A happily tired report from the EBHQ biennial

The Wise Tree collection was a star at the East Bay Heritage Quilters biennial in Oakland, CA (Apr. 10-11, 2010)! We joined our friends at New Pieces on Sunday afternoon to share our mission made manifest in fabrics with quilters in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Pictured: Sharona Fischrup, owner of New Pieces in Berkeley, CA and Ketra Oberlander, founder of Art of Possibility® Studios, with its debut fabric collection by George Mendoza for Art of Possibility.


Pictured: Proof that a good time was had by all. The ransacked display by the show's close Sunday evening says more about the popularity of the line than we ever could.

Pillow Talk

A little fabric, a little quilting, a LOT of style! These Art of Possibility pillows pop with color and are a great example of the creative spirit let loose on our fabric line through Free Spirit Fabric. Buy. Sew. Style.

CHA-CHA-CHA

CHA show was like a meditation retreat. Just this one pic:

A quick little catchup on the beginning of the year

Atlanta certainly spins its weather. I’d expected the deep south to be all ladies with paper fans saying “lawdy, Ah’ve got the vaporhs!” but no, 15 degrees, ice & snow is what I found there.

The exhibit hall was frigid. I wore overcoat & mittens most the time. People probably thought I was a germ-phobe. I mean, a weirder germ-phobe than I am, that is. I’m well within the spectrum of normal germ-phobe. Sure, I carry antibacterial gel. Blind people touch a lot of gross stuff. Ew.

More good news

What’s more fun than completely changing your life at 40? More magazine reporting on it!

Happy Birthday, Art of Possibility® Studios!

We just turned 2 and are riding through the transition from startup problems to early stage growth problems. Personally, I’m stunned at the difficulties involved in doing something as straightforward as changing the world. Who would’ve guessed?

Special Thanks

Thanks, Mark, for letting your readers know about the Art of Possibility textile collection launching in October at the Houston Quilt Market.

Can't wait to see you there!

The Delicate Balance

I want to keep everyone informed about Art of Possibility's progress as a business and change agent and we've had some boy-howdy successes, but now I have a new brand management fear to add to my list of commerce paranoias: winding up on Tweeting Too Hard's aggregate of blowhard tweets.

See, we have a lot to shout from the mountaintops and people who take a genuine interest in the work we're doing, but out of context we'd just look like ... me. With 30 drinks in me. Is perception reality? maybe I'm focused too much on being understood than being understanding, or averting misunderstanding, or caught up in my own cheerleading while not depriving folks of learning about our ups and downs. It's just been a lot of ups lately.

We'll take 'em when we can get 'em.

And therein resides the dilemma: sharing our glad tidings without coming across as boastful, self-important bores.

At the risk of overthinking the latest news, thanks to:

• The Cincinnati Enquirer
• The kokomo Tribune
• The Kentucky Enquirer
• Hot Spots magazine
• Elk City Daily News

for your recent coverage. It means a lot to us to share our message with others and we love you for caring about us.

Off the Grid

Sitting at the Lake watching the moonbeams dance reflecting on the water, listening to guitar ballads, fireflies – the coolest insects ever – illuminating their lazy trajectory, with spartan distant fireworks and the blue-black night's canopy over the verdant slopes to the water, I revel in the sublime moments off the grid.
Roman candles across the lake, the subtle sizzle of the neighbor's grilled fragrant goodness wafting through the screen porch of the log cabin, hand hewn walls from the land on which they stand, I delight in how connected I am to it all when I disconnect from the cloud that's responsible for 90% of the items on my task list that I need the vacation from in the first place.

As the momentum for Art of Possibility has accelerated I'm again leaping outside my comfort zone and the holiday break has been a great chance to renew, restore and remember how damn much fun it all is. Anyone reading this, feel free at any time to remind me of the fun of it all. I get caught up in the doing and forget how deeply I love my life – all of it.

Tomorrow we pack up coolers, kids & dogs and drive on the two-lane ribbons through the corn fields, across the one-lane iron bridge, easing ourselves toward the Interstate that leads back to the airport, as we gently close the story of the 4th at the Lake and catalog its moments of delight, laughter, minor annoyance with a slathering of SPF 45, I'll take home a joyful collection of stories and snapshots of the spaces opened for sharing love.

Sharing Our Message of Hope

Thanks to our friends in the media for sharing our message of hope with their readers.

- MomFinds Daily Blog

- Jennifer Wang of Enterpreneur

And - a PodCast on the Dino Herbert Show.

Exploring Creative Expression

I'm off to corn country shortly to enjoy friend and fellow artist Tamar Assaf's participation in The Fields Project. Tamar is Hebrew for fabulous and the selection of her work for this annual celebration of art and agriculture creates not just beauty but also an excuse for me to road trip (via commercial airline, naturally. I'm a lot closer to hip replacement than I am the hip college scene) to the Land of Lincoln where I shall eat tomatoes and corn from local farmers all day every day while talking about how good the food is, which is the way of my people. We are a people of Grammas offering seconds, of long, lazy discussions of string bean varieties (go, Kentucky Wonder, go!) and of watermelon slices so sweet you'll weep with the glory of the divine mystery that is summer eatin'. Art and agriculture belong together. The smell of grilling burgers and sunblock, the sweet nectar of a peach, sleeve-wiped and juicy fresh from the tree, the moments sublime and cuisine exquisite, will kick off hot fun in the summertime for me. See you there.

