I've been away for so long...

Where do you begin when you have taken a seemingly forever hiatus from doing something?
I have a theory that I am to art as bi-polar people are to mood swings. You just cruise along all normal and stuff and then, suddenly, a manic episode where everything is moving in fast forward. That is how inspiration hits me. I get really super involved in certain mediums for a truncated period of time. During that time, I am very prolific and create tons of stuff in that medium, but if I take a break from it, or get interrupted, boom, the ride is over, back to reality. I've done it with music, writing, drawing, photography, painting, sculpting, sewing, cake decorating, knitting... you name the genre and I have probably dabbled in it at one time or another.

My family has been kind enough to dedicate one of our very few and precious closets in our tiny city dwelling for me to store all of the supplies, so if the mood strikes me, I will be ready. They also don't seem to mind when I spend a long weekend in my pj's keeping strange hours just creating one thing after another like some sort of machine until finally I am nodding off and Jon tells me that it is time to go to sleep. In that tiny closet, I have supplies to do pretty much anything. I like knowing it is there. Opening the door is unlocking the things that are always swirling around in my head.

On that note, instead of trying to detail with words everything that has been happening in my life recently, here are many visuals to show you what I've been up to:

Chewie is still the cutest doggie ever and I discovered he has a teeny mustache:

There was The Posies show at The Croc where I got to see lots of friends I have not seen in ages:

A new art store opened in my neighborhood, so I've been painting:

and I went to SXSW for the first time. Here is a video I shot backstage:


more happened, but right now I'm distracted by an empty canvas across the room...

The good, the bad and the AWESOME!

The bad news, my camera died and I lost a LOT of the pics and vids from the shows this last week.

The good news, by some awesome twist of fate, the ONLY vids that I did not lose, managed to be one song of each incarnation of The Posies!! YES!!

You can see them all here.
Just finished uploading: youtube.com/dreamingviola

Alaska

While I was back in Alaska earlier this month I shot a couple of videos. People always ask me what it is like up there, so I thought it would be fun to string them together and give you a little glimpse.
Most of this video was taken on the drive from my mother's house to the Airport. The song is one that I wrote the lyrics to with my old band, Dear John Letters.
I hope you enjoy my little video blog!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

This is a photo from Darian's 10th birthday. I LOVE it! The party had a witches theme. I even made a witch Barbie cake!

Tonight we are having friends over and going Trick-or-Treating. This may be the last year we do it, so I am gonna enjoy it just that much more!!

In the spirit of Halloween and the masks that we wear, I made a new video using the song, Bottom of the Bottle.
I know the song is about drinking, but I always heard it to be more about a person who just got lost. I used the whole process of putting on make-up as the backdrop for this song because putting on that pretty mask, even if things are messed up, conveys that same idea of sadness/being lost to me. Wouldn't it be interesting if we always looked how we felt? I waited until it was the morning after I went out so I could look a little run down in the video. I wore all gray and kept the mirror kind of dirty to give it a certain hopeless feeling as well. It was an interesting experiment and I like how the final version turned out. It is all one shot, which is something I have never done before, so at the very least it was great practice.

Here it is:

First vid with the new camera!

It is a lot bumpy because it is the first time I used the camera and I was playing with the settings. Here is a video of Josephine & Angelita from The Triple Door show, 7/14/2007


See more videos at: http://www.youtube.com/dreamingviola

Enjoy!

Letter

This is just something I did for fun. The song is Jon & I screwing around with the recording devices on our home computer.

Radio8Ball - Sundown

This is the video of Jon and Andras doing the live version of the radio8ball show. Our friend, Bre, was randomly drawn on this particular night.
Her question was, "Who, even, are you, even, fer-reals?"

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This next video is of our fearless host doing a song himself! It is a lovely song called Message for the Moon by Andras Jones.

Beautiful

This is a music video I made with the help of Posies fans from Dear23 & Myspace who donated their photos to the cause. The whole thing was shot using the video function on my little digital camera. The outdoor shots were from New York & Seattle.

Dream all Day...

Someone uploaded this video to Youtube and I just came across it tonight. I forgot how funny it was. All of the smoke and hair.
(For my relatives who read this and have never met him, my hubby is the one singing lead on this song) Oh the days of yor when Seattle was all about hair and Doc Martins.

OMG- gotta love Youtube. No sooner did I post this when I found this one too: