October 5, 2007 – Sunny, warm. Maria Heinrich’s “Fiber Chair”, to be shown at the Art Harvest at Gardenworks, Salem, N.Y., on October 13-14 (518 854 3250), has taken on a personality of its own, at least to me. It is of the farm, really, and it talks to me and I have dreams about it, the first time I have ever been close to a chair. I think it has powers. Maria is an astonishingly gifted artist, and am shocked at the power of her imagination to capture mine, through things as varied as eerily beautiful quilts  and chairs. Like a fiber art fairy, she simply reinvents things through the prism of her art. She is a wonderful friend too, and I would not like to think of life without her or his husband Bill, two of the best friends I have ever had.
   I’m been trying to get the fiber chair for weeks now, and Maria and I have bartered – I get the Fiber Chair, she gets one of my photos that she likes. I move the chair all over the farm taking pictures of it, and so now, of course, Izzy hangs around the chair as well. Last night at midnight, when I should have been sleeping and recovering from the Yankee-thumping in Cleveland, I was out in the road, dodging pick-ups sailing down the hill and taking pictures of the Fiber Chair. I am going to post several of them today here.
  As always, I marvel at the ability of Izzy to slip into the nature of things, into the moment, into what I am  involved in, so when I started taking pictures of the chair, he started curling up around it. I think he will be a bit out of joint when Lenore the lab puppy comes, but Izzy is malleable, and so are lab puppies. They’ll work it out.