Archives for posts with tag: art

 
Please do not watch video if you suffer from epilepsy or complicated migraines!

Above is a very short video I took with my iPhone last night. It is a video of something called Steve Spangler’s Energy Stick. My daughter is activating the Energy Stick by touching the metal ends on the device. Its copy on the packaging (which I have never removed) says, “Watch Your Body Conduct Electricity!”

Moods can be contagious. A positive person can make us happy. The New Age considers every person to be encircled by an energy field. Ben Franklin, it is a common fact, made huge advances in the study of electrical storms and how, even beyond the practical application of electricity in our lives today, there is a rush and charge in the air when an atmospheric change such as a storm is about to occur.

The Energy Stick was given to me last Christmas by my husband. My mother had passed away four days before. In trying out the Energy Stick, since it was my present, I discovered there was no sound and no lights. Like the stick displayed for my husband and daughter! It was because of my grief over the loss of my mother that the stick did not respond to my energy. I threw it in my closet. Almost in the trash!

I pulled out the Energy Stick from my closet recently and touched the metal ends. To my great relief and surprise, my grief was subsiding! The sounds and colors were there!

A separate example of the manifestation of energy, was four years ago with my friend Lorraine. She accompanied me on a business trip to New York. We both were in a happy mood, even though I was there on business. Although solo art exhibitions are a positive thing for the artist – a time to celebrate, share and reflect – It is still business. I was in New York, being given a special reception this time, in addition to the customary opening reception where I was also in attendance the week before. We had enormous crowds the first time, over three hundred people came to see my video, “Bread In The Sky.” Therefore, I felt Lorraine and I could take a quick break to venture upstairs to the top floor of the gallery‘s building. We were drawn to the end of the hallway, and ended up hanging out the window, laughing about how, right there in Manhattan, a window could swing open into the “fresh” air! Looking right toward the Hudson River a block or so away, we marveled at the blue light, lightning and wind. There was the smell of ozone in the air.

When we returned to the gallery downstairs, Lorraine touched my silver bracelets by accident. She got a shock! My bracelet vibrated! It was as if my phone was on vibrate and someone was trying to reach me.

In the cab the next day, the driver told us about two tornadoes touching down in New York City the night before. And how it took him nine hours to get home due to fallen trees and power lines. On TV, Lorraine and I discovered the path of one of the tornadoes went directly through Chelsea. Through West 27th Street. Our window. Our fun. We were in the middle of the storm! In fact, my silver bracelets were probably struck by lightning!

Do you, my blogger friends, have any experience with energy, electrical and other?

Copyright Hollis Hildebrand-Mills 2014 All rights Reserved

 

images I was told I would have bad karma.

A member of my family is not speaking to another member of the family. This has been going on for years. Rather than go into the drama of why she is not speaking to her, the family member just says, “She died in a mining accident!”

No further questions are asked. A look of horror passes over the questioner’s face and the subject is dropped.

We all thought this was best, since it really is boring to talk about family members’ wrong doings and such. And to play the victim is ridiculous. No one in my family is a victim. We may seek council from an attorney once in a while, but we are never victims.

One school day in the fall of fifth grade, our daughter was questioned about this family member as in, “Do you have any relatives living close by?” Our daughter answered, “Well, we did, but she died in a mining accident.” The teacher was not put off. He asked what mine. Our daughter said she did not know.

Since then we have filled in the blanks for everyone in our family, so that this second question does not throw us. Usually we just have to say, “She took one step back too far!”

Copyright  Hollis Hildebrand-Mills 2014  All rights Reserved

Hoarding. I think of hoarders as people with stuff forming a landslide in their homes.

Until we had our basement finished. And we designated a certain part of the finished basement to be unfinished. That was when I thought of our family as hoarders. We did a lot of purging and sorting. To attempt to revamp the hoarder self image.

My husband collects music. He has 10,000 vinyl records and 8,000 CDs. While the basement was being worked on, these boxes of music were stored next to the furnace in the designated unfinished part of the basement. He also encourages others to keep their collections. Or make new collections. He is the person who, when I posted on Facebook: “What should I do with all my Martha Stewarts?” (I have been collecting the magazine since she first published. I have every issue.) My husband said, “Keep them!”

Our house is immaculate. Each room, people go into, saying, “What a nice room to read a book in!” Very sparse. I have a thing about neatness and cleanliness. You can tell. But to read a book? I spend a lot of time maintaining the neatness.

We hoard. Not only music, but Fiesta dishes. Many different kinds of china. And crystal serving dishes. Clothes. Dolls. Little porcelain shoes, also in boxes like the dolls. Bordering on hoarding.

The music on vinyl has gone into decorative crates in the finished part of the basement. The CDs in shelving in the unfinished part. However, we too have that cliched hoarders characteristic. When we wanted to find something like the wire that hooks the computer to the printer, we had to sort through a box labels “wires”, and delving into the assortment of extension cords, picture wires and Christmas light blinkers was a journey unto itself.

My car. My precious Honda. It is old but it is special. So special, in fact, that every time I drive it, someone asks me if I will sell it.

