The return of the pods with a twist! Those gorgeously twisted mahogany colored Locust pods that fall every autumn and beg to be re-purposed, if not for their procreating seeds, as table dressings!!! Yes, I have embraced their raw, organic beauty for quite some time. Look back to my introduction to these handsome hulls and the first fabulous table-scape that resulted. https://patriciandesign.com/resourceful-creative-festive-fun/
There have been many bouquets since. Then yesterday, as I walked my 10,000 step trek around a nearby park, I pondered the theme for this Christmas blog and another pod piece came to mind. One lone Locust tree there in the park had produced a blanket of pods that have been weathering these last couple of months – fortunately, not weathered too badly. I gathered 2 dozen of them and marched home with a purpose! Fists full and looking a bit curious, I passed several strollers wondering about my two unusual bouquets.
My idea was to tweak them from their natural autumnal brown to a gilded glory!
Yes, gilding the lily of lovely rich, natural pods to become wildly twisted golden spires flanking the traditional poinsettia of our Christmas table.
Last minute gold glass balls ringing the red poinsettia centerpiece,
a pair of silver reindeer, silver snowflake napkin rings, blue spruce cuttings from the backyard, scattered votive holders, crystal and china for the touch of formality and we’re ready for our silver and gold, red and green, festive feast!
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
I was touched and photographed it to share with my instagram followers, which lead me down the #paintedrock hashtag. The first artist’s post I clicked on – she does amazing mandala dot art – shared what kind of paint she used and gave other general tips. By that afternoon I had a rainbow of colors and was painting my first rocks.
Although Kim’s photography still plays a significant and pleasurable career role in her life, this quest to explore other of her creative energies and talents is proving to be an exciting and potentially lucrative path.
As is true in our world of fast-paced technology, ultimately more expeditious and modern machinery aided the artist in guiding the needles and now computer-generated digital methods of quilting and patchwork stitch at amazing rates of speed and detail.
So the take-away from this week’s musings are if you have not tried a rug on your wall – get out there and find a cool piece and get it up there!!! You will be surprised at the effective texture and interest it adds to your eclectic interior!!!
It truly is a wonderment for all ages. This architecturally magnificent building designed in 1859 by James Renwick, in the then chic Parisian Second Empire Style, is the elegant backdrop for a most progressive and creative collection of present day modern artists’ works. Diverse examples, of spectacular displays using simple materials, brought to life in forms unexpected – of grand proportion and thrilling magnitude. Although my learned and previewer cousin had introduced me to the exhibit in advance, it captivated and engaged beyond my expectations.
The glitz and bling make such a striking, formal, contemporary statement in this expansive volume that it startles with joyful contrast. The artist, Leo Villareal of whom I had heard in advance, was originally from Albuquerque – where we now call home. A remote desert origination transplanted into the fast pace of the urban centers of the east coast resulting in this shiny experimentation with light, form and wonderfully reflective surfaces. Villareal melds basic high-tech coding to use his own algorithm of the binary system 1s and 0s communicating to the lights when to turn off and turn on – yet sequences that are never exactly repeated .
It’s not just your linear code of characters that is read on a screen – here it is an artistic experience shared by all who look up in this gallery’s exciting exhibit.
Large scaffolding at the end of the room suggests the manual installation that was required to suspend this wondrous drape catching light and glowing with golden aura. 
We were at once drawn into these cozy nurturing cubbies of what appeared to be nature – not forms created by man. Nature. Organic and raw, elegant and graceful winding toward the far reaches of the very high ceilings. Like a sculptor who says that the stone dictates what it wants to be and how he carves it – Dougherty knows that the long willow branches have a true will and bend their own way challenging him to work with them toward that goal of partnership with nature. The beauty is in the end result. People of all ages wandered in and out, peeking through window-like openings pretending to be exploring an enchanted forest of wonder.
Have you ever experienced Tent Rocks? 
Have you ever looked upward and around and through the magnificent forms created by nature eroding the earth’s strata revealing layers of color and creating spires of rocky towers? It is a magic land just south of Cochiti in a very unexpected pocket of nature’s magnificence in our Land of Enchantment. And the spires that artist Tara Donovan created with stacks of index cards – an overwhelming accumulation of millions of index cards suggest grey spires replicating nature’s wonders in the canyons among the spires of the Tent Rocks. 
It’s as though a photographer captured this natural formation in black and white. Donovan’s interpretations are tones of grey as a result of the stacked white index cards with slivers of shadow sucking away light in between each of them. Clustered and staggering in height, the “Untitled” towers are inviting to walk amidst and pass between, winding around them like a tourist or explorer or perhaps inhabitant in ages past and present as they have stood for ages.
How could a human working only by hand – without computer generated machines digitally fabricating such perfection create this finished piece that we are studying with such wonder? How can this fine tedious seemingly impossible count of thousands of threads be executed with such grandeur and grace by one mere mortal? 
The artist Gabriel Dawe transcends our ability to comprehend the exactness of his beautiful accomplishment with extraordinary patience, precision and creative foresight to imagine the end result and bring it to fruition. It is a wondrous, luminous sculpture of rainbow colored threads inspired by the skies of his native Mexico and current home in East Texas. The fine weavings also inspired by his Mexican heritage are interpreted, stretched and exaggerated here reflecting the light and spectrum of color from its base to ceiling. 
