Lisa Call

Purple Water ©2008 Tina Mammoser
2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

 
Not enough brain power tonight to write about scrum. I tried, I got distracted and have now spent 45 minutes typing with no satisfactory results.

So on to other miscellaneous short topics I’ve wanted to mention recently (mostly links out to the blog world):

1. Above is an ACEO I bought from the Cycling Artist - Tina Mammoser. I love her seascapes. Gorgeous. When my house is done and I have room for art again I hope to purchase a larger piece, but couldn’t resist this little purple one the other day.
2. Seth Apter over at The Altered Page has started up another round of The Pulse, a compilation of artist interviews.
   
   At the moment, he’s posting answers to the question about collecting stuff. My bowl of rocks is in this post: Show and Tell Part 1. This is all a huge amount of work on Seth’s parth - so thank you Seth. It’ll be a fun few weeks as the answers to the 5 questions are posted.
3. Came across a new artist blog, which I can already tell I’m going to love, by Diane McGregor. Definitely check out her blog Working Space for some interesting reading. Every post is packed full of great content.
4. This weekend I went gallery hopping with Alyson Stanfield, of artbizcoach.com, and a handful of other artists. We had a really good time and saw some of the preview art for Dialog: City, an arts and cultural event in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention, happening right now in our wonderful city. I can’t decide if I’ll head downtown tomorrow to see some of these events with the crowds or not. Looks fun, but also looks like a potential zoo.

Alyson took many pictures (if you subscribe to her newsletter you would have seen me this morning in the intro, well, except I haven’t been able to get it to load yet today - I think the server is having problems).

Here’s a photo she took of just me. Behind me is the Pepsi Center (the red building in the far back) - where much of the political action is. We’re standing on the top of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s House at Ghost Ranch
 

This weekend I finished reading Anita Pollitzer’s memoir about Georgia O’Keeffe, A Woman On Paper. I very much enjoyed Pollitzer’s personal view of O’Keeffe and found it a refreshing and enjoyable read after attempting to get through the rather dense biography of Matisse, Matisse The Master, by Hilary Spurling.

It wasn’t until yesterday I remembered I toured O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu, New Mexico in 2000.

I spent two weeks at Ghost Ranch in the fall of 2000 attending an art workshop and I went with some classmates down to Abiquiu for the tour. While fascinating, it was also a bit weird to be traipsing through and gawking at someone’s personal life. Not much had been done to the house and what really stuck in my mind was they showed us the container with the tea leaves for the tea she drank daily, kinda weird to me they still had it 14 years after her death (how long does tea keep?).

The house is no longer open for tours so it was a wonderful opportunity to see how a talented and focused artist lived, but I always remember it as a bit creepy also.

Many of us in the class also drove over to look at the area around O’Keeffe’s house at Ghost Ranch, which has never been open for tours. The above picture is her house and the amazing view she had. The best piece of land at Ghost Ranch in my opinion.

Below was O’Keeffe’s view of El Pedernal, which she often painted, from the house.

How can one not make amazing art surrounded by such stunning colors and landscape. I’d move back to Northern New Mexico in a heartbeat if I won the lottery. I grew up in Los Alamos, only 40 miles from Abiquiu and I very much miss the southwestern scenery.

 

El Pedernal as seen from Georgia O’Keeffe’s House at Ghost Ranch

 
When I was a kid, I knew Ghost Ranch as the Ghost Ranch Living Museum and they had a lot of desert animals like a zoo. I’m not sure I spent much time appreciating the scenery but animals were very cool as they were in small cages and very close and scary: wolves, mountain lions, snakes and I’ll never forget the gila monster, ick.

Although my favorite spot on the drive past Ghost Ranch was Echo amphitheater just up the road from the animals. Definitely a place to visit if you are in Northern New Mexico.

 

Echo Amphitheater