Monday, March 19, 2012

It's All About the Shoes! Fly Tribe Blog Hop

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I’m a part of a group of creative people known as “The Fly Tribe” brought together through Kelly Rae Roberts “Flying Lessons” ecourse in 2011.

Today our blog is about:

Shoes!

For the past year I have been on a fast paced and fun creative journey. What do you need when you take a journey? Something on your feet. I’m following the footsteps (pun intended) of Dorothy of Oz and my shoe of choice is “the ruby slippers”.


 Shoes represent your “walk” - where you are and where you are going. The color - red/ruby - is the color of passion, fire, life and love. My passion for art runs through my blood like fire, and I love running my creative business. When you love something and are passionate about it, it shows in your work. The glitter on the ruby slippers are reflective. They reflect light - they SPARKLE. Four years ago when visiting Disney’s Epcot with my family, I picked up a small coin purse. It has Tinkerbell on one side and on the other side it says “I’m all about Sparkle. What a way to live; to sparkle with the passion inside of you, have it manifest in your art and attract people to it.  A few months ago, an artist friend (who didn’t know about the coin purse) actually told me that I “sparkle”. That makes me happy.

For creative people that are out there - sparkle on. Don’t let anything or anyone try to take those ruby slippers from you. Do you remember what Glenda told Dorothy when she placed the slippers on her feet? She told her to never take them off!

Thanks for stopping by today. Please leave your “footprints” below in the comments section so I’ll know you were here. Then hop on over to the next blog and check out more shoes!

Saturday, March 17, 2012

An Off The Wall Night

Last night my husband and I attended the Masur Museum "Off The Wall" Art Auction, a yearly fundraiser to help support the museum. Local, national and international artists donated art for a silent auction, and the winning bidders take the art "off the wall" and home with them at the end of the night. There was a great turnout for the event.



My husband had a mini-reunion at the event. The musician for the night was Kevin Gordon, formerly from our area, but now a successful Nashville recording artist. When my husband was a teenager, he and his friends used to skateboard - alot. They had ramps and half-pipes. Kevin was one of his skateboard friends. One of his other friends was also at the event last night, so they had a small mini-reunion. 
 


If you love music, check out the Rolling Stone magazine write  up of Kevin's latest album Gloryland. I think you will find a bit of Louisiana in it.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a wonderful St. Patty's Day. We are off to the Vineyard for more live music.

Friday, March 9, 2012

I'm a Flygirl Friday's Featured Artist

We just dropped off my art at Masur Museum. The Off The Wall Fundraiser is next week and I'm so excited. Kevin Gordon will be performing at this event. How exciting. Here's another one of the paintings I donated to this event.

"Cool Waters Run Deep" by Melanie Douthit

And I'm happy to share with you that I was recently interviewed by Violet for the Flygirl Friday's blog and today it went live! Hop on over there and check it out. Leave a comment so I know you stopped by.

Happy Friday!

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Art of a Daydream Believer

I was saddened to hear the news about the passing of my childhood star crush, Davy Jones. I have had "Daydream Believer" playing in my head since last week. As I've stated before, I'm very artistically inspired by music, and I already have several versions of this particular song swirling in my head. I completed one this week.


"Daydream Believer No 1" 20" x 20"

This painting was created for a silent auction raising funds for the Masur Museum of Art in Monroe, Louisiana next week. I'm so looking forward to this event.

The studio has been a creative hub for the past few weeks. I'm still frantically trying to get orders done as well as some personal projects I'm working on. Here's a peek at some in-progress work.


Here's a fun photo I took of one of the collectors of my "Bon Appetit Y'all" signs. I purposely had her stand in front of her camaro so I could show hubby that people that drive cool cars collect my art.


Lots to do today and some deliveries to make tomorrow as well as a supply run. We are expected to get 5-6 inches of rain in the next few days. (I thought it was April that had all the showers). Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend!


Monday, March 5, 2012

Welcome Guest Textile Artist Frauke Schramm

As I mentioned in past posts, taking Kelly Rae Robert's Flying Lessons last year has impacted my life and business in so many ways. One of the benefits of the ecourse was the personal connections made with other creative people and I'd like to share some of these people with my blog readers.

 For today's blog post, I'm thrilled to be welcoming my guest blogger, Frauke Schramm. Frauke is a talented textile artist from Germany who makes beautiful quilts. She's also sharing her hubby's photography in today's post. I'm so happy to have her as my guest. Please be sure to leave a comment to let her know you visited.
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Hi everybody ! I’m Frauke (also known as quilthexle), an emerging textile artist – and I’m sooo honored to be guest posting today on Melanie’s lovely blog! Thank you so much, Melanie!

