Journalling: 1 step back - 2 giant steps forward ...

Bet you wondered what happened to that journal I was going on about. Yep, I'm still journalling, but haven't had time to post lately. And let's not talk about what's happening to my computer. It (apparently) is reaching the end of a long and creative life ... riddled with feebleness and memory loss and just straight out crankiness. Are computer years like dog years, I wonder? I simultaneously long for and dread the inevitable upgrade. So I'm limping along for now ... several times I started this post and lost it. Today I'm ready to try again and hoping the computer gods are with me.

Since my last posting, I hit a roadblock and rethought the whole structure of my journal. The coiled book seemed like *such* a good idea when I began. But of course within weeks it was too heavy to carry around, thus defeating the whole purpose. I decided to go back to my original idea of working in individual signatures which I would stitch together at year end into one "annual". So, I took apart my giant coiled journal and rebound it into 20-page signatures, attaching the pairs of hole-punched pages together with masking tape (on both sides of the page, for strength) and gave each signature a "temporary" cover using the ubiquitous press clean-up sheets I scavenge from work.

And then I decorated the covers. I still intended to stitch them all together at year end, but man - the pile is almost 2" thick and I'm only at August. By the end of the year it might be 4" thick, and the idea of re-reading my journals (which I actually DO) also might mean snapping my little hands off at the wrist. And I was exhausted at the prospect of carting the finished volume to a photocopier somewhere. So now I'm thinking maybe I'll just make a slipcase for them at year end. And, as a friend pointed out to me the other day, it's like my very own personal set of magazines, which is pretty darn cool.

Anyway ... thought I'd share the new covers with you. They began (as most of my artwork does) as Something Else. Whenever I go off to an art retreat, I give myself the first evening to "not be creative". I let go of any expectations and just spend some time with the materials, absorb the joy of being with my art friends again and let my creativity find its groove. At the last retreat I thought I'd take a crack at making Soul Collage cards. But (as usual) I almost immediately broke 2 of the rules: I went for 8x10 (which coincidentally is the page size of  my journals) and I included text (just a little, here and there). Anyway ... fell in love with the collages and came home with the plan to shrink them down to Soul Collage card size. Only the proportion wasn't right, but I LOVED them. So I took the photocopies and glued one to the front of each of my new journal covers and added some washi tape, and a number, et voila!

The new journal covers ... pretty spiffy, hm?

Someone asked me the other day where I got my images ~ for collages, my journals, these covers, and other things, and I have to admit these journal covers benefited very much from one of my art friends bringing a stack of Communication Arts magazines to the retreat, combined with my own little stack of National Geographics, but generally I just keep my eyes open for anything that looks interesting. Most of what I work with I pick up in the everyday ~ newspapers, flyers, junk mail, etc. You never know what's going to go with what. And I love it when things come together and tell their own new story.

The astronaut on Journal #1 came from an article in NG about a man obsessed with space travel. The lightbulb on Journal #2 was an article in CA about brainstorming as a group, and the bird was a matchbook cover. The elevator in the canyon on Journal #3 was a CA ad for something having nothing to do with either elevators or canyons, the feet underwater were from an ad about foot pain relief (!). Mr. Intuition on Journal #5 was an ad for a sales conference + I added the text and new eyes (the old ones looked too sneaky for me). The hands at the top of Journal #6 were from an ad for virtual team building over a phone network ("almost like being there"). So you really just don't know where fun stuff will come from.

As I remarked to a friend the other day, advertisers are pretty shameless about stealing powerful words and images to convince us we have a hole in the center of our being that can only be filled by their product. I feel no guilt whatsoever about stealing back those images and repurposing them to fill my own (alleged) inner void with creative expression - and it works pretty well.

FYI ~ Journals 1 through 5 are already full, and I've still only posted halfway through the first one here, so I guess I better post some more pages here shortly ... but I don't think want to push my luck with the computer gods today. I'll see how they feel tomorrow ...

