someone is about to pay 31 dollars for my BROKEN nintendo. i am including 5 games and all the controllers, but still. there's 5 hours to go on the auction, come on 50 bucks!
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Show in DC
Hello all- I hope everyone is having a great summer. For those of you who will be in the Washington, D.C. area in July, I'd like to let you know about a show I'll will be participating in.
The particulars:
My Space on 7th July 11 - August 4, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13th, from 6:00 to 8:30 pm. Closing Reception: Saturday, August 4th, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.
Touchstone Gallery 406 7th Street, NW, 2nd floor Washington, DC 20004 202-347-2787 http://www.touchstonegallery.com
If you read the press release from the gallery (included below) you will see that it took no great talent for me to snag a space in this show. All it took was persistent dialing. However, being polite and flexible got me a really great space. My work will be one of the first you will see when you walk into the gallery. Mickey and I will be at the opening and possibly at the closing so I hope to see some of my DC friends there! Feel free to forward this info to anyone else you know who might be interested. The gallery is also being really great about sales and they are taking NO COMMISSION on work sold at the show.
Gallery Press Release:
"Answering the need for alternative and interactive exhibition opportunities, Touchstone Gallery created a unique, non-juried option. On July 9th and 10th, artists will hang the art of their choice in their assigned space(s) in the Main Gallery.
In less than two days, the 76, 22-square-foot spaces available were quickly snatched up, overwhelming the phones at Touchstone. Many artists eagerly waited outside the gallery's doors in hopes of being the first to reserve their space as this was a first-come, first-served opportunity.
This exhibition will coincide with the Capital Fringe Festival, where Touchstone Gallery will host several plays on a stage in the center of the gallery. Including more than 400 performances in 22 DC locations, "Cap Fringe" sold more 566 tickets (sold-out shows!) at Touchstone alone last year!"
This morning while flipping channels I stopped on the new Fergie video because it features the hot guy from "Heros" covered in tattoos and wearing a tank top. He also has a weird ponytail but I've decided to ignore that. Anyway, thanks to the supremely untalented Fergie I have a new favorite song lyric: "I'm going to miss you like a child misses a blanket."
It made me snort coffee.
*sigh*
ok, may be it's just me but if I were dropping my kid off in a strange city for a summer program I would like to think that I would know the name of the dorm they are staying in. I would also like to think that if I didn't bother to come armed with this information, that I would not get snappish when the poor sod who's stuck working at the library on Saturday (me) doesn't have this information readily available and can't immediately figure out who to call. By immediately, I mean with-in 15 seconds. She waited slightly longer for me to tell her where the bathrooms were located. grrrr
I love summer!!
I was going to write about how much I love summer, the way the extreme hotness makes me feel like my bones are warm, how much I love riding my new bike and some other blather. But then this arrived in my email box and I got distracted, in a good way. Artomat in Juxtapoz
I still dream of an Artomat machine in Baltimore. Can you believe the Visionary Museum blew him (Clark, the Arto founder) off when he called them about hosting a machine? Shame on Baltimore. Anyway, Mickey and I are going to be at the Artomat 10th anniversary celebration in Winston-Salem this August. I will pass on more information about that sometime soon.
I would also like to point out that my grad school education is being put to use since I have never before understood how to write in links.....Hooray technology requirement!
Foiled
I came to school (grad school not work school) early today to make photocopies of some readings. Apparently I have to set up a special account at the copy center and that closed a half hour ago. *sigh* Now the only question is, do I spend my extra hour on homework or wasting time on the internet? I'm a total dork and my answer is going to be homework...
Squirrels!!
University of Maryland has black squirrels!!! I had never previously read the history of black squirrels, apparently they are sort of like Canadian kudzu. I'm a little worried about the dude mentioned at the bottom of the second page... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/18/AR2005051802251.html
As promised, here are pics of my new bike. Its a 750 Honda Shadow American Classic Edition, with some sort of special seat and after market pipes that Mickey can tell you all about but I just think they look cool. I didn't realize that Mickey had pulled his Triumph so close to my bike so the pictures aren't quite as good as they could be. Oh well, I'm crossing this off my "to-do" list anyway. The bike is rather loud which is more fun than I thought it would be. I don't usually subscribe to the "loud pipes save lives" school of thought but some timely revving stopped a soccer mom from throwing a cup of something out the mini-van window that would have hit me right in the face. Also a problem are cigarette butts that people flick out windows, but that's a whole separate conversation.
So it seems that this summer's road trip will be a lot more comfortable for me than last year's was. Riding has become more fun and less stressful. Speaking of stress, I start school on Monday. So weird.
Things I learned in Italy
1. When you are very tired and rather clumsy it is perfectly possible to lose one of your cute new sandals between the train and the platform. We were trying to catch a train from Leonardo da Vinci Airport and I tripped going up the stairs. The sandal bounced down the stairs and fell on the tracks between the train and the platform. Also, I learned that it's not really possible to retrieve the sandal and so it's better just to say farewell. 2. Mephisto sandals are cheaper in Italy.
3. Americans are really screwed by car companies in the small, efficent car catagory. Seriously, as someone who spent a long time trying to find the perfect balance of function and fuel effciency, I was really annoyed to find out that all the car companies have adorable small cars that we can't get here. INCLUDING, a four-door Yaris that would have been my car of choice had I known it existed. I'm sure many others are already aware of this but for me it was a surprise. Also, Americans are denied the mid-range sized motorcycles. Here there's not really anything between a 250cc and a 750cc. Mickey had a great time pointing out all the styles and makes that were unavailable here. In fact, that might have been his favorite part of the whole vacation.
4. May seems to be off season for the famed gypsy children pickpockets of Italy. Not only were we never bothered but we never saw anyone else bothered. Before we left so many people warned us about being robbed that I started to get worried. I was imagining wading through a never ending sea of pickpockets where ever we went. People even tried to warn against going to Naples at all because of rampant thievery. We had a great time in Naples, we were treated very well and had no problems. Keep in mind that none of this kept me from leaving my wallet in a cab in Treviso........Today it's off the the MVA to replace my license.
5. It's really hard to keep Mickey from walking out of a restaurant when he notices that sliced fried lard is on the menu. For those who don't know, Mickey has some food issues and was very concerned that he would starve in Italy because he wouldn't know what to order. Overall he did very well but sometimes there's a downside to being handed the translated menu.
7. There is a big difference between Vicenza and Venezia. Choosing the wrong one at the train station causes you to miss your flight home. (i would like to point out, that it was the only navigation mistake i made on the whole trip. sadly, it was on the day that actually mattered)
6. Sometimes it's really refreshing to have no idea what the people around you are saying. Yesterday coming home was a little shocking. I preferred not being able to understand inane conversations around me.
We had a great time in Italy and hopefully someday we'll get to go back. For now it's really nice to be home and see the dogs. (and our friends)
Show in NC
If you know me, you know that I am rather fixated on showing artwork in North Carolina the way most artists are fixated on showing in New York. The people are nice, the events are fun and while I'm sure there are other places that are equally nice, my love is for the Tar Heel State. So, I am super excited to be part of this show in Raleigh, NC:
Low Pop Opening Friday May 4, 2007 from 7-10 pm in our new space at 323 West Martin Street
http://www.designbox.us/gallery.html
(note that I am included in a show of "the south's greatest cartoonists".....hee hee)
If anyone out there happens to be in the Raleigh area while the show is up, please head over to Design Box and check out the show.
In other news, I went to grad school orientation on Saturday. I rode to College Park on my new motorcycle (I swear i will take and post pics soon) and it is a huge improvement over my old bike. I'm not sure if I'm ready to brave regular traffic on 95 but Saturday traffic was fine. Orientation was dreadfully dull and hilarious at the same time. At first, I thought it was weird that some people brought their parents but I keep forgetting that sometimes people in grad school are very young. I also realized that I had some sort of brain freeze when I registered for classes. I was supposed to register for Summer and Fall classes at the same time, but I only registered for summer. I'm first in the waitlist for the Fall classes so I'm sure it will all work out. *sigh* I haven't been in school in a long, long time.
ps- next week this time, i will be in rome. wheeeeee!!!!
I felt I should update about the outcome of the benefit since I was very tired and frustrated the last time I mentioned it. It went amazingly well. I even overheard comments from people, who had no idea who I was, about how well organized everything was. I tried not to laugh out loud. If they only knew the true story..... The artwork sold very well, I've been told the music was good, we kept track of the money and our method for having people pick up their silent auction stuff went off almost with out a hitch. The school had a recommended method for how to do it that made no sense and would require four times as many people. Also their plan for how to run the bar was completely dumb, I figured out a way around it that worked fine.
It looks like we raised about 12,000 dollars which is well over what Sherri and I estimated. That made it all worthwhile but I am more than ready to give up my career as an event planner.
I'm happily back to planning my vacation, I registered for my first class at University of Maryland and if the weather would cooperate I could get my new bike out of the garage. I also finished up three new drawings for a show in North Carolina. I really should stop promising to send things out for shows when the drawings are not actually in existence yet. I'll post pictures of them soon. I really like them and I'm sad to see them go. Maybe they won't sell and I'll be three drawings closer to being ready for the show in October!
For the ladies...
I'm trying out my new filter "girls only", although I think it only excludes Ben Moy. Anyway, feeling better, loving the sunshine and nice weather. I went shopping today which I hate but I'm feeling sucessful. I had my first ever bra fitting. AMAZING. Found three bras in 15 minutes, none of which are scratchy. Apparently I'm an F cup. Maybe that's too much info but really, an F cup? That should make future shopping extra fun. I didn't even know they made F cups. Underwear shopping was a little less successful. All I want is something between grandma panties and a thong. It seems that is too much to ask, the first rack I looked at felt that an extra large equals a size 8. SIZE 8 IS NOT EXTRA LARGE!!!! *sigh* I left the mall before I could feel too frustrated and pushed the shopping envelope by going to the grocery store. Trader Joe's saves the day again by limiting my options and make grocery shopping manageable. I made it home in time to accomplish other things before Passover at the in-laws. Hooray sunshine!! Hooray warmth!!
Soon there will also be pics of my new motorcycle......
--So my mom, laughingly pointed out that underwear is not sized by pants size and instead uses some other measuremnet form. So really a size 8 is rather large. It didn't look all that large. It's all too confusing, I'm going back to buying underwear in bags at Target. What is it, 6 pairs for 8 dollars?
closer to the truth
The truth is that I am completely scared that the benefit will not actually go well and that it will be a huge disaster. The school has been overall unhelpful and all planning and promoting has fallen to my co-worker Sherri and I. It's just that neither one of us plans benefits and we are doing the best we can with what we can figure out. I just don't want to disappoint and I'm finding it hard to stay positve. I keep telling myself that people do things last minute and that I can't freak out about slow ticket sales. After all, the bulk of the stuff for the silent auction came/is coming after the deadline. The sad part about it is, that this is going to be a really cool event. The artwork is really fabulous and I'm not just making that up. The musicians are top notch and I can't wait to hear them not to mention that tickets are cheap, 16 bucks in fact. I think I'm just tired. I've been spending a ton of time on this while trying to keep of with my job (and my new boss's job, but that a different story) and I'm coming close to being done. Planning the Italy trip is seeming like a chore and we won't even talk about my complete lack of preparation to start grad school.
At least the weather is nice. Now I can feel guilty about not walking the dogs as much as I should. *Bleck*
As many of you know in August of this year my boss and friend Mary Anne Rosinsky passed away after a very brief battle with cancer. To honor her memory, myself and a group of colleagues are organizing "An Evening for Mary Anne", benefit concert and silent art auction. The event will take place on April 7th, 2007 at Falvey Hall on the Maryland Institute College of Art campus. The proceeds from the event will go into a college fund for Mary Anne's two children. Over the past few weeks work has been coming in from all over Baltimore and beyond, since I get to look at everything that has come in I can assure you you don't want to miss this event! For more information on the event and to preview the silent auction please visit, http://www.mica.edu/library/benefit/ . The preview page just went up today so check back, we'll be adding to it every few days! Please forward this information to anyone you think may be interested and feel free to email me with any questions.
More tiny paintings!!!! These are three of the thirteen new paintings i took to Minas last week. Enjoy.
Will You Be Mine?
Hello all- In celebration of the new year, my favorite non-holiday, my inability to send out holiday cards and the completion of my screen printing shop, I have printed close to 300 (the edition isn't quite clear yet) Valentines to send out to the lucky people on my mailing list.
