Mud Slinging!

I will be performing a live pottery throwing demo at Paradocx Vineyard this weekend. If you are in the area, drop on by, have a glass of wine, listen to the concert featuring Rory Sullivan and watch me throw dirt around.

If you are not in the area, and even if you are, check out my first demo video made for your viewing pleasure!

Meet My New Intern, Lisa

 Full Name:       Lisa Joy Meyer

 

How old are you?  19 years old. Birthday?  April 29th 

Where do you live?  I live in the Amish country of Pennsylvania. :) 

Pets, siblings?  I have one cat named Smokey. He is full of personality and lets us know everything he is thinking! I have an older sister, Nicole. She has a degree in culinary arts and has been happily married a little over a year now. My younger sister is Isla. She is almost 13 and loves horses and youth group. 

Whats your favorite thing about where you live? I love the diversity and beauty of this area. After a long day, I can take my camera out to catch a sunset. Within a short drive we have rolling farmland, lots of woods, and rivers and lakes all around. I can choose from any number of wonderful locations on a given day. It's so rejuvenating to be out in nature, enjoying the landscape and the wildlife. On another note, major cities like Philly and New York are within a reasonable distance. Cities provide a whole new subject matter for photography.  

You want to be a photographer, why?  Life is full of amazing moments. I love the ability to capture those moments. When I am able to do that effectively; make my subject look its very best and share that with others, that brings me so much joy! 

What excites you about that? Photography is exciting not only to capture what we see, but also what we can't see. When I capture a photo of a bird mid-flight, it takes my breath away to be able to see each individual feather spread. Or to take a macro shot of a Bumble Bee collecting pollen. A flower has thousands of perfect little sacs of pollen on it. The details are so incredible! 

Favorite subject matter…  I love taking photos of anything in nature. From landscape scenes to the little details in leaves. I also love photographing old architecture and setting up still life scenes using some man-made and some natural items. I don't think I can pick a favorite! :)  

Why did you want to intern?  First of all, I wanted to intern because it is a wonderful experience that I know I will learn and grow through. I see the value in learning from someone who has gone before me. She understands where I am at and how to get to where I want to go with my art. Secondly, I wanted the hands on experience. It is one thing to have people tell you how and what you should do with your marketing. But to have someone showing you and then letting you actually do it is a very important part of growing. Lastly, I wanted to do this internship with Mrs. Hahn because she is a fun, patient person who cares about my success and who is extremely successful and gifted herself.  

What do you hope to gain from the experience? knowledge on how to market effectively. The opportunity to work with an experienced, established artist who is able to guide and teach me. I hope to meet people at shows and make some good connections. It's hard to put into words exactly what I want to gain from this experience, because it is the little things as well as the big things. There are so many benefits to being able to see an artist working behind the scenes and having someone to answer any questions that come up. 

What are your strongest assets?   One of my strongest assets is a creative vision. I see the potential in different scenes and am able to compose the subject matter well. I have a thirst for knowledge. I have read as many manuals, photography books/guides, magazines, and online information about photography as I can get my hands on. This has been so valuable in training the way I see and create my art. 

What is your impression so far of the life of a full time artist/creative person?   Fun, busy, demanding. It is so awesome to see someone living out their passion and creating art on a daily basis. The flip side of that, however, is all the work and effort that goes into marketing. Marketing can be exciting and fun. It can also be tedious and time-consuming. So my first impression would be that you have to be passionate about what your doing. If that passion is there, then the life of an artist is a wonderful, fulfilling experience. 

What skills and insights have you gained thus far that you feel you will be able  apply to your future as a photographer?    I am learning that selling art well is as important as making art well. I am learning SO much about how to market effectively. I am also learning about all the important details that save time and thus accomplish more. 

If you won the lottery, would you still choose the artists life? Absolutely! It would just give me more freedom to travel and create more art. 

If you could live in any country, where would it be? why?  To be honest, I'm not attached to any particular area. I love traveling around and would love to visit places all over the world. For me, it is more about appreciating the unique and beautiful qualities about each location.     

 What is the best compliment you've gotten so far about your work?   One of my mentors helped me prepare for a photography trip to the Grand Canyon. We critiqued photos from tons of different photographers to see what worked and what didn't. When I got back from my trip, he critiqued my photos. After looking through all of them, he said that my photos were better and more well composed than all the photos we had previously viewed. 

