The Omniart Notebook

A Colorist’s House Playing House with Colors I love to play house. I just can’t believe it sometimes! I am all grown up and can set up a house the way I want to?  It seems unreal somehow. And it is. In the sense of the Real things, the truly important things, it IS just play acting. For, by my definition, Real Things last forever. So these supposedly real, grown up things, are just toys and games to my artist brain, which is quite childlike. In a way, I am designing a kind of stage set for the theater of life. So but here I am, fixing up an old house in just the way I would like! It is of course practical, but also, whimsical. It is aspirational, even symbolic, and with an activist dimension. It is the kind of thing you might expect when an artist plays house. It is the colors you will notice first when you walk in. The stairs and hallway leading up to the second story dwelling, and the landing at the top, are white walled, with black trim. A neutral straight passage. But as soon a...

We are traveling light.  My fiber yarn of choice for traveling is my embroidery floss bag.  I gather some twigs fallen from the trees as we wander.  I like the kind with little knobs on both ends.  One twig is a perfect equal cross, so it is just right for a God’s eye.  Ojo de Dios. We are visiting my favorite mountain, and I gather the colors of the mountain and its setting of sky and trees from my yarn bag.  The center, the focalizing point of the ojo is the mountain, of course.  Is is glistening, snow covered, crystal, outstanding 14,000 feet in the deep blue sky, with the forest greens all around. First I weave mountain, then sky, then forest.  Soon I will add tassels. “Some people have had visions during sacred ceremonies in which they received guidance from Infinite Creator who appeared before them in many shapes, though the eyes of the God were so intense and overwhelming that many could only see the eye of the God. To show others the visio...

I Cherish the Sheep They say every spinner eventually gets curious about other fibers than wool.  With me, it turns out the other way around. First, I try various other animal and plant fibers: The neighbor’s mountaineering pack llama fleece.  My friend’s prize winning alpaca fleece.  The guard llama, Blue, down the road from us, who ferociously watches over his own little sheep flock.   The family dog. The pet angora rabbit. The angora goats we had for a while, before they tried to eat all of the native flowers on the land, and we gave them to another sanctuary farm, run by a friends who had a lot of invasive plants to for them to gleefully chew through.  The cashmere goats we babysat, for a friend, for a few months. Exotic animals; yak, camel,  qiviut,  etc. Flax. Organic natural colored cotton. Rayon.  Hemp. Silk. Then raw silk, in which no harm is done to the silkworms. The abandoned cocoons are gathered, picked from the mulberry trees, a...

Homepathic Dye Experiment I am playing with colors again. I take a pinch of dye and dissolve it in a quarter cup of water. I pour half in a tiny little jar in the crockpot with a bit of fleece. I’m working with merino staples and a few stunning  teeswater twelve inch long curly locks I just got.  With half of my dye left, I stir water in the mixing pitcher back to the same quarter cup level. Half of this goes into the next little jar. The third jar gets half as much as the previous one, and so on, until jar number six, which is so diluted that the water barely shows any color at all! The orange dye at full strength turns the fleece almost red, but is quite yellow at the end, at the last dilution. Turquoise is lovely and deep at the first jar, but a pale minty green at the end of the line. Pink just keeps getting paler… “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

My newest book is out today, albeit only on this link, so excited for you to get a sneak preview!  I have been working on this one for years. Everything I know about color, from this colorist artist:) Understanding color in art, lifestyle, philosophy, and psychology. A fun little book of Omni’s art, and thoughts and meandering commentary on color in art and life. This 173 page book is full of colorful illustrations on every page, color insights, and useful tips for using color in your life, art, and mind. You will learn things about color perception and yourself, as waves of color wash over you, with a chapter on each color and more. To read the Omni’s Colorbook on your device in its entirety for free,  CLICK HERE:

Big Leaf Maple Art “Appreciate and don't take for granted the things and people you have. Better yet take the good out of the situations you may face, I think 2020 came to teach us that.” -Hopal Green These Big Leaf Maple trees in our area will grow nowhere else, though people have tried. And they make the largest maple leaf of any other maple.  These trees are everywhere around us as we meander through the rainforest. They light up the understory in dappled sun, drenching us in golden light. Their leaves pile up into crumpled papery paths through the woods. They read like naturally self recycling newspapers, littering our way, with the stories of the last few seasons printed on them. Pick one up, it has a message for those who can read tree language.  There is the news of wind, rain, and sun, gossip about the affairs of birds and squirrels, and from this fall, the tale of the great smoke. We kick through them as we walk. The rain turns them into soggy cornflakes that squish u...

The Omniart Notebook The Rainbow Viral Geometry Fiber Art Project When I started this project a year ago, the whole world was in the beginning stage of the first truly global pandemic in modern times. Never before had an event affected almost everyone in the world before, (although certainly a good case could be made for the advent of the almost universally available cell phone.)  Many did not realize how long things would be quite different at the time. Some thought we would all hunker down for a couple of weeks. But as weeks turned into months, people realized that not only would things not go back to “normal” soon, that indeed, they would be changed forever in some ways, some even for the better.  Families realized that they enjoyed hanging out together with their children.  Couples either found out how compatible they were, or not.  Working from home was proven to be workable in many cases, and may never again be seen as an unusual option.  People came to va...