The good news is that I hung my ongoing show at the Good Cup Downtown. For the month of December, I have both sides of the fireplace. In January another artist will use the space on the right side of the fireplace. The owners of the Good Cup on the mesa bought this coffee house in downtown Santa Barbara. It's located right next to the Fiesta Theater. It was a bit hard to have enough small items that would fit in the shelves but I think it looks pretty good and hopefully the mosaics will sell.
The bad news is that the Poria incrassata - house-eating fungus - has returned to the studio. It was just two years ago that my wonderful carpenter Jim replaced the whole left side and the back wall. Now hopefully we've caught it early and will only need to replace the left side of the door.The first clue that it's in the wall is in late November or very early December -when this pretty mushroom-like bloom shows up between the seams of the wood. Then it's time to start removing wood to see how much the fungus has eaten. It feeds on wet wood (my fault, no doubt) and turns it to mush.
One good note about the studio is that I have it set up inside with all my tools and a large work table. I should have taken pictures before we started tearing out the walls but I'm sure Jim will once again fix it and I'll post new pictures.