Do you have a website? what is it?  Yes I do, it is:  lisajoy.zenfolio.com  My website is still in the exciting beginning stages. I will be adding photos often, so be patient with the limited selection. :)  

Anything else you'd like to say?   I am so blessed to be able to live out my dream of being a photographer and to have all these wonderful opportunities like the internship in my life. I am very excited to see what this next year holds for me! 

Welcome Lisa!  I am just as excited to have you working with me!

Lovin' TheGoodOleDays: Come on, Get Back Up

A shared bit of inspiration from my friend Lisa over at Lovin' the Good ole Days. Uplifting, even with Stallone's bad acting :0)
Lovin' TheGoodOleDays: Come on, Get Back Up: Day after day, we juggle our schedules, finances, priorities, and responsibilities to do what needs to get done, just to do it all over agai...

Video- Using underglaze to create ceramic cat mugs

Music Video Studio Takeover

There were exciting doings over the weekend here at Chez O'Lone-Hahn. Being the artsy-fartsy family that we are, my husband Al, the very talented bass player for Knowlton Point and the rest of his bandmates took over the back yard and my studio to shoot a video for their new song "Your Way".

Their videographer Hui and his assistant Bill arrived around 11:30 to start setting up for the shoot. When I found out that the primary location was going to be the area in front of my studio, I had to scramble to get the 10 bags of mulch out of my car so that I could back it up to my studio and load in all of my artwork for a show before I wouldn't have access. I didn't have to leave for my show until 3:30 but I knew that video takes a really long time so with my husbands help, I got unloaded and reloaded and ready to go.

  Little did I know that my studio would also serve as a dressing room. I didn't mind at all, since my husbands people are totally respectful of the work and the space and wouldn't want to suffer my wrath if anything was a miss :0)...

While it was a little tedious hearing the same song over and over again while they filmed and I mulched the yard, it was an interesting process to watch. I know that some shots were done in the house, so some of my paintings will probably show up in the background. The video will be out of production in a couple of weeks and I will post so that you may enjoy their new song and play spot the KOH paintings. In the meantime, head on over to Knowlton Point's website to check out their current music and CD. http://www.knowltonpoint.com

Mother's Day-Pt. 2- Artist as Mom

(In a nod to Mother's Day, this is a repost of a previous writing. To bring you up to date, my daughter is now going to be 23 in a couple of weeks and preparing to go off to Thailand with her boyfriend for a summer of teaching English and adventure. I'm so proud of her and her fearless spirit and miss her terribly at the same time....)


My life is never seperated from my work and I have created a plethora of paintings around mothering as I journey along in one of the greatest adventures of my life.  I thought I would continue with this subject in this month when mothers are celebrated. 

Most of my paintings come from a very personal place. Even some of my cow paintings tell stories about what's going on in my life, such as in "Eat Your Broccoli" which depicts a momma cow and her  calf in a surreal field of raining broccoli. (A nod to Magritte) This painting was inspired by my Kayla who wouldn't eat broccoli as a little girl.

Before I even knew I was pregnant, I painted "My neighborhood", which depicts myself, my husband (in between the two houses) and our neighbors on their respective porches. There I am talking on the porch, very preggers, while my husband looks on.

 When I was actually pregnant, I painted this one, "Pregnant Artist." I have to laugh when I recall my pre-teen girl begging me to take it off the wall so her friends wouldn't see it. So much for being sophistcated about a little artistic nudity even though I tried to not actually show much :0) Note the Van Gogh calendar in the background and the rooster in the window. Van Gogh is my favorite and the rooster is symbolic of my husband whose last name in German means "rooster".

Sometimes I run into women who tell me that they were artists until their kids were born and then they stopped. I would just as much have stopped breathing. I don't know how they could do that, maybe they were less driven than me, but I never stopped. It helped that she was such a good, easy baby. I used to get up around 4:30 in the morning before she woke so I could paint a little, or sometimes she would sit and watch me in her little bouncy chair. At 19 months, she had her own plastic easel, paint and tam. She too created very colorful works, though she was an abstract expressionist at that time :0)..

As wonderful a baby as she was, just the shock of becoming parents can be overwhelming. The shift that takes place in your life from self centered to other-centered, and the responsibility of it all is all encompassing. I have depicted these feelings in the painting "New Baby", where the beautiful little diapered one is a giant in the space, overtaking the picture and the lives of the Mommy whom she holds in the palm of her hand and her Daddy by a string.

