11 December 2007

The Art of Strange Bedfellows is now available online

The art of Strange Bedfellows is now available online at My Imagekind Gallery.

Giclee prints on paper, as well as canvas are available... and all of them can be custom framed at Imagekind.

Pay a visit to see what the artwork looks like on its own.

11 November 2007

Read an Excerpt from "Strange Bedfellows" here...

Strange Bedfellows



Looking for a taste of Strange Bedfellows?

An excerpt (in PDF format) can be viewed here.

Introducing "Strange Bedfellows" - A Cautionary Tale for Times of Global Change

It is with deepest gratitude that I now announce the publication of Strange Bedfellows - A Cautionary Tale for Times of Global Change. It is the retelling of an amazingly detailed, epic dream that came to me unexpectedly in 1992. Dreaming this story was like watching an intricate and fully developed feature film -- it was awesome, even a little intimidating.


About Strange Bedfellows

Everything is going great for Paul and Christina. Their careers are fast-tracking them to success, they're moving up in society, and their future prospects are excellent. They take what they desire from the world around them and live life to the fullest. Everyone and everything around them reinforces their entitlement, and they have no reason to question their right to do what they please, when they please, to whomever they please.

But when a strange and horrifying incident takes place in their home, their lives are turned upside-down. In the blink of an eye, everything they've worked so hard for is at risk.

What will they do, when a grisly guest appears out of nowhere? Will they have the courage to make the changes necessary to restore right relationship to their world? And how will they save themselves from a horrible fate they have helped to create?

Strange Bedfellows is a cautionary tale for our times, a retelling of an epic, intricately detailed dream Kay Stoner received in 1992. This is a story of truth and consequence... entitlement and impoverishment... conscious choice and change... and the hazards of being motivated by self-centered fear and short-sighted ignorance.

Strange Bedfellows can be purchased online here at Lulu.com. Proceeds from these sales benefit women who make earth stewardship a priority.


The Journey Into Print

This work has been some 15 years in the making -- a decade and a half of fits and starts... believing in this story, trusting it, pondering its truths, and integrating them into my life. Now, as we propel forward into times of dramatic change on a global scale, it's time to get this story out to the broader world. I give thanks for all the help I've received from seen and unseen folks over the years, to help make this publication possible. I've been challenged and cajoled, encouraged and dismissed, prompted and chastised, supported and urged on, in countless ways by folks who never knew they were contributing to the creation of a book, but helped make it possible by their examples and their expressed needs -- needs for vision, needs for clues, needs for leadership, needs for a new story to tell ourselves about ourselves and our planet and our place on Her.

The creation of Strange Bedfellows truly has been a group effort, in many ways, with me being the steward in the middle, working steadily to make some sense of the many messages and meanings behind this tale, and pulling together the feedback and input and impetus from so many different sources. In the end, though I was given the dream, I am ultimately its steward, and this publication is an act of service to you all -- to us all.

Some dreams are clearly only about the person having it. They touch on aspects of experience that are particular to the dreamer -- symbolic representations of family members and friends, or personal characteristics which beg closer inspection. This dream was clearly not just about me -- the characters were far too well-developed, the scenarios were far too realistic, the events were much too sequential, and the message(s) inherent in the dream plainly had a great deal to do with more than just me.

Oh, no -- this was a dream about us. For us, about us, from us... this dream was us. It's about all of us, in these times of global change... how we react to the choices we've made which endanger our survival, how we choose to alter the course of our lives, and how we do -- and don't -- make sustained change possible.

I hope you'll pay a visit to Strange Bedfellows at Lulu.com and consider the message within. This is a story we all need to work through -- for the good of our planet and the hope of our children.

01 November 2007

Fame - Feng Shui - Inspired artwork available at my Imagekind gallery



This piece incorporates the concept of fame in vertical triangles of red, with smaller visual elements incorporated into the intersection of horizontal triangles.

Buy it here

Purchase a print with this frame, or use principles of feng shui to choose another frame that fits your space better.

Montain 1 and 2 - Feng Shui - Inspired artwork available at my Imagekind gallery

Feng shui-inspired artwork is now available in my WindWater gallery at Imagekind.com -- http://www.imagekind.com/GalleryProfile.aspx?GID=0f28b4f3-23c7-4ec2-9a23-f22044e5b17e&P=1



These pieces were created to anchor the energy of Mountain -- one Yang/Heaven above and two Yins/Earth beneath. Created with oil pastels, this piece uses color to convey the strength of mountain and the expansiveness of sky. The two Earths below are signified by the dual mountain ranges, each of them "broken" as the two lower lines of the Mountain trigram.



Working with Mountain, I'm finding that having the images prominently displayed in the Mountain/self-knowledge/wisdom sector (gua / kua)in my workspace really helps anchor me and center me... enough of the scattering already.

Somehow, it just works. As I'm sure thousands upon thousands of Chinese folks have discovered over the past couple thousand years.

20 September 2007

Totem II


totem_II, originally uploaded by kaystoner.

This is one of the drawings that came out of my getting set up on my own in Philadelphia in early 1990. I had my own home, I had my own schedule, and I could do as I pleased, for the first time in my adult life.

The sacred came forth for me a lot, during that time... when I was completely un-interrupted in my home life, by any intrusions, and I was free to create as I pleased. Totems and images and myths... and more.

Sacred Geometries on Flickr

I've posted a collection of my early work on Flickr

Follow the link to get there...

21 August 2007

About Me

Born & raised in southern Pennsylvania, with plenty of ties to Canada through Mennonite population (who all seemed to arrive in PA from the Ukraine via Waterloo, Ontario).

1983-1985 -- Lived 30 miles from the Canadian border, attending SUNY-Potsdam majoring in German & Cultural Anthropology, spent Saturday mornings watching Sesame Street in French and catching up on curling while finishing off last night's pizza. Primarily Ottawa-influenced, media-wise, listening to the BBC and CHEZ-106. Got used to snow and cold pretty quickly.

1985-1987 -- Studied in Germany, just inside the French Zone in Tuebingen. Traveled widely throughout Europe during semester breaks (as widely as the Iron Curtain would allow at that time, of course). Worked for an American translator who worked for VW and translated automotive material for Detroit. Learned enough French to say, "Je ne parle pas francais." Learned plenty of German, tho'.

1987-1995 -- Lived in NJ and Philadelphia, where I was a freelance writer/editor, and lived in northern California for 3 years, where I was Head of Documentation for a software company that built relational-database-driven desktop software. Created electronic and print docsets for DOS (it was 1993, after all), Windows and Mac versions of the product. Also contracted at Hewlett-Packard's microwave technology division, training their HR dept to transition from paper files to their international hiring database. Also wrote documentation for a hardware supplier for Intel, which built wafer handlers for silicon wafer printing, as well as medical pathology software. Worked for O'Reilly & Associates, who are based in Sebastopol, where I lived at the time. Spent a whole lot of time at the Sebastopol public library, combing through gopher servers (as the web had yet to emerge) - O'Reilly was at the time working on their "Internet in a Box" product, "the first shrink-wrapped package to provide a total solution for PC users to get on the Internet. Internet In A Box provides instant connectivity, a multimedia Windows interface, and a full suite of applications. New features in the second edition include: access to the CompuServe Network; Spry Mosaic, Mail, and News; Secure HTTP; and a Network File Manager." Blast from the past.

1995 -- Moved back to the East Coast (Boston), where I supervised staff at one of Boston's top law firms, dove into web work, starting to build my own websites on my own time -- with one of the first WYSIWYG html editors, then deciding I could write the code better myself. And I did.

January, 1997 -- signed on with Fidelity eBusiness as one of their first in-house people to do web development. Survived two full-site redesigns, directed construction of site-wide templates for componentization and standardization. Go-to-gal and general troubleshooter/problem-solver for various issues, such as "broken" back button off the login page, cross-browser compatibility, Netscape 6-related (remember that debacle?) changes to 1700+ individual web pages, enterprise-wide web development issues, returning mixed search results from non-secure and secure contexts, page optimization, code cleanup, Perl customization implementations, daily net asset value feed monitoring, online calculators & retirement/investing tools, content management systems vetting, etc., etc. You get the picture...

