The Art of Cancer

You may recognize this photo--it's been on the sidebar of this blog throughout, because of course, everything I needed to know about cancer I learned from my dog. This dog. Seamus (pronounced, by the way, Shay-mus. Just back from our heartland America tour I have learned that a blog reader or 20 has been pronouncing his name Seem-us. Uh, no. It's Irish for James and pronounced Shay-mus. Shay-moose when he's eating a lot. Which is always.) My mother (a very talented art quilter in her own right) has a friend, Roberta Ranney, who reads the blog and cleverly deduced how important this little dog is to me. So she "quilted up" this for me and gave it to me at my Survivor Party Part Deux.
Isn't that spectacular? Yes, it's a quilt! (Not the big kind your grandma put on her bed. This is "textile art" and it gets hung on the wall!) It turned out so well--I can't believe how beautifully she captured Seamus's (slightly crazed) personality. I'm not the only one who was impressed. Thus she's now launched a line of custom pet quilts! You can order one of your pet and while there is absolutely no way your pet is as cute as Seamus, the textile art will be stunning. Her blog is RobertaRanney.blogspot.com (or just click on that!). She's posted a few other animal portrait quilts she's done, including one of my mom's Australian Shepherd, Barbee (yeah, don't ask about the name. It has something to do with "shrimp on...". Right, don't ask.)

And in other artist news, one of my favorite art websites The Artful Home is having a breast cancer fundraiser. Not the normal "buy something tacky and pink and we'll make a profit and give oh, a couple of cents, to some gigantic research conglomerate" kind of fundraiser. This is specifically for one artist who has had a recurrence of breast cancer and it's spread to her bones. She requires 16 rounds of chemo and because this was a "pre-existing condition" she has no insurance. A bunch of the other artists have donated their works and 100% of the sales proceeds today and tomorrow go to the "Hearts for Anna" fund to help pay for her treatment. Hey, I had insurance and I can't believe how much money I had to spend battling this disease. She's going to need a lot of help. So, check it out. There's some beautiful work. (Click here: "Hearts for Anna").

There will be more art updates soon. My mother shipped the quilt she made and is donating to the Shop to Stop Breast Cancer event. I should have it next week and will post photos of that too. Because of course, we'd love donations from other artists for this event as well. (That was subtle, right?)