Having a child also was bringing up a lot of stuff for me as she grew. It was like she was holding up a mirror that reflected my life, causing me to worry and wonder about if I could make her life bettter than my upbringing had been. In this painting "Toddler" she is a hybrid of herself and me. She stands, again overwhelming the picture, but she is standing off the curb in a street between two houses, representative of the New Jersey street where I grew up. (Boy, did I have fun painting that bunny)

I painted her many more times as she has grown up, less as she approached her pre- teen and teen years when I could barely get her to be near me or smile, until this one (Flying through Life) which I painted last year, when she was leaving to go to college. It was so hard to let her go and I couldn't believe that that she was leaving already.

She and I are depicted flying through the air in our matching Mommy-Daughter dresses that I had made, through a world of things that I had taught her about or that we had discovered together.

 As I write this I am tearing up again......I know there are plenty more paintings to paint and the journey with her is not over. I just miss my baby.

My Mother in my Art

As Mother's Day draws near, I am thinking about my own mother and how she has impacted my life as an artist, mother and woman. We are a product of our environment for good or bad and the one person in the world who tends to have the most influence over you if you grew up with her is your Mom. My mother, Elizabeth Helen Slovinski, died  in 1984 when I was 25 years old, 3 years after my father.

 
These are the things I remember about my mother.

1. She had a big laugh and sparkly eyes
2. She smoked a lot
3. She drank a lot.
4. She worked hard.
5. She could be cold.
6. She loved me.
7. She had suffered a lot.
8. She taught me how to make things
9. She said one encouraging, memorable thing to me in my life and it was near when she was dying. She said "I always new you were going to do something special but I don't know what it is."


Well, here I am, 54 years old and still trying to figure that out. Am I already doing it, writing books and making paintings and pottery? I don't know. Maybe it was a Mom's wishful thinking, putting her lost dreams and wishes into me. Anyway, I miss my Mom. I got married without a Mom, had my daughter and raised her without a Mom around, had Christmases, Birthdays, failures and triumphs without a Mom to cheer me on or show me how. Maybe my Mom wouldn't have been all that anyway. Sometimes she wasn't very good at being a Mom. I have painted her from memory a few times trying to get a grip on her, my struggle most obvious in the painting below called "Mother, Saint or Sinner?" in which I am trying to reconcile my feelings about her.

In "Party Girls", there is my mother and my Aunt Clara, sitting on the couch, doing what they did best together-drinking beer and smoking in what looks like a happy little party but, unfortunately, it would eventually lead to fighting.

There was a lot of that in my house. The alcoholism ran through both of my parents and my aunts and uncles. A family gathering could never be trusted as a peaceful, happy occasion. My parents were older when they had me. When I was growing up, she was already old at 46, white haired when I was 6. My father was 50, so I would always get asked if they were my grandparents.When she was 65,  I found some black and white early pictures of them in her apartment when she had gotten the cancer. I didn't know what to do about the cancer, about the fact that I was about to have no one, but I knew what I would try to do-I  would hold on. Hold on in paint. This was when I started to be a painter. I  bought some tubes of white and black oil paint and  a couple of canvases, and taught myself to paint the people in these pictures whom I had never known but was so curious about- my young mother and father and a brother 17 years older than me whom I still barely know.

My mother was not an artist but she could crochet and do macrame'. I don't remember anyone else in my family as being an artist, so I will say I got the creative gene from her. I got some of her other good traits and some of her bad. I think the most important thing I got from her was her strength and resilience and willingness to work hard. My mother was not a saint. What I have concluded is that  she was  the flawed, vulnerable person that God chose to bring me into this world and shape me to do and be what He intended. And as she could express it, she loved me and I loved her.

 Being a Mother is a rich gift and a challenge. We do our best most of the time and the rest of the time we just  pray. Much of the time we are going on what we were raised with, maintaining the good and hopefully, throwing out the bad.

I think I have done a good job at one thing with my daughter. I don't think she will ever doubt that I love her or say she suffered from a lack of affection from me. Beyond that, I have made plenty of mistakes as a Mom, but none I hope that she can't forgive me for. It's been such a joy and adventure raising a daughter and I feel blessed to have had the privilege.


Happy Mother's Day!

(The theme of motherhood and my daughter in particular have shown up in my work a lot and so this month, look for more posts on these subjects.)