Art of Possibility on Art Buyer

Oh Look! An Art of Possibility Studios article scavenger hunt!

(You'll find us on p.34).

Bloggus Interruptus

We're doing our part to stimulate the economy by having a kid paint the entire interior of the house. A sunny yellow living space and cool sage resting spaces will enhance our lives and keep someone out of work in motion while the downturn trundles along. The thing about having your house painted? It's like moving cross country, one room at a time.

Unlike moving cross country, though, there's no "stop" to your life while your brother-in-law drives the truck from sea to shining sea. Instead daily life continues amidst a hubbub of home furnishings and the chaos of cardboard boxes. Compounding the drop cloth drama is a home-based business, so I get no reprieve from the tumult while I'm at work all day.

And with Surtex and Licensing just around the corner my work load skyrockets so I have a lovely aerial view of the pandemonium I hath wrought.

I just took three paragraphs to say "I'm busy."

As such, expect bloggus interruptus; less frequent posts while I ride the wave of commerce (my economy is booming, frankly. I keep costs low and work like a field hand and y'know? Art of Possibility is doing o-kay) but I'll tweet the big deals and hope to post when interesting ideas catch my imagination.

It's That You Play the Game

Friendships may or may not translate into good business, but good business invariably grows into lasting friendships.

I'd like to introduce another upstart, friendly, fun, artist-founded company to the growing list of friends of Art of Possibility: Sandy Parker's Phenominoes®. Sandy founded Deep in the ART of Texas to create affordable, wearable art and generate jobs in her community, a place I lovingly described as "not California."

Sandy found my work online, called, and we just love one another's unique, independent goals and are now working at the intersection of those objectives, making both Art of Possibility and Phenominoes better for the shared effort.


We chose 27 different great paintings by George Mendoza and me for our first collection. Each domino pendant has a cleverly designed hook so you can easily transfer it onto other necklaces to add a little play to any ensemble.

Art of Possibility on ABC News

Art of Possibility was profiled on the 6:00 news, by ABC's SF affiliate Channel 7.

Watch it here.

The Evolution of a Brand

To those who are checking in, Art of Possibility didn't make the Echoing Green finals. In their supreme coolness, however, I can get the judges' unredacted notes (anonymized, naturally) so I can see how my concept was perceived by others more clueful than I.

I'll keep you posted and you know I deeply appreciate your support.

And today I realized I'm not really an art agency in any traditional understanding of agency. My not adapting my language to describe what I do as the business has evolved created significant confusion. So after I finish this I'll begin calling Art of Possibility an art brand. Period. To build that brand it represents artists but that's where the similarities between the work I'm doing and a standard art
agency end.

We represent artists, but we also help them through professional development and creating an infrastructure that facilitates their success. When I started the business it was because I saw market gaps that limited opportunity for artists with disabilities and I adopted a traditional model, then line item by line item, adjusted it to be positioned for optimum success. In those line item transitions I
moved away from the tried-and-true into the vast enormity of our shared potential.

It's into that potential that I drive forward, always exploring, and as I look over my shoulder and see the limits of the old vocabulary I realize I must advance, not cling to the ordinary so my hands are free to grasp the extraordinary as I reach for it.

How Does Your Life Matter?

"The Call" usually comes with a lengthy Latin-based diagnosis, a medical mystery shrouded in grafted syllables of a dead language. Anyone who's done any amount of living has gotten "the Call" and has paused.

Work can wait. Errands will keep. Inhale. Listen. A nearby spring bird declaring its sole right to the elm. A distant motor accelerates and fades. The fabric of the draperies lets loose a gentle shimmy in recognition of the invisible force of the wind upon it. Email will be there later. It's not going anywhere. Inhale.

Elle's surgery is scheduled; what dates are we available for a pre-surgical party to give love? Calendars, usually the boss, can be cleared. We'll be there. Y'know, we have a guest room if Elle needs a recovery place; I work from home; I can be here; feeble, desperate bids for uniting against the C word - recurring at 46 - inhale.

I'm much more comfortable with my own mortality than I am the mortality of friends. It's a control thing I guess. I joke with my husband on lazy weeknights as we Tivo through commercials that he can just put me down like Old Yeller if I crumble.

The crumbling of others, though, digs deep into my gut, into that adolescent stick-girl obsessed with fairness, fists clenched, ready to show you all when she grows up. A call for justice, sunburned shoulders and scabbed elbows, lacking in life experience to see the big wheel, to know that fortunes ebb and flow.

Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty pass. I'll do the next thing, the next work of my workday. It matters. Being able to create a path for others to continue creating, that matters. Carefully formulating a way to connect the disconnected matters. Giving love through the difficulties matters.

Giving love matters.

Love matters.

Meet the Reasons I Love What I Do: Enid Swift

Enid found Art of Possibility through an open call on VSA and I immediately loved her work. Tired of simplistic, childish patterns I found a complexity and maturity in her aesthetic that I believe in completely, mostly because she designs
patterns I want.

Enid's also the only artist with us who has repaired Chinook helicopters.

de Young and de Artest

Ketra will have work featured in Art Slam 2009 at the MH de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, from 1:00-3:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 28.

An expansive slide show of works by disabled artists will be shown in the Koret Auditorium as part of the de Young's Access Advisors annual event, celebrating the diversity of creativity that emerges from disability.

The 2009 Art Slam marks the third year of the event and Ketra's participation in it.

AOP an Editors' Pick

Art of Possibility elegant floral notepads are Editor's Pick at ShoppingByMail.