my memorial piece for my father

my father
photo © the Winne family

We called my father "Dood" because when I was a little girl I couldn't say "Dad." It stuck. And so my younger brother, Tom, also called him that.

Dood was a deep and profound thinker, always writing notes and keeping articles on spirituality, music, art, community and architecture. Our conversations on subjects could drag on for hours and even days. In speech he was always careful and thoughtful about what he said; in thought he tried to see all sides of an issue before formulating an opinion. Never one to be impulsive, his thought processes could get mired in many, many details and possibilities before they were formulated into speech, thus in order to really know Bob Winne you had to be patient enough to hear his words.

He told me many, many times throughout my life that I was like him in health, mind and spirit. Indeed we could talk with ease and intuitive understanding about all kinds of subjects. Our love of long walks and conversation dominated our relationship. We rarely parted ways in taste or opinion.

My father fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge. Shortly afterwards, he got to know some of the German soldiers he had fought against. He said he realized how impersonal war was from that experience, shooting and killing souls who could be saints -- only because their respective governments told them to do it.

Because of his experiences in war, he became a Quaker, heavily influenced by his conversations with Ken Webb who had started Farm and Wilderness Camps. From there he went on to study the writings and teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

My brother and I were also brought up Quaker, and in the Quaker way, taught by our parents to respect the speech, identities and life experiences of each person equally, to be humble, to be non-ostentatious, to be careful of our speech towards others in terms of how we effected others. He loved deeply and with sensitivity.

Dood also was constantly working on his own integrity, to be pure and full of heart in his deeds and actions towards other people. He always tried to see the best in everyone around him and take into consideration the challenges they faced; indeed he expressed anger very rarely. During our childhood, I had seen him break into anger only a handful of times and then by the time I was 11, he stopped.

I asked him when I was a teenager why he didn't show anger. His response was that anger was mostly unproductive; it is good only insofar that it serves justice, not hatred or intimidation or for motives which aren't moral.

When I was 18 and leaving home, I thought there were more people like Dood. I came to find out that Dood was rare. Throughout my long life, Dood and I had cross words only 4 times, and three of those times it was trivial: turning down loud music for instance. The more I got beat up in the outside world, the more I sought out the heart and advice of my father.

When he got dementia, it was my cue that I was on my own now and that I had to use what he had taught me to the best effect. Our conversations became about simpler things, but I will always be thankful that his dementia didn't progress to the point where he forgot my name or our common goals and interests.

I feel honored that I was the one who got to spend the last minutes of his life with him. He turned and looked at me as he took his last breath. In many shamanistic cultures, if a dying person looks into your eyes as they take their last breath, their soul merges with yours. I sure hope that is the case and I will let you know...

I don't relish my life without him, but I hope I will hear his voice in my head as I go through all of life's challenges. I hope that I will see certain scenes over and over in my head like the one time Jim and I parked in the driveway where Dood was waiting for us and he outstretched his arms to me and we danced in the driveway. Every moment with him was precious, a gem of enrichment in my life. I hope I can go forward with the joy of having known him rather than the grief of having lost him.

I hope all of you will too.

November 2012 sale: horse holiday cards

horse holiday cards on sale only through my Artfire Shop for November

wholesale prices: 25 cards for $25 (excluding shipping costs)

from top to bottom (click to be taken to listing or to buy):
Spirit of Winter

Spirit of Christmas

Christmas Horse

Most of 2012 is the year of the Chinese water dragon, a year marked by sudden and unexpected events and changes. For me, that's an understatement! They haven't been pleasant events and have impacted me and every close family member in my life. It has been overwhelming, a juggling act that it is teetering on failurse at every moment, without a shread of normalcy in anything: work, home, relationships with family and friends, events. Phone calls with my mother often begin with "The water dragon strikes again!"

That's how the Chinese year/astrology is effecting me. Now for those of you into western astrology, I have a Uranus exact square Pluto on my native sun (also exact) most of this year. What does that mean? Well, it means sudden and unexpected events and changes. More of the same, apparently. So, does that mean I get a double whammy since both eastern and western seem to match in this case? It would seem so.

