Words, Art & Science by Anthony Francis
SO! I am behind on blogging. But my wife and I have been traveling so much this year (near constantly for five months between the two of us) that, frankly speaking, we need to focus on us time more than I need to focus on the blog. So it's going to take a little longer to get things rolling ... because other things come first.
-the Centaur
Pictured: an anniversary picture, from years ago (since the blog image uploading is still borken).
Another Photoshop study based on some of Sandi's art, which we finally got around to hanging after the renovations. Fun fact: both the lion and the wall are Sandi's (a sculpture, and a faux).
-the Centaur
P.S. The original is below ....
I'd gotten out of the habit of doing these quasi-comic style art pieces based on photographs, but I've taken a few really good candidate pictures with the right layout for it, so I hope to get back into doing that. This is a picture of one of Sandi's art pieces she completed this weekend at Silicon Valley Open Studios, and it will now be on display at Kaleid Gallery in San Jose. Neat fact: this little guy is actually a cabinet!
Still, he's a little guy.
-the Centaur
Pictured: One of Sandi's sculpture cabinets, to be on display at the Kaleid Gallery.
Well, that's a wrap for Silicon Valley Open Studios. After-action report will have to wait - it's late and I'm tired.
This was our celebratory meal from Craft Roots, though - almost identical to the one I failed to take a picture of a few days ago (yes, we went to Craft Roots just three days apart, it's that good).
-the Centaur
Pictured: Sandi's brochures on an unfinished table, and a meal at Craft Roots.
Cue "It's Happening" meme: Silicon Valley Open Studios is this weekend, May 18th and 19th, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture!
Our friend Diane, a glass artist, dropped in to help us manage the day, bringing snacks and champagne!
Sandi has a lot of artwork and furniture on display today, including some very nice large-format art. Above you can see "Kirsten Piig" and "Jim Dairy" from Sandi's "Animals are People Too" series, and one of the geode tables (along with Diane on the left, Sandi on the right, and my toe at the bottom); on the other side is "Missy Elephant" and several of Sandi's other pieces with custom art boards made to look like stone:
Another room has more pieces and some works in progress:
Below you can see "Collie Parton", "Yeti White" and another striking geode table:
This is an open studio, so several of Sandi's in-process pieces are prominently on display, like this bar and chairs set (and also the finished art "Moo Paul" and "Mllama"):
In the back room, this enormous piece is going to be a conch-shaped day bed:
It is so big that Sandi's actually going to partially take it apart and make the top into a removable cabinet:
Not because it can't fit through the door or anything. Not at all. Sandi also let me have a space to display my books, since we needed to find a place to put that bookcase (which I designed and built, I'm proud to say). The giant egg creature is actually one of Sandi's furniture pieces - a hat cabinet!
At the back there is the final geode table, which I think I showed yesterday ... oh, no I didn't, here you go:
We will be here working on art today and tomorrow from 11-5, so please come on by!
-the Centaur
Contrary to yesterday's post, which was done after midnight so it fooled me about what day it was, TODAY is one day left to Silicon Valley Open Studios, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture, like the geode table above.
Below is one of my wife's pieces, Marylin Thumbtoe, from a series combining animals and celebrities into surreal combinations, like ... Marilyn Thumbtoe.
Perhaps the work should speak for itself.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Yes, I know, after midnight is the next day according to the calendar, but I count days as over when I go to bed, unless for some reason I pull an all nighter, so a 1am post is technically the previous day. I don't always hold to that, but for the purposes of the blog series, that makes the most sense.
Just two more days to Silicon Valley Open Studios where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture. Can't photo yet, we are currently scrambling to get the place fixed up, so let me present representative samples from South Carolina (not on display here).
These three, however, will definitely be on display!
Most of this art, even the large furniture pieces, are made from recycled materials such as paper and reclaimed wood, which I think is very cool.
Please come check it out!
-the Centaur
Pictured: One of the frames I helped assemble today, and some of Sandi's furniture.
On my way to Silicon Valley Open Studios to help my wife with her art show this weekend - both paintings and mixed media, including furniture:
Short layover, hit publish, please attend!
-the Centaur
So, my wife's furniture business is finally kicking off! Here's the first ad for Studio Sandi's custom sustainable furniture, made from (almost) all eco-friendly, recycled and recovered materials:
Check them out at studiosandi.com , where more information will be added soon!
-the Centaur
Pictured: An ad for Silicon Valley Open Studios, showing four pieces of art and two pieces of custom furniture, almost entirely made from recycled / sustainable materials except for the resin tops.
So I dropped in to Cafe Intermezzo near Perimeter Mall to get a little editing in on SPECTRAL IRON and realized that THIS was where I and my wife went for our first date, almost exactly twenty years ago! (I think we were sitting just out of view, not far from the chair you can see at the left of frame.)
I wasn't taking pictures as regularly then and selfies certainly weren't a thing, so the closest pictures I have of Sandi were from a photo shoot we did almost a year later when she needed reference images for some paintings she was doing. Many of those are just Sandi striking odd poses that corresponded to something that she needed to draw, but I think the one above turned out quite well.
Cafe Intermezzo will always hold a place in my heart as it's one of my best late-night thinking and writing places, but the one at Perimeter has an even more special place, as it's where Sandi and I, who had met at the Chamber a few weeks before, shared our first date and our second kiss.
Here's to another twenty great years!
-the Centaur
Thinking Ink Press’s first novel, DEBRIS DREAMS by David Colby, is out now on Amazon! I’ve described the story as “The Hunger Games meets Gravity”, but to get a clearer picture, here’s the teaser:
The year: 2069 The place: Sun-Earth Lagrange Point L1, 1.5 million kilometers above the surface of the Earth The objective: Survive!
Sixteen-year-old Drusilla Zhao lives in the Hub, a space station used by the Chinese-American Alliance as a base to exploit Luna's resources. Desperate to break free of the Alliance, a terrorist group from the Moon destroys the space elevator, space's highway to Earth. In a flash, Dru's parents are dead and she is cut off from her girlfriend Sarah on Earth. The Alliance declares war against the Moon, conscripting Dru and all the youth of the Hub. Dru is forced to become a soldier fighting in the lethal vacuum of space. Can Dru survive lunar terrorist attacks and find her way home to Sarah?
I’m especially excited that this novel features a cover by my wife, Sandi Billingsley! We’re working hard to bring you the next two books in David’s series, SHATTERED SKIES and LUNA’S LAMENT, so stay tuned - but in the meantime, check out DEBRIS DREAMS!
-the Centaur
Saudi’s latest art show is today in downtown San Jose at 6pm! She’ll have 25+ pieces on display highlighting all aspects of her amazing creativity. The full details:
https://www.facebook.com/events/262434390823115/
PRESENTING THE ARTWORK OF SANDI BILLINGSLEY
Please join us for an evening of Art and Wine on Friday, November 4th, 2016 from 6 to 9 p.m.
1 Almaden Blvd, Suite 800 on the 8th floor
Please RSVP with Emilie at 408.287.6500 or emilie.slawinski@ampf.com
The site is the offices of Ameriprise Financial Services, but as far as I know, this is just an art opening - a series of events hosted by them for over a decade to support the arts in San Jose. Come check it out!
-the Centaur
Hooray! Thinking Ink Press has a new book out, BEYOND THE FENCE, a collection of short stories by Marilyn Horn! We’ve just got the proof now, but the proof was approved, and we’ll be putting the book into distribution SOON! Also, the art’s by my wife, Sandi Billingsley, and we got a very nice print from Fracture Me of the front cover art:
w00+!
-the Centaur
Wow, something awesome just happened. Our publishing company, Thinking Ink Press, independently invented the idea of a postcard short - a flash fiction story on a postcard - and a new one has just been published which really ups the ante in the genre with its postmodern take on a postmodern book, illustrated with a mashup of The Book of Kells and a Nook!
Finnegan's Firewall: Awesome art by my wife Sandi Billingsley, great design by Keiko O'Leary, cool story by David Colby, all in a postcard! Right now you need to get this in person from Thinking Ink, but we’re working on making it possible for you to check it out!
-the Centaur
So after catching up for a while on Camp Nano, I fell behind again … because I and my wife traveled back to Greenville, South Carolina to assist my mother’s rehab from knee surgery, and frankly that’ more important than any amount of word count. The good news is, she’s doing very well, and came home from the hospital yesterday … the even better news is, that my wife and my mom patched it up after eight years of not speaking to each other, a feat which I didn’t think was even possible. What a wonderful trip!