In the meantime ... release your expectations, follow your intuition, and keep an eye out for cool images, whatever their source.

Yep ... still journalling ...

Been awhile since I posted some journal pages - sorry 'bout that. Sometimes life gets kinda busy. I'm still creating pages (which is a good sign) ... so here are three more for you:

... and here are the inevitable notes:

Page 1:
~  The symbols used on a family crest to designate the order of sons. I found these in an old genealogy magazine. Nothing about daughters, not surprisingly, but history is history I suppose. Maybe we should invent some symbols of our own. Being the oldest child, I kinda fancy a crown of some sort. :)
~ Random planning ... an idea for a roll-out closet (I can hear Mr. B rolling his eyes already). More useful plans about alphabets for a zine swap I'm involved in. I'm pleased to say this *did* develop into something.
~ I tore a piece of washi tape putting it down, so I drew a little roof + smoking chimney to fill the gap. Sometimes it's these little things that satisfy me the most. Go figure.
~ More random musings about writing and time travel(?).
~ The collage is one I did at a retreat. The headless woman was from an article about old collars. For the stenciled bit I used one of Chris Cozen's pod stencils, a lovely little set. I've embellished it with extra dots and lines as well.

Page 2:
~ Basket making card from one of those ubiquitous sets of cards that were popular in the 70's. The Lifetime Collection of Homely Arts (or words to that effect). It goes with the other circles, of course.
~ A diagram loosely based on Susie Lafond's journal that I saw on Pinterest. I called it Gathering Up, but I see she's actually called it: Wild Rumpus. Great name. So amazing ... wish I had time to try my hand at all the beautiful things I'm inspired by.
~ And a song by Ferron that simply would not leave my head one day. I finally listened to it and realized I'd got many of the lyrics just plain wrong. Memory is a curious beast ... I caught the feeling if not the words. There was a time when I attended a Ferron concert every time she came to whatever town I lived in. Haven't done that for years, but her early albums are pretty much burned into heart ... just not all the words apparently.

Page 3:
~ "Never on Sunday" ~ Another article from an old genealogy magazine. Sometimes a story just sticks with you. I was particularly amused by the last line: "I don't know where they buried the horse."After all, the horse was the innocent party here. :)
~ The writing is just some random fiction from me. Oddly, the picture I have in my head is of my grandfather, a man I hardly knew, who did indeed in the photo look like he was wearing a pair of spittoons on his feet as he crossed the yard half-covered in patchy snow. Not sure what made me think of it ... just started writing at this came out (as with so much of what I write).
~ The triangles are from The Buzzer, an occasional publication on BC transit. I'm attracted to the artwork they choose for it because they're working with a quite limited colour palette (black plus 1 colour), reminiscent of printing that seems to be dying out with full-colour digital printing so prevalent these days.
~ And a postcard for "The Foreigner". I never saw the play, but I love this postcard, a sort of Magritte-ish kind of character collaged surreally with flowers and nose-glasses. What's not to love?

That's all for now ... more pages next week!

Sketchbooks revisited ... part two: cover stories

Ever have those days when you're attracted to a particular colour palette? Brown kraft + black + white has always been my thing anyway, and it certainly doesn't hurt that the original covers on the Sketchbook Project Sketchbooks are that nice earthy brown to start with. In my own contributions to The Sketchbook Project, I've never been able to resist covering up everything with colour, but I find all the above covers unspeakably beautiful and oh so wish that I'd come up with them myself.

Left to right on the top row we have: Simple Beautiful Things by Staci Adman, Atlas of Turning 50 by Robin Matthews and Fox + Owl by Shawna Handke
Left to right on the bottom there's: i no longer feel the need to ask permission by kelly letky, untitled by therese murdza and untitled by artist unknown (sorry!).

