By Carrie Bloomston
We had a business for seventeen years, my husband and I. It wasn’t a scalable or glamorous business. It was just him and me in painter’s clothes working in houses one by one. We painted murals and did faux-finishes and generally painted and glazed all of Scottsdale a warm Tuscan gold or medium taupe.
I’m writing in my head all the time. Well, actually not in my head. In my body. Since I’m constantly urging people to turn off their minds in their creative practice when I teach art, painting, creativity, vision board workshops, I can’t say I’m writing in my head. More of the torso, actually. I feel the words in my shoulders and chest, roughly. Not the wrists. Not the root chakra. Not my heart, really. But in my chest. They collect like Luna’s fur does on our concrete floor. At first it doesn’t seem like much–she’s a German Shorthaired Pointer, after all, so it doesn’t seem like there’d be a lot of fur. But after a few days it’s like a game of miniature pick-up sticks–white dashes covering the tobacco colored concrete. When I sweep it up–there’s enough fur that it looks like a medium-sized gerbil. And that’s just after two or three days.
Hello! I’m so excited to announce that Windham Fabrics printed my Newsprint fabric in 108″ wide quilt back cotton and it is zooming to stores near you…in fact it might already be there!
When I created my newsprint four years ago, I made a print that I knew I needed in my own stash. I LOVE newsprint and words and text. At that time, I only had one or two newsprint options (one was a linen which I had bought on etsy and which arrived a month later from China in a little brown paper package covered with lovely markings). But the newsprint fabrics I had seen were filled with inappropriate content…kinda like a real newspaper.
Hello and happy summer. I hibernate in the summer–I take time to unplug from media and obligations, be with my family, and clean and organize the corners of my house. I did this long before I fell in love with Marie Kondo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (which I did last summer). If you haven’t read it, you might want to. So, I’ve been hibernating a bit. But I wanted to share a cool thing in case you haven’t seen it. I was honored to be featured in the Summer 2016 of the stunning, inspiration-fest that is Where Women Create magazine. They completely captured the depth of my artistic life and I’m honored to see myself on the pages of such a richly nourishing creative magazine.
Hello there. Long time no see…or I guess I should say, long time no say because I haven’t posted here in a few months. I hope you are well and good and emerging from nature’s cocoon of winter. Our spring here in the desert has been warm and lovely. The garden bed is singing to me–the heirloom tomatoes ripening, the dill flowers are shoulder high, and the sunflowers are showing us their faces now.
If you read this blog, I just want to thank you and wish you happy holidays.
I honestly don’t know how to interpret backend blog analytics or to understand if my numbers of readers are good or bad, high or low. I’m kinda low-tech.
But still, if there are ten of you (other than my mom) who read this blog and support my work then that feels good to me. And if there are a hundred then that’s pretty awesome. And if there are 1,000 then that is amazing. But for some people, 1,000 would seem insignificant.
I’ve been making art a lot for a few months and that process plugs me into my essential nature. In that space we meet all the aspects of the self. All the biggies pop up when we head into the unknown land of our true creativity. (If you haven’t yet fallen in love with Jason Silva you’ll probably want to watch this. And then watch all of his Shots of Awe videos. But read my post first.)
An open letter to all the Little League shamers of the world:
We see you. We of sound mental health. We are watching you. But today, you went too far, papas.
Ranting isn’t usually my style. Forgive me because here I am about to place my high horse on top of my soapbox. Today my pen is my sword and it writes on the side of mental/emotional health:
Remember our Happy Flag Project?
A year ago we were heading to Birmingham, Alabama to see the Dalai Lama. My mom and I had spent the previous five months collecting handmade, artful prayer flags in honor of the visit. We led workshops in Alabama and Arizona. The whole city of Birmingham got involved–it was part of the University (UAB) curriculum in many departments. The Sculpture department created an installation with 1,000 flags.
I will never remember all the things we didn’t do this summer.
I won’t remember looking out from the top of the Eiffel tower at all those rooftops in Paris
or splashing in the ocean–Atlantic or Pacific.
I won’t remember waiting for Old Faithful to do its thing–