I lost my momentum the moment I hopped on that plane, and after that it was tough to get it back when I was caring for Mom - you can see the dent in the schedule around the 20th - and getting back on track after that required a full court press. But, in the past several days, I was able to do just that, and managed to pump out 2000+ words on all of the past five days, and double that on three of those. As of tonight, I am caught up.
As for now, there’s two days left, which I could tackle at a normal pace—though I’ll likely try to finish by Friday so that I can chill out on Saturday and have a nice relaxing weekend.
Wish me luck.
-the Centaur
I blogged this before, but now the formal description of Sandi’s art show “Beautiful Garbage” is up:
http://www.kaleidgallery.com/2016/03/beautiful-garbage-by-sandi-billingsley/KALEID Gallery presents Beautiful Garbage a new feature exhibition for the month of April by Sandi Billingsley.
The goal of this body of work is to continue awareness of the need to recycle. Working in various states, in many homes and living with clients for months at a time, I am witness to the fact that it is still rare to recycle. In fact almost every home uses disposable cookware, cups, plates and utensils for every meal. Not only is this a questionable use of gas to transport the goods, and power to make the disposable goods but it all ends up in a landfill. I would like to encourage a change in mindset from a disposable to sustainable by creating beauty out of garbage.
Exhibition dates: April 1 – April 25, 2016
88 South Fourth Street (@ San Fernando), San Jose, CA 95112
Tuesday – Saturday, noon -7pm
Free admission
It will be showing through most of April, so go check it out!
-the Centaur
So Sandi’s art show was a great success! I didn’t take pictures once people really started showing up since I was talking to people nonstop until after 11pm, but we had a big crowd at Kaleid Gallery last night!
Many of Sandi’s pieces incorporated a spiral design which is a long-running theme in her art, but the real focus of the show was sustainability - all the pieces in the show were recycled, that is, made from materials rescued from the garbage.
Everything’s made from styrofoam, paper, and other rescued materials - even the large trompe l’oeil piece in the middle, which looks like a stone gateway looking out onto a pond, is actually made from lightweight paper.
Sandi also had five sculptures in the show (technically seven, but two of them were hangars for other art) including Petrified Coral 1 on the far right above, which was priced at $48,000 because it was owned by a private collector - me. I enjoyed the doubletakes made by people as they saw that price and then looked for that piece - but I was quite serious about the price.
Sandi needed the piece to fill out the show - its colorspace and spiral motif really brought things together, and it fit perfectly on the wall - but it was an anniversary gift to me, the painting was originally priced at $2400, I wouldn’t let it go for ten times that - and Kaleid Gallery would get half. So I don’t want to see it go - but if you want to cough up ~$50K for it, I’m happy to buy Kaleid Gallery some new lights and Sandi a new truck with the proceeds (after Uncle Sam takes his cut).
Many, many people came by, and we all stayed so late the gallery eventually had to kick us out (that’s a slight lie; the last four of us chatted with the docent for half an hour after he closed the outer door). I’d call that a big success.
She’ll be showing through the end of the month. Go check it out!
-the Centaur
At Kaleid Gallery tomorrow at First Friday in downtown San Jose, my wife Sandi will be having an art show featuring a wonderful new series of petrified coral pieces, atmospheric shapes, and enigmatic masks!
Please drop in and see this fascinating show … and while you’re there, support your local artist and buy something!
-the Centaur
So, no blogging for me today … instead I want to point you to my wife’s (re)new(ed) blog at Studio Sandi. This for now is an adjunct to her main site, but we hope to shift all the old content from my hacky scripts over to WordPress. Keep watching that space for more news about Sandi’s projects and continued posting of her awesome art!
-the Centaur
So what you see is a gift, a gift from my wife and myself’s, our gift to her sister and her husband, a gift given on the occasion of their 20th anniversary, a gift, by necessity, wrapped in a very, very large box. I think this is the largest single item that either of us have ever had to ship, other than perhaps a car - and other people did that for us. What is this gift? It’s “Petrified Coral”:
For scale, it’s the artwork you see on this wall:
This “Petrified Coral” piece is one of a series that Sandi’s done - one I own:
