When I Was a Bird

When I Was a Bird

collage on multi-media board, 8 x 14 inches

ingredients: vintage book pages and hand-written letters, image transfers, magazine cut-outs, gampi paper, water color crayons and pencils, stitching

This one looks pretty much the same as the last time you saw it; I just added some stitching, the birds, and tweaked a few other things. Trying not to overwork it, as I sometimes tend to do.

You may have noticed that people with wings, angel-like figures, and girls with one wing appear frequently in my work. I tried to get to the bottom of this obsession in a past blog post titled, "Where Wings Come From", which you can read here if you're interested. Someone once said that all of the figures an artist paints are reflections of him/herself, and in some way, I believe this is true.

detail of first spread from my handmade book, Book of Dreams

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher

a page from Not an Open Book

In trying to find quotes for this post, I came across a very interesting website called Every Pianter Paints Himself: Art's Masterpieces Explained. The home page text states:

Every painter paints himself, a saying first documented in the early Renaissance, has been mentioned by artists ever since. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci used it, as Picasso did too; Lucian Freud and other contemporary artists still cite variations today. Yet despite its great significance to artists, art scholars rarely discuss the saying or its meaning. Those who do seem to have no choice but to deny it: painters don’t really paint themselves, they say, but their sensibility. But why would a phrase that meant so much to great masters, and still does to their followers, require re-phrasing to mean anything? The truth is, as this website demonstrates, it is the images of these visual artists that are veiled, not their words.

Here's an example from the site where they discuss some of Basquiat's paintings in relation to his life. I plan to go back and read what they say about other artists and their work. Just something to think about, you know?

So Far...

Despite drowning in a sea of product tags, focus keywords, alt attributes, meta descriptions, and SEO titles, I have managed to make a little more progress on When I was a Bird, a collage I had started for an art challenge a few weeks back. I took photos of it with my phone, and they did not upload to my dropbox. I have no clue why, but it is surely aggravating. So I took photos with my Panasonic Lumix, and couldn't get them to upload to the computer! Just one more thing, you know?

But I have managed to grab little snippets of time here and there to work this collage, mainly to keep myself sane. Now, back to work, and maybe a bit of studio time! I'll keep you posted!

Art Challenge: Birds

When I found out the theme for this week's Art Challenge was "Birds", I couldn't resist, despite the fact that I'm busy trying to build a new website (trying is the operative word here), and I've got tons of yard work and gardening to do, not to mention the normal everyday stuff to keep up with. But it's BIRDS, you know? If you've followed my blog for very long, or looked at my website, it's pretty obvious that birds are a very important part of my symbolic vocabulary. In fact, I did two long posts about birds in art, which you can read here and here, if you're so inclined.

So I thought I'd maybe just take one of my old collages that didn't work out, since pretty much all of them have birds on them, re-work it here and there, and voila! - a new bird collage. Nope. Ideas started whirling around in my head and I found myself starting a whole new collage, which I knew I wouldn't be able to finish in time for the challenge.

Work in progress: When I Was a Bird

But luckily, no one in this lovely group of artists cares much about deadlines or rules, so I'm posting what I've got so far. There's a lot more work ahead, but I think the basic bones of the composition are in place, and you can get an idea of where it's going. I will be sharing my progress here, so check back in a few day for an update!


Eric Adama of Cerulean is our kind host, so head over to his blog for the links to more bird art!

New Work: Temple

Temple, 17.5 x 11 inches, mixed media

ingredients: vintage book cover, monotype, vintage maps and engineering drawings, other vintage ephemera, metallic ink, found objects, brads, brass wire, acrylic paint, artist pens, feathers

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 "Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life."                                                                                                                              - Hermann Hesse

Progressing... a Few Quick Glimpses

Coming along slowly with the new piece I first showed you in this post. It's been quite a while since I completed something; as some of you may know, I've been busy studying business things. More about that later. (You can read a bit about it here and here.)

Most of the basic components are glued down, and I have added some stitching; I think it will be finished in the next day or so. In the meantime, I just wanted to share a few more details before you see the whole piece. (Is that an oxymoron?) Anyway, without further blah-blah-blah:

I kind of enjoy using the hammer and awl to make holes for the stitching.  My dogs, however, do not enjoy the noise - I suppose it sounds like thunder or fireworks to them - and when I start, they quickly find another place to hang out.