My car was hit by some obnoxious person. Hit in a mall parking lot on private property. Which, no police officer can assign guilt or liability to either party involved in the accident.

My car is not mine anymore. I have to go to a lawyer to get it back. My fear is, that it is in a place where everyone wants to drive it and claim it as their own.

Say a prayer for Frostie. Although he is nineteen years old, he is not used to spending the night away from home.

Whizzing by the other night, I saw a dog with a light on its collar. It was designed for the dog to see where it was going in the darkness. Just loose enough to move with the dog. Just tight enough so that the light didn’t swing and sway to confuse the puppy.

I have never seen these lights for dogs. Then I thought of SkyMall, the inflight magazine on airplanes. (which, by the way, was where I ordered my dog repellent device.) SkyMall, of course, is now online.

SkyMall is the best magazine for obscure and interesting “things.” An “It Is what It Is” inscribed bracelet. Really, people say that all the time: what does it MEAN? A scalp massaging shampoo brush. (Shown with water showering down on a head in the photograph) Stretchy wearable posture aids, a floating desk (with storage), phone mounters for the car, iPhone printers and so much more.You can see why these magazines are on the airplane. Why worry about lousy inflight service when there is SkyMall?

Have you ever tried to solve a mystery? Something in your daily life you can’t quite figure out, but you have a gut feeling about? Have you combined your intuition with some facts surrounding the situation and BAM! you have it the solution. Or have you? Has this ever happened to you?

The Chinese say that intuition is a “second brain”, physically located in your stomach. Hence the “gut feeling” expression.

Most people do not trust their intuition enough! When I try to solve a problem using my intuition, it feels like stepping out on a cloud, walking off a plank, taking a shot at something. It feels a little strange. People think they need facts alone to solve problems and mysteries. That to use intuition could not possible be sound.

But, as I said in the first paragraph, I put some facts with my intuition and…..well, I can solve almost anything. Can you?

Have you ever tried to solve a mystery? Something in your daily life you can’t quite figure out, but you have a gut feeling about? Have you combined your intuition with some facts surrounding the situation and BAM! you have it the solution. Or have you? Has this ever happened to you?

The Chinese say that intuition is a “second brain”, physically located in your stomach. Hence the “gut feeling” expression.

Most people do not trust their intuition enough! When I try to solve a problem using my intuition, it feels like stepping out on a cloud, walking off a plank, taking a shot at something. It feels a little strange. People think they need facts alone to solve problems and mysteries. That to use intuition could not possible be sound.

But, as I said in the first paragraph, I put some facts with my intuition and…..well, I can solve almost anything. Can you?

“Water On Paper 2″, pencil and charcoal on paper, 5″ x 5”, 2014

Ceres Gallery is having a group show. In June. The exact date of the reception is June 26, 6-8 PM. It is a Thursday. The gallery is located in Chelsea, an established gallery section of New York. 547 West 27th Street. New York, NY 10001. Phone: 212 947 6100. The second floor. You can take the stairs, if you prefer.

I did the piece for this group show and am pleased with it. It is based on a painting I did a few years back. The painting had collage in it and the abstraction was based on the spaces in between trees. In the painting, I chose the pieces from magazines, not for their subject matter, but for their potential for volume and how they related to the paint.

The charcoal translation is interesting (bad word, interesting) to me, since the face from the painting comes through as significant here, where in the very large painting, it was just a shape.

I hope some of you can attend my reception! It would be so nice to see you!

Phones. We all have cells. I like those. But the land or “home” phones as they are called, bring with them terrible sales and political calls. The phone rings. We rush to the phone to answer and we get the dreaded waste-of-energy call.

Therefore, it was during a very high stress time in my life, (when is it not?) I asked my husband to make the home phones not ring. Yes, we could call out, but no one could call us at home. To reach us, they would just have to call our cells. We told ourselves we were keeping the land phones for emergencies.

No problem. We had a vast assortment of Motorola, T-mobile and Panasonic phones littering our house. And he timed the ring systems so that the phones didn’t ring. Quiet.

Stress began again when we switched phone carriers. My husband got mad at one of the customer service reps (They will elevate your blood pressure) and out, we yanked ourselves. Oh yes. It caused a great deal of trouble. New internet provider. Had to be installed by coming to the house, new home phone provider, all having to be redone. Our security system in our home was affected too, because we have the older version, the kind that runs through the phone lines. Even our cells, although upgraded for free, were paid for with an eight hour wait to transfer pictures and such.

We were in the store the other day picking out new home phones and my husband said, “All this, for phones that don’t ring?”

I am about to tell you I have broken my planking record at the gym. I know I told you this before, that I could do “the plank” by visualizing being underwater, thus being nicknamed “The Scuba Planker!” And I was at two minutes then. As The Scuba Planker.

Now I can hold that position for six minutes! And I do not have to visualize being underwater anymore.

I expect to walk into the gym one day and I’ll see a plaque on the wall. or worse yet, as I extend my time, I wonder if there will be a Plank Off. Like a Bake Off. Or a Pie Eating Contest. I will be matched with someone and together side by side we will be tested to determine who can hold the plank the longest.