Looking for the light

Friday night was the opening for the Gallery's November show, Women Behind the Lens, and I decided I wanted to wear a touch of schoolbus yellow (also known as Mimosa, which Pantone experts have apparently decided is this year's color of the year) because it appears in almost all the works I submitted for the exhibit.

What I REALLY wanted was a yellow scarf to wear over my blue jacket, but I wasn't able to find one in the right shade in any of the local stores, so I decided instead to invent the pin shown at left. I printed a 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch version of one of the images in the show and taped it to an existing pin, and then took some of the leftover jawbreakers from Halloween and glued them to yellow and blue buttons (having run thread through the buttons first). I taped the thread to the bottom of the pin and Voila! -- a decorative and dangly (though quite possibly short-lived) device announcing my connection to my work.

So this morning -- since I promised my incredible poet friend Maureen I would share -- I photographed the pin against yesterday's paper, which happened to be lying on the counter under the brightest light in the kitchen... a goofy accident, but it works. I confess I had a blast with this little project, and it did turn out to be a perfect channel for that restless energy I spoke of earlier in the week. And the good news is that someone bought FIVE of my pieces at the show -- apparently he's a regular ferry commuter (they're all images of the floor of the ferry, like the one featured here) and just enjoyed the idea that there can be beauty in that daily chore. What intrigued me most was that he, the buyer, was wearing a dark blue jacket lined with -- you guessed it, mimosa!

Driving down the road to church this morning, still in my yellow-seeking mood, I could see that our deciduous trees (always gravely outnumbered by our cedars and firs) have lost a lot of their leaves in the last two days of heavy rain; almost all the red leaves are gone now. But those bright school-bus yellows are still out there, and provide a bright and lovely accent to the dark evergreens. And on a dark gray day, with those bright yellow leaves as illumination, even a yellow warning sign can have artistic appeal. So there IS light, even in the darkness. But sometimes you have to be very conscious about looking for it.