My son-in-law gave me these old engineering drawings, which I have since found out are done on silked vellum. We knew they were vellum, but when I tore a piece of it to use in a collage, I saw tiny threads, and realized it was woven. Later I heard, just by chance, that in the past very very thin sheets of silk would be somehow laminated onto vellum to make it more durable. It's a strange material to work with, as it doesn't behave like either paper or fabric, and seems to stretch when wet (or has glue on it), and is very hard to glue down flat.

Here, tree roots have been stitched with embroidery floss - a mix of two different blues. Hopefully, it will all come together soon, and I will share it with you here!


Happy Monday, everyone!

Untitled Post With Nothing in It

Until just a minute ago, that's what this was. For a very long time, started sometime in what seems like the distant past, this post had languished in a dormant state called, "I'm doing too many other things, but I'm planning to do a post at some point, preferably sooner than later." But my brain was so otherwisedly (at least I found time to invent a new adverb - I think) occupied that I had gotten no further than this, and I was stuck there, with no idea at all as to what it should be about. Sometimes if I just begin to begin, inspiration may strike me out of the blue - or maybe not.

I have had this little collage sitting on my press next to the computer desk, but I hadn't scanned it, or thought of a title. So I've decided to call it "Otherwisedly Occupied", which seems to be the best I can do right now, and also allows me to use my newly-invented word.

Otherwisedly Occupied

mixed media collage, 6 x 4 inches

ingredients: vintage book pages and other vintage ephemera, decorative paper, watercolor pencil

I hope you enjoy! Have a great weekend, everyone! xoxo

Art Challenge: Ritual/ Routine

When lovely Nadine of tinywoolf declared the theme for this art challenge "ritual/ routine", I knew I wanted to participate. It's such an interesting subject, I thought it would be easy to come up with something good. While I find the concept of ritual to be quite fascinating, I found that when I actually sat down to think about what I would do, I had difficulty narrowing it down to a workable size. I mean, it's a BIG concept; it covers a lot of ground. So I thought looking up the definition might help, give me some clues or spark an idea.

Here is Merriam Webster's definition:

1. :  the established form for a ceremony; specifically :  the order of words prescribed for a religious ceremony
2. 2a :  ritual observance; specifically :  a system of rites
    b :  a ceremonial act or action
    c :  an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner

Humans are creatures of habit, as are all creatures, it seems. My dogs will wake me up at the same time every morning, and expect to be fed at 5:00. We naturally fall into forming patterns, of doing things at the same time in the same way over and over again. I would suggest that this saves some part of our brain to think about working out more complex problems, because we don't have to re-think when we're going to brush our teeth every day. Or maybe not.

Rituals are also important to the formation and continuance of societies; we agree to elect our leaders the same way at repeated intervals, we decide on the guilt or innocence of people who break our laws by using a set, prescribed, series of rituals. If we didn't have rituals in place for these things, no society could survive, but would quickly descend into chaos.

 Weighing of the Heart Ceremony, Book of the Dead, 1285 bCE

Based on the definition above, the word "ritual" covers everything from the sacred burial rites of the ancient Egyptians to the "March Madness" college basketball tournament to brushing our teeth at the same time each day. (Just to amuse myself, I thought about making a shrine with a toothbrush inside of it; I know - weird sense of humor!)  So I'm probably thinking about this way too much, but my ideas for this piece just kept bigger and bigger, and I realized there was no way I could do it justice in the short time I had left. In fact, it's really still in the planning stages; I'll share it here as I work on it.

Invocation of Tara

ingredients: map fragment, magazine cut-outs, image transfers, artist pens, watercolor pencils

So I decided to use a piece I had already been working on, which does relate to the concept of ritual in an obvious way. Tara is the Tibetan Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, and rituals to honor her have been performed since the 6th century and possibly longer. According to Wikipedia, "Tārā became a very popular Vayrayana deity with the rise of Tantra in 8th-century Pala and, with the movement of Indian Buddhism into Tibet through Padmasambhava, the worship and practices of Tārā became incorporated into Tibetan Buddhism as well. She eventually came to be considered the "Mother of all Buddhas," which usually refers to the enlightened wisdom of the Buddhas, while simultaneously echoing the ancient concept of the Mother Goddess in India.... Tārā is also known as a saviouress, as a heavenly deity who hears the cries of beings experiencing misery in samsara."

The image of Tara I used for this piece is based on a centuries-old painting somewhere; I have unfortunately lost track of the source. By the way, she is not always green; different aspects of Tara are different colors. Green Tara is one of the most popular.


Be sure to visit Nadine at tinywoolf to find out what the other participants came up with for the challenge. Happy weekend, everyone!

