Robyn Hill Hendrix

  • Home
  • About the Artist
    • Bio & Press
    • Artist’s Statement
    • Résumé
  • Portfolio
    • Watercolor
    • Drawings and Prints
    • Public Art and Placemaking
  • Blog
  • Say Hello

ta da!

April 9, 2011 By Administrator

I’ve been tweaking a lot of little things on the website.  The homepage now has a nice updated list of upcoming events (two the first week in May!).  Plus, I changed the font!  It feels like the housewife who just got a new haircut and is waiting to see if her husband (aka the general public in this case) notices the change.  I like it; feels more clean.  But I am open to suggestions & criticism if anyone’s got some.  Plus I fixed the blog menu bar so now you can link directly from this blog to all my other website pages (portfolio, statement, etc).

I’ve been thinking I should revive my e-newsletter.  I started using Mail Chimp a while ago, but haven’t really sent out many updates.  Perhaps if I had more subscribers, I would be more motivated to use it… (subtle hint).

First rumblings of spring thunderstorms are coming through Minneapolis tonight.  I love thunder.  Reminds me of stormy nights visiting my grandparents at their old house at the mill in Ohio.  The windows rattled with the wind and it was kind of creepy, but the memory of it now is somehow comforting.  This picture might have been taken there, not sure.  I saw the Dusty Porch Sisters play today at the Walker for the MN Made event, which was great, and made me feel a little bit of nostalgia.

Robyn and Grandma with mandolin & ukelele

Filed Under: art, random thoughts Tagged With: blog design, events, memories, nostalgia, thunder, web page design

poetry & memories while sick in bed

January 29, 2011 By Administrator

I’m feeling sick-o today.  This poem from A Child’s Garden of Verses came to mind.  It was one of my favorite books as a child, and I have a little miniature version of it on my shelf so thought I would share:

The Land of Counterpane, by Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

I remember the dreamy illustration in the big book I had of these as a child, it was one of my favorites.  But when I continued looking through my little mini volume I found another poem that is rather disturbing:

Foreign Children, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanese,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas,
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtles off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often, as you trod,
Have wearied not to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell beyond the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanese,
O! don’t you wish that you were me?

Well then!  That could certainly have made me feel like a very entitled little girl, couldn’t it.  It does evoke a sort of childlike innocence…or shall I say ignorance.  But I vaguely remember thinking this poem very odd and sort of silly, maybe because we moved to Sydney when I was 5 and I was around lots of “foreign children” at a very diverse elementary school, then I returned to the states two years later with a thick Aussie accent and had to insist to my classmates that I was born in Vermont and was indeed American!  However having moved to the Pacific Northwest, none of the first graders in Mrs. Hubbard’s class knew where Vermont was, they just thought it was part of Australia.  After a year or so my accent faded away and no one even remembered that I was once the weird kid who called cookies “biscuits” and sweaters “sloppy joe’s.”

Filed Under: random thoughts Tagged With: australia, children's books, children's poetry, poems, robert louis stevenson, sick

information overload

January 22, 2011 By Administrator

I’ve gotten into a habit in the last couple months.  It goes like this:  come home from work…browse through twitter (via hootsuite) and facebook…click on links that interest me…maybe read a third of the article or watch half the youtube video and then get distracted/busy with other things…accumulate at least twelve different tabs in firefox of articles, videos, blogs, etc that I intend to read with this idea that reading them will somehow benefit me or my art career or maybe they will just make me laugh so hard that I fall off my chair.  Keep these tabs open continuously until I read them, asking firefox to save my tabs if I have to quit the program.  The list seems to be neverending.

So I thought while I’m hanging around waiting for my chicken soup to finish cooking, I’d share the random things I have tabbed in my to-read list right now:

a blog entry about community participation in arts funding

an artnews.com article about street art

something about whiteboard accounting which sounds like something very practical

“Isabella Rossellini’s bizarre and artful web series on the mating behaviors of animals”

An article on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, which mostly just interests me cuz I’ve read the Poisonwood Bible

An article on survival skills for fine artists (I tweeted this and didn’t even finish reading it, shame on me)

best Abundant Artist posts of 2010 (I just discovered this website and it has tons of articles that I should read.)

