Weekly Quick Collage: Passage of Time + Radioactive

Passage of Time

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
~ Steve Jobs



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 wanted to take this opportunity to share a wonderful book with you.  Lauren Redniss has written and illustrated a book about the lives of Marie  and Pierre Curie, called  Radioactive.  The book is beautifully illustrated throughout. Many of the illustrations are cyanotypes ; this photographic printmaking process produces moody, deep blue  images that I think are just mesmerizing, and Redniss's gorgeously sensitive line drawings are equally enthralling.            .

If you look on Amazon, you can see more of the book's illustrations. Check it out!



Here is Lauren Redniss's Ted Talk, where she speaks about developing the book:

Weekly Quick Collage: Passing Thoughts

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

                                                                                ~ Pablo Picasso

Passing Thoughts

Once again, made from stuff I found on my art table. If you're thinking I just might find the kitchen sink in that mess, you're probably right!

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
                                                                                                                                            ~ Aristotle

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

Have a wonderful, art-filled week, everyone!

White

The Search for Roy G Biv has brought us beyond the rainbow, to white. However, I would be remiss as a science geek if I didn't point out that white light is actually all the colors of the rainbow, combined:

"Visible light, also known as white light, consists of a collection of component colors. These colors are often observed as light passes through a triangular prism [or a raindrop]. Upon passage through the prism, the white light is separated into its component colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, [indigo], and violet. The separation of visible light into its different colors is known as dispersion. ... each color is characteristic of a distinct wave frequency; and different frequencies of light waves will bend varying amounts upon passage through a prism."  
                                                                     ( Dispersion of Light by Prisms; The Physics Classroom )                                                                        

It was Isaac Newton who discovered that white light is composed of these different colors:

"Newton’s contribution created a new understanding that white light is a mixture of colored light, and that each color is refracted to a different extent. The different colors correspond to light with different wavelengths, and are refracted to differing degrees. This separation of colors is known as dispersion."
                                                                                        (Causes of Color: What is Refraction?)

 I'm not sure what type of caterpillar this is, but I think it's pretty cool-looking....

 A white egret at Hilton Head, South Carolina...

Bear grass at Glacier National Park...

A springtime favorite in my yard, paper white narcissus...

Clouds in Ohio, and in South Carolina...

This odd-looking Kentucky wild flower looks white, but is ever so slightly tinted with violet in places...

Seeds of the season with their fuzzy white parachutes, just before they fly away...

My son Colin's beautiful bride, Lindsey, in her shimmering white wedding dress last weekend...






For more beautiful examples of white found by others in the Search for Roy G Biv, visit the blogs of our hostesses, Jennifer Coyne Qudeen and Julie Booth; they will link you up!  Thanks for joining me on my journey into WHITE; hope you enjoy it!

Exciting News, and a Sneak Peek

I'm truly excited and so happy to announce that the wonderfully talented and generous artist, teacher, and now author Roxanne Evans Stout of River Garden Studio has asked me to make a collage for her  upcoming  book. I feel honored to be included in this project, and naturally can't wait until it comes out. I'm afraid that's about all I can reveal right now, but don't worry, you'll be hearing lots more about it before the release. In the meantime, I was given the go-ahead to show you a tiny sneak peek.

Yes! So excited!! Please stay tuned for more news as it becomes available.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Weekly Quick Collage: Expansion of Dreams

Expansion of Dreams

Rambling around the internet one night, I found this poem by Stanley Kunitz, and thought I'd take this opportunity to share it with you. I hope you like it.

The Science of the Night
by Stanley Kunitz

I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
My careless sprawler,
And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,
That have become the land of your self-strangeness.

What long seduction of the bone has led you
Down the imploring roads I cannot take
Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,
Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field
To guard you where you lie so deep
In absent-mindedness,
Caught in the calcium snows of sleep?

And even should I track you to your birth
Through all the cities of your mortal trial,
As in my jealous thought I try to do,
You would escape me--from the brink of earth
Take off to where the lawless auroras run,
You with your wild and metaphysic heart.

My touch is on you, who are light-years gone.

We are not souls but systems, and we move
In clouds of our unknowing
 like great nebulae.

Our very motives swirl and have their start
With father lion and with mother crab.

Dreamer, my own lost rib,
Whose planetary dust is blowing
Past archipelagoes of myth and light
What far Magellans are you mistress of
To whom you speed the pleasure of your art?
As through a glass that magnifies my loss
I see the lines of your spectrum shifting red,
The universe expanding, thinning out,
Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.


From hooded powers and from abstract flight
I summon you, your person and your pride.

Fall to me now from outer space,
Still fastened desperately to my side;
Through gulfs of streaming air
Bring me the mornings of the milky ways
Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;
And by the virtue of your honeyed word
Restore the liquid language of the moon,
That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.

Awake!
 My whirling hands stay at the noon,
Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my hearts in unison strike twelve.