Recently I joined forces with a group of fun and diversely talented artists to form a new craft collective of sorts. We have been meeting once a week for the past month or so to discuss what we are working on, provide creative inspiration and share ideas about how we can work together. Ultimately we have plans to open and sell our art from a grass roots garage turned gallery that opens alongside prime store front boutiques in a trendy neighborhood of San Francisco and gets a lot of shopping traffic.  The space is being fixed up and renovated to accommodate our needs and hopefully we will have the door up and the shop running before Summer.  Our gracious hostess and ring leader has crowned it with the name "Ornament & Oddity".
Right now we have on board photographers, an illustrator, painter, performance artist, musician(s), poet, jewelry maker, chef, and little mixed media me.  Recently I made the suggestion that we join forces and attempt mini collaborations with one another. I asked gifted poet Karl Langer if he would write an original poem to pass onto me so that I might create a piece inspired by it.  And on one very stormy night on the bus ride home he came up with Safety Harbor to You:

Rolling slightly and some yielding groans
The old ships in the yard know,
Like any old sailor,
There is a storm come.

Yet this one, candlelit, and full of song sways
further one way and another-
Light! You will not be taken by this storm,
But with this song and spirit, taken by wishes.

He handed it to me on a printed piece of paper and right away I had ideas churning in my head for a collage piece.  I hadn't made a paper collage in quite a while. I've been totally engrossed in assemblage for over a year now.  But my mind's eye immediately filed through my back stock of paper clippings and I knew I could go home and make something that might do this poem justice. And this is what I came up with:

click here:   [link]

I loved the exercise of working off what someone else had initiated and hope to get everyone in my group to participate.  I'll share more info/pictures of "Ornament & Oddity" once we officially open for business....coming soon.