a week of Saturdays

I can finally identify with all those people who don't know what day it is. When you never go out and every day is the same, you have no way of differentiating. The past 10 days have been like that for me, except for last Sunday when I attended the opening of my two-person show at the Gaelen Gallery in West Orange. The theme was Ellis Island Memories and the other artist is Paul Margolis, a photographer whose haunting photos of the abandoned, deteriorating hospital buildings were beautiful, stark,and very moving. I walked out without my camera that ,day, so he took photos of my work before the show opened to the public. Thank you, Paul, for taking these.
It has been a week of Saturdays, including today, when Marty's new Dell laptop was delivered and I spent ALL DAY setting it up, connecting the new router, figuring out Vista, getting him his own e-mail address so that we won't clutter up each others' inboxes, and helping him with passwords to his various business sites. He uses a computer all day at work but is completely computer-illiterate. Don't ask how this is possible, but it is. I am DONE and have now gotten back to work, sort of.

Since I can't get to my studio till Marty goes back to work, and since I have disdismantled the downstairs print alcove, I am now printing on the kitchen table with a portable print surface.
Ah, the glamour of being an artist. The dim light in the kitchen is due to the drab compact fluorescent high-hat floods which are really horrible. BUT - I am experimenting with a new resist that has great potential, so I am excited. The paint is still drying and shortly I will try my experiment on another piece of cloth to see whether this is a fluke or not.

Notice the Surface Design Newsletter on the table (along with today's papers - now you know what the Gillman kitchen table really looks like). I promise myself I will read this SDA pub before I go to bed tonight. Speaking of surface design - don't forget, if you are a surface design person who prints lengths of cloth, you may be a candidate for membership in the Art Cloth Network, which has some openings for new members this year. Application deadline is Feb. 15, so if you are interested in applying for membership in this terrific group, go to the website and click on "Join ACN" to download the application materials.

Finally, to answer a few comments from yesterday's blog:

Gerrie - I have been keeping strange hours and sleeping in till 11 the last few mornings. What a waste of time! And our kitchen hasn't started yet but our Caldera gas cooktop (made in Vermont) is being delivered tomorrow and will sit in the great room room for god-knows how long.

Linda - this is one piece of fabric that I haven't cut yet - so we'll see where it goes from here and how it gets rearranged.

Pam - I see the woods from the sliding glass doors in my kitchen, right beyond the chairs in the photo above. They are my joy, no matter what the season or the weather. What are not joyful are the huge, terrifying wild turkeys that live there. I counted 16 of them yesterday, 8 of which were under my deck at the sliding glass door on the lower level, and one of which was FLYING right outside the deck. Scary. But I love the woods anyway, despite the turkeys and the deer.

Back to the kitchen table.