Although I didn't get to spend this Easter in Texas with my family, my weekend certainly was not void of any love, good food or great company. My boy and I took a trip to Atlanta and spent Easter Sunday strolling and snapping pics around the Little Five Points district. Art and kind souls never fail to reinforce my appreciation for my health, my freedom, and the continuous gift of existence. Life is good. 

xx

artist spotlight: Stella Maria Baer

What lies beyond Earth is profoundly captivating. It is, in a sense, completely imaginary-- as most of us have never been to space or seen it with our own eyes. But we know that it's there... It reminds us every day; the motion of the tides; the rise and fall of the sun and her nocturnal counterpart; the tiny dots which scatter the night sky.. appearing barely the size of grains of sand, but rumored to subsist as massive balls of plasma and cosmic gas. Maybe they hold souls; maybe they hold stories; but they've been around longer and seen more than any human has or will have. In regards to our timeline, space and all of her children are the closest to permanent that anything will ever be... and few things have the power to make us feel as utterly dwarfed-- and yet totally reverential-- as the Universe and solar system. I recently stumbled across the artistic works of Santa Fe-based painter Stella Maria Baer and found myself washed again by this sentiment. But this time, there was something else... for once, I felt a warm tinge of familiarity in the company of my once-intimidating brush with infiniteness. Baer has clearly taken the time to get to know these stellar structures; to love them and respect them... And somehow she manages to capture their magnitude and ancient wisdom on a two-dimensional surface that the viewer can hold with his or her own hands. What is an artist. 

xx

Check out Stella Maria Baer's full portfolio and print shop here.

art, defined

“The World is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises, that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouins tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again.

Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can only be approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.””

-Michael Chabon, The Wes Anderson Collection

-All photos are stills from films by Wes Anderson.
xx

reflections

It is apparent to me 
that in this world, most everything that we do and strive for centers around who 
or what we are going to be.
We spend our lives working toward this divine calling;
this destiny that we, or perhaps even someone else have laid out for us
telling us, this... THIS is you. This is what you are good at. This is what you were born for.
And we listen to them, to ourselves. 
We hurdle down these tracks on a one-way train
not realizing that the only limit to our opportunity is our mentality...
And those of us who do not yet know what we are going to be have been made to believe that we are the lost ones. 
But I don't feel lost.
I feel multi-talented.
I feel boundless.
Because, you see, everyone is anything. Anyone is everything.
Picasso was no more an artist than you are,
and Steve Jobs was no more an innovator.
I am an astronaut who has never been to space.
I am a scientist who's yet to make a discovery.
I am a mother with no children.
Only when we put ourselves in these labeled boxes
with the misconception that we "can't" and that we're "not,"
only then are we truly lost.
Passion is good; to be engulfed in flames that don't burn... Do what you are passionate about, always.
But don't do something simply because you think that that is the only thing you are capable of doing;
the only thing you're "good at."
You don't have to limit yourself like that.
Break those chains, baby.
Be a rock star.
Be a stunt-man.
Take every train you can. Maybe you'll catch one you'd like to stay on a while.

Never let them tell you who you are or where you're going.
You are you, 
and where you're going? 
Wherever you want. 
That's TBD on this here itinerary.

Much love.
xx