Staci Adman's Simple Beautiful Things is all it says it is. I highly encourage you to look at the whole book online. I posted one of it's pages, Fall vs. Summer Honey, in my previous post, but truly every single page is quite, quite amazing and made me want to rush home immediately and journal all my little treasures with a similar care and magic. And notice the lovely little beads along the spine - simple AND beautiful!

Fox + Owl is a lovely work of torn text page collage and paint by Shawna Handke. Some pages are breathtakingly beautiful and it would be a tragedy if they weren't seen by more people, so go there now.

Kelly Letky's i no longer feel the need to ask permission is a great example of how to marry striking natural images with deep personal poetry. I felt like I was reading a work that ought to be published for a wider audience.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it barely begins to cover the tactile satisfaction of therese murdza's untitled. omg. I *so* did not want to let this book go. The combination of crunchy gesso, text page collages and simple mark making had me envious at first sight. Why oh why do I fill my sketchbooks with complex cerebral ideas when something like this is so gobsmackingly delicious?

I feel bad about not getting the info on the last book. Up to this point in the day I'd been studiously taking pictures of the back cover of each book, and noting whether or not it was digitized for your viewing pleasure, but I guess the sketchbooks were flying thick and fast and I didn't make a note of the author's name on this one, for which I am truly sorry. I tried finding it on the Sketchbook Project website, but either it wasn't digitized, or wasn't tagged with a searchable word. The book was a touching story of a woman whose mother chose medical denial for what was (by the author's judgement) a 98% treatable kind of cancer. It was a hard read in some ways ... but unable to talk to her mother about her hopes and frustrations, I like to think by telling all of us, she was letting go of things in her own beautiful way. I'll keep looking and see if I can find it online, but (ironically?) the odds aren't good.

Okey, dokey ... time for a little colour! Top left: Encyclopedia of Sharks - Part XI by Pascal Lecocq. Okay ... so Part XI isn't digitized, but some of his previous shark encyclopedias are. If sharks are your thing, I'd start with the first one, and then you can work your way through Parts 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. You don't have to, and of course they're about more than sharks. I just loved his cover, so blue blue blue in a sea of brown (if you'll pardon the pun).

Top right is Atlas of My Dreams by Sonja NYC. I was immediately amazed by the use of thread on the Australian coast on the cover. I pretty much love anything that incorporates fiber in unexpected ways and this was beautifully done. The inner content never mentions Australia, instead it features Alice in Wonderland and sea creatures. Mysterious ...

Bottom left is Greetings from South Africa by Mieke van der Merwe ~ a cover (and book) that shouts it's beautiful detail from start to finish. I know very little about South Africa but this book's lovely colourful  line drawings and paintings of buildings, people, cameras and condiments (condiments?!) makes me want to go there.

Lastly, bottom right, is Map of the Table by Bonnie Hull. Now this is truly a case of not judging a book by its cover. I loved the cover right off ... triangular duct-tape snow-covered mountains, running along a duct-tape road, looking up to a fabulous blue duct-tape sky ... wonderful and tactile ... and absolutely no hint on the cover that inside there's a quirky string of simple line drawings of ... stuff on tables. A sense of the everyday  captured on various tables at various times ... tax time, breakfast time, meeting time, dinner time. I almost saved this one for my next post on fabulous inspiring line drawings, but since this post is about covers, the cover won out.

More next time ...

One for the bees ...

Just a brief little postette ... a bit of art I created over the weekend prompted by a challenge created by Effy Wild for her ning group. Say what you will, but sometimes having a jumping off point can be really satisfying when you're feeling creative but don't really have anything specific in mind.

I thought about "finding" a good bee quote to use as inspiration, but (as usual) the act of reading a bunch of bee quotes and not seeing one that grabbed me generated some writing of my own. When in doubt, use your own stuff, I always say.

The background is blueprint paper that's been gelli printed using my 6x6" gelli plate on Impression Obsession's plexiglass Mega Mount designed for their 6x6 Cover-a-Card rubber stamps. It's a cool quick way to get multiple layers of paint and texture on a big sheet of paper, and I just keep stamping and stamping till I figure that paper's had enough.