Melanie and I met via a inspiring, life-changing online course by Kelley Rae Roberts. One wonderful experience we made through this class was connecting with lots of amazing artists from around the world. How else would a textile artist from Southern Germany do a blogpost on a mixed-media artist’s blog from Louisiana?

Only after I graduated in Political and Educational sciences and started working in corporate world, my creative voice started nagging at me with a voice I could not overhear anymore. So – I took a patchwork class. And was hooked – immediately. In 2009 I entered a quilt into a juried show in the US – and it won first prize in the category “cutting edge”.


I was thrilled, happy – and very nervous and unsecure at the same time. My inner voice urged me to do “more” – to live a creative life, with the big goal of doing this textile art thing for a living sometime in the future. Now I’m on this way … taking baby steps, sometimes without any progress, sometimes leaping forward, sometimes I’m a happy big smile, sometimes I feel just miserable about it.  




One important thing I learnt: be prepared to have downtimes, to be desperate, to consider to quit. But these feelings are so important! Because they do tell you something about you, your own journey and what you need. Just a few days I was standing in our dining room, sobbing in the arms of my wonderful husband – the words I uttered were “I don’t know the way!” A bit strange ? yes. It got me thinking … what do you do when you’re lost? You ask for directions! And so I did – right now, I’m getting into contact with a coach. She’ll not know my way – but I hope she can help me to find it ;-)) I have the strong feeling that this was meant to happen, that it is my very own logical next step. So – listen well, and if that inner voice sounds strange, listen even closer … it wants to tell you something ;-))


So, enough about my creative journey and me. For this guest post, I want to look a bit further into living a creative life as a couple (with both still holding “paycheck jobs”). While I’m a textile artist, my husband is a talented hobby photographer. Of course, taking pictures is an important part of my art, too – capturing the everyday inspiration. Sometimes we go on a photographing trip together. The process of being on a photo trip together is a lot of fun for both of us; when we look at the pictures at home, it is always so inspiring to see how the important other one captured the scene we both saw. I’m going to show you some of the pictures from these trips – do you want to join me? I would be delighted !


Recently we had a short period of winter over here in Germany. And here’s a picture of both of us ! Well, at least of our shadows ;-)) to the left is DH, taking a picture, the shorter figure is me.

 Another trip took us to an old furniture fabric that was torn down. We did not see any “do not enter”-signs ;-)) and spent a very inspiring hour in a wet, cold surrounding. This picture by Jens gives you an idea what we were looking at:


The reflections of the partly torn-down roof in the puddles on the floor fascinated me – so I took this picture:


And Jens took a pic of the fire extinguisher and later on edited that pic so the red became the prominent (and only) color.
I took pictures of small details:



This last picture was taken by me – and Jens edited it, so it is a true coproduction:

I hardly ever do a lot of digital editing with my pictures (I do resize them, and sometimes I correct the colors), so it is kind of weird for me to see one of my pictures edited like this. On the other side, when we spoke about this guestpost, it became very clear to me that Jens would not want to have any of his unedited pictures published. To me, that’s an important part of working creatively together: you must respect the way your partner sees his or her art. You don’t need to love it, and you don’t need to praise it when you don’t feel like it, but respect for the creative decisions of your partner is absolutely necessary. But working together or side by side can be truly inspiring, and in the end, you’ll profit both … even if it’s only because you enjoyed a great time together!

Thanks again, Melanie, for having me over for this guest post. Everybody who read it – thank you so much, I do appreciate your time! If you want to see more of Jens’ photography, please visit his flickr account (and if you don’t mind, tell him how you liked his pictures …). And if you would like to visit my corner of the web, you are invited over to quilthexle’s world – the door is always open, and I do my best to keep my blog a happy and welcoming place.

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Thank you, Frauke, for sharing your and your husband's art with us. Thanks everyone for stopping by. Have a great week.

Friday, March 2, 2012

More Mardi Gras

I'm still celebrating Mardi Gras! I have had three Mardi Gras Dachshund orders this week, and painted two back to back. These are for long-hair dachshunds, so - just in case you wondered - yes, I can paint your long haired doxie. You can order your custom Mardi Gras Dachshund painting from my Etsy Store.


All this Mardi Gras art has me longing for the French Quarter, so we've planned a trip in the next couple of weeks. I can't wait.

Busy weekend ahead - an art reception to attend, a "Dancing With the Stars" local event, and a few days later another "masked" event with a twist. And I will be featuring an artist here on my blog this month. I can't believe it's March already!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day.