Amy Middleton Loves New York

This message brought to you by the letter C.

It’s more sentimental than it would be if it weren’t the best free-form art he’s done on our chalkboard wall, and if he didn’t complete it on his last official night in NYC.

It started out on Tuesday with an introduction to fantasy baseball. The photo below is of the final work, so it’s a bit busier than it was originally:

Wednesday being April fools day, CADIE and pseudo google products were on the brain. Meanwhile Becca was trying to come up with a worthy entry for Micah’s Easter contest. “Google peeps,” Seth wrote. “That lacks and idea,” I said. But once it was defined, I couldn’t argue.

In proper order, Thursday was the day of adornment, intricacies and passages claiming unused space:

Click on the pics for a bigger version. Documentation complete. Time to erase.

Update: That I had thought of it as deleting rather than erasing is unremarkable. That while erasing, I decided I could use Quadrabird for my next wall art project, and stopped what I was doing to remember how to “undo” my actions… that gives me pause.

We had some folks over for some plant-based foods and a discussion about plant-based diets. Seth Nielsen was nice enough to draw the grid and add all the veggie info while I did something equally important like take the garbage out or stir soup. I told him to imagine the tiger was on the z-axis and to draw the grid behind it. That worked for him. Thank goodness:

Erasing the Chinese New Year off the chalkboard wall was hard. Not so much sentimentally, but physically. It takes a LOT of erasing to get the chalk to come off rather than just getting smeared around. Thankfully it happened in time for Seth Hill and Aja Graves to add a little somethin somethin to the wall. Behold:

Here is the wall as decorated for Chinese New Year. Tiger by Ty, Volleyball by Micah (the day of the party was the anniversary of the advent of Volleyball), Chinese characters by Chateau, other drawings by me.

On my Facebook wall, Ty mentioned that we should have taken our picture in front of our creation. For my response, please see below.

We couldn’t very well erase the tiger after just one week, so we had our friends who came over to dinner add some embellishments.

At the Art Party, Ty Mecham drew and then erased a small picture of a tiger. He said he used to draw tigers all the time, but lacked some practice as of late. We invited him back, and miracle of miracles got this on our wall in return. It makes more sense in context of the Eye of the Needle, which I’m sure I’ll eventually post, but haven’t yet. Anyway, Ty has been our hero for making this happen. Clearly.

After Fine Art Friday (which happened 1.11.08; three weeks into this, I’m confused by my own numbering system).

Goals are an important part of ringing in the new year. Here are ours (with the little help of some friends):

Quit lying about my age
Stop lying about words that rhyme (naked - raked)
Get up in your face more
Don’t become morbidly obese
Write more words that look like “Travolta”
Stop calling your mom
www.overcomeinternetaddiction.com
nourish my plants a.k.a. myself
win Ned over to the D.C.
win Ned over PERIOD
Have Martha draw her family tree on my wall
Buy low sell high
Paint more walls
Stop locking myself out of the apartment
Achieve World Record HT visits in Harlem
Abundance! (Learn how to make goals)
Win the Lottery
stop shooting up at work
stop lying about if people can use my spices
stop lying about honeydew melons
Get action
Prepare for the wedding of my dreams
Listen to my maturing body
stop changing Stewball’s name to Stewboy
Be Champion like Martha
To grow up
harness my chi and learn to fly

We were trying to come up with ideas of how to decorate the living room, and Becca suggested chalkboard paint. I loved the idea, having just left behind an exposed brick wall filled with chalk signatures. We decided that we would clean it every week so that it wouldn’t become too familiar and stale. We also decided we’d take pictures of it to satisfy the attachment that develops with random, adhoc artwork.

Prior to the pictures you see here, the wall had only been used for a few hangman games and some random drawings. Here’s hoping I am somewhat regular at posting, and that our installations are worth documenting.