2000-2002 -- Developer and project manager for Search, eLearning and Knowledge Based projects, working with third-party vendors. Built front-end for enterprise-wide search engine pulling data from multiple Fidelity-owned domains and disparate data sources. Built it in Perl, parsing out xml returned by the "black box" search engine implementation. Worked with former members of Israeli intelligence for data mining projects. Development consulting for Instant Messaging implementation.

2002-August, 2005 -- Consultant Software Engineer with Fidelity Institutional (employer services), heading up web accessibility and compliance initiatives, leading client-side development for site-wide redesign of 2000+ piece self-service HR benefits management site. Oversaw efforts of developers in multiple US states & India, set and enforced standards, coded application for customer perceived response time to ensure compliance with SLA(s) for third-party vendors.

August-December, 2005 -- Technical writer with Fidelity Institutional, writing back-office operations documentation for HR outsourcing business.

December, 2005 - January, 2006 -- Built a podcasting content management system, written in Perl and PHP and some integrated Java components.

Feb, 2006 - April, 2007 -- Client-side developer for Generate, building out presentation-layer code for G2 and the first iteration of the corporate website. Also freelance web developer for several websites.

Technologies used over the course of the years: (D)HTML, C, Perl, SQL, CSS, Javascript (since 1997), Java (J2EE/JSP), ASP (classic), IIS configuration, Apache HTTP server and Tomcat, UNIX, Linux, emacs (not so much vi), DB2, PHP, Lotus Notes, graphics programs, command-line and IDE environments, Websphere, Weblogic, dotNet (@ Generate), Vignette, various content management and knowledgebase/data mining systems, etc.


Other hats:

Executive Producer & Digital Engineer for the nationally syndicated radio show "Women In Music with Laney Goodman", which you can hear on over 100 markets nationwide in the US (from the tropics -- including Guam and the Philippines and Puerto Rico -- to the tundra, reaching as far north as Barrow, Alaska, not to mention a few stations in the Aleutian Islands) -- www.womenonair.com is the url, and you can listen online through affiliates, most notably WUMB in Boston at 10 p.m. on Friday nights -- hear it online at www.wumb.org tonight!

Independent publisher with over 10 books published, to date, and a couple more in the pipeline.

Visual artist and designer -- see www.kaystoner.com for a smattering of my work. More to come. Soon.

30 July 2007

Selected art - 20 years in review

I've been unearthing my collected artworks from various folders and notebooks around my study and the house... and getting some positive feedback from folks about it. Turns out, my lack of proper training in this area works in my favor, and according to an artist whose work and vision I have tremendous respect for, nobody is apparently doing quite the same kind of work I am, these days.

He also told me that some of my stuff is "seriously good", which comes as a surprise, 'cause I "jest do it"... I haven't sunk vast amounts of time into classroom instruction or classes or whatnot... I haven't been tutored by geniuses... I haven't gone to Paris or Florence to hone my craft. I just go about my day, go about my life, and I draw and write what comes up, as a result.

I've started scanning my collected visual works into the computer, and I'll be uploading them to this site, as I go. I work mostly in paper and colored pencil and crayon and some pastels and some markers and some black pencil and some ink, as well as mixed media, so the textures tend to get lost in translation, especially since my scanner leaves a little to be desired.

And so, without further ado... the first of my visual works I'm posting online -- from May, 1990:


5/90 - Graphite and colored pencil and crayon on paper. 8.5" x 7" Unframed



About this Piece
This work was created in May, 1990, when I was going through a great deal of transitioning around my life, my work, my relationships... basically, everything was up in the air. I was crashing at the pad of a friend, while I was looking for a place to live. Technically, I supposed I could have been considered "homeless", but it was such a heady time of great excitement and change, I didn't mind it at all. It never occurred to me at that time, that I was living on the edge. I didn't see the edge -- I was too busy looking out to the horizon, and I was a whole lot more excited about what I saw there, than what was right in front of me... which was changing rapidly, anyway.