What the Flowers Know

What the Flowers Know

mixed media collage,  11 x 8.5 inches

ingredients: vintage book cover and ephemera, dried plant parts, found objects, image transfers, mica, brads

available here

When I made this piece, I was really thinking about this subject in the poetic sense: personification, metaphor, just to name a couple of literary devices that might apply. But I recently read a very thought-provoking and seemingly incredible article in the the New Yorker called The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan.

"The new research, he says, is in a field called plant neurobiology — which is something of a misnomer, because even scientists in the field don't argue that plants have neurons or brains.
'They have analagous structures,' Pollan explains. 'They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives ... integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way in response. And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what's incredible about it, because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information.' "  (PRI Science Friday)

Amazingly, he goes on to explain detailed experiments that show apparent presence of memory by plants, as well as responses to stimuli, such as hearing, and even the ability to learn. To me, this is poetic in itself, because it makes us aware that all living things are more alike than we ever thought possible. How could we not be connected, when we are made of the same stuff?  Life started as a single cell, and grew and differentiated from that cell, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at the commonalities among different forms of life. You can listen to the podcast of Science Friday or read the article by following the links above.

You Never Know

You Never Know

mixed media collage,

ingredients: vintage ephemera, pencil, image transfers, magazine cut-out on multi-media board

It seems I've been saying this a lot lately. The world continues to grow more puzzling by the day; the future seems more uncertain than it has in a very long time. Things you thought could never happen, well - they have, and they are. Still, the world is full of good people; the amazingly selfless things they do often take me by surprise. Perhaps they are angels in disguise. You never know.



One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.”
“One is Evil – It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
“The other is good – It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

Mary Walker's Pants

When I started working on this collage, I didn't really know who Mary Walker was; I just thought she looked fascinating, and that it was pretty bizarre that someone could be arrested for wearing pants. So I looked her up to see what else I could find out.

Mary Walker's Pants

mixed media collage, 11 x 8.5 inches

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage book pages and ephemera, cut-outs, child's drawing, lace, image transfer

I also found a page in this history book where someone had made some notes about women's rights, written right underneath the heading, "Manifest Destiny." Since women's rights seem to be in the news quite a bit lately, I thought now might be an appropriate time to share this.

Here are some things I learned about Mary Edwards Walker (November 26, 1832 – February 21, 1919): According to Wikipedia, she "was an American feminist, abolitionist, prohibitionist, alleged spy, prisoner of war, and surgeon. As of 2017, she is the only woman ever to receive the Medal of Honor." Though women were not allowed to serve as doctors, she nonetheless served the Union Army during the Civil War as a surgeon in an army hospital, and was captured by the Confederates when crossing the lines to treat injured civilians, and sent to the prison at Richmond.

   After the war, "she became a writer and lecturer, supporting such issues as health care, temperance, women's rights, and dress reform for women. She was frequently arrested for wearing men's clothing, and insisted on her right to wear clothing that she thought appropriate.
Walker was a member of the central woman's suffrage Bureau in Washington... She attempted to register to vote in 1871, but was turned away. The initial stance of the movement, following Walker's lead, was to claim that women already had the right to vote, and Congress needed only to enact enabling legislation."  She also wrote books and articles about these issues which concerned her so deeply. (Wikipedia)

Yet the history book only mentioned that she regularly got herself in trouble by wearing pants. What else, I wonder, has been left out of our history books?

Mending

This much I have learned. Never give up. No matter how broken you are, it is possible to mend. It may take a very long time, and it may be the fiercest struggle you ever face. And you will probably be completely unprepared, like I was.

Mending

mixed media collage, 17 x 11.5 inches

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage book pages and other ephemera, vintage textile, image transfer, watercolor pencils, found objects, acrylic ink, rice paper, feathers, stitching

available for purchase here

I thought I was unbreakable. Just pile it on, I can take it; I've been doing it for years, right? I never gave any credence to that whole "straw that broke the camel's back" thing. How could one little straw make a difference? After all, it was nothing at all when compared to what I'd already been carrying around for so long.  The phrase, "nervous breakdown" never even crossed my mind.

But I was wrong. To my great surprise, there is a tipping point, and I suddenly landed flat on my back, broken into pieces. There's a saying, attributed to everyone from Leonard Cohen to Rumi, something about the cracks being the place where the light gets in.  That may be true, but that light can be blindingly, relentlessly painful.
 
For a year and a half, that pain seemed unbearable, unsurvivable. It's difficult to talk about this without seeming melodramatic; I just want to say this as plainly and as honestly as I can.  If the last straw has broken the camel's back, the camel will have to build up it's muscles, to become stronger than before. If you lose a wing, it can be mended, and the mended place will be your greatest strength. And someday you may fly again.

