Self portrait of sorts. Put my hand to a Xerox and enlarged it. Picked out palmistry lines with appropriate comments in alphabet beads. Thus Love line becomes bead lust, Spirals of time refers to the use of a spiral as a metaphor for the passage of time, Passionate is my response to people who say I must have patience. Digitally compulsive comes from Joyce Scott.

$1,500.

Inspired by Hand of the Suttee by M.Clayden, done a decade after my own widowhood & very glad that I was not widowed in another culture. Suttee is the custom from the India of burning a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. Live. Drugged, yes, but live.

$1,600.

Based on Buddy Mondlock's song NO CHOICE : "It was a love so big that it filled his heart till it swelled and finally burst apart, the love spilled out and they called it art but he never really had no choice, no he never had no choice, when he gave his river a voice, he never really had no choice..." gets right to my feelings about creativity, and how it flows through you.

Collection of Jack and Mary Ann Katzenmeyer

A real building on the near west side, on I-90 near w 117 exit. Coming round the bend at sunset, with the sunset showing the empty factory building, reminds me of opening scene of Ayn Rand's novel ATLAS SHRUGGED. Here the sunset is referring to the migration of rust belt industry to the sunbelt states, and the highway sign changed from west to south.

Collection of Daphne Farago.

Based on an Aztec stone carving in Cleveland Museum of  Art, color and pattern taken from racer snake from Guatemala.   The Serpent is a sacred symbol to the Pre Colombian Meso-Americans, but a symbol of temptation and sin to the Europeans. The seed beads emblematic of the trade with Europeans, are used to incredible advantage by the native peoples.

Private Collection

Hundertwasser inspired linear shading. Working from an old sketchbook series of houses and roads, that became trees and networks.... Intentionally working with shading by changing colors with each line as with Huntertwasser...

Private Collection

Based on a sketch I did from a show of Oriental painting in a show of painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art: GARDEN GROVE AFTER A SNOWFALL Ming Dynasty (1541) by Quin Gu, Peking. I have inserted my own view of sunset skies in winter from my studio window. The idea of meeting someone at the door with a pot of tea is exactly my idea of hospitality!

Private Collection

I spend a great deal of my time listening to Celtic music. Much of it has to do with the many sorrows and hopes of immigration. The concept of the streets being paved with gold may be universal, but somehow it seems so essentially Irish to me. When others look at this, they've found their own ancestors in it as well. The buildings are rendered in a faerie tale like subjective shading that refers to some of the cubist style and WPA era art that always speaks to me of this period in American history.

Collection of Joanne Bast

An anonymous avian in a pear tree: I knew if I  called it a partridge, I'd have some ornithological expert telling me exactly why the little carved bone birdie didn't look like a partridge

Private Collection

Thinking of dreams as the fruit of an exotic tree... folks tend to think eating the wrong thing can give you nightmares: what is the fruit to eat to give you good dreams?

Collection of Pattrick Keenan

Thinking of dreams as the fruit of an exotic tree... folks tend to think eating the wrong thing can give you nightmares: what is the fruit to eat to give you good dreams?

Based on Medical Mission Sisters song: Spirit of God in the clear running water / Blowing to greatness the trees on the hill Spirit of God, Man longs that you only /Fill the earth, bring it to birth And blow where you will/ Blow, blow, blow till I be, But breath of the spirit blowing in me.

Collection of Pattrick Keenan

The week before Christmas, and the slanting light at sunset hit the trees with a light that made them all look made of metal against the stolid opaque sky.

$1,400.

Thinking of dreams as the fruit of an exotic tree... folks tend to think eating the wrong thing can give you nightmares: what is the fruit to eat to give you good dreams?

$425.

A picture out of a child's book and a mother's nightmare. Inspired by the mom who "just went out for five minutes to buy cigarettes" and came home to find her house afire and her children burned to death. This sad combination of neglect and stupidity is much too common. When are children more likely to play with flammables than when left alone?

$725.

Inspired by the bold colors a neighbor painted their modest tudor style house. It got me to wondering, what IF...? Building details sketched from houses in the Shaker Lakes area, but none of them are anything like these colors.

$1,575.

Buildings by the riverside each one different from the next. Makes it easier to get where you are going when there is some difference in destinations. Painted canvas background.

Collection of Jack & Mary Ann Katzenmeyer

Another suicide bomber has killed in the middle east, and Tommy Sands' song "There Were Roses" about `the Troubles' in Northern Ireland comes to mind and serves as a warning for the futility & devastating effect of group hatred. Form is based on traditonal `God's Eye," using eye beads, traditional amulets for safe travels in the middle east.

Wrapped oak branches, seed beads, bone beads, bone skull beads, base of bead embroidered fabric over plaster.

$2500.00

Commission Challenge: Fox is the family name, Bryan is a watch collector, include both in the piece. I've chosen to adapt Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes with a fox who looks like he just might be able to get those grapes, which are pocket watch charms. The flowers on the ground are all watch gears donated by Ruth, who commissioned it.

Collection of Bryan Lever

The arch from a passage grave, based on the dolmens at New Grange, melded with a bit of  the idea of a gate to faerie land as expressed by Charles  DeLint's story The Little Country.

Arch stuffed with cotton, base "grass" of bead fringe mounted over cotton knit padding, on a wooden base.

$1250.00

ALL WORKS AND IMAGES COPYRIGHT JOANNE LAESSIG.
Not to be duplicated or used without my express written permission.

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