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!
Moms with special needs kids will recognize themselves in my
words here today.
I can’t even tell you how often this happens to me: the car behind me honks to startle me awake
from solving all the world’s problems or writing my shopping list or
deciphering last night’s dream. Sometimes I am thinking about how to help my
children lead their best lives. Oftentimes I am specifically thinking about Samuel's education. The next round of assessments, the IEP or whatever barrier I think may be right around the corner.
We are bombarded with advice, good intentions, and “professional-know-how”
but when it comes down to it, we teach our children from our gut more than our
intellect and we hope and pray much of the time that somehow something is
getting through.
Sometimes those prayers turn into an obsession.
Samuel has high functioning autism and is in a sixth grade general education classroom which
sometimes goes well and sometimes, like anything else in life, falls short. I made it a
point to introduce myself to the teachers earlier in the year, neither of whom
had experience to teaching children with autism.
I reminded them I never expect anyone to be an expert in my
child along with a request for us to work together in helping him become
successful.
This week Samuel’s language arts teacher sent me an email
over the weekend so I could start prepping Samuel and then working with him
throughout the week. Their writing assignment was to write a story about waking
up one day as a CAT rather than a PERSON.
At first Samuel didn’t want to do this until we started
talking about characters and how different characters impact the “what happens”
in the story.
This seemed to become a theme for me this week: it started with how to best help my son with autism in school more and turned into a different way to approach the world.
Last night on the way home from an event at the Art and
Spirituality Center we created from a whole new-to-me version of Hansel
and Gretl. This lead to me wondering how Emily Dickinson might write a poem about a particular
intersection here in Bakersfield.
I sat in my car, looking at a street light. I thought, “How
would Emily Dickinson see this seedy neighborhood with this high powered street
lamp?”
I was having so much fun I almost didn’t see the traffic
light turn green.
Are you ready to experience the darkness on a Bakersfield
street corner with Emily Dickinson and me?
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
Without question
Your work is done
# # #
Think about one of your favorite characters: fictional,
historical, literary, and consider what might happen how they might experience
your life through you.
To go deeper and more personal with your family, what might it be like to experience your life as your child?
Have you ever considered that in a creative, playful way?
Perhaps writing as your child will help you understand him or her better.
Just beware of when the light turns green. The car behind
you might honk to startle you awake from your creative parenting play.
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.
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.
One of my
biggest, most politically incorrect confession is this: I abhor homework for my
kids. This year I am taking a different approach because oftentimes one of the
teachers, especially, sends Samuel home with work he didn’t get done in class.
He and I then have a dialogue about the work and get it done.
He knows I
am in close contact with his teachers and we are all a team. He has a long day
at his afterschool program and frequently isn’t home until 6. I believe in the
power of play and don’t like harnessing him with more work after a full-of-work
day.
Today he
needed to turn in a story about a missing turkey.
There is an
illustration to go with it.
I gave Emma
the task of finishing it with Samuel last night as I had a meeting to go to rather
than do homework. All three of us had a hand in what we have now declared a new
holiday classic which is destined to be shared at least for one generation
after this.
We decided
you could join us in search of… a rather unusual (did I mention talking?) turkey.
Or perhaps it is a very listening, tuned in farmer named Frank who is unusual.
Have You Seen Taylor the Turkey?
My name
is Frank the Farmer and the strangest thing has happened here on my farm this
week. My favorite turkey, Taylor, has disappeared! Just like that! I don’t know
if he has been turkey-napped, or if he hitch-hiked or if he just walked away
from the farm but I do know I miss him a lot.
Taylor
isn’t your everyday turkey. He has lots of unusual colors in his feathers. He
has orange and green and yellow and even a stretch of purple feathers. Some
people say he looks like a “peacock turkey.” He walks around the farm yard
showing off his feathers. The girl turkeys all blush when he comes around
because so many of them have crushes on him. He doesn’t brag about it, he is
even nice to the least pretty of the girl turkeys because he doesn’t want her
to feel sad.
I went
into the barn on Friday to feed everybody and I found a bunch of seed missing
from my feed bags. There was also a stick missing and some rope. Right by the
seed were an orange and a purple feather. I asked some of the girl turkeys if
they saw what happened.
Marie-the-Turkey said she hadn’t seen anything. Beth-the-Turkey ran
away, scared, when I talked to her. She is a scaredy Turkey.
Lucy-the-Turkey-Gossip confessed she had heard Taylor and Carly, the
not-so-pretty-on-the-outside-but-beautiful on the inside Turkey with a map out
and making a plan to run away to the Turkey Haven, a place where all Turkeys
are safe from the Thanksgiving Rush.
I was
shocked. “Isn’t my farm a Turkey Haven?” I asked Lucy.
Lucy
laughed. “That Taylor is just a show off, anyway, and without Carly here we
each have more food.”
I was so
sad all day on Thanksgiving. It wasn’t the same not having Taylor to watch
parade around the farm yard. I tried not to show it because I don’t like the
others to feel like he is my favorite. I cleaned out the stall and gave my
daughter a bouquet of Taylor’s colorful feathers to make a centerpiece for the
Thanksgiving dinner.
Friday
morning, I thought I heard Taylor’s laughing clucks and looked out the window.
He and
Carly were back! I grabbed them and said, “Isn’t this a Turkey Haven, too?”
They looked
confused. “Farmer Frank, we went to Las Turkey Vegas to get married! We
wouldn’t leave here forever. We had to come back to make our home here and have
baby turkeys here.”
We were
so happy, we threw a party to celebrate: all the turkeys, the cows, the pigs,
the horses and the chickens came. Hooray!
A bouquet of Emily’s Roses mixed with Katherine Anne Porter
roses and a vase upcycled from a pesto jar and covered with more books pages
painted pink. The house in the photo is a Virginia Woolf house. I thought they
looked pretty together.
The roses in the foreground are more Emily Dickinson Roses.
I even made teeny tiny roses, about ¼ inch in diameter. These roses will be on
a different upcycled project which I officially began with making the roses. J
I bought another used book of Emily’s poetry to paint/dye
and use. I decided since she is so well known, I should use more of her work
instead of only doing obscure artists, writers and poets.
I have long fancied the idea of teeny tiny houses.
The first teeny tiny houses I made honored Emily Dickinson.
The next set honored Virginia Woolf. I
have been snatching up bird houses from thrift stores ever since.
These most recent two houses are houses… in general.
Houses for all women, especially the quirky, the giddy,
those of us who sometimes sound like Pollyanna: you know, playing the Happy
Game and things like that.
I just love these two little houses, so I took them up to
the bluffs near my house and took some photos.
The larger of the two has two literary images on it: Anais
Nin on the roof and then an
image from the Raggedy Ann series written by Johnny
Gruelle. His daughter, Marcella, inspired him to create the series and since my
Grandmother was also named Marcella so I have taken Raggedy Annie as my “Every
girl” or “Every woman”.
She was featured in the body of work I created for the art
show “Silent All These Years” about 18 months ago.
I am so inspired by these little homes I want to put a teeny
tiny house in my backyard for myself to serve as my studio and office.
Where has your creativity and art taken you today?
I love the smell of paper when it is being ironed.
The first day my Mom did the paper ironing I noticed it. I was busy doing some other activity and I thought it would be a good way to keep her busy and get a job done that I didn't really feel like doing. Once she got that smell going, I knew I had to try ironing paper, too.
Now when I need a moment away from the keyboard, when I need
some meditative, reflective time, I turn on the iron and I grab a stack of
ever-present wrinkly dyed or painted paper and I start the process.
The iron meets the first piece of paper and the smell
begins, gently, to rise toward me.
I continue, reading snatches of words as I flatten the
paper, make it more useable for me in my many word-related art projects.
I ponder whether others have used this same practice. I
wonder if other word-love artists also iron paper. I am curious if the scent
makes them wobbly as if drunk with a slight word-horniness scrambled into the
mix.
Ironing pages makes me insatiable for the pencil or the
keyboard.
Oh, to use words as these.
Oh, to hold a thesaurus – an actual page from the thesaurus
book and claim it sacred. I do, oh, how I do. As a final moment of
paper-ironing-prayer, I press to pages of Silas Marner, slightly blushing with
petal pink rit dye, slightly gold around the edges still, slightly dirty from
the Bakersfield dust as it sat outside under unrelenting sun to dry after being
lifted from the dye word bath.
I discover then my writing fingers cannot wait any longer, they start to tingle and twitch. I notice my
first finger is swelling almost unnoticeably to the unobservant. They must meet
the keyboard for a word tryst, perhaps if they are lucky, a
letter-word-sentence-paragraph orgy.
I unplug the iron, I move away and note the heady scent is
still in the air.
This is my thirteenth post (of 31!) for the October Ultimate Blog Challenge.
Watch here for challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing
Tips and General Life Tips and Essays.
Julie Jordan Scott
has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator
and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award
winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother
Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam
champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS &
this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this
unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she
finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your
inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the
Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and
poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
Today's Autumn Blog Challenge question is...October 12 – What has been your favorite DIY project?
I have been working more and more on DIY lately and getting
more and more adventurous. I want to put my indelible stamp on this home of
mine, the home I sometimes feel is my partner in life as much as any human
being has been.
I have a bunch to do here!
Lately I have been focusing on the smaller pieces that are
artful to enjoy myself and to eventually throw out into the world and see if I
can market them to bring in more money to do some of the larger DIY projects
that are actually more like “real contractor” projects.
Lately I have been having a blast making paper roses. It
started with completely random paper roses and now it has become thematic (and
dare I say it) comical paper roses which I plan to work into some mixed media
art pieces. I’ll at least make one for my office wall and if other literary
types enjoy them, I will make more.
These lovely roses were crafted from a very popular English
101-style text book. I love this gem so
much I give it away to writing students
because I think everyone should have a copy.
The other cool thing about them is their tiny size and the
fact I can work on them while I watch TV or in short 15 minute stints between
other activities… plus the applications are endless.
This was inspired by a prompt from The Autumn Blog Challenge!
Watch challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing
Tips and General Life Tips and Essays.
Julie Jordan Scott
has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator
and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award
winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother
Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam
champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS &
this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this
unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she
finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your
inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the
Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and
poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
I learned something new about my mother this weekend.
You would think after fifty years of life together we would
have covered everything.
Somehow I had forgotten or never knew some things about Mom,
but this reached into my heart and squeezed. How could I not have translated
her deep love for certain author/illustrator of children’s books alerted me
that at one time, this was one of my mother’s wildest dreams – to be an
illustrator of children’s books?
How could I not have known that?
She made paper dolls for my children when they were little:
in fact it was always Emma’s first expectation. “Nana’s coming? She will make
me paper dolls!”
She would sit down with colored pencils and draw children
much like the ones who pop up in 1930’s and 1940’s children’s books.
I knew my Mother’s drawing from her deep presence when
drawing houses for the Junior League tour. I remember sitting beside her, very
aware that what my Mommy was doing was sacred and sitting with her in silence
as cars drove by is one of those very sticky early childhood memories that
still comes awake easily when nudged.
I never took the time or hadn’t even thought to translate
paper dolls – assignment for Junior League to – this is what My Mommy really
wanted to do before she became My Mommy.
I realized I don’t even know what she majored in at Colorado
College before she left to become a wife and eventually a Mom of six. I know
what she majored in when she returned to school when I was seven-years-old,
Education – specifically Special Education, but her life pre-baby-Julie lived
mostly in stories told rather than creative jaunts taken together.
It took this weekend – this time of closeness after my
cancer experience – to give breath to her life and mine and the places they’ve
never intersected to now, when the invitation was opened the bridge was
lowered.
Several years ago I wanted, desperately, to collaborate with
my mother on a creative project. I provided watercolor paper, pencils, brushes,
even a fantastic location we could visit.
The collaboration never happened. I half-heartedly gave up.
This weekend, I shared my love of paper art – making a
variety of projects using old and vintage books and loving those books enough
to put them on display so they are not pushed away on a shelf and forgotten.
“I feel a twinge of guilt,” she said as I handed her an iron
and a stack of crumpled pages.
“Please iron these, it makes it so much easier.” I had dyed
pages and they had dried in such strange shapes and once again needed to be
flat.
I pulled a page I especially loved from my wall. “See, Mom,
I love this page too much to cut it up. The illustrations are so… I want to
preserve them.”
She looked at it thoughtfully, poised with the iron above
other pages. “I would like to somehow color the illustrations, but I’m just not
sure…”
She nodded, silently, and I put the page back on my wall.
Later we took other pages and made them into roses. Hers
didn’t turn out quite as they should, but I gave her the “No worries, they
always look strange until we unfurl them.”
The next day I found out she had simply rolled from the
wrong direction.
It was a simple fix to get it done.
When Mom was gathering her things to leave, she took a stack
of dyed papers we had set aside for her to watercolor and then she took the
rest of The Middle Moffat by Eleanor Estes to glean the best
illustrations and watercolor them, again. She looked like “the cat that
swallowed the canary” as she took the book from my house.
She had a creative plan.
We were collaborating.
Before she left she gave me a suggestion to make my roses
even more special.
I tried it. They’re looking better and better and better.
We ARE collaborating.
Another dream come true. Now when I get the water colored
pages back, I will frame them and hang them on the wall. Eleanor Estes’ words
will live on as will my mother and I. None of us will be up on the shelf, dusty
and dark, unread and unfavored. In the tiniest way, Mom is living her
illustration dreams.
This is my seventh post (of 31!) for the October Ultimate Blog Challenge.
Watch challenge posts which will include Writing Prompts, Writing
Tips and General Life Tips and Essays.
Julie Jordan Scott
has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator
and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award
winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother
Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam
champion in Bakersfield. She leads Writing Camp with JJS &
this Summer will be traveling throughout the US to bring this
unique, fun filled creative experience to the people wherever she
finds the passion & the interest.
Did you enjoyed this essay? Receive emails directly to your
inbox for Free from Julie Jordan Scott via the
Daily Passion Activator. One inspirational essay and
poem (almost) every week day. Subscribe here now -
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