open studios

After working our butts off yesterday, including sending off the taxes (yes, we used Turbo Tax this year and probably will next year, too, now that we have rediscovered our capacities), today was a "play day." We went to Church in the a.m. (I like to go on the third thursday of the month, because it is mostly music, in high style, with trumpets and bell ringers, piana, organ and sometimes string instruments) and thus I get filled up with "big Methodist music."

After that, we went to RinCon Market and leisurely read parts of the NY Times while savoring eggs, turkey sausage and a decadent cinammon role. Another musical treat was a cellist playing Vivaldi so we really had a lovely morning.

One of my colleagues from a previous consulting job was going to be at the 7th Ave. Studios for Open Studio weekend (www.ercregistry.com/sfairfieldsculptor). I have been wanting to go to this event for the past three years, and so I made it today. http://tucsonopenstudios.com/artists.php

While I was there, I reconnected with an artist from the 1970s who is a weaver, Crane Day (www.craneday.com). I bought a pancho from him in 1976 that I just recently wore in Philly when we went there for my niece's bat mitzvah. The pancho got many raves while we walked Philly's chilly streets.

I met a new artist, K. Loren Dawn (kloren@oceanplum.com)who does collages that struck me as whimsical as well as affordable. She has a genre called "nomadic artist" where she puts watercolors and small collages into a plastic stationery envelope that can be easily tacked onto a wall. I bought one of those and put aside a larger one with glass shards and pastel brush strokes that seemed to strike my fancy today, entitled "chips fall as they may". Even with just modest support, it's good to be a "patron of the arts."

We ended the afternoon on with a trip to the newly opened Costco on the southside of Tucson. We needed lamb chops for a small Seder dinner tomorrow and they have a good meat selection but it's almost not worth it to me to have to snake my way through the mountains of retail goods that fill the floors. I try to make the best of it by watching young families herding through the aisles with babies in carrier packs and toddlers in the basket seats. But the experience always leaves me feeling depleted and a bit ragged in the brain.

So it was good to get home, review all of the artist's cards I picked up from their studios and tack up my small nomadic art collage on my wall to remind me of the artistic spirits swathed in their warehouse studios on 7th Avenue.