So here's the deal, if you recieved a postcard for my show in October, you are on my mailing list and will recieve your Valentine shortly. If you sent Mickey and I any sort of holiday card you are also automatically on the list. If you have moved recently or did not recieve a postcard for the October show, you need to send me your snail mail address ASAP. Please email me at jodi@jodihoover.com. I'm not going to include a picture of the actual Valentine so that it can be a surprise, hopefully this is the first of many prints produced in my new shop. I'm excited to share a little bit of the fun with all of you!
Happy Valentine's Day,
Jodi
www.jodihoover.com
Hot damn, it worked.
Today I pulled the first layer of the first screen print in my now fully functional home shop! Considering that the past seven days have been the most unproductive of my adult life, I'm claiming victory! In fairness, I was pretty ill with some sort of super cold but any energy I did have was channeled into a video game that has eaten up over 24 hours of my time and will probably eat another 24 in the near future. The exposing unit worked great. I know I claimed to have done tests but I was really half assed and didn't spend nearly as much time as I should have checking exposure times. It seems to work well at about 15 minutes. If you are used to commercial equipment then 15 minutes is a looooonnng time. However, Mickey and I built this thing, using plans I bought on eBay, in two Sunday afternoons and spent around 300 on the project. Commercial units cost around 2 grand so I think the extra minutes will be a bargain for many years to come.
I was a little concerned about the emulsion when I washed out the screens because it's a little different than what I was used to working with previously. It seemed thin and I wasn't sure it had hardened enough during the exposing time. I did roughly 150 pulls today and it held up sharp and clear for all of them so that's another worry out of the way. The only thing that I forgot to take into account was that my drying rack doesn't actually hold the amount of paper I'm working with for this print so I had to put things on the floor. It's not the best solution but since I am the ONLY PERSON USING THE SHOP (!!!) it doesn't really matter.
Ok, here are pics of a few of the tiny paintings I took to Minas the other week and never posted.....
I have spent most of this week on the couch. My lovely comfy couch. I have a terrible cold and it's one of the worst ones I've ever had. I can usually shake a cold in three days tops, but this one just keeps hanging on. I tried to go to work today but decided after few hours in that I had been a bit too optimistic about the speed of my recovery and I returned to the soft embrace of the couch. Currently I'm waiting for the cold medicine to kick in so I can sleep. I'm dead tired but can't sleep. If all goes well, I'm going to start screenprinting valentines tomorrow and every time I close my eyes, I start planning the print step-by-step. I tore down the paper tonight, there's a big lovely stack in the studio. I really love stacks of paper.
The high point of this week has been playing "Okami" ( http://ww2.capcom.com/okami/ ) It was a present from ms. basilmint (i know that i'm supposed to link to blogs if i include usernames but let's refer back to the cold medicine and assume that i am too loopy to do things correctly) and it's my new favorite thing. Ben Moy if you still read LJ, you get to pick all my new playstation games.....
Catching up
I'm trying to deal with the many things I have been ignoring for some time. My current projects are updating my mailing list, responding to the many people who have emailed me since the show and in general trying to clean up my files. Pictures of my artwork need to be sorted, labeled, burned to discs and hopefully moved to a fire proof safe since it occurs to me that if anything happened to the computer I would lose three years of work. I know I should keep up with this sort of stuff but it always takes me so much longer than I think it should and I get annoyed and wander off. Today for instance, I decided to figure out how to get everything from my Hotmail account to my Gmail account since gmail is so much easier to use and overall will make my life better. I finally figured out that Hotmail has disabled it's mail forwarding feature and I found a nifty little program to do it for me. The problem is that every five messages Hotmail blocks everything and demands that I sign in manually to prove I'm a real person. I applaud their vigilance but I wish they would apply it to keeping spam out of my account rather than trying to keep me from spamming. *sigh* Anyway, slowly but surely it's working and I am pleased. I also didn't know that I have a sent message limit and apparently I'm reached for today......
Here's what you can look forward to when I'm feeling more organized. Responses to messages (with-in reason), new links to things I think are fun, pictures of the new tiny paintings I'm about to drop off at Minas, and maybe even new pictures on the website. I also intend to print Valentines although at this rate i should plan on St. Patrick's Day cards.
errghhh
damnit- i just figured out that the series of books i've been reading does NOT end with book four but continues to book five which has not been published yet. That means that by the time the next one is published i will probably have to re-read the previous books just to make sure i remember everything. Christmas was merry and all, no fights with the family, traveling was fine, i have much to be happy about and so i really shouldn't whine. *sigh*