phil Fung‘s War and Peace depicts a hundred or so maniacal Continue reading
Okay, random things first. In between my too-many pursuits, I finally finished Howl, my mosaic protest piece, just in time for the opening of The War Against Peace Exhibition at Ciel Gallery. I chose to work this piece in a folk-art style, because it is so often the “child” within us that reacts most instinctively to the atrocities around us. The image depicts a Peace Angel howling in anguish over the current state of Man and Earth. Alphabet Millefiori spell out her howls as she flies over the land surveying our lives below. This piece uses vitreous, smalti, millefiori, glass beads, and shell. Click on the image to enlarge and read the messages.
The great thing about mosaic artists is that they just never want to put down the nippers. So what starts out as “just finishing this one little section” ends up with you staring zombie-like across a cup of steaming tea while a Dear One utters words that sound oddly like, “What happened to you? You never came to bed last night?” Hence the Premier Gluefest of Charlotte Art League’s Community Mosaic Project was a howling success, Continue reading
I am such a huge fan of Master Mosaicist Giulio Menossi, that I would consider it the highest honor to be plastered with smalti and embedded into one of his wholly fantastical three-dimensional works, just to have the honor of hanging about in his studio and watching this genius at work. Continue reading
Entries for the Contemporary Mosaic Art Juried Exhibition must be received by digital submission by August 4, 2008. A full prospectus is available here. Questions can be asked and answered here. The exhibition will feature artists working in mosaic from across the globe, both 2-D and 3-D, showcasing a wide variety of materials. Show dates will be September 5 – 26, and will include several receptions. Best of Show Award is $500, sponsored by MosaicSmalti.com. Artists’ Reception and Cocktail Salon will be held Saturday, September 6, sponsored by ArtfulCrafter.com. More information on Ciel Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina is available here. Mosaic Art featured on the postcard shown above by (clockwise from upper left) Virginia Gardner: Secrets; Valerie Fuqua: Dangerous Curves; Marian Shapiro (inset): Lolita; Kathleen Jones: Un Moment de Paix, and Pamela Goode: The Happiest House.
I was waxing my way through Summer Pierre’s fab blog called An Accident of Hope (gotta love it), when I mired down in the post “30 Things I Feel Oddly Passionate About.” Of course that got me to wondering, what would be tops on my own list of odd passions? Of course I’m passionate about my family, art, respect, and a crucial pair of gladiator sandals from Anthropologie, but those hardly qualify as odd. And I’m passionate about things like open cabinet doors, spiders skittering towards my legs, and combing my hair before answering the phone, but I’m just going to go ahead and file those under OCD. When it comes to the quirkiness that makes me me and makes you you, what are the defining idiosyncrises? Shall we give it a look? Continue reading
Today I became official, with the (six-hour) mounting of Ciel’s sign, and my first (and last) adventure with stained glass. I can’t tell you how giddy I am to 1) have that nine-square-foot sign off my living room floor, 2) to give my slit fingers and gouged nails a break from the grinder, 3) to have survived the deadly plexi-flex , and 4) to have kept the smile nailed in place through four mounting trials and three dismountings so the space could be adjusted, and adjusted, and adjusted. Mounted photos to follow shortly on my flickr site. Stained glass on plexiglas, with crystal point stars, ungrouted, mounted behind a clear glass pane.
It is with utmost pleasure and not a small amount of surprise that I announce the opening of Ciel Gallery and Mosaic Studio and, coincidentally, a call to artists for our first juried mosaic exhibition. With the generosity of MosaicSmalti.com and ArtfulCrafter.com, we’ll have a fabulous show opening September 4, 2008 in Charlotte, NC — as far as I can tell, a real first for these parts. For more information about Ciel, go here. For a full prospectus, go here and click on the September exhibition. Hmmm, should I say “Y’all Enter??” Well, perhaps not. But hey Babes and Boys, let’s show this city some killer mosaic, every which way and then some. Power to the tesserae, and I bow to those who cajole the bits of glass and stone into arias of light and texture and heart.
Pam Goode Writes 