and I’m off… New Mexico bound, land of enchantment

(photo by Catherine Massaro)

You all know how the old adage goes –

  Fences make good neighbors.

I just smiled big when I saw this fence on a road trip.

Can’t we all just get along?

(Photograph by Catherine Massaro)

” You do not pass through this life, it passes through you.”

(photo by Catherine Massaro)

There are so many good art books out there. One of my favorites is, THE VIEW from the Studio Door, by Ted Orland. It’s a book on how artists find their way in an uncertain world.

Here is an excerpt that I found particularly valuable to me.

“…When it comes to making art, our intuition is often light – years ahead of our intellect… we sense the meaning of the world unconsciously and capture that meaning through our art – and then have to wait for our intellect to understand what we already knew.”

Something I learned in my last body of work, featured in this web site (TO END IS TO BEGIN) was to go with my intuition and not second guess either my motive or the outcome of the work. I just started doing it – one after the other for over a year and a half. It was only the following year that what I had created became clear to me. They still reveal things to me everyday.

( feature photo – Studio Massaro/ NV – interior, by Catherine Massaro)

Camille Paglia wrote the most amazing article, How Capitalism Can Save Art. Camille is a University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philidelphia.

I think I’ve read it about 10 times now, and it’s just so powerful and well written. Check this paragraph out:

…”Capitalism has it’s weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.”

I love my iPhone too. And I love this lovely Mac Book I write this blog on. I love this amazing machine that allows my voice, art and website to reach out to anyone, anywhere. But thankfully I was educated in an ART school, where making something every day mattered. Looking deeply and thinking long and hard about what you saw was our everyday fare. The history of art was our timeline and connection to the past that put our history in perspective.

God, I loved art school. It taught me to think and see in a hundred different directions. It’s a sad thing to see the arts diminishing in our troubled public education system. It will make for a weak society.  Even as we advance technologically we are in fact getting less and less civilized I fear.

(featured image – DRAWING 101, canvas collage by Catherine Massaro)

Boy there was a great write up in the Sunday New York Times travel section on the beautiful Texas Hill Country. It’s filled with many of my favorite places around the area, but with only 36 hours and lots of roads to discover, many left out. Fredericksburg, in the hill country, happens to be the location of my winter home/studio. I don’t do winters anymore as it  seems I’ve spent a lifetime escaping winter. If New Mexico had no winter, I’d surely still be there, but Texas is where I would rather be when it gets cold. So around December in Reno, NV, I pack up and head to what Jeannie Ralston refers to:

“the Hill Country—being Texas at it’s finest—is like nowhere else in the world.”

Amen to that , sister.

(featured image – HILL COUNTRY HOMAGE , canvas collage by Catherine Massaro)

” Only in the last decade have I learned THAT LIFE, with all its perilous ups and downs, does turn out BETTER than we anticipate and that most of the things we worry about DON’T HAPPEN.”

When you’re in your 50’s, your measuring stick for happiness finds a different mark than the one you had in your 20’s, 30’s or 40’s.  Happiness seems to come from old friends and new starts. I have recently reconnected with some  dear old friends, maintained great relationships with one’s I’ve had for years, and even lost my oldest childhood friend – and not from an untimely death. But it was a fine friendship for over 40 years and what I have to take away from it is how we were each other’s best memory keeper. It was a traumatic break for me, but I found solace in a recent editorial by Jo Packham , in her marvelous publication, Where Women Create.

“It is written that if you can name one person who is a true and trusted friend, who has endured , and is victorious through the tests of time, then you are blessed indeed… Often friendships just cannot last forever; along life’s journey, a bend in the road can separate the two of you before you realize that one of you has been left behind”.

Anyway, my life is not lacking for friendships – thank God.  I will continue to build memories with those dear enough to share good times and bad with me,  accepting  both who I am, as well as who I may become. After all, if we do not change, we are not growing. And if we are not growing, we are not really living.

I am happy to be a memory keeper along for the journey, but will keep a wary eye out for  those bends in the road.

(featured image – photograph by Catherine Massaro)