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Heron Moon Designworks
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- Lucerne, CA
- United States
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Heron Moon Designworks's Discussions
Questions for the Community
Replied Mar. 11, 2008
Questions for the Community
Replied Mar. 11, 2008
Heron Moon Designworks's Page
Profile Information
- Etsy Shop:
- http://www.heronmoon.etsy.com
- About Me:
- I love light and color. I live for those things. I've been living for those things for 48 years now, lots of those years in beautiful northern Alabama but seven of them here in northern California. Right now, I live in Lucerne, in Lake County, CA, with the love of my life, Gary, and my two furry children, Remy and Tiki (a border collie and a Siamese mulatto, respectively.
I guess I've always been an artist. (Haven't we all?) I drew prolifically, on everything from the walls to drawing paper, from the first time they let me make marks with a crayon. My wonderful grandparents encouraged me to make art. I think they both had lots of talent and they wished they had followed their dreams, so they got vicarious enjoyment from watching me flower, artistically. Trapped in a tiny featureless farming town in featureless southeast Missouri, my grandmother turned to crafts and knitting, and I think she was the primary support for the tiny, tacky crafts store that sprang up there and then withered away after her death. She made amazing things, though some of them were awfully kitschy: she knitted wonderful dorky garments for us kids; she knitted, sewed, and crocheted utterly fabulous Barbie doll clothing, from picnic shorts sets to sequined ball gowns straight out of classic movies; she made unbeviably detailed Barbie-scale upholstered and wooden furniture; she covered everything that would hold still in gold foil and then antiqued it. But she inspired in me a consuming passion for the handmade, and I haven't been able to shake it, ever since.
I floundered around in college for a few years, but finally went back, at age 25, and got my BA in Art (Univ. of Alabama-Huntsville, 1987) with a primary focus in printmaking, especially photographic-derived images (which required a thorough facility with black and white film and darkroom processes--which I also adored). My minor area of focus was sculpture, mostly additive (which required a good facility with woodshop equipment--which I also adored). My weakest area was fluid media. Despite having produced a few nice little paintings, oils and watercolors, that's still my weakest suit.
I had every intention of pursuing a master's degree, having been the darling of the art department and having earned full-tuition scholarships based on portfolio plus straight-A academics, seven of the eight semesters it took me to finish my bachelor's, but the mice and I laid our best plans in the dustbin. Life intervened, and I worked, over the ensuing years (with making art a sad, random, frequently-aborted black hole of energy) as an art museum preparator--at least I was around art every day, for those years--and a house painter (I mastered fluid media on a rather large scale, I guess), carpenter (thank the Goddess for that woodshop class!), freelance writer, newspaper proofreader, medical assistant, maintenance (wo)man, dilettante, ne-er-do-well, roustabout, and rabblerouser. Some of those things didn't pay very well.
I was always a wild child and free spirit, and I've traveled most of the Western and Southern US and parts of Europe on my personal quest for ever-expanding visual food and experiences. I always feared being my mother and my grandmother: they never left their tiny hometown, never took any risks, never had the world get in their faces. My goal, from early on, was to avoid Western women's all-too-frequent process of looking around, suddenly, at age 45 or 65 or 85 and realizing that their lives had been lived for others, lived according to society's expectations, lived out of duty while postponing, often 'til too late, their own dreams and aspirations. I backpacked, sometimes solo, in remote lion- and bear-infested mountains and deserts. I did a long solo trip out West, waking up and picking each day's destination on my map, letting the wind take me to the next adventure and seeing some amazing things that changed my perception, my theology/spirituality, my concept of beauty, and especially my knowledge of myself. I loved passionately and sometimes indiscriminately, I experimented with LSD and psychedelic mushrooms in my quest for different views of reality, I suffered mental illness and sometimes even gave up on life (though each time, miraculously, I was pulled back from death's seductive embrace, locked in a clean white room, and sent back, with a mixture of dismay and relief, into the jumble and cacophany of my life). I was always on the move, whether to a new apartment or a new city, and recently I calculated, finally, the frequency of my changes of address: since age 17, I've spent an average of 1.5 years at any given location. Weird.
I've made some strange choices that have affected my view of the world, too. At age 18, charging off to my first apartment in Memphis, TN, I made the decision to not own a TV. I believed that it was, at best, a seductive and addictive syrupy potion that narcotized and envigorated most Americans, and at worst, a nefarious tool for manipulating the public mind, by unnamed governmental forces and greed-drunk megacorporations marketing often-useless (and sometimes-harmful) things--and ideas--to people with no need for them. I succeeded, too, because after a couple of years without TV, I grew "clean and sober". I would find myself somehwere with a television turned on and, desensitized as I was, it felt like a poisonous assault on my senses. It was incredibly offensive and insulting, and I had never noticed it before. I mean, I quit watching mostly so I would read more, originally. Anyway, you'd be surprised how differently you see things, and how free to make unbiased opinions and decisions you are, when you have lived free of its mind-control for many years. Of course you are also missing an enormous vocabulary, socio-economically, and you find yourself across a strange moat from the rest of the world, leaning on a staff and wearing rags in the desert of your existence--but that is their image of you, not yours (though you sometimes notice the moat).
