Open Every Day Till Christmas: Lots to See at Two Loons in the Lincoln Park District. Buy Local.

I started with this photo because (a) it's colorful, and 
(b) Somerset Maugham wrote a fun short story called
Mr. Know It All. 

I stopped in at Two Loons Gallery & Boutique in Duluth's Lincoln Park District to pick up a calendar for 2022. Yes, it's hard to believe we're turning the page on another year. For Christmas shoppers desirous to shop local, there are a whole host of shops in the West End, and places to eat or fetch a libation. The photos here are from Two Loons, but since we're just two weeks from Christmas, you should stroll the whole neighborhood. 

Today is a good day for it. It's Saturday, and here in Duluth every Saturday is a Small Business Saturday. Buy local and you'll be circulating your cash in the neighborhood. 

Aaron Kloss is a local artist who has gained a following. 
Here's a book he and Chuck Haavik partnered to publish.

Susie Newman, the Down Home Creator, has decorated 
goose egg ornaments and goose feather quill pens here.
Both have been popular, all of it home grown.

The Northland has lots of cribbage players, and almost as many
varieties of cribbage boards. Imaginations run wild and free.

Night lights, not bright lights.

A lump of coal, in the event you need to give one. If you give them 
a lump on the noggin could get you arrested.

A doll for doll collectors who have all the rest.

Scandanavians-R-Us here in the North Country

Jammin' with Boondock Enterprises

The store is overflowing with goodies and treasures. 

If you've never been, check it out.

TWO LOONS

Art, Gifts, Apparel and Decor

Open 7 Days a Week till Christmas

2025 West Superior Street

https://www.twoloons.mn/

Saturday Snippets: Fragments of Imagination and Observation

The other night I decided to do something useful: cleaned some of the debris and scraps of miscellany off my desk. What follows are various notes, interspersed with a few quotes from other sources. Every once in a while you just gotta do it.

* * *

"Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain..." Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

* * *

His method: Following an idea as far as it would go.

* * *

Don't gather 'round people
don't go out and roam.
Please stay in your houses 
and please stay at home.

* * * 

As I was walking into town
I met a man whose head was down;
He used to be a happy clown
But now he only wears a frown

* * * 

I'm so old I can still remember when it was illegal to break the law.

* * * 

She gave him a tornado and said, "Let's go for a ride."
"I'm a little burned out, and it's late," he replied.

* * * 

One good thing about reading a lot of Solzhenitsyn & writing about it
is that you learn how to spell his name without having to look it up.

* * *

How did it happen that people created a special day to be tricksters?

* * * 

The next person who asks me for for a glass of pineapple juice mixed with grapefruit is gonna get a punch.

* * * 

"The best conversations... start over good food." 
Printed inside lid of Mezzetta Imported Capers

* * * 

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."
--Frederick Chopin

* * * 

"The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route." --George Sand  

* * *

Meantime life goes on all around you. Make the most of it.

Miscellaneous Saturday Morning Catch-All

Today is the 3rd day of August and the 215th day of the year. It was a moonless sky and black as pitch last night when I turned in after spending a couple hours in my studio. Did some work on three or four different pieces, but was primarily trying to make decisions about what to submit for consideration in September's PRØVE Gallery show titled Transplants.

The show caught my attention because I myself am a transplant. Born in Cleveland, grew up in New Jersey, college in Athens, Ohio. Lived in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and the Twin Cities for getting dropped onto Lake Superior's doorstep. The idea of submitting a set of images reflecting these various life stages appealed to me.

But then I thought of other kinds of transplants and it will be an interesting show. Plants and tress get transplanted. And body parts, too. Heart, lung and liver transplants are miracles of modern medicine.

I can imagine someone submitting a group of flower paintings themed "Bloom where you're planted."  If you're an artist, the call for art has gone out with a deadline for submissions being August 28. For submission guidelines, email Nick at provegallery dot com and include the word Transplants in your subject line.

NOTE: If you read the guidelines you will see that the actual show is geared toward artists who have "moved to Duluth for any reason. We are in a time of change in many ways, and would like to showcase this with an exhibition highlighting the rich variety that all of this intermixing can achieve." In other words, it's not about heart transplants, though if you have geographically been transplanted here let's hope your heart came with you.

Next weekend there are a number of art openings to get scribbled onto your calendars. Friday night is the usual Second Friday Art Crawl with openings at Washington Gallery (Hootenanny, featuring Chris Dunn and Emma Rustan), PROVE (Papyri group show), and Ochre Ghost (Colin Marx). Minnesota Wine Beginnings and Double Dutch down below may also have something special planned. Then on Saturday evening there will be an opening for the Northern Printmakers Alliance Group Show titled PANORAMA. It's an afternoon opening, from 2 - 6 pm at the Northern Prints Gallery, 318 North 14th Avenue East here in Duluth.

For what it's worth today's a sunny, gorgeous day here in the Northland and if you don't have plans, it might be a nice day to go biking. If you like mountain biking, we've got all kinds of trails here. In fact, I think Duluth has more parks and trails per capita than any city in the world. (I just made that statistic up but it rolled of the fingertips pretty easily and might even be half true.) For leisurely biking there has been a continued investment in bike trails here in Minnesota. If you don't own bikes personally, you can drop down to Carlton Bike Rental and rent one of theirs. They recently had a hundred young people fly in from Chile to go biking here and it was quite the adventure. (Disclaimer: I have some of my art there including the piece here on the left, Riding Like the Wind, which I completed two weekends ago.)

One more item, in the event your day isn't already jammed, Anne Labovitz will be giving an art talk this afternoon from 1-2 p.m. at the Tweed Museum. Her exhibition there this summer has been fabulous. If you're near the U and want a mid-day Art-boost, go for it. I love the Tweed's slogan: Driven to Discover. Anne's work is worth discovering if you have not already done so.

And finally, last but not least, N&L Publishing will likely be releasing the eBook Intergalactica this coming week if we can pull it off. The sci-fi fantasy art project which we've been shaping for more than half a year will at last be ready. It will be FREE for All, so download a copy and share it when it becomes available, hopefully by next Friday. (The Link will be posted.)

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Make the most of it.