I have a friend who is an art professor at the local
college. I don’t know how
many times he has told me it shouldn’t be essential
for me to like my art, I just needed to make art, even if I despised it.
I have a much better time when I like what I create.
What I am showing you today is a mixed media piece I
finished this weekend which I really like. Its foundation was a plain, oak
colored frame. Blah, I thought. I painted it last week and waited for inspiration.
I had painted pages of Silas Marner by George Eliot I have used in a writing
workshop so I pulled them out to see if they would fit well. They did. And then
I thought, “Why not experiment with my new inks?” so I did, using the glass of the frame as my canvas.The final touch is a diary page from a woman named Bessie who was cataloguing her day in January 29, which is exactly twenty years before I was born!
Here is the outcome:
I'm so curious about the history of everyday people. Who was Bessie? What happened to her?
I have actually created some
collages to show you for next week AND I’ve been doing quite a bit of photo
editing. If you look at my blog for the A to Z Blog Challenge Series you will
see these photos on each blog post I write.
Thank you for visiting & Happy Creating!
*Visit CreativeEveryDay if you would like to participate in this artful challenge.*
I wanted to write a fantastic, tying all this art together
sort of post for the final day of Art Every Day Month, though I am a creator
one day and poster the next so I will actually post whatever work I do today
tomorrow… but when I woke up this morning, I thought… there is nothing more
perfect than posting my work-in-progress assemblage I began during Thanksgiving
weekend and actually started to build last night.
This is the first time I have made an unprompted assemblage…
you know, I had collected material and I knew I wanted to do something with
them. Last night it all started to come together.
I started last week with collecting and writing.
When I packed my things, I tucked these treasures from the
sea in my fisherman’s cap and waited. I waited. I waited. I wanted to feel
something before I started.
Last night I had been sitting at my computer writing and
networking, networking and writing. I needed a break before a twitter party and
quick writing sprint.
I found a foundation – a simple wooden salad bowl. But I
needed to paint it. I brought it inside the house to dry and promptly dropped
it on my kitchen floor. Creating can be such a difficult mistress.
There was paint on my floor but I immediately grabbed a mop
and cleared it up.
It was time for the assembly to begin. I built it on a piece
of cardstock which I will cut and cover when it is complete. This was such fun –
I wish you could smell it. The rock on top is a heart shaped rock I picked up
as a memory of my dear friend Tom.
So simple, yet so just right – just as Art Every Day Month
has been this year.
Thank you so much for being here with me. I’m counting on
the Monday check in for Creative Every Day – I don’t want my momentum to slow
at all.
YOU ROCK!! Congratulations, woot woot TA-DA! And all the
rest. Please keep on touch via twitter and facebook (see below) or ofcourse on the weekly checkins.
THANK YOU, Leah! I have loved continuing this process. It just keeps getting better!
I worked more on my “Fragments” piece focusing solely on
Emily Dickinson today. She’s been on my mind a lot lately, not precisely sure
why but I am sure there are reasons. After I share my images, I will share a
poem I wrote in her style, but definitely not a topic she had to write about
when she was living.
This piece includes acrylic, snippets of ephemera,
photography and crayon.
This top image includes flowers she pressed, a handwriting
sample, poem fragments, a photo of her and the color you see underneath is my
Tempest Zentangle from yesterday.
This bottom image shows my work in progress yesterday during
a rare rain in Bakersfield, I lit candles and kept this “fragment” beside me. I
wondered at that point if it was finished… and no, it wasn’t. The photo above
shows some final touches I added. (the photo and more random ephemera.)
And finally, the poem I wrote in homage to Emily's style after wondering, "What would Emily write if she was sitting at this intersection?"
Street Light, Corner of 21st and Union
Electric orb
Sharing luminousness with the
Members of the pearly ancient profession
And the shaking, tittering loose toothed
Hungry for the next, next, next….
As well as the cars who have lost
Their way and landed
Underneath you
Thank you for visiting my Art Every Day Check in. I look forward to looking at your art, too.
I’m just going to say it: this has been a great morning.
My between six-and-eight-am hours get pretty chaotic, so my
preplanning today carried me through my last minute Mommying.
Before the last rush out the door, though, I had pulled my soul
collage card for the day. I call this “My Zen Card” and basically it tells me
that even on your way to that serious, dressed up, put on a good face place you
are going in such a hurry, there is always time for rest.
Rest lives in each raising of the foot and every returning
to the ground of the same foot.
I had thought “I want to go to Dagny’s this morning!” almost
simultaneously with that, but most of the time when I have inklings like that I
wrap myself up in the fur stole belief of “Oh, I have way too many important
things to do than take an hour and hang out in a coffee shop when I could be
doing exactly the same stuff at home.
I was out of my house by 8:15 and my friend, Kimberly,
texted me and said, “Meet me at Dagny’s later?”
I was meant to go. I brought my creativity supplies because
I knew, today, I was going to create a zentangle on a dictionary page for Art Every Day Month.
My crayons spilled in the bottom of my bag so I simply
scooped them up and dumped
them on the table and started working with lines,
lines, lines.
I really want to improve my drawing from about third grade
skill to much better, so I am focusing on “line” and that’s it. I managed to
copy the coffee cup on the back of the chairs at Dagny’s and their image became
a part of my Zentangle. I circled words on my dictionary page like I do when I
have writing prompts and I alternated between writing, coloring and grading
some papers: something I do for my part time job at the local college.
I had been sitting there contentedly for two hours when Kimberly
arrived right on schedule.
I found myself wanting to put more lines on my zentangle but
I wrote these words:
I thought, “Oh, a line with black crayon around it all would
be so pretty and it would feel so very finished!” I used self control. “My
zentangle wasn’t about completion, after all,” my wise sage self reminded me. “It
is about process.”
I got up to use the restroom and when I returned, Kimberly
was using one of my crayons on her work, so I giggled and spoke my happiness at
her using my crayon. I dove right back into my crayon box and what do you
suppose I did without even thinking?
I made a black line around my zentangle.
I felt so pleased with myself when looking at my finished…. Oh,
my. I laughed at my silliness. Fewer than ten minutes ago my wise sage self had
spoken.
“My zentangle wasn’t about completion, after all. It is
about process.”
In less than ten minutes I forgot my own wisdom!
I laughed some more and I am even laughing now. How often
does that happen: we declare some thought or idea as brilliant and alas, hours
days weeks months years decades go by and we don’t follow through with that
brilliance or we act in complete opposition to it.
I know my normal response has been to beat myself up for being
so insert your favorite self effacing phrase here.
It feels so much better to laugh and learn something from it
instead. I look at my “complete” zentangle now and I enjoy it, especially
because my wise sage apparently wanted to show my impetuous youth she is still
in charge. There is one segment that does not have the finishing line upon it!
Now that, my loves, is brilliant.
The process of creating art teaches in such a subtle, loving
manner, doesn’t she?
Where have you surprised yourself with your creative process
recently?
This post was written especially for Art Every Day Month. After November, many of us continue to create daily via CreativeEveryDay.com the website from Leah Piken Kolidas. Her website is a fine way to connect, to create and to share your creations.
Saturday I sat to watch yet another silly holiday movie and
I thought, “I haven’t really created anything tangible today. Nothing I can
point to and say, like a young child, look what I made!”
It reminds me of elementary school art class: it isn’t that
I crave acknowledgment because I am one of those rare folks apparently who do
quite fine without other people’s approval.
What I did next fits perfectly within my creative themes
lately:
I grabbed a leftover masonite board, some mod podge, and a crayon
sketch I made earlier in the day along with some papers I had used in other
projects and started tearing and gluing, tearing and gluing, tearing and
gluing.
It is a part of my fledgling “Fragment” series which I
realize I have been working on for a while without knowing. I have been working
with fragments of books in fragments of time all along. Now, however, I am
being mindful with the action yet completely intuitive in my process.
If you want to see a larger size of the photo, just click on the image and a larger image will open.
I have been away from the keyboard since Thursday morning.
This is always a disappointment for me since I love nothing
more than to sit and write AND at times it is a positive thing because it
reminds me of life beyond being online and writing on the keyboard daily. A
natural slowing occurs.
I am going to go backwards in my postings, perhaps combining
a few but for now – here is yesterday’s art: coloring a sailboat on a
dictionary page as well as experimenting with sea “finds” which I plan to use
in making today’s art.
I have also found my work this month (during November, otherwise known to me as Art Every Day Month) represents a lot of the
fragments we women naturally experience in life. We do a little of this, a
little of that, vaguely satisfying but often not completely because we are so
pulled in so many directions.
Watch for more on this in the coming days. Thank you for
visiting!
I can’t help falling in love with my Strunk and White Word-Love
Roses.
This bouquet is made from the pages of Elements of Style,
a tiny little text book that fed
generations of writers wisdom and inspired them to exceptional writing. I also
relate to it from the teacher/student perspective – all those red pens smashing
the hopes of young writers.
Will you give me just a moment for a story?
When I was in the fifth grade I was in Mrs. Wilson’s English
class. We were brand new to Middle School – it started in Glen Ridge in the
fifth grade - and it was a sad time for me: students were discerning who was
cool and who wasn’t cool and although my winning personality USED to get me a
ticket to the cool kids’ lunch table, now I was a cast off and felt very sad
and lonely about that AND next, the unbelievable happened.
Mrs. Wilson took a group of seven or eight of us out of the
classroom to discuss and correct our sub-par first papers we turned into her. I
was horrified. There I sat with, wait, let me remember.
There are only two who I remember because I had my head down
almost the whole time in that small room. Sitting here in 2012 I can still see
the way the light was shining, I can still see the wooden walls, seeming to
mock me.
Beth Williams, who became a dear friend was there as was Perry Keane, who tried
valiantly to comfort me when I couldn’t hold the tears back any more. Perry and
I always sat side by side when teachers alphabetized seating charts and after that
episode, I carried the shame of being pulled out of the class with him by my
side so we never became the good friends we probably could have been.
Perry, if you are out there reading, thank you for trying to comfort me.
I may write to make my living now, but back then I was a
little girl who had excelled and now was being told my work was “fair” at best
and I believed I was destined for a life of failure and the dreaded red pen
would dangle relentlessly above my word-loving page. Mrs. Wilson might have put
a slash through that last sentence and shouted “RUN ON!” with her red pen.
My writing students often give me the feedback they haven’t
written
in YEARS because of the dreaded red pen and through my teaching are
reborn as word-loving writers.
For this, and many other reasons, I love these red roses.
The color and flower of love and the washing away of “mistakes” in our writing
and “bad form” in our writing: Strunk and White and all our writing teachers
truly only hoped to make us into better writers.
Thank you, Mrs. Wilson, for believing in me after that
fateful day.
And thank you for casting me as the Cook in The Dispeptic
Ogre. While that memory was also tarnished by the meaning I bestowed upon
it and the choices I made afterwards, I now see it as cherished and lovely.
I am even posting this photo, where I see the roses very clearly and I also see on the right side of my face, the fading pink slash mark of my surgeon. It could almost be
mistaken as an indentation, but it is a part of my scar.
It must be a day to celebrate mistakes made whole. It must be a day to take hurts and integrate them, choosing to see them, finally, as just right.
My friends have heard me repeatedly talk about my usual
“relationship trajectory.”
I have lived by a pattern over my lifetime: usually I am
very excited about someone (or something) in the beginning. I am passionately
drunk about the person or idea or activity. I rearrange life to make space for
the object of my passion and for a while I can’t imagine life without it.
This is like a firework that flies up in the air and
explodes…. And falls to the ground.
There are also fireworks that zoom up into the air, seem to
disappear and then KABAM!
Their booming demise is remarkably loud though not very
colorful.
Then there are trajectories that go up… and up… and up… and
float around up and up and up… usually profound friendships, love for my
children, appreciation for my parents look like this.
Finally, there is my love of language and all things
word-based.
I can’t even put into words the passion I feel for words,
but today I was in office max, copying pages of paper I have painted, I have
sprinkled, I have torn and photos I have printed over a painted sprinkled page.
I found myself stroking the paper: the originals and the
copies.
I loved how they both felt: very different but both
absolutely heavenly. As I made more copies, I spread them out on the table behind
me. This may have gotten on the nerves of other customers there at Office Max
but I couldn’t help this public display of
paper affection going a bit over the
top.
More paper and more paper and more paper all in varying
shades of pink and purple: so feminine. The pages were such a reflection of me.
I actually had to self-talk myself away from the copying
machine. My frugal self met up with my creative self and said, “Julie – these
are enough copies to start with, really.” So my creative self rearranged the
papers on the table and taking photos of the paper.
Each satiny sheet of paper delighted me. The multiple copies
of the same pages arranged differently delighted me. The resounding shout of
the click click click of the camera fueled me more.
You might think the two images I posted here are the same. They are not. The bottom image includes one of the very first pages I painted and created with several years ago. It was from a book I thought I would love that I ended up hating. I thought making art would help my feelings for it and it did.
In the bottom photo, you see a heart from that book, with a quote that reads, "A poet must be more useful than any other citizen of her tribe." Those words both ground and inspire me now like they did when I first read them.
My relationship with word-love trajectory goes beyond
anything quantifiable. There are no metaphors or illustrations that can capture
it. My romance with words is longer
lasting and has more of a future, perhaps, than any relationship outside that
of
my children.
I can’t even put into words the passion I feel for words,
but today I was in office max making love to them in a blazing display of
public affection.
A question to tuck into the back of your mind as you read:
What is your creative process teaching you?
My day yesterday was flat out weird creatively.
I couldn’t get myself to sit still to create anything
meaningful or long lasting. I didn’t even write anything of merit and when
things are sour, at least my writing muse comes out to play most of the time.
I gessoed, I did some first coats of paint, I took some
photos, I collaged but I wasn’t happy with what I collaged.
For a change of pace
I picked myself up and visited Hart Park where I contemplated at my favorite
spot.
Something wants to float up from me, so I honored my lack of sitting
still with some quiet time out of the house.
I even brought some pieces of my art as my companions.
At least the day wasn't a complete loss as I look back at it.
I helped a sick friend, I purchased materials which were running low, I laughed at synchronicities that told me I was on the right track even though I felt wrong.
I allowed myself to feel nostalgic for being on the stage.
I watched yet another Hallmark movie and didn't beat myself for not making roses at the same time. I felt like I needed to rest, free from movement.
Today’s art was a matter of necessity meeting crankiness
meeting “I have to be creative to solve this problem.”
For any of you who don’t know, I had surgery for melanoma
nine weeks ago today. There is still a hole in my face from it because the
deepest stitch – where the heart of the cancer lived – has not dissolved. My
body continues to say “Foreign body! Foreign body!” and attacking it.
Thus my wound, no matter what wondrous care I give to it,
remains unresolved. If it doesn’t take care of itself by January 3, I will have
to have a second surgery to take the interloper stitch out of my face.
The rest of my scar looks pretty bad ass. It is shaped like
a heart and even though I have a dent in my face, I also got a mini chin lift
from the way the surgeon moved my skin around.
SO! Today I had a hair appointment. I had dirty hair. I had
roots of grey and the
rest of my hair was brown. I needed a hat, with a brim,
since I still can’t wear sunscreen. I had bought a fisherman’s cap a while back
but it made me feel even uglier than I naturally do, which now is even worse
than before I sported a very unlady-like though interestingly shaped scar.
I grabbed the hat, though, and grabbed some paper flowers I
created in the past few weeks as a form of creative meditation and at last I grabbed a glue gun.
And here you have it: hat history. This is my daughter, Emma, wearing my hat.
I think it is somewhat ridiculous looking, but I got
compliments as I wore it about town today.
I laughed each time.
Now my hair is back to all brown.
I still have an unhealed wound.
My mood has moved from worry about being seen in public with
roots and an unhealed scar to a deepening heart wound I was able to ignore most
of the day. I don’t think covering the brim of hat with paper flowers will
help.
Sleep, perhaps – and time, perhaps, will.
This is just another way Art Every Day Month has helped me
continue to heal in more ways than one.
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