Patti Gibbons Art

I recently gave an artist talk. One of the questions that I had been given in preparation was  “what inspires you to create? “ It  not a simple answer. Or maybe it is.  Everything inspires me.  I told that to my accountant, said that an artist should be able to deduct all life expenses on their taxes.  He looked at me a little oddly and laughed - while shaking is head “no”.  I was serious. Most of my life is run at breakneck speed. I want to do all and feel all and cram all into my reservoir of life experiences.   I  race through the day to get to the next thing, my life scheduled into 30 minute segments.  And then I freak out and scream STOP....  put the brakes on and  S L O W  DOWN,  BE IN THE M O M E N T.    FEEL.     SMELL.     HEAR .  TOUCH.    TASTE. And when I do that, the inspiration reveals itself.  Stories  resonate in ...

Summer flew by. School started. My days are now fast paced and crammed with so much work. Teaching in NY has changed and all I do it work from dawn till dusk doing stupid paperwork, some of which is a waste of time and proves NOTHING save for the state can make teachers do more.  When will the state start making parents do more? I am still drawing every week in my Abstract Drawing class with Meredith Rosier , producing a body of what some are calling"new surreal colorist art".  I have worked in a surreal manner ever since I was a child, and especially seen in my collage work.  Now it is creeping into my drawings, and  I am  finding my voice in my art making.  It is the most original work that I have made -  most drawings are automatic drawings (meaning they are begun with my eyes closed) and it is created out of a well of lifetime experiences, and sometimes I think the human race's collective experiences; there are times when I feel that th...

I have been gone much of July, starting with a trip to Barcelona, Spain, then to Nashville to visit my daughter and grandchildren, finally to paint with Woodstock artist Christie Scheele for four days in Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod. I am home now...but not sure for how long.... It has been a summer where I have had little time to think about my travel phobias; I just put on my big girl panties and did it.  Don't know if it is was the EMDR, getting older and braver, or help from GPS, but I had little if any anxiety about traveling - save for a few instances in Barcelona when 1) I got lost in an immense building and forgot where my friends were sitting in the outside cafes and 2) when I stopped to take a few photos on the street and my friends disappeared around the corner in what was only a few seconds.  I don't speak Spanish, many there did not speak English, and it put me into instant anxiety mode.  I lived through it and eventually found them, and quickly go...

I spent most of Saturday doing chores. 9 am killates, followed by breakfast,  the farmer's market,  dry cleaners,  drug store,  art supply store. By 2 pm I was done. Done from the running around, done from the 96 degree heat. At my last stop my cell phone rings. It is my friend telling me she is at my house and can I meet her  at Michaels. Seems she bought 150.00 worth of canvases, LARGE ONES, at 60% off, and decided that she did not need them.  They were holding them for her there and she needed to either sell them to me, or else return them. Did I want them? HOW BIG? The convertible would not hold the canvases, so I used the CRV, Larry's car, the one WITHOUT A/C (and it isn't that we don't have the money to fix it, it is just that he never has bothered to get it fixed...) and crankily headed over to Michaels, an arts/crafts "box store" that I try to avoid. In the end, it was well worth it.  Six 24" x 36", and two 36" x 48" heav...

I felt like I was giving birth, digging up the garlic with my little spade this morning before the heat of the day hit.  I pushed away the fall leaves, dug carefully around the head, making sure I did not dig into the head. I then lifted under the roots, breaking them up a bit,  and lifted the entire head out of the ground, gently knocking excess dirt off, without disturbing the head. The garlic is of the hard neck variety, and is called "Music". Planted late last fall, this was my first garlic crop.  The cloves came courtesy of a good friend - Woodstock Occupy Congress Ross -  who had the cloves and  nowhere to plant them..so they he made a special ride up from NJ to  plant them in one of my raised beds while the light was fading one cold autumn day. He left them to my care, and I felt like a mother hen, mulching them for the long cold winter, and then fretting in the spring when the greens were up and we had multiple frosts.  Somehow it all wor...

I wrote this story in a curriculum training yesterday.  It was a story that I would not have remembered if it were not for the fact that I had to write a prompt, and being my smart-ass self, I wrote down the word bra.  I ended up using my own prompt to write, and this is what happened.  Oh, and I made the card last week. So apropos for the blog! I think that every little girl dreams about their first bra.  I dreamed about it for years. As I entered fifth grade, there were girls who started “developing” and their mothers bought them their first bras, which were proudly seen through their white Catholic School peter-pan collared shirts. I, on the other hand, still wore undershirts. When I moved up into Jr. High, into a new school in the Catskills, I looked forward to wearing my first bra. But my mother took one look at me and said: “you don’t need one yet”  I was forced to keep wearing undershirts.  And frustrated with my body that seemed to be perm...

Tonight's photo was shot while I was riding down Broadway at sunset.  Taken with my Droid, cropped in Photoshop, and special sepia effects in Vintage Scene, one of my fave iMac photo apps.  I love how the car looks like it is flying through the air. You can get some pretty interesting shots while shooting from a moving car.  And ahem, I was a passenger...though I have been known to do a few drive-by shootings, lol.