I avoided movies, too, from age 18 or so, until I was about 45, but not for the same reasons I eschewed television...I am, it seems, just really sensitive to imagery, music, and dialogue well delivered--and triply so when they are combined with skill. I just found movies too powerful, all those years. They overwhelmed me, even on the small screen, and the violent ones gave me terrible nightmares and sometimes even day-mares.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I've slowly re-accustomed myself to these media, over the last several years, but their absence has, it seems, pretty profoundly affected my view of American culture and my cultural and even artistic language. Thankfully, I still have the removed perspective I gained: TV adverts, programming, and movies, which seem to control the minds of my friends, based on their responses (if you see it on TV it has to be true, right?), are rather transparent to me. Their tactics, their strategies, their subliminal messages--it's like looking at the framing of a house, for me. And for that, I'm grateful. It's like looking at media with x-ray glasses, especially advertising. It lets me break down the message and the various elements of its construction; I feel it gives me a clearer picture of, and access to, its tools, especially the illustrative ones, and I often see how that affects my art. Maybe you will, if you examine it; maybe I'm full of hot air.
I studied art history as a minor in college, and have never been able to get enough eye candy. I've been to major museums in Washington DC, Berlin, St. Louis, San Diego, Atlanta, Chicago, and other cities, and I've explored galleries in San Francisco, coastal Oregon, Santa Fe, and all those cities I mentioned already, and I love art festivals and even crafts fairs, at least the better ones. I used to keep up with Art Journal and all the serious art publications, but sometime in my late twenties, I gave them up, for a pair of reasons. I couldn't afford, on my carpenter's intermittent wages, the subscriptions to them, and I had one other reason. One of the ideas our professors shoved down our throats--or attempted to indoctrinate us with--was the separation of art and beauty. They didn't phrase it so, and they might have even argued that it wasn't what they were telling us, but it was the overwhelming message I got, and for the duration of my art school years and several years after, it was a major tenet of my artreligion. Beauty was for the dabblers, the Sunday painters, the overweight, frustrated, talentless middle-aged empty-nesters (women, mostly) of no redeeming value to society, and they, and hack art, were to be ground beneath our real artist's heel. We made art, after all, about ideas, about historic and modern social constructs. We made art that was intercourse with all art that preceded it, as well as with art that was its peer, and that art could hardly be taken seriously if it debauched itself in the brothel of beauty. My art, from that time, was awkward and angular and often pretty ugly, and I never felt it was ugly enough. It kept lapsing, like a fat woman unable to push away the box of sugar donuts, into the pretty, into lush colors and happy textures. A general deliciousness kept creeping in, around its edges, no matter now vigorously I worked to excise it.
Finally, several years out of art school, the hypnosis began to wear off. I kept looking at a lot of art, and as I've always done way too much examining of my motivations and struggling to define my goals, I looked at what drove me to both experience and create art, and I had one of those Aha! moments: I loved beauty! I loved the play of color and line and texture that unashamedly branded certain art as beautiful! I realized I could love what was lovely without sinking to what lacked taste. And I came to this conclusion, as a caboose to the whole realization train: there is a place in this world for Sunday painters. There's a place for ordinary art that doesn't challenge people or get published in glossy expensive magazines in New York City. Art that makes Joe Blow happy is at least as important as art that only over-educated pundits can understand, and it is probably more important, in the grand scheme of things. That which makes people happy to look at, if created by a human being, is art, according to my (enlightened?) rules of the universe. That was my epiphany, and I still embrace it as a philosophy, to this day. I don't care a whit about getting published in ArtSnob magazine any more. I care about other human beings, and the things that are important to them, and I care about looking at things so beautiful that they make me dance or sing or cry or worship or beg to die right that moment 'cause I've had such happiness it should crown a lifetime.
That's what I think to tell you, when the AboutMe opportunity presents itself. I create because I have to, and I would be honored and humbled if I could make something that made another person happy when they looked at it.
I became disabled, about six to eight years ago, and it has changed my life profoundly, of course. One of the most difficult changes has been economic; I live on a tiny Social Security disability check that leaves less-than-no money for art supplies, and it has been through the generosity of my life partner(s) (I left the abusive one in 2006 and met the love of my life in 2007! But they both helped support me, to my great chagrin and gratitude...) that I've afforded to begin in my current, disability-friendly non-choices of artistic medium, digital imagery and jewelry design. (I still plan to make more art quilts and have thousands of ideas clamoring to get out of my fuzzy head, but textiles are on hold while I get a good working knowledge of jewelry fabrication, including, hopefully, lampworked glass beads and components I build from polymer clay, the latter of which I'm immersed at the moment). I'm sure that other hungers will come looming at me out of the mist with their gaping, money-swallowing maws wide, but for now, I list myself as a graphic artist and jewelry designer, to give people a pigeonhole in which to put me.
I chose the name Heron Moon Designworks because of things I've seen during my recent life's transformation. I left the nightmare of five years of abuse by a former partner in late 2006, choosing homelessness over more battery and endless verbal denigration and humiliation. I was at the absolute nadir of my existence when I met Gary, and he not only brought me into his exquisitely lovely home here in paradise, with beyond-gorgeous views of the lake and wildlife out every portal, but he also loves me and supports my need to create, well beyond anything I've ever experienced. And I'm equally devoted to--and in love with--him. Anyway, some of the most powerful things I've seen, in my daily study of the lake and its many faces and details, have been the full moon over the water, and a lone blue heron who haunts our dock when I'm very still and quiet. The heron has been an especially moving experience, in its beauty and sheer size, and it has taken on the meaning, in my shattered and reborn life, of the phoenix of mythology. Superimposed on the enormous full moon I've photographed countless times as it rises above the dark water, I think it also makes a lovely image, and I've chosen it for my business logo (and, logically, business name) and even gotten it tattooed (my first tattoo, at age 48!) rather hugely, on my back, it holds such meaning for me.
My need for art is inextricably entwined with my need for community. Somehow I have wound up almost completely isolated here. Actually, I've been isolated since coming to California in 2001. My former partner kept me a virtual prisoner of his jealousies, my disability limits my mobility and energy, and gorgeous as my life is, here in rural Lake County, I only leave the house every two weeks or so, and know no one here in California socially--much less anyone out here in the country, my neighbors. And I've lost track, almost completely, with friends from my old life in Alabama, and have let my online friendships based on music-sharing go by the wayside.
Frankly, I'm starved, almost to the brink of existence it seems, for community and friendship, and go on with life, as they say, just one day at a time, praying (sometimes literally, neo-pagan agnostic that I am...) for human contact. Contact, by chat or phone or e-mail, with other women, and to top that, with other artists (other women artists--that'd be sublime!) is something I starve for daily and I struggle to be patient 'til I can find it. I'm hoping that joining Etsy.com's various Yahoo groups as well as EtsyLove will open up veins of sustaining companionship, flowing both into and from my heart. I am an open book and an unguarded heart, living without guard or censor and trusting and loving all I meet...people often take me wrong, but I'm simple and caring and honest to a fault (and sometimes funny and smart) and the truest of blues. If you feel the gentle itch, please do contact me. I make a loyal friend and a generous community member, and would love to meet anyone and everyone.
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- Hoo-wee, well just look at my profile for my favorites, for now; I wrote AboutMe and can't sit still any longer or my Fibromyalgia will never forgive me. More later!
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Heron Moon Designworks's Photos
Heron Moon Designworks's Blog
I'm now selling at a gallery!
Well, finally. After looking around the area at galleries, shops, and other venues, for the past year, I happened into a little gallery in Lower Lake, CA the other day after hearing an ad on the radio about it. I had actually known the gallery was there, but just hadn't made it into the place since it opened, due to a series of events that took up most of my time and energy. When I heard the radio ad, which mentioned that the gallery also sells Fimo clay and WireLace, I literally turned my tr
… ContinuePosted on March 25, 2008 at 10:06pm —
Photography and local gallery
Photography is going well. I've just been using natural light, from the big windows facing the lake, which I thought was far too green to use, but apparently the "Cloudy" setting in the white balance on my Nikon gives a fairly balanced col
… ContinuePosted on March 13, 2008 at 10:55am —
Finally, success shooting my work...
Nobody reads this blog but since I have nobody else to celebrate with, I'll share. Maybe somewhere across the galaxy, an alien will catch a whiff of these ones and zeros and experience a tingle of digital pleasure. Man, what a weird thought. That's my brain, for you.
Finally! I have had so much trouble trying to get good shots of my jewelry, against all odds, really: I majored in photography and printmaking, in college, and am a fine photographer. I even worked for an art museum as pre
… ContinuePosted on March 10, 2008 at 8:03pm —
art supplies nearby!
I was out, yesterday, driving (a rare occurrence, with the price of gas, these days!), bent on obtaining some plywood and diet Coke, when I heard an advert on the local radio station. Here in Lake County we can't get much except local stations, and they advertise mostly casinos in the area, plus hydroponics supply stores, as this is apparently one of the country's prime marijuana growing regions, plus odds and ends ads: for local restaurants and gift shops and a children's clothing store. I d
… ContinuePosted on March 5, 2008 at 12:13pm —
My very own polymer clay helpful tip!
Wow, I actually have something helpful to offer. This doesn't happen very often, at least not in my artwork, though I'm not sure why.
I've been soooo busy, lately, trying to help my DP (that's Domestic Partner) through the loss of his mother, and so, as usual, haven't posted to this web
… ContinuePosted on February 26, 2008 at 3:19pm — 1 Comment
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>safe!! I have an awesome store you can shop at
>and GO GREEN. It is wonderful , I would be lost
>without these awesome products.
>Thank you,
>Chris
>
>http://www.livetotalwellness.com/chrissauner
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