Field and Forest, for your Neck

My latest collaboration with Anthropologie unites my love of painting with my love of fabric in these three whispy Field and Forest scarves. I had the idea of using these symbols of birds, butterflies, buttons and fruit along with colorful pattern to allude to a modern-day totem pole, telling the story of your own personal journey, while wrapped around your neck.

In this Swan and Bird scarf, the black swan swoops its long neck around a tulip and ducks a sailboat and anchor, while opposing the flight of a bluebird flying through a floral sky, in a tale of adventures at sea.

This scarf features the male and female Diana Fritillary butterflies in a mirror composition with pattern and leaves, as a sort of love story in flight.

Here, it is the green and black Honeycreepers who flit about amid floral flares, blue buttons and ripe persimmons to tell the story of nectar givers and takers.

A Fantastic Blur of Tradition and Wonder

A friend informed me that I appear in this video at 2:29, dancing on the street in the marigny amidst bubbles, in my swan costume, on mardi gras day. Love the music this montage is set to.

Revelry

The night is shattered...

"Falling Stars", 16" x 20", acrylic on canvas, February 2012, SOLD

It will really be a good day.

Introducing: Print Tapestries

By humbling popular request, I am excited to announce the availability of some of my most coveted paintings, in the form of a brand new product called the
"Print Tapestry"

"Bayou Tree"

"Cotton Tree"

"Goodnight Loneliness"

Currently, there are three images available as Print Tapestries. The original painting was made with acrylic and mixed media on stretched canvas. These reproductions are printed on canvas by my archival company in Georgia. The tapestries are assembled by hand in south Louisiana by myself, my mother, and my sewing circle. The image is trimmed and hand-stitched with embroidery thread to a cotton canvas backing with a 2.5" border. Each image is available in a limited edition of 50, and comes adorned with an engraved edition plate. Aside from the professional printing, each element of these heirloom pieces are assembled by hand, carrying on the tradition of gathering to sit and stitch and talk among friends and family.

These print tapestries allow me to offer an affordable alternative to buying original paintings, in a handmade artisan format that retains the quality and aesthetic of my original work.


The Print Tapestry allows the finished piece to be rolled up and ship to you in an affordable and sturdy shipping tube. It comes with a fabric label on the back, indicating it's title and edition number. It also comes with 4 upholstery tacks for hanging it on the wall. Simply place one in each corner and tap gently with a hammer. When you rearrange or move, no worries, just remove tacks, roll up your print, and go.

When you receive your Print Tapestry in the mail, I recommend taking a hot iron to the back of it to get it good and flat again. (don't iron the face of your print). To really connect with the tradition of things handmade in the south, I suggest doing this step with a meditative smile, in the quiet of an afternoon, focusing on only the task at hand, at least for the 3 minutes it takes to iron a square of canvas. You'll feel glad you did.

Prints are approximately 16" x 20" each
and available for purchase online at my Etsy Shop
and in New Orleans at my showroom,
"The Beauty Shop", 3828 Dryades St. Uptown.
Fridays and Saturdays 10:00am - 2:00pm.

To Start Again...

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tear Sheets

I had to stay in the country this weekend to finish up some pressing work. So with my coffee this morning, I stole some time to go through a six-month stack of magazines and tear out inspiring pages.
Love having them all spread out for a moment before I file them in binders or pin them to my mood board for Spring Collection 2012.

You become.

Story-time similarities...

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." "Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit. "Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt." "Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

“[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment.”
― Robert Penn Warren