art welcome thanks for having me gayle thank you for being here art night which i'm also a member of has a big fundraiser coming up on april tenth at the v f w at seven o'clock and it's a benefit for the belmont food pantry so we're very excited about that what i'd like to do is we brought some of our art to shout but before we do that i'd like to ask you johannah how you got started in our night and what it's meant to you i have never thought of myself as an artist i guess the fact that i make our and people look at it makes me an artist and that's been a process that's really happened because of art and i've always been crafty i worked as an arts and crafts director at a girl scout camp a long long time ago and i've always liked working with my hands but had never really specifically sat down to make art just for the sake of making something nice to look at and getting involved in art and i was a way to spend time with other women i had moved to belmont just within the last within a year or two of meeting our leader stacey who organized art i initially and so it was a way to get together with other women get out of my house i have small children at home so it's nice to have an excuse to go out and have a mom's night out but the process of beginning to make our on a regular basis also started to change the way that i look at the world it reminded me of my amateur appreciation of art it got me looking around my house differently looking around my neighborhood differently i make a lot of collages with what i call found objects but a lot of it is what i find in my closet and what i find in my house and it's a way to so looking at the artistic lens but also finding helping me to sort of organize some of the things that are going on in my life taking objects and putting them together in ways that are humorous or maybe meaningful to me that  give me a chance to reflect a little bit on what's what's going on and my my day to day life and having to look forward to every month is a great venue for nurturing that different way of s things i find the same thing walking down the street and someone has their own something away and i mediately it doesn't matter how rusty or older rained on i immediately think oh my gosh you know how my going to what could i make i look  that which is really great and i agree with you i would never have thought that way before you know i do growing up i always had a craft in my hand i was never without a craft of old friend of mine recently said you know when i was telling about this and he said it doesn't surprise you never were not you know al playing basketball but had like crocheting in your hand so i find too that as life sort of gets very complicated and as parents you kind of push that aside and i think it's been a really really great way for all of us to rekindle you know that artistic spirit which may have been sort of sublimated not everybody in our group though some people have continually done art or they sell some of their art but  we have a couple of women who are incredibly talented very gifted women who i know everybody is gifted however i know we mean we do have a couple of professional artists and people who are yes  who actively show their work and are trained yes we do and so this is our third this will be our third night party always a benefit in this year we chose the food pantry  and for anyone who's watching who comes to our party on april tenth at seven o'clock at the v f w there's a small admission charge ten dollars but we would also really urge people to bring a can of food also for the bellman food pantry and to describe the party a little bit what has occurred in the past sure well it's amazing to me that this is our third annual art show because i remember about four years ago when someone or i guess maybe three and a half years ago one of we thought gosh we're making all this great art and some of the women were really all of us were doing things that were incredible but we were admiring each other's are and thinking other people really ought to be able to see this and not just have it in our houses or our garages or wherever you know we keep what we make it and so the idea of having a show we all laughed a little bit oh sure we'll have a show  but then the ball got rolling and when we were in the process of planning for the first show he had even put in an application for a different space or was that the second year encourage other people to make our and maybe start their own arc groups and we were amazed to have a great turnout and an amazing response to the art and the process of how we all got together and made  and i think gosh last year we had a couple hundred people we did several hundred maybe and a d j and the first year we had a band and then that's from last year and this year we have a d j in a big dance floor and i'm always really struck with how people are coming because it's a great party and it's and benefit but all and to see the art but i'm always struck by how people really really concentrate on the art and really take the time to view all of our our stuff and how  it's also a chance for all of us to view each other's because some of us make stuff at home sometimes and the first year was a benefit for the v f w and last year was a benefit for our space which is a cancer center and this year will be for the food pantry and another aspect of our night that we also include in our in our show each year at the v f w one of the ways that this group of women this group of friends we've all become friends really even closer friends through our night we celebrate each other's birthdays by making a piece of our for the birthday woman and in the past we've shown the paintings that we've made as a group for each other in this year we changed the theme and we started decorating boxes just i'm not sure i don't remember exactly how this which happened was a birthday party for three of us and we were when we got to the party there were empty wooden boxes with all kinds of we'll show yours in a minute with all kinds of things paints and objects to decorate and that sort of became the new birth to a tradition was it make a box for each other and last and so then we decided for this year to turn that into our theme last year we had a theme of mannequins and we each made these i think wildly awesome mannequins and this year's theme in the title of our night this year the party is called inside outside the box which we've all interpreted very differently you want to speak to that so will be the original conversation and when we talked about whether we wanted a theme about a year ago we talked about the stages of women's lives from birth or even pre birth through life to death and we talked about maybe we would do rituals maybe we would but we couldn't we but the conversation came around to something much more concrete it actually started with a conversation about  about how different how this is like the ultimate box we had started with the birthday boxes and we started joking about how this was really the ultimate box that most of us end up in and could we make our out of this macabre box and and then the box theme i think kind of kind of rolled from there and from there and then we had our birthday boxes and then each of us or most of us in the show are going to be displaying one or many boxes of all kinds and i will add that the coffin idea became controversial in a way that i think is really helpful to women are people to just build express honestly with a group of friends and have the courage enough to be to be expressive with friends because we all love each other and respect to each other and i mean that's another story but that you know that beginning theme turned into in addition to art  words we end up talking about a lot more than art yes yes and the group also began for some of us as are many of us as a as a healing form and continues to do to be so and so i think the discussions right from the beginning about women's lives it just keeps going as far as digging deeper into even though a lot of our art is very playful and there's often a deeper deeper meaning and connection with that actually the into  i had all of these little blocks that i had started decorating thinking about the different roles that i have in my life as a mother as a midwife as wife as a person in my community  and how they all feel very separate and and contained but i have to figure out how to balance a monster in them together and i started at art and i would just bring my bag of paints and fabric and things that i glue on things and star and think of a theme and start working on a little cuban all of little blocks when they were finished i decided to suspend them in the frame as a kind of thinking of a tenuous balance you know and again you talked about our as as therapy for me the really the making of it i'm i'm surprised when people enjoy looking at what i make because i really am doing it for myself as as i said is a way of just looking at things a little differently making some sense out of things so you know pasting together my little magician terro thinking of the mother trying to fix everything all the time and and thinking of the  woman and passion and i have my little poem that i put on here but then thinking about containing it all within one person and trying to figure out what that really looks like and maybe it's a midlife crisis and you know the theme is inside outside the box but we will all be showing all kinds of other art and just to add to what you said about you make it for yourself when i've shown mine sometimes talked about people ask if they can buy it and  not shocked i love my art but i think you know and that's my favorite piece of yours but i make it for me and it's very very personal i can't imagine ever parting with anything let's move on to some other art behind me is a quilt an absolutely gorgeous you won't be going to see all the details but made by one of our fellow artists stacey  connelly and it's absolutely beautiful she's an amazing quilter she has also other things that she will be showing but we all have a lot of stuff that we're showing but i did want to make sure everybody saw that because it's quite gorgeous  all right i move on a little bit to my own art i'm getting better like your time out calling yourself an artist and as everybody knows it's a word that does not come easily to me but i'm trying for one of my boxes i will be i painted pink they would go and call this peace love letters and it's all kinds of letters that one would hope i think to find in a mailbox and you know movable parts and people can read the letters they're not actually real ones so when you guys read them and you're like oh my gosh i can't believe someone wrote that to you and but as true art form i made it all up but it's still really nice to read i love that one  guess i'll just go through my normal work our way down two years i'm doing three different themes my title of my ship my works is called banter bras and boxes some going to have a series of bras this one broad donations and keep them coming and so that's that one and the other one we're all just bring in examples but i do a lot with text i seem to except for the dog when i cannot make anything that doesn't have  i will have a series of these wooden things covered in words and kooky ideas so that's mine for now what i could bring through monte year the theme that lifestyle changes in the past year worked changes and trying to find who i am as a woman in my forty's when i used to think of myself as sort of a rebel in a rock star and now i'm a p t a mom and i drive a minivan and and happy but trying to kind of reconcile those different people so that's a sort of don't tell me who i am based on the car that i drive or the fact that i live in boma and my kids play soccer but so this piece  is sort of about that this piece is called just a class that i made i made it out of a piece of broken furniture so it's kind of meaningful for me it's the first piece of furniture i've ever broken i don't know if i should admit that on television but my neighbor probably heard it anyway when i lost my temper and was really embarrassed about it and i broke a chair that i was meaning to throw anyway but i as a way of you talked about our is healing i took this and i hate wasting things and that's probably why i don't usually break things and i was so i so i made this into a kind of a meditation on things that you know just waste things that get thrown away and tried to make it attic but also to put some beauty and to try to find some of the some of the beauty in chaos and some of the beauty and things that end up just thrown together and thrown away and and  that's i don't know if that makes any sense it does to me anyway and this other piece i'm not really sure where this started sorry i meant for it to be part of house clocks tend to break i'm not sure why in my house so i have a lot of art that's made out of broken clocks and maybe that's why i don't get very many places on time but i see the clock is another symbol of you know sort of being boxed in a box that i want to try to fit into but i just often don't and then the last piece over here is my birthday box which i didn't really participate in making but i particularly love because it was made by my friends and elinor jack to say that when it's our each of our birthdays we don't do anything for our own birthday box except occasionally to add a little something but the our friends we each make it for each other and it's really exciting to see how it's going to turn out and i love i love my box and i love some of the pieces that the friends brought to include i'm looking forward to seeing everyone else is also there will be a nice little there will be a cash bar and snack acts and it's a really really really fun party i know people and we will have a d j and dancing again at that and people really look forward to it every year because we see a little less now than last year request plenty of dancing yeah and people really do look forward to it they asked militant your show and your show and so it's just been a really community way to get people together in the community who might not know each other and to show our art and kind of gets back to even maybe a lot of us when even normally have met or become friends and art is what has just throughout thick and then has tied us together and i would say you all are some of my closest friends in the world because we've shared stuff of those nights about our about our lives that are really quite intense so i guess hobbies facilitate conversation they do in a way that i completely did not expect yeah and aren't particularly an organization together with her friend kathy rush who's also an artist called waverly arts and they're on facebook i think is the best way to get updated information about what we've really nights  but but they're definitely on facebook and that's an informal way for women to bring their projects and hopefully i think the vision is that other people might decide to spin off their own yes and i found that even that night many people said can we join your your group but there's only a certain you know we like to all fit around the dining room table and so we barely fit and so we're trying to encourage women to start their own groups and we've really nights is a great way for for women to me and people to me  and i will say you know when a lot of us moved to belmont from maybe more arty communities it was a scary prospect and i worry and i think it's been really really great to see how much art and just expression is happening in our little town and belmont's been really great i do want to say that if you'd like any more information on the party or night that's coming up you can write to g e six three nine at l dot com and your questions will be answered i want to thank you johannes swift heart for coming on to my shell it's been really nice to have you and to see your art that i sometimes get to see in the dining room on t it's good i hope that you all will come to our tonight april tenth seven pm at the v f w and also i would encourage you if you'd like to be a guest on my show please contact  w w dot belmont media dot org because i would love to have have you know michelle so this has been a nother edition of gale force and i will see you soon thank you very much this was fun down glad you enjoyed it