Kansas City with Mary Buek

On May 18, I had the joy and privilege of touring the best parts of Kansas City with online art friend, Mary Buek. I have admired her photographs of the interesting places she goes on her photo walks, and when I learned I was going to be in Kansas City, I asked her if she would mind letting me tag along. She was very gracious and even picked me up at my hotel. At first, she gave me a driving tour of the Plaza area where we were staying. We drove by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and saw some very interesting statues of heads coming out of the ground. No photos, but I don't think I will soon forget them.

The first stop we made was in River Market. We stumbled on a great old brick storage building that was being torn down, brick by brick. The photo ops were fantastic. We scrambled over bricks and skirted mud puddles to take photos of rusty equipment, chain link fence in a pile, empty doorways, and much more. There was even a wrecking ball just waiting to have its photo taken

Our next stop was West Bottoms. Where we stopped was filled with old brick buildings. Some looked occupied, most not. There was wonderful graffiti everywhere. We didn't wander too far, but the small area where we wandered was filled with incredible eye-candy of my liking. I discovered a large drain pipe on the side of a building that had broken in a few places. It created a very cool waterfall. There were several puddles of water where the buildings and the graffiti reflected hopefully. Here is another photo from that area.

After leaving West Bottoms, I was hungry, so Mary took me to a great Mexican restaurant where I had avocado enchiladas. They were really great. I am going to make them at home, if I can. After lunch, we walked across some train tracks under a freeway to an old brewery. I fell in love with what I saw there. If it hadn't been getting late, I would have wanted to stay there longer, in spite of the drizzle. Here are a couple of photos from there.

Our last stop was a grain elevator. So cool. I had a fantastic day with Mary exploring the parts of Kansas City I wanted to see. One day, I hope she will come here and I can show her where I found the rusty car in the woods. I leave you with one final photo from the grain elevator. I have many more to process, but these are some of my favorites.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine for Tom

10 x 10 mixed media collage

by Miki Willa

Happy Valentine's day, everyone. I created this valentine for my husband and actually framed it. It is the first collage I have framed. It is created with five layers of wonderful hand made paper, two hearts of scrapbook paper, and one of wrapping paper. I had great fun selecting the papers, hand tearing the hearts,and figuring out an interesting layout. There was no stress to this project, just joy. All creative projects should be this way. That is a big part of my artistic goals for this year.

Speaking of goals, part of my life coaching group homework this week is to work on setting a goal and creating a plan to achieve that goal. I am excited about creating a series of visual odes (see this post) about places I have visited or lived in that left a strong impression with me. In addition to the visual piece, I want to share a story or two about the place. As I get more clear about the goal, I will post about it here. Part of the plan will include an accountability piece. When I was doing a painting a day, I set up this blog to keep me accountable. I think this will be part of my accountability system for this project as well.

I am still working on my artistic freedom manifesto. I will have more photos in the next post.