Answers

Answers

mixed media collage, 7 x 4 inches

ingredients: vintage book pages, ephemera, watercolor pencil

Available for purchase here.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (excerpt)
 By Wendell Berry

Denounce the government and embrace

You need to make a commitment, and once you make it, then life will give you some answers. Les Brown
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/answers.htmlDenounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns....

... Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts....


I have no answers, but this, one of my most favorite poems by my favorite Kentucky writer Wendell Berry, makes me feel there may yet be reason to hope...

Fear Not

Fear Not      

 mixed media collage, 9 x 5 inches

ingredients: map fragments, vintage book pages, image transfers, watercolor pencils, mica, stitching

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie



“I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Broken Girl - the Art of Recycling

Here is the finished version of the collage I was working on in the last two posts (here and here):

Broken Girl, mixed media collage on vintage book cover

ingredients: cabinet photo, vintage book pages and torn papers, vintage ephemera, watercolor pencils, stitching

The edges are cropped because it didn't quite fit on the scanner, and it's been way too dark and cold here to take good photos. (I take them outside in open shade.)  As you may remember if you're a regular reader, the torn pieces of layered papers on the right side started out as a completely different collage. I wasn't happy with the way it was going, so I incorporated it into a very different type of collage, i.e. one where the composition is more planned out and less abstract.  This doesn't usually happen, and I certainly didn't predict this turn of events when I started taking photos for my blog. These aren't the posts I had intended to write, but I thought it might be interesting for people to see what happens when things don't go as planned.

One thing I learned some time ago in my art-making explorations is that there's nothing wrong with tearing one piece up to make another; in fact, that's how I first began playing with collage. I didn't start out to become a collage artist, but as I tried making compositions with pieces of discarded work, I became hooked on the collage process as well as its outcomes. I love taking pieces of old ephemera that would otherwise be thrown out and combining them into something new. They bring with them something of the time they are from and the people who used them, which I think adds depth and meaning to the work.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_art.html

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country


"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
-- Scott Adams

“We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents.”
― Bob Ross

Destruction, and a New Life

A very melodramatic way to describe the second day in the life of our collage, right?  However, I'd have to say it's pretty accurate.

Here's how I left it last night; it was going nowhere, as far as I could see.


I'd had this idea floating around in my head for a few days, using a particular cabinet card photo of a young girl, something nebulous about a lost or broken girl.

You can kind of see her here, amidst the flotsam and jetsam. When I peeled the photo off the card, it tore, but that didn't really bother me.

I had recently found an old set of encyclopedias from 1971 in my basement. Jackpot! I removed the cover from one of them and sanded it to get the slick finish off so that things would adhere to it more easily, also making it look older.

I had already glued the girl together on a piece of an old engineering drawing, and given her a flower hat. Here's where the collage met its fate.

I ripped it into pieces, and laid some of them out on the book cover with the girl.  Not bad. Now we're getting somewhere.

 But where?

 So, putting things on and taking them off, trying to decide which I like best...

 No, way too much...

 So, imagine this happening about a hundred more times...

I feel like I'm getting close, except for that skirt-thing.  Sooner or later...

...I have the basis of my composition laid out. Time to start gluing!  Soon I'll post the finished piece.




p.s. You might see other pieces of the original collage turn up here or there later on...

A Day in the Life of a Collage

It started this way:

I had an old watercolor of a tree that I didn't want any more, so I thought I might recycle it and use it as the base for a collage.

First, I glued some brightly colored pieces of an old museum guide onto it, since I wanted to be able to scrape through to show bits of color.

Then, I covered the entire thing with pieces of vintage paper from old books, drawings, and sheet music.

I immediately added a second layer because it's easier to scrape or rub off when still damp from the glue. (I use matte gel medium as my adhesive.)

Here's a close-up view. I have to apologize for the poor photo quality, as it's been very dark and dreary here, and there's not really enough light to get a good photo with my phone.

Here it is after I scraped some of the papers off to reveal the colored paper underneath.  I call this the "Glaaaaaaah!!!" stage - when a piece gets to the point where I'm either going to throw it away or cover it up again; in other words, I hate it. Could I make a decent composition out of it? Probably, but right now I'm not seeing it.

My studio and materials were also in a complete state of "glaaaah!", but I still couldn't leave well enough alone...

 I glued some more papers on, then rubbed some more off (lather, rinse, repeat) .... and this is how I left it for the night.



Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens to our poor, pitiful collage. Will it live to see another day?  I'm not so sure...