tashina knight

Well, not the greatest photo of my art I’ve even taken, but this is the sort of thing I’ve been working on in my little hotel room. I really want to be learning to make handmade tiles at the moment, but I don’t think they’d appreciate a kiln in my room. Especially since there was a small fire here a couple days ago.

I have a small fear of fire in buildings, enough that I don’t light candles indoors and if it were left up to me, I don’t need a fireplace in my house either. The apartment I lived in 10 years ago almost burned down due to the carelessness of my next door neighbor. I heard a lot of banging in the next apartment at about 1am. Her bedroom and my bedroom shared a wall. I wasn’t quite asleep yet and wasn’t about to sleep with all the banging. I am a pretty quiet person, but in this case I decided to bang on the wall with my fist. Ineffectual….didn’t make a sound. So I figured I’d get up and get a broom to tap the wall with. I turned on the light and immediately saw smoke pouring into the room through the electrical outlet on that wall. I grabbed the bird cage and some clothes, called 911 and was out the door. Turns out the woman had been burning a candle - she had placed it on her printer and left paper in the printer. Need I say more? THEN, she had gone out to the bar downstairs and left the candle burning. It gutted her apartment - structurally still okay, but all her belongings were burned to a crisp and she had no insurance so red cross helped her out. She didn’t seem upset about it, more like “oh well, these things happen”. Our apartment smelled bad for a while and the stuff the firefighters sprayed on the wall to dissipate the smell ruined a lot of my polymer clay jewelry but other than that we were okay. I was just glad I was awake, because none of our wired-in smoke detectors ever went off. I actually think they were fire detectors not smoke detectors, because to prove they worked, my landlord held a match up to them and they went off, but they didn’t go off when our house filled with smoke. Test your detectors!!

The fire this week was on the floor below me and was a cooktop fire. It didn’t spread beyond the one room, but brought back bad memories! We all had to evacuate the building and sit outside in the Texas heat while the firemen went in with their axes. Now, how did I get on that topic?

Oh yes, tiles and kilns…I’ve always loved Michele Griffoul’s work. Look at her pool installation! So, I hope to make something like this but in my own style. And, of course, that’s on top of the watercolors I’m trying to learn and the acrylic paintings and the quilts and dolls I want to make, not to mention painting and decorating the new house! I need to be like a cat and have 9 lives!

The thing I’m most excited about in the new house is my art studio! We looked for a home with a large game room that I could make into a studio and found one with a 16′ x 21′ open room that was just perfect. I can look out over the first floor from the room and keep an eye on the second floor too. For some reason I’ve never been able to do art in a closed room. In our last house I had a small bedroom to do art in, and I just used it for storage and I ended up making things sitting on the couch in the living room! Here’s a picture of the room during framing last week… and next to it is the photo of the room in the model (from the opposite side).

I can’t wait til it’s done and I’m out of this hotel room. I measured my hotel room and it’s about the same size as the game room.

Hopefully, coming this week, one of my new and upcoming craft books posts.

My self-imposed exile lasted longer than I had planned!

First, Illustration Friday had a series of weeks where the themes were amorphous like wisdom and death and I’m more geared to topics like flowers and frogs. THEN, I got news that we were moving and not only that but that I was leaving in 3 weeks to move half-way across the country. Add to that the fact that I was then told by my husband that I couldn’t mention it in the blog until it had been properly announced at work - which took 6 WEEKS, and suddenly I couldn’t discuss the most important thing going on in my life. I had no time to do art, no time for anything but packing and planning and finally here I am.

Where? Austin, Texas. I lived 30+ years in San Diego and a few in the Bay Area. Except for a 7 month stay in London after college, I’ve never lived outside of California. So this is quite a shock to the system. I’m so happy to be here though. I lived in San Francisco for 4 years in the late 80’s and although it’s a beautiful city, it just wasn’t MY city. I like it warm in the winter and hot in the summer. So I moved back to San Diego never intending to go North again. Then my husband got a job offer that he really wanted to accept in the East Bay and since he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse (he would work, and I’d stay home and do art) we moved. We had been hoping to transfer whenever possible to somewhere warmer and when they offered us Austin we jumped at the chance.

I’m staying here in a hotel until our house is completed in November. My husband will join me in October, but luckily we booked some cheap flights for him to visit in the meantime. We meant to buy a resale house - I was going to look around for a month and get to know the area, then go into escrow, close, and fix the house up a bit by the time M moved here. But life never quite goes as planned and we found a new house we loved here in South Austin.

So here I am in a new place, just trying to figure out where I fit in. It’s beautiful here. I’m so used to California which is so dry and brown in the summer and here it is green and beautiful with stunning sunsets and clouds and thunderstorms. There are pretty bridges, stunning views, and the people are wonderful. I’ve been here a little over a month now and I don’t think I’d ever move back to the coast. San Diego will always be my hometown and I’ll want to go back and visit, but my heart now belongs to the hill country.