Anyway, since I am unable to get much work accomplished, I thought I'd have a sale of some designs from the past. Enjoy!

WEBSITE

ARTFIRE ON-LINE STORE (largest selection)

ETSY ON-LINE STORE (seasonal selection)

and oh, yes, I launched a facebook professional site recently:

FACEBOOK SITE  

admiration for ArtdeJoie

I can't resist telling you about this! Remember I had done a satire piece about Etsy called "Etsy Deluge" (complete with owl, cowl, mustache and the kinds of clouds that Etsy loves)? If not, here it is again (this was the blog post about it if you want to delve further):

Well, after I posted it, ArtdeJoie told me she was working on her own satire piece. It is called, Hipster Jury. Here it is:

Hipster Jury by ArtdeJoie

Copyright Joy Appenzeller Bauer, 2011
(click on the painting above to buy from ArtdeJoie-- if it has sold, she may have prints, so check the rest of her shop too)

It is modeled from the Henri Gervex painting, "Salon Jury".

In the 1800s in Paris during a time when Impressionism was in full swing, the all-powerful Paris Salon, which put on the premier exhibits of its day, rejected Impressionist works (the ones we so admire today) and tilted their curation unfairly towards certain kinds of painting styles, defined as Academic.

In ArtdeJoie's painting, the artists who get preferential treatment are not based on merit or formal fine art training, but upon subject matter: the owl, fox, mustache and cupcake. Further promotion is granted based on hearts, tweet frequency, popularity, networking circles and conformity to hipster tastes.

Indeed, in a recent Etsy Success Writing Workshop on Etsy's website, mtraub says, "Your MFA and press mentions are all well and good, but I'm far more persuaded to buy your resin sculpture because of your weekend zydeco band and passion for coleslaw."  

Really?

Anyway, I admire ArtdeJoie and her "Hipster Jury" painting.

Etsy Deluge, the Etsy privacy issue

Etsy Deluge

© 2011

watercolor, ink and a tad of colored pencil

painted in response to Etsy's latest buyer privacy issues

(note: only Etsians will get what this piece is about. But, to enlighten those not privvy to the joke, it has to do with Etsy's front page, which for years focused on owls, cowls, mustaches and certain kinds of rain clouds-- to the point of radically over-doing it, at least to many who sell on the site). 

For the moment, if you want this piece, it is available as an original 11" x 14" watercolor through this link

or as a 5" x 7" print through this link from my Artfire on-line store. Other purchasing opportunities may avail themselves at some point, so check back for the edit on this page.

Anyway, the privacy debacle started out in the Penny Arcade forums where a buyer's name came up in a google search with the artisan dildo she bought on Etsy. Yup, all out there for her grandmother, co-workers and the world to see! It was placed in the google search under her name on the first page of the search, right after her on-line job resumes. Why? Because Etsy changed their privacy policy to make real names of buyers come up in searches. The only way for buyers to change their privacy settings was to log onto the site and change them manually.

Etsy claims to have e-mailed everyone about the change, but the e-mail was buried in a newsletter about how to take great catalog worthy product photography. Also, many buyers only came to the site once to buy or discontinued their e-mail addresses, so many were not notified. I have strong spam filters on my web-mail address (if I didn't, I would get thousands of spam messages a day-- as it is, I get anywhere from 700 to 1,000 now). So, I never got the e-mail either.

From there, Ars Technica took up the story. In the Ars Technica comments section after the article, there was a "battle royal" going on in the forums between Etsy's CEO, Rob Kalin (along with some of his Etsy staffers) and the sellers and buyers of Etsy. What angered sellers and buyers most was that they had been complaining in the Etsy forums about the "opt out" (of having your name shown in searches unless you opted out)-- arguing that it should only be an "opt in" situation. Every forum that was brought up about the situation was immediately closed and some of the sellers were also "muted", i.e. not allowed to post in the forums any longer.