My friend Jade and I went to a book reading last night.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone to one before.  It was Heidi Durrow reading from her book The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.  I liked her writing a lot, it’s very good. The crowd seemed really quiet at first, maybe just due to the bookstore being really quiet, so she had to really work at it to get people to start laughing.  It was kind of awkward but oh well, whatever.

So “go to an author’s book reading” can be checked off my life bucket list now.

Filed Under: art, random thoughts Tagged With: blogging, information overload, reading, reading list, Twitter

what I’ve been up to…

November 29, 2010 By Administrator

art and tea

The painting on the table is a new one inspired by the mountain ash berries I used to play with when I was a kid.

taking inventory of my stash

enjoying autumn colors

and watching the snow

Trying to find room for contemplation in the midst of life’s chaos.  Feeling saddened by the sudden loss of Alex’s mother and wishing I could have had the chance to meet her.

This poem has been on my mind.

i carry your heart with me by E. E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Filed Under: art, crafts, random thoughts Tagged With: art, autumn, poetry, snow, springboard for the arts, tea, women's art registry of minnesota

blog styling still in progress

November 26, 2010 By Administrator

I’m still tweaking things around to get this new blog setup to look similar enough to my main site that viewers won’t feel like they’ve gone to a completely different web page.  Fiddling around with wordpress has been more frustrating than I thought it would be; for some reason it takes forever for the changes I make to go through.  I have this vague unfounded hope that creating a new post will wake up the system somehow.  But at least I figured out how to get my tweets into the sidebar, so I guess that’s something.  all the wordpress widgets seemed to be useless but copying the html from twitter’s profile widget builder into a text widget in the sidebar seems to be working nicely.

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!  Mine was pretty low key, baked a bunch of pumpkin bread and took some over to Alex’s family’s house where they were having a Thanksgiving meal.  Ended up watching Avatar not once, but twice.  Kind of ridiculous.  I justified the second time with the facts that I was watching it with family members & friends, and it looked a lot better on their big screen than it did in the morning on our computer monitor.

Had to go to work today, but listening to MPR kept me going.  Science Friday had some great stuff this afternoon.  The bacteria-themed Ig Nobel awards were hilarious and were followed by a flashback rebroadcast of a show from about twenty years ago in which they discussed “the future of the internet.”  Laughed out loud at the ponderings about how “even the White House is using the internet now” and the callers referring to their “work station” instead of a computer.  My job would be so lonesome if I didn’t have a radio in that kitchen.  Wish I could play podcasts in there though, that would be amazing.  Except it would probably hamper my productivity because I would put off going downstairs to get the extra ingredient I needed just to hear the rest of whatever conversation I was listening to.  Maybe I do that anyway with regular radio…?

I was going to post a pic of my nifty “Springboard Artist” mug that I got when our workshops ended (sigh) set on my drafting table next to a new painting (of berries!), but I have once again lost my memory card adapter (double sigh), so that will have to wait.

Filed Under: art, random thoughts, regular life stuff Tagged With: blog design, web page design

Newsletter Signup

What you'll get: sneak peeks of works in progress, event announcements, and tips on fun happenings around the Twin Cities art scene in your inbox no more than twice monthly. Need a sample or want to catch up? Click here to see the most recent one.

Social Media

Keep in touch with  FacebookKeep in touch with  TwitterKeep in touch with  LinkedInKeep in touch with  InstagramKeep in touch with  PinterestKeep in touch with  TumblrKeep in touch with  Etsy

Search

Archives

Tags

art art 4 shelter art house coop artists australia berries blog design carleton college CCLI circa gallery creativity drawing events exhibit facebook feminist art gardening inspiration intermedia arts irrigate ladders Minneapolis minnesota Minnesota Fringe Festival mnarts mnfringe northern spark nostalgia painting Pinterest placemaking plants professional development reading simpson housing services sketchbook sketchbook project sketchbookproject smarts springboard for the arts WARM watercolor web page design women's art registry of minnesota work in progress

All images and designs are the copyright of Robyn Hendrix and may not be used without the artist's permission.

.

Copyright © 2019 by Robyn Hill Hendrix. Site design by the beautiful page. Powered by Genesis