The bees are acetone image transfers. They come from Clipart, Etc, my favourite online resource for black and white images (historical, biological, etc etc). The flowers are from Stampin Up. There are a few random bits of collage and washi tape here and there.

The poem was created ransom-note style on scraps of paper using miscellaneous rubber stamp letters, rub-on letters and the ever-so-handy (but impossible to find at the moment?) Tim Holtz Label Letters. If I don't find more of these soon, I may need to make my own, which is a shame since I love the font (Dymo labeler!) and how each letter is already pre-cut. I created each word separately and then figured out the word spacing on the finished piece afterward.

Nothing too grand, but for some reason I really like it. It's funny (at least to me) that I'm always trying for "casual primitive" and wind up with "neatly organized". Think I'll just blame it on my Virgoness and learn to live with it.

The Evolution of an Idea ...

Sometimes in the creative process your brain finds something interesting ~ an image, a process, a juxtaposition ~ and then one day you realize its been showing up in your work in different ways over a period of time without any apparent conscious decision on your part. I thought I might present a series of works I've done over the last year to illustrate this point ...

The first (known) occurrence of what I've decided to call "little tree" syndrome happened at a retreat I attended last October called Faith and the Arts, hosted by Jill Cardwell, organizer of the Creativitea meetup group. Some of you may be surprised to find me at a retreat called Faith and the Arts. So was I. One of the things I've said about my strict religious upbringing is that it acted more as an immunization against religion rather than an indoctrination. But setting that aside, I think the creative experience is also a spiritual one and when presented with an opportunity to "be present" with whatever drives my creativity, and to share that time with other people considering the same question, I attended with an open mind and an open heart.

At the retreat we were given a blank journal, and over the course of the 3 days I filled it with collages, writing and drawings. One day we began our creative exploration with a simple, elegant prayer, which I later collaged into the journal spread below. Something about the earthiness of the magazine imagery I found and the way I tore the top edge created a kind of hillside and made me think of the main part of the page as "subterranean", so I decided to reinforce that by drawing little trees along the hill's top edge ...

A few months later I went away to my regular art journalling retreat (I know, I know ~ how lucky am I to have all these retreats to go to?) and I was playing around in one of my ongoing projects La Musee d'une Vie Inventee (The Museum of an Invented Life), and I found myself again creating a page with that same subterranean dark hillside feel. And again, a tree just seemed like the thing that was needed. This time I added some roots, perhaps to show that the character exiting on the right was not only leaving the landscape behind, but also her roots ...

A few months later, I was working on my submission for The Sketchbook Project. I'd decided to illustrate a  short story I'd written in my journal a few years ago, and (since I can't draw) I thought it might be fun to do it using torn paper collage. At one point I realized I wanted tall trees, and realizing the limitation of fine detail with torn collage, I decided to draw them. The little trees in my previous work came to the rescue, although I'm not sure my attempt was completely successful, at least they *do* look like trees ...

A few months ago my art journalling group had an Art Journal Zine Exchange ~ something we do from time to time to share our work with each other, and I wanted to include some of the pages from the Faith and the Arts retreat, but the page size was a completely different shape and size. I photocopied the original pages to a smaller size and then shortened them as well. The prayer seemed out of context with the rest of the zine, so I replaced it with inspiring quotes, something my art journal group also shares with each other on a regular basis ...

Okay .. we're almost up to the present ... a few weeks ago I bought a LARGE jar of black gesso. Like a lifetime supply. I started painting some more background pages in La Musee d'une Vie Inventee, and had a bit left over (you know how it is) ... I grabbed some blank ATCs so that nothing would go to waste. And the first swipe across my card was (you guessed it) ... that hillside shape again. So I painted a bunch of them. Like 30. I had to get more black gesso, but when a good idea strikes I feel it would be just rude to ignore it. After the ATCs dried,  I started drawing (you guessed it) ... little trees. Which were shortly joined by fences (as in the page above with the person leaving the landscape). As I was drawing I was thinking about human-scaled objects that might be seen in silhouette on hilltops, and I thought of parks, park benches and bicycles, so I threw a couple of those in as well. And when I'd drawn all the little pictures, I remembered the quotes I'd added to the zine pages, and started looking through some random text pages that I keep on my desktop for cleaning my brayer when I'm using the gelli plate, and little stories started to appear ...

 

I'm calling them "momentaries", as in commentaries on little moments, maybe? Well, anyway ... yesterday while working on the last of the momentaries to prepare for my ATC group trading session this upcoming Sunday, one story surfaced that seemed to be particularly meaningful and made me stop and think of all sorts of other moments. I'm not sure what it might mean for anyone else, but it felt like it wanted to be shared and it felt like the right thing to follow that instinct ...

Inspiration vs. Imitation ...

Card I made for an inspiration deck exchange. Hand image: from Teesha Moore's zettiology rubber stamp collection.

There was a time when I didn't make art. Oh, I made *stuff* - cards and gifts for people, things that were useful for myself. For a period of ten years I wrote, edited and mailed a monthly newsletter to about a hundred people. The newsletter was full of whatever I was interested in at the time. Looking back now I don't know where I found the time. Or that many things to write about, actually.

Then I found art. One day I realized that I didn't just want to be looking at interesting stuff ~ I wanted to be making it. There was just one little problem: I didn't think of myself as an artist. I couldn't draw or paint (still can't, really) and didn't even know where to begin. I thought it would be smart to look art that inspired me and see if I could identify what made those pieces "beautiful" to me. Once I'd cracked that, I could start making my own "art". Easy peasy. Or not.

I could feel the creativity flowing through my heart and brain, but when it reached my hands it kind of ... sputtered and failed ... leaving me sad and frustrated, unable to translate whatever it was inside me into some kind of visual form I could share.

One day while carefully examining the work of a famous artist, I began to see all its parts ... the composition, the rich colours, the layers of deep meaning. How all the bits of it spoke to all the other bits of it and communicated something of their relationship to me. I wanted so badly to make Art like this, with a capital A, but I worried that anything I created would only be a feeble imitation of this artist's work, not an original work of my own.

Then I had a revelation.

If the artist of the piece I admired came to me and gave me a kit of his own materials, and even if he stood there telling me what to and I tried my best to imitate him, I still couldn't help but create something original. Through the subtle decisions involved in the creative process, the finished piece would be a reflection of *my* vision, not *his* vision at all. And just as my vision was different from his, it was also different from any other person in the world. Something I'd always known deep inside, but hadn't trusted.

So ... I had "vision" ...all I lacked was skill. I've been learning skills all my life ... walking, talking, reading, cooking ... all I had to do was learn new skills and trust the vision to be there. And it was, and is.

Another thing happened ... I stopped being afraid of imitating art that inspired me. I realized there are some things you can only learn by doing. I'm sure there's some magic brain chemistry going on when we explore new creative territory. It's one thing to passively enjoy a work you admire ... with your eye to follow the curve of a face in one of Leonardo's paintings, it's quite another to put a piece of chalk in your hand to try to recreate it. You have to make a million little decisions as you go along ... angle of wrist, location of mark on  paper, pressure of chalk as you move it, how curved is the curve? And you learn, learn, learn every step as you go.

Recently I was playing around with some fun new backgrounds (remember the "paper pillows" from my last post?), and I wanted to try drawing something on top. Something colourful and playful and ... oh yeah ... maybe sorta like Dan Casado's work, which I admire so much. So using his piece The Boat as a jumping off point, I played a little bit with shapes and colours I wouldn't normally use. I've learned not to bite off more than you can chew, so I selected just the two people in the boat. I ditched the moon. And the dog. I wanted to see if I could understand the posture of the person rowing and maