Language of the Earth

My intention was for this to be a multi-panel piece, but as you may know, artwork seems to take on a life and mind of its own, quite carelessly ignoring our plans. Since these pieces didn't turn out as I had envisioned, I'm not sure they say what I wanted them to, and so the purpose of attaching them to each other may now be moot. I'm wondering if they might work better as separate pieces. Has your artwork ever mutinied on you this way?


In this post, I introduced the first panel, which I'm posting here so that you can see what they look like together. (I apologize for the horrible photos- the colors are affected by less than optimal lighting conditions, and I haven't had time to get good shots.)

Here's the second panel.  I'm now going with the working title, "Language of the Earth", though I'm not certain that's right, either.

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage map, found metal objects, fossil, ash seeds, ginko leaf, metallic ink, stitching (embroidery floss).

Some details:

So far, so confused. Let me know what you think, as I seem to be fresh out of thoughts right now.

Book of Dreams middle pages + Uh-Oh

The second, and center, spread of my altered book Book of Dreams is finished.  (Click here, here and here to see earlier parts of my process.)  I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome of the pages, though I did struggle for a bit.  I regret to say that I didn't photograph earlier stages, due to the fact that I got carried away and forgot, but also because it was just too embarrassing at some points- it will have to remain my deep, dark, secret.  Kidding, of course, but it really was that kind of "what was I thinking?" ugly that you just want to forget!

Anyway, here it is:

2nd spread of Book of Dreams

ingredients: monotype on Rives BFK,image transfers, mica, metallic ink, ink jet prints, map fragments, Derwent watercolor pencils, Caran D'ache crayons, artist pens, feathers, stitching

However, I have encountered a major problem.  Leave it me to do things bass-ackwards and try to make altered books without really having much knowledge of bookbinding technique. So, here's what happened. 

I think I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that the binding of the book was in bad shape.  I also took out a bunch of pages to make room for the paintings.  Right now, the first 2-page spread is glued to the front cover.

But here's the real problem (well, one of them): When the book is open flat, the painting fits perfectly.  But when you try to close it...

not so much.  And here's the other issue... The spine of the book is very thin.  I thought that if I took out most of the pages, it would be big enough to contain 3 spreads.  But now I'm thinking...

not so much.

So, what to do?  Right now I'm considering gluing the pages together, kind of like a board book, then cutting the spine in half down the middle, and sewing a wider spine from another book onto it to hold the 2 parts together...  I dunno.

But it's been one of those days, anyway, if you know what I mean.  Have you ever started to shake a bottle of ink, thinking the top is screwed on... but it's not?

Who knew I looked so good in bronze?  This is the only way I'll ever have a tan, but it would definitely take a much bigger bottle to do the job!


Hope your day is going better than mine...

The Process So Far

A couple of posts ago, I showed you the new altered book piece I'm working on, entitled Book of Dreams. A lot has happened since then- I got a new computer, the school year (finally!) ended, the Figuratively Speaking exhibit opened, and then, on Sunday- I broke my ankle.  I still can't believe it myself- just strolling along the creek side, anticipating a fun and leisurely search for good junk that the Spring rains might have washed down to the island (or, as the ER nurse put on the report, "looking for art materials"), I put my foot on a rock, slipped, heard a snapping sound, and found my self lying in the rocks and mud.

So, my point is, somewhere in between all those events, I was still working on the piece, a bit at a time. Not so much since the ankle fiasco, which I think you probably could have already deduced on your own, right?  And, since I did not hit my head when I fell (why did the ER staff keep asking me that?), I still remember that I had promised to give you a step-by-step overview of my process.  So, here goes.

I started with the front cover, which I envisioned as the gateway to the realm of dreams.  I wanted to use the sphinx from a piece I had made and sold several years ago, so I used photoshop to cut out the figure, then printed it out to use as a transfer.  My idea here was to do an acrylic gel transfer of an inkjet image, hoping that, if I lucked out, the resulting poor-quality transfer would have the appearance of a worn, faded illustration on the cover of a very old and forgotten storybook. (Gel transfers work best with toner-based ink, not inkjet.)  I knew it would probably be a big bloppy mess, but I gave it a try, and to my great surprise, it worked perfectly.  Unfortunately, the acrylic medium soon began to peel off the surface of the book cover, which was more smooth and slippery-feeling than covers I'd previously work on. Ultimately, I had to peel it off and re-do the transfer four more times, including a good deal of sanding, gessoing, and scraping; it never did look as good as it had the first time, though.

Before doing any more work on the sphinx, I glued on the map pieces and dress pattern piece that form the bottom/foreground, as well as the dress pattern pieces that form the rectangular 'door' area.  Images of cuneiform characters were transferred onto the rectangular door, and transfers of the botanical illustrations were layered on top of the other images.  Acrylic paint, inks, watercolor pencils and crayons, and artist pens were used to enhance the sphinx and other parts of the drawing.

I used my awl to punch holes in the book cover for the stitching, which was done with embroidery floss. After quite a bit of debating, I decided to make the letters for "Book of Dreams" from the cuneiform characters, cutting, turning, and/or altering them to make them look like English letters.  Though it initially seems to work, I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

The "door" is an old brass escutcheon that I bought on etsy, and attached with brads; the "doorknob" is strange sort of screwpost thingamabobby I bought somewhere.

Well, that's the first installment; I hope my explanations were more helpful than confusing.  I'm never sure if I'm including enough information, or rattling on way too much, so please let me know.  If there are things I didn't explain well, or you just want to know more than what I addressed, please feel free to ask.  Likewise, if there are easier or more efficient ways to do things, don't hesitate to share these with me.  I'll also be talking more about some of the materials I use, as I continue to share my process throughout this project.

Palimpsest:: Language - with convoluted commentary

In a previous post, I showed you the beginning of this piece, and the second unfinished part was featured here.  It has taken me quite a while, what with Christmas and other projects, but here is the final result.

 Palimpsest: Language

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage maps, handwriting from 1930's composition book, vintage newspaper pages, vintage book cut-outs, 1950's dress pattern pieces, stamps on vintage paper, Chinese Hell notes, inkjet print, acrylic paint, acrylic gel mediums, Caran d'Ache crayons, watercolor pencils, stitching, vintage ledger paper, image transfers, brads, metal spinner, metal thingie (?), feather, pen nib

languages/alphabets: English print, English handwritten script, shorthand, Chinese, Spanish, Tibetan, Tibetan ideograms/ pictographs, cuneiform (2 Types), Mayan pictographs, English numbers/mathematics

Several of you indicated you wouldn't be bored by reading more about the concepts, symbols, and meaning of this piece, so here goes.

As I said, I started to consider the concept 'palimpsest' to my way of working, and drawing parallels between those ideas.  Palimpsest is defined by Wikipedia as "a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again.".  (recycling!) These manuscripts have often been disaggregated, deciphered, and used to recover important lost writings and other information.

palimpsest with Greek text of Luke  (Wikipedia)

Much of my recent collage work has incorporated a process of layering in which materials are partially scraped off to reveal parts of what's beneath. The idea of the interplay between the transparency of layers and the mystery of covering other sections has always been present in my work- probably because I so inherently see everything as connected to every other thing; I just can't seem to separate them.

Angel of the Sunrise

So, back to the language thing. (If you're not at all interested in linguistics or the human brain, skip over the next 3 paragraphs.) As I shared before, language is my business, in a sense.  As a special educator, I think a lot about ways to remediate my students' reading, writing, and spoken language deficits.  As I watch them struggle with these skills that come so naturally to many of us, I can't help but wonder how the human brain processes language, and ultimately, how language came to be in the first place.

Needless to say, the topic is too complex for me do an in-depth study.  However, I did encounter some interesting and useful ideas, foremost among them the widely-held belief that the human brain is hard-wired for language.  Many would argue that this is the one characteristic that separates humans from other animals. Thought and language appear to be inseparable- we think in words, and apparently can't think without them.  (You might be interested in watching this.)  Why some of our brains seem to be hard-wired differently (or less) than others is unclear, but calls into question that whole "nature-versus-nurture" debate; research indicates that both are involved in this case. 

As for the origin of language, no one can say for certain, because it happened so far back in prehistory that there's little evidence available.  Research into this subject continues, and perhaps someday more clues will be discovered.  I was surprised to find out, though, that preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky believes that language acquisition occurred over a short period of time as a result of a sudden gene mutation, while most other experts think it evolved slowly.  Chomsky says: 'To tell a fairy story about it, it is almost as if there was some higher primate wandering around a long time ago and some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain'. While cautioning against accepting this literally, Chomsky insists that 'it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language.' (Wikipedia, Origins of Language)

This brings me to myths, folklore, and mystical stories concerning language.  There are plenty of stories about the invention of language, often imbedded within larger creation myths. What I found particularly fascinating is that the concept of the power of "the word" is basic to virtually all of the world's spiritual traditions.
"We find in the Bible the words: 'In the beginning was the word, and the word was God', and we also find that the word is light, and that when that light dawned the whole creation manifested.... It teaches that the first sign of life that manifested was the audible expression, or sound: that is the word."  - from The Power of the Word.  This same idea is echoed in the Hindu Vedas, in the Hebraic Kabbalah, in Sufism, Islam, Zoroasterism, and many more.

I normally don't like to explain the meaning and symbolism in my work to a great extent, because I believe  each viewer brings his/her own experiences and perception to the piece, constructing an individual interpretation which has meaning for them.  Please don't think that my meaning is the only one; it's simply the perspective from which I created the piece.

The idea of the invention of language and of the creative power of the WORD is embodied by this figure, who speaks the word of creation, OM, in Tibetan script.  The sweeping shape of the dress pattern piece with stitched lines coming from the figure's (other) mouth represent the sounds being put forth into the world, and reinforce the idea of something being made, or created.  The bird in symbolist art has long been seen as a messenger, due to its ability to fly to realms beyond our reach; the map within its body implies access to all parts of the world.

 This part of the piece has so many layers of print and symbols that they blend together to form almost a unified surface.  The red symbol tumbles out of the original utterance from the figure's mouth, breaking open like an egg to spill out letters and symbols.

I started on the bottom part first, before I really knew where the piece was going as a whole.  I knew it was going to be about 'palimpsest' and 'language', but beyond that, my idea had yet to gel.  I was hoping that it would reveal itself as I proceeded.  After scratching and scraping and rubbing paint into the surface, I cut the book cloth and ripped a big hunk of it off, then stuck part of an old piece into the hole (yes, 'hunk', 'hole', and 'stuck' are the correct technical terms).  I glued things on, ripped things off, scraped, peeled, and transferred.  I did lots of this for a long time, and can't really remember what came first, next, or before.  It was very therapeutic!

Some of the first things I glued on were from a girl's high school composition notebook, circa 1931, that I bought at a used book store.  The girl, Margaret Duncan, was apparently quite fascinated with the newly discovered "Life of Our Lord" by Charles Dickens, which had just been published for the first time as a result of the death of Dickens' last surviving family member.  As each section was published in the Lexington Herald Leader, she cut it out and glued it over her own compositions.

I was more interested in her writing than in the newspaper clippings, so I started pulling them apart in places where there was no glue. 

By accident, on the back of one part of the Charles Dickens story, I uncovered an article about the execution of someone from the Dillinger Gang, which you can see in this detail.  In another section, there was an article about the possible repeal of prohibition!  As I scraped and uncovered and dug down into these old books and writings, I felt at times that I was time-traveling- it was really the oddest feeling.  And so it seems fitting, I guess, that I finally finish this on the last day of this year.

I hope you've enjoyed my long and winding explanation, or, at least, that you didn't die of boredom.  Happy New Year, my dear friends!  Happy New Year, Margaret, wherever you are!   Please give my regards to Mr. Dickens, and to the Dillinger Gang.

The Whole Shebang

As promised, here is the finished version of my altered book cover.

As you can see, I've added a lot to the left side since I posted it here.  The biggest change is the little girl; she is part image transfer, part drawing, and the flower "dresses" are image transfers of botanical illustrations from a textbook dated 1899.  I've also attached a piece of mica, using eyelets and brads.

A word of warning: attempting to set eyelets in mica is not really a great idea, in case you're wondering.


Here are a few details of the piece:

When I was a child, I drew constantly, from a very early age, and loved to make things out of paper.  My grandmother showed me an amazing trick.  She would fold up a sheet of paper like a fan, make a few snips with the scissors, and when she unfolded it, there magically appeared a string of paper dolls, all holding hands.  She told me that when she was a little girl, her family was very poor, and they had no toys at all unless they made them.

I had plenty of toys, including all kinds of dolls, but I found it more fun to make my own. My other favorite pastime was to run around in the woods like a wild animal, exploring every nook and cranny.  Between my yard and the woods was our next door neighbor's yard, and it was here that I got some of my doll-making materials.  I would find just the right stick for the body, and use either one of my neighbor's unripe grapes or apples for the head.

Usually, they wore petunias as dresses, and snapdragons as hats.  Wouldn't you, if you could?

I liked to know the secrets of the earth, and how things grew.  My grandmother taught me these things, and she also taught me to sew.  All these images are woven together in my mind, a tangled collection of dreams and memories.  If you peel back the layers of years, that world still exists, inside me.

We all have these layers of memory.  How many of them are real, or have mixed with dreams and stories and other memories, slowly changing as that moment becomes faint and cloudy, as if behind an old, dusty pane of glass?  And does that even matter, when what's inside our minds and hearts makes us who we are, whether or not it's strictly "accurate"?  These are some things I've been thinking about.