The Living Artist

We arrived in St Louis on my husband’s birthday, a year ago tomorrow.

A few months ago he was laid off from the job we moved here for.

Today he got the offer for a new job. A good one, with a company that appears to be a bit more stable than the last.

It’s in Pittsburgh.

This is good and bad. We love St. Louis, against all expectations. We’ve made some dear friends-cum-family here. Aiden’s in a fantastic school. I have vital and useful work in the local OTO. We’d really hoped to be done moving for a while – but there were just no jobs in Andrei’s field here.

Pittsburgh, on the other hand – we both grew up there. (Which is in itself makes moving back both good and bad!) We have dear friends there. My dad, who I haven’t seen in years, lives an hour or so from there, and it’s closer to the rest of my family on the East Coast. There are some folk trying to get OTO started again there, so that’s not going away. When I left 10 years ago, I couldn’t wait to get out of my hometown; but now I can say with experience rather than provincialism that it really is a pretty nice city.

Plus there are slightly fewer scary right-wing fundies there than here. I’d looked forward to becoming more involved in local politics here, but it’s honestly pretty scary around here. And churches. Churches everywhere, like they’re staring at you. Gack. Anyway.

So yeah. Pittsburgh. We’re flying out the week of the 12th for house-hunting and such, then A. will telecommute for 3 weeks while we get stuff packed up, and then he starts work proper on May 10th. Going to be a crazy month or so. Obviously new art and other content here will be on the, um, sporadic side.

Much of my art tends to be on an uncomfortable boundary between erotic and sensual. It’s not erotic enough to fit into most purely “erotic art” shows that I have seen; it rarely shows genitalia or overt sexual activity; and yet it’s got a bit too much in the way of happy naked people to be what you’d call family-friendly, especially here in the Midwest.

Lilith is about as close to explicit erotica as I’ve gotten (yes, that is what you think it is in the background, and there’s a whole story around that).

In Seattle there is a big erotic arts festival every year. But every time I’ve gone I’ve been singularly unimpressed. For me there are two schools of erotica: first, the teenage-boy approach of HAY LOOK BOOBZ; and second, the more sensual (and to my mind, mature) approach that explores arousal and attraction on a deeper level than genitalia and shock value. The Seattle show has always seemed to me to be more of the former and precious little of the latter. Case in point: one of the featured works on the website from the 2009 show is a phallus covered in disco ball tiles. Yeah, okay, your dick is shiny. Whatever. *beavis snicker*

I have hope, though. I just discovered that St Louis has an erotic arts festival too, amusingly termed “Naughti Gras”. And after watching the slide show of their 2009 exhibit, it appears that the collective concept of the erotic here matches much more closely with mine. The best in show award went to Carol Carter, whose work is very firmly on the sensual side of the spectrum, and yet to me undeniably erotic.

A fascinating aspect of my move from Seattle to St. Louis has been the shattering of place-based expectations. Given the above two types of erotica (as much as anything so fluid and subjective can be divided into two types), I would once have thought that the more conservative Midwest would be fixated on poking at taboos and gluing mirror tiles on dildos, and the liberal, suave Northwest would have grown past that and be able to explore the deeper levels. But it would, in fact, appear to be the reverse.

Of course, you could argue that the sensual approach is the more conservative one, not daring to flagrantly shatter taboos so much as delicately hint that there might be something outside the norm. That just doesn’t ring true to me, though. It’d be like learning to use a fine-tipped rapidograph pen before a crayola marker. Sure, the crayolas have their uses – but shows and scenes full of nothing but get very tedious very quickly.

Things are still really slow around here. I’m getting over Teh Sick, but incredibly slowly, and my husband has developed a nasty pneumonia. At least the little one is healthy and off to daycare, which gives me a bit of a breather today.

And I’m sitting here thinking in art-y directions, and – nothing. That part of me is sitting quietly, waiting for the foundation of our new life to set. And that’s okay. I’m too tired to stress about it, really!

But I do have some actual content. Before we moved I did a quick google search on the art scene in the Saint Louis area, and was blown away by the strength of the results. At least judging by the number of arts organizations, the robustness of their websites, and the sorts of work they’re doing, the “scene” here is better than it was in either Los Angeles or Seattle, which is… counterintuitive, to say the least! We’ll see how well they stand up to actual investigation. And the most crucial aspect for me is how… conservative, I guess? they are. I don’t mean politically conservative, I mean how tightly focused they are in terms of what styles of imagery are being shown, and how open they are to things that aren’t exactly like everything else out there.

I’m in no huge rush to get things started out here. As stated above, I need to get my foundation set first, not to mention build up enough pen & ink to have a reasonable portfolio in that style. But once I’m ready, these are some of the places I’ll be looking into:

http://www.artstlouis.org/: coop, advocate, nonprofit. offers education and portfolio reviews

http://www.saintlouisart.com/: directory of visual art and artists

http://www.saintlouisartfair.com/: 9/11-9/13 – 16th year. entry deadline is past for this year

http://www.stlouisartistsguild.org/

http://www.art-stl.com/: regional arts commission

http://www.keeparthappening.org/: arts and education council

http://www.gslaa.org/: greater st louis art association

The Seattle-to-Saint-Louis move has been accomplished, and the Fire Sea Studios server is back up.

