Then there are the series - Light as a Feather; 2 Sentence Horror Stories; Creeped Out - a kind of fun British Twilight zone thing geared to a younger audience - I love those; Cabinet of Curiosities; The Devil’s Hour; Chucky (I love this). Then there are podcasts - Obscured, about the witch trials in Salem; and I just listened to several episodes of a podcast about John Carpenter’s Halloween. I’m not going to give you reviews, some are good, some are not so good, some are just bad - it doesn’t matter. It’s just so exciting to have so many, to have this genre in the forefront because the rest of the year it’s pretty slim pickings.

​I get chills when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which was played during the opening credits of the 1931 version of Dracula and I find it calming to hear the screams of people in a haunted house. I don’t particularly like bloody, gory, torture movies unless they are campy, like You Might be the Killer or Scream (1, 2, 3, 4, AND 5!). Movies that I’ve seen so many times that I know when to look away.

Why am I so attracted to it? My husband hates horror movies. However, when I went back home to see my brother and sister, I found out that, yes, my brother had seen all the Final Destination movies too. And my sister was a fan, as well. I had to go back to my roots, where it all began. I remember my parents taking the family to see a movie when I was about 4. It was a movie directed by William Castle, king of the B-horror movie and gimmicky stunts at the premieres of his movies. He would have nurses present in the lobby or mock insurance policies guaranteeing $1000 in compensation in case you died of fright during the movie! He had a few movies that premiered in my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. And in 1959, the Faras family made their way to the Newport Theater to see The Tingler. That movie scared the crap out of me and I couldn’t sleep that night. My mother wanted me to go to bed and told me that it was just a man inside a tingler costume. She didn’t think that through because that freaked me out even more. The Tingler was only about a foot and a half long (it really looked like a giant centipede) and it creeped me out thinking that a man was inside there. My sister being 8 years older than me calmed my fears by telling me it was just a robot. After watching this movie about 30 more times since then I am more aware of the string used to pull the rubber Tingler across the room. Another highlight of that movie was the scene where Vincent Price is trying to find a way to scare himself and uses LSD for the purpose. Love the scene where he is sitting in his chair reading a book whose title is “FRIGHT EFFECTS INDUCED BY INJECTION OF LYSERGIC ACID LSD25” - for sure a precursor to the 60’s and 70’s.

My youth was spent watching movies like The Blob, Creature From the Black Lagoon, any movie by Roger Corman with Vincent Price, The Haunting, The House on the Haunted Hill... Maybe that and growing up in a very ethnic household, where my grandmother read tea leaves and my mother had icons and alters, burned incense, rubbed holy water/oil on our foreheads, and wore amulets to protect from the evil eye, led to my otherworldly interest. I was always intrigued by ghosts and the supernatural. I had Kreskin’s ESP game and a Ouija board. There was always a seance at a slumber part and everyone at one time or another, went to a psychic. When I was in 8th grade, our science teacher let anyone who wanted to, teach a lesson on a scientific subject. I chose the Psychic Sciences.

I like being able to see beyond what is in front of my face, trying to figure out how this world is put together. In addition to the horror genre from my youth, I also find quantum physics, parallel worlds, other dimensions... all fit into this idea. The way I figure it out is through my art, transferring the feeling of otherworldliness into metal and enameling. I’ve completed making my interpretation of a set of the 22 Major Arcana cards from the Tarot. And of course learned to read them along the way! I’m now moving into my geometry series featuring The Chengellian Woman.

Leave a comment about your favorite scary movies or experiences from your youth.

White light contains all wavelengths of visible light and is the sum of all possible colors.

I’ve been reading Fred Ball’s book, Experimental Techniques in Enameling about using liquid enamels with a white overlay on sgraffito.
Sgraffito is a type of decoration made by scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of contrasting color, typically done in plaster or stucco on walls, or in slip on ceramics before firing. Sgraffito and Sgraffiti derive from the Italian word graffiare ("to scratch"), ultimately from the Greek γράφειν (gráphein, "to write").(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgraffito).

When using the sgraffito technique in enameling you can sift or paint enamel onto metal and scratch through it or you can enamel a color on first and then sift or paint on top of that and scratch through to the color layer. Some of the tools you can use for scratching are toothpicks, needles, xacto knives, comb, toothbrush, Q-tip, and chain.

I generally paint a low-firing liquid white onto bare copper, let it dry and then scratch through it with one of the above mentioned tools and fire it. Then I sift several thin layers of a ground soft white on top, torch-firing each layer separately, usually overfiring. All of the enamel pieces here are fired only with white enamels.

Challenges for 2017 -  Consciously creating an art piece everyday for a year can definitely be challenging! Having to do something every day starts to get tedious after a few weeks, but if you can get past the tedium and just keep going even when you don't want to you begin to see in a way that you forgot about. Everything around you becomes art and you can push your brain to a new level of thinking and questioning.

Then of course we have the Drawing A Day Challenge, which led me back to working on a series based on Photo Booth pictures I took when I was in college. Every time I do one, I think ok I've exhausted the possibilities, but apparently I haven't!

You can follow along on Instagram using the hashtag ringaday2017 or the FaceBook group Ring A Day.

Here's a little taste (literally!):

I have to admit while reading it I thought he was just making up words and ideas, but I did look them up and, yes, scientist are sitting around talking about a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light. And this was another highlight of this book - it made me think. And it made me curious to research things he said in this book. Whether he is right or wrong doesn't really matter. I mean, look at 'science' - its ideas change and expand constantly as we learn more about the world. And well, that's another thing... I have a much larger idea of the world or universe or consciousness now and really, that's not a bad thing. I have felt this need to think about some of the things I read, so I am reading it again, only stopping with each idea to write about it and think about it out loud, feel free to join in. I will of course include pictures of my art - if it has anything to do with what I am writing about... let's just say I am unaware of that.

Chapter 1 starts out with a quote from James Baldwin - The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

For me making art is about trying to find a connection to why I am here in the first place. I feel like there is something deep inside of me that knows the answer and that answer can emerge in my art because there are  no words for it. The idea is that someone else will recognize that.

Shlain talks about when we learn language/abstract-thinking that the word/symbol takes the place of the image. "When we reflect, ruminate, reminisce, muse, and imagine, generally we revert to the visual mode... ...we forget that to learn something radically new, we need first to imagine it" (p18). We forget how important and essential it is to be able to have time to daydream.

This leads to the idea of a critical mass of people coming to a consensus about how the world works and when these ideas are no longer questioned they become bedrock truths. These things you just believe because you always believed them and never think that there is a need to question them (unless of course you grew up in the 60's). That blows my mind a little bit, just because we believe that something is true, doesn't mean it was always thought about that way or that it always will be. This may date me little, but when I was in elementary school I remember learning about Pangea. It was 'one' of the 'theories' about the continents 'possibly' having all been joined together at one time. I found that really interesting as a kid and it stuck in my mind. Now I find out that it is no longer a theory, but a fact and I have a very difficult time accepting that. One of my bedrock truths has been changed. It freaks me out a little. Maybe because now it has me wondering what else I learned was wrong. Of course, this leads me to the 70's and my brother introducing me to Firesign Theater's album 'Everything You Know is Wrong.' I don't remember any of the skits from the album (after all it was the 70's - take that as you may) but that title gave me something to think about.

I liked this: "What makes any set of bedrock truths slippery is that every age and every culture defines this confirmation in its own way. When the time comes to change a paradigm–to renounce one bedrock truth and adopt another–the artist and physicist are most likely to be in the forefront" (p18). The idea of being able to imagine or think about something in another way is the beginning of changing these truths.

Ok, so when reading this book, I could only read about 3 or 4 pages at a time, so that's all I'm going to do for right now! Let me know what you think about these ideas. But before you do, take a minute to reflect or perhaps daydream a little about it!