Tuesday, April 17, 2007

F2 - artist's book - installation view from Seeking Shelter at the Manhattan Arts Center, Manhattan, Kansas

installation view from Seeking Shelter at the Manhattan Arts Center, Manhattan, Kansas

installation view from Seeking Shelter at the Manhattan Arts Center, Manhattan, Kansas

Had fun in Kansas. I drove up on Tuesday and had a fairly uneventful drive. I was wondering how many times I've taken that trip up I-35. When I was little and we lived in Kansas (between the ages of 3 and 7 and then again from about 10 to 12), my maternal grandparents lived in McKinney and Melissa, so we would drive down to visit them. Then when I was in high school, we moved here and we would drive to Kansas to visit Larry and Ellen and Colleen. I'd estimate that I've made that trip maybe 15 times. I don't know. There are so many things that are so familar about it. Frontier City in Oklahoma City. The Horseshoeing School somewhere in Oklahoma (I can always go there if the art thing doesn't work out), the Flint Hills along the Kansas Turnpike, the big Coors beer can at the northern end of the Turnpike (which is either gone or I missed it this time), and the curiously located Knute Rockne memorial. Oh, now I get it. If I had stopped to actually look at it one of those times maybe I wouldn't have been so confused...

Anyway, the trip always takes 8 hours.

I stayed with Larry and Ellen, who were nice enough to live with all my boxes for a couple of weeks. I had sent my work to them from the last show in Iowa, since the art center in Manhattan didn't have room to store the stuff.

On Wednesday, I drove to Manhattan, which is about 2 hours from Overland Park. Larry helped me stuff all my boxes into the car. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't all fit. Well, it fit, but I couldn't see out while I was driving. I had to use the force the whole way. It was stupid and very scary.

I realized later that when I had fit it into the car before (plus two additional long paintings and Trish!), I hadn't packed everything for shipping. This time the smaller (14" x 14" x 14") boxes were packed inside larger (18" x 18" x 18") boxes. I also had my house sculpture and the wooden circle in boxes this time. So it all took up so much more room. Had I realized that earlier, I would have taken the smaller boxes out of the larger ones. Which is what I did once I unpacked everything. I broke down the larger boxes and brought them back with me. When I go back to pick it all up again, if anything doesn't fit, I can always ship it back home.

Manhattan is a really cute town in the beautiful Flint Hills. They call Manhattan The Little Apple. It reminded me a little of Denton, since it's a college town.

Colleen went with me to the reception. We were worried the night before since they were predicting 3 inches of snow in Overland Park and 5" in Manhattan. It rained and snowed Friday night but nothing really stuck, so we had good travelling on Saturday. We stopped in Lawrence to eat at one of Colleen's old college hangouts.

Not many people came to the reception but we had fun, anyway. Afterwards, we went to a cool restaurant near the K State campus - an area they call Aggieville (K State is a big agricultural school).

It was a good trip.

So this is my first full week of being an artist. I'm freaking out a little but it's OK.

Last night I went to a meditation class at the local Unitarian church. It's lead by someone from a Buddhist center (temple?) in Arlington. I enjoyed it. I've been wanting to try meditation and wanted to get more information about it.

I was supposed to go to Houston this weekend to teach a workshop but they had to reschedule, so I'm not sure when that's going to happen. I'm kind of glad that it's not this weekend, though, since I was gone so long last week...

Check this out:

Letter D e a N RED N A

How fun is that?

Do your own: Spell with Flickr.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was a good time. But who was the pretentious person swilling wine and pointing everywhere?

Dr. Bill (William L.) Smith said...

It has been very interesting to have a Google Alert for Blogs on "Kansas Flint Hills!"
Yours came up today!
We now have a 22 county Flint Hills Tourism Coalition – this is the new website: http://www.kansasflinthills.travel/
Our web site is to promote the Kansas Flint Hills; and we are so happy to be in the 22 page color photo spread in National Geographic's April Issue on the Kansas Flint Hills, as a distinctive landscape.

We are really looking forward to the increased interest following that event.
We would appreciate a link from your site, to ours, if you are willing to do so. THANKS!
Best wishes!

Bill ;-)
P.S. The Coors silo was at the Emporia exit of the Turnpike - it has been taken down as part of the new interchange they are building - many do miss it, also! ;-)

Jenna said...

Hey, I'm just now noticing this post! The installation looks great. I followed the link you posted to the pic of the Flint Hills, and I was going to say that those don't really look like hills to me, but then dr. bill might not appreciate me saying that. :)