On the down side, I’m sick as a dog, the house is in chaos, and the whole household is running on the ragged edge of exhaustion. So art is kind of not at the forefront of my mind at the moment. But we’re here, we’re alive, and at the very least I know where my art supplies are, even if I don’t have the energy to use them!

The Great Moving Project is nearing its end! Tomorrow comes the big-ass truck, and Sunday afternoon we head out.

Among other things, this means that this blog will be down from sometime Saturday (3/28) until Friday or Saturday (4/3 or 4/4). I’m sure I’ll still be Twittering and maybe even LiveJournaling on the drive, but fireseastudios.com is hosted out of our house, and the server box will be, well, in a box!

I’m hoping to return to regular blogging starting Monday 4/6, and it might even be topical! See you all then.

And we have a house in St. Louis! Ok, actually Ellisville, but nobody outside of Ellisville has heard of Ellisville, so St. Louis is close enough.

The house is beautiful. Four bedrooms, two fireplaces, gorgeous kitchen, a space to put a hot tub should we be crazy enough to get one, a well-lit basement for me to take over with art projects, a small but fully fenced back yard, and it’s TWO DOORS from a huge wooded park! The neighborhood has no sidewalks – because it doesn’t need them. There were backyard swingsets and kids playing everywhere. Sure, it’s suburbia – but it’s *pretty*, and a neighborhood I’d be really happy for Aiden to grow up in.

Oh, and while we’re renting now, the owner is favorable to selling to us in a year or so once we’re ready to buy.

Only issue is a minor angel infestation in Aiden’s room (cherub wallpaper border, obviously meant for an infant girl) that will have to be dealt with. I wonder if they make Wall-E or Doctor Who borders….

Hola, campers!

Just to prove that I’ve not been completely move-obsessed, I have a new pen&ink to show you. She’s, I suppose, about 98% done – you’ll notice some unfinished-ness on the right side where I haven’t yet figured out how I want to frame the image.

This was modeled off of a photograph of a friend of mine, who can identify herself (and link to the photograph) if she likes :)

Tomorrow it’s off to Saint Louis for house-hunting! Most of my online presence is concentrated in Twitter-length bursts right now, so I’ll be a bit scarce in blogland for a few weeks yet!

I started packing my art studio today.

This is actually proving to be a far less torturous endeavor than in past moves (so far). Yet another advantage of my recent shift to pen&ink is that my needed supplies consist of a couple of pads of paper, one small bottle of ink, three brushes, a handful of pens and pencils, and my light box; the sum of which fits in a small backpack easily. So if I get stir crazy from packing and HAVE to do some art RIGHT NOW in the next month (very likely), I have those supplies, and everything else is fair game.

“Everything else” is a lot, I will admit. I am a pack rat and dabbler in myriad forms of artistic expression. I have supplies for jewelry making, clay, wire work, maskmaking, collage, photography – and most dangerously, “found object” sculpture, meaning any kind of junk object with an interesting form that I think I might be able to make into something someday. I’ve even kept about a zillion of the little orange tabs that twist off the top of my printer’s ink cartridges.

But more unexpected help comes from my newly limited resources thanks to my back injury. I’m no longer trying to do craft fairs, meaning I’m not going to keep trying to find new crafts to flesh out my product line (2-d prints alone do pretty badly at such events, I’ve found). It’s far less likely that I will have time and energy to, say, create a faerie diorama on a mirror just for fun, so away can go the supplies I got for that sort of thing. I’m not ditching the beads – I’ve found I like making jewelry – but gone is the fear that I am losing precious business resources if I want to get rid of something rather than move it across the country yet again. (In the past ten years I’ve moved from Pittsburgh to Boston to Seattle to Los Angeles to Seattle again, and now to Saint Louis!) Oddly enough in this case, with limited resources comes an increase in focus, and a decrease in attachment to all this stuff I’ve accumulated but can no longer use.

Anyway, I’m packing. So far there’s a bag of trash, and two packed boxes of canvases, and a slowly-filling box of stuff to give away. The mat cutter and slide projector will probably go on Craigslist, in the hope that they will go to an art student. The (heavy!) art books will go one or two at a time into the bottom of boxes with other supplies. And as I sort through boxes of stuff I haven’t even seen since before the last move, I will constantly fight the glee of discovery with “no, you haven’t used this in at least two years, you don’t need to keep it!”

It’s official: we’re moving to Saint Louis.

Yep. Saint Louis, Missouri. The Midwest. A Red state. Jesusland.

Wait, what?

No, really. I’m having some difficulty comprehending the fact that I’m really pretty excited about this. It’s not a direction I ever expected us to go, but against all expectations we like the area and there are some really intriguing opportunities for us out there. Seattle will always hold a place in my heart, but it would seem our time here is done.

Anyway, we’ve been waiting on this news for about a week, and now that it’s come things are all aflurry. By the beginning of April we need to have a five-bedroom house, a cat, and a toddler (not to mention the adults) packed and moved two thousand miles. There are a few decades of junk to be sorted through and dealt with, a new house to find, and all the other crap that comes with a big-ass move, all-absorbing to us but likely boring as infomercials to most of you!

So yes. I will try to check in here a couple times a week, but it will be sparse at best until we get settled in STL. And then there should be lots of interesting content as I explore the arts scene there. (Even just a cursory Google search has yielded enough to make me actually interested in doing so!)