From the Ars Technica article, it went viral. The list was substantial in the end (click on each name to see each site's article on the matter): MSNBC, Washington Post, Consumerist, Huffington Post, Yahoo, BoingBoing, Forbes, Digital Trends, Help Net Security, NY Magazine, NY Convergence, Auctionbytes, The Business Insider, Gizmodo, The Village Voice, The Mary Sue, BuzzFeed, About, Reputation, Salon, Now Public and Geek Sugar.

This was preceeded with lots of other bad press including the rape card fiasco and the Glamour fiasco. Click on these preceeding links if you want to understand what it is about.

I was personally effected by the rape card fiasco. Two women customers, who saw the unflattering story break on CNN, came into a brick and mortar gallery where I was working and wanted me to sign the petition to force Etsy to take the rape cards down from its site. And then they looked at me and asked why I would want to sell on a site like that, not realizing that Etsy is not all about dildos, radical art and Regretsy type items. I do think the outside world mainly regards Etsy as an off-the-wall kind of marketplace filled to its brim primarily with Regretsy items and Keep it Weird items when actually the opposite is true: there are more artists making exceptionally unweird items than weird ones, they just never get much press.

It's not getting much better over at Etsy.com. The recent article in Inc Magazine portrays Etsy as a giant flea market and its CEO as crazy:

Inc Magazine, April 2011:
“Today, Kalin is socially awkward, reticent and given to eccentricities which seem downright crazy.”

Kalin speaks in the article too: (Inc Magazine, April 2011):
"I speak to people in the business world and the technology world, but I don't admire them", he says, pointing an 8-inch combat knife at me for emphasis.

There's more, but I won't go further.

I know a lot of sellers are having a difficult time selling, and many blame the latest happenings (if they are allowed to speak out-- you mostly have to look off of the Etsy site to find out how sellers are really taking it all).

Needless to say, I don't really fit in (in terms of what they like to promote). If I made owls, cowls, mustaches and certain kinds of watercolors and Regretsy types of items, I would. But I don't (normally!). I'm trying to figure out what to do about my own shop on Etsy and in the meantime primarily focusing on my Artfire shop and the brick and mortar gallery scene in my area, which is sober in comparison. I'm not recommending or actively advertising Etsy at all to my brick and mortar customers primarily because of the privacy issues. All I need is my brick and mortar customers coming into the store with "Why didn't you tell us that our names would be splashed all over google and that our e-mail boxes would be bombarded by spam!"

I still have a few things listed at Etsy. If you love Etsy, then make sure your privacy settings are the way you want them!

Here is a close-up of the owl's face, complete with mustache:

edited to add: more on this subject through this link.

links:

MY WEBSITE
SOME OF MY ART FOR SALE ON ARTFIRE

MY MUSIC LINKS (hear clips):

Music MYSPACE
My band, Saratoga Faire’s MYSPACE
My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort

MY MUSIC IN ON-LINE STORES:
CD Baby
Amazon
InandOutRecords (Europe)
My band, Saratoga Faire, on CD Baby

Owl in a Heart and Mediaeval Heart II, 2 Original ACEOs

Owl in Heart ACEO (tiny original in ink and watercolor, paper size: 2.5" x 3.5", image size: 2.25" x 3.25")

Mediaeval Heart II ACEO (tiny original in ink and watercolor, paper size: 2.5" x 3.5", image size: 2.25" x 3.25")

Note: the copyright watermarks do not appear in the actual art

These are both up for sale at the moment in my Etsy shop. This is probably the last of the original ACEOs for awhile as I have a lot of bigger, more ambitious art projects I am trying to finish. We (Saratoga Faire) are also in rehearsals for The Dance Flurry Festival.

My Website

Music MYSPACE (hear clips)

My Etsy on-line store and Artfire on-line store for purchasing some of my CDs and some of my art

My band site: Saratoga Faire

My Renaissance band MYSPACE: The Spirites Consort (hear clips)

Purchasing our Saratoga Faire CD on CD Baby