I am so excited!!!!!!!

My senior art show is having it's gallery opening tomorrow night. The past two weeks have been a crazy hodge podge of cutting, pasting, sewing, deco pouging, painting, and other random activities. Unfortunately, this has made little time for sleep or for seeing my husband. So although it's been fun, I'll be kind of glad when it is over.

I just finished writing the artist's statement that will be hung in the gallery. Each member of the opening has to write one. I thought it might be fun to post it on my blog for those of you who won't get to come to the show. I'm planning on posting pictures asap. Wish me luck!

Artist's statement:

"Before going to Kindergarten, I would spend most of my days at my Grandma Pierce’s house. Our normal activity to pass the time was to sit at her dining room table and have drawing competitions. The guidelines for these competitions were as follows: use crayon on paper towel, and draw monsters. So I spent hours trying to draw monsters more scary and spiky than those of my eighty-year-old grandmother.

Art ran through the veins of my family. My Great-Aunt Doe was a gifted photographer who painted her black and white images with pale pastel glazes. Everyone who grew up in Menard, Texas, had their first picture taken in her dining room, which is in the house I eventually grew up in. My father is perhaps the most artistic of the bunch; he is a carpenter, pianist, and painter all in one. And my mother and her mother are gifted seamstresses who sent me to school each year with two week’s worth of homemade clothes. Also, my brother had a passion for the written arts that was contagious, as is apparent by the poetry sprinkled among my artworks.

I grew up with very quirky, artsy people all around me. And I loved it. Art, be it visual, musical, or written, was a tangible presence in my life as I grew up, and thankfully, I lived in a town so small there was nothing else to do but art. I guess it is only natural that I ended up in a department that so many people look at with a skeptical eyebrow raised. When I am asked my major, and I reply with “art”, I always get the same response: “You won’t be making any money.” Yes, I know. But without art, without its acts of creating and of seeing the created and of continuing in the traditions set for me so many generations ago, life would not make sense to me at all."