Friday Faves Edition 48

 

Friday Faves.

I’m rounding up my Friday Faves for the week. On Saturday, I had a nice visit with my mother-in-law, along with my niece and her babies. For me, the week has been spent mostly behind the scenes, BUT the hubby and I did brave the frigid cold to head to Downtown Roanoke on Sunday. Our destination was the Taubman Museum of Art, so we did get to spend most of our time reveling in warmth.

Megan Whitmarsh.

Even though I will be doing future posts on our visit to the Taubman, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at just two of the artists whose work I enjoyed. The first gallery that we came upon included works by Megan Whitmarsh. According to the write-up, she is an American Contemporary Artist based in Los Angeles. She uses her childhood memories from the 70’s and 80’s in her creations.

Being a child of late 70’s and the 80’s, I think this is what drew me to this installation. The entire piece is titled Your Thoughts are Forming the World. In it she creates the “impression” of a 1970’s female artist’s working studio. I have included only a small fragment of the piece for today. The segment I have shared reminds me of the large gold chains worn by Mr. T., Run DMC, and probably a plethora of others whose names I am not digging deep enough into my mental recesses to find. If you are a product of the 70’s and 80’s, you know what I mean.

I also loved that she has it say “ALL IS POSSIBLE.” It’s such an uplifting and motivating statement.

Paul Villinski.

The gallery that was probably my favorite was the one containing works by Paul Villinski. This installation was located in the entrance area of the gallery. Look for a future post where we walk around the gallery.

The write-up lists Paul Villinski as American, Born 1960. This specific piece is titled Prescience. It is made of found aluminum cans, wire, and soot. The dozens of butterflies become a whole, large swallowtail.  According to the artist, this work is a nod to a higher presence among us “…the many become the one”.

 

Behind the Scenes.

I mentioned that most of my week has been behind the scenes. I don’t really know if that’s the best term, but I’ve been busily laying the groundwork for things I want to accomplish in 2018. If you recall from last week’s Friday Faves, school had been canceled for my teens. WELL… freezing rain kept the schools closed until this Wednesday! That meant my behind the scenes groundwork moved at a snail’s pace. They also have Monday and Tuesday of the upcoming week off from school.

Blogiversary

However, I did manage to find time to acknowledge the two year mark of this blog. Yay! Blogiversary! The comments that you all left were enough to warm a girl’s heart and fill up her love tank. I truly thank you for all of the sweet words that were left on that post. And I want to thank you all again for following along and coming beside me on this journey.

Layout.

If you are wondering about any of the behind the scenes things I’ve been tackling, I can share a few. I’ve tweaked a little of the writing layout on the blog, hoping that it flows a little better. I’m still debating a change to my theme because I want the front page to be excerpts so that you don’t have to scroll through an entire post to get to the next and I’d like to have my categories in the header. I like to take my time pondering a process, so it’s likely this will be a slow migration if I go down that path.

Photography

I also have over 15,000 photos and think that I should (and have started) start deleting the blurry ones and organizing the rest before it becomes 50,000. As a note of excitement on my part, I finally added Lightroom! That was very recent, so I haven’t played with it much. I plan to schedule in watching YouTube tutorials to work my way through its learning curve. That’s another behind the scenes thing that I’ve been working on….time management.

Maverick.

Occasionally, Maverick stops for long enough for me to snag his picture. He’s been naughty lately. Finally, after having torn up my prior calendar, eating a number of toilet paper rolls, demolishing a tape measure, and damaging (but not decommissioning) a fireplace remote, it has been decided that he must again sleep in a crate. He is not unhappy about his crate, which makes that easier. Not only was he ruining things, but we became concerned about his safety. And yes, we’ve tried picking everything up, but he always finds a random, stray thing.

During the day, he’s an angel…mostly.

For anyone who thinks that Goldendoodle’s shed “only a little”, my black clothing begs to differ. pic.twitter.com/91oiNPZdm1

— Amy Lyon Smith (@AmyLyonSmith) January 10, 2018

Twitter.

I don’t really understand Twitter. I’m not sure that I’m willing to put in the time to learn. Mostly my posts just get automatically tweeted, but I did put out this post on Wednesday.

Anybody else with me on that one?!

 

Music.

The song I found this week is by the American electropop duo Frenship. I hope that you enjoy it!

I hope that you have an amazing weekend and a wonderful week to come!

Let your light shine!

Amy