New Year's Cheer.... kudos everywhere!

My goodness! What a great start to 2013. There's nothing like recognition to inspire me to work even harder in the new year.

My little magpie linocut (now titled "Lurking," in honor of silent blog followers hiding in the cyber shadows) was voted "Best Picture of 2012 (Nature)" by readers of Katherine Tyrrell's Making a Mark.

This was the 7th year for the Making a Mark Art Blog Awards... so kudos are due back to Katherine for her devotion to art and artists around the world. Thank you.

And THEN... who woulda thunk it? Charley Parker over at Lines and Colors surprised me with a feature about my work in his December 29th post. Charley presents some really beautiful work with concise and thoughtful commentary and links to all sorts of online resources. And, holy cow! "My" post comes between articles about Monet and Le Brun? Get. Out. (Amusing aside: A scraper site that gathers celebrity gossip picked up this post, too. My name in big letters and an article excerpt next to photos of Hillary Clinton and the Denver Broncos. Yeah, baby. Linocuts are All That.)

And THEN... last but not least, Ian Rogers at Grey Not Grey put together a nice post about my linocuts just yesterday. I love that Ian hit on one of my own inner struggles with the following statement:

" There’s something deeply refreshing about somebody who simply makes art based on their experience of nature. We don’t all have to be exploring the implicit tension between modes of art history or whatever."

Yeah. What he said.

All this cyberbuzz is wonderful, but DANG. I have to get back to work. Guess what the FedEx driver brought me yesterday? 24" x 36" sheets of lino! Now all I have to do is figure out what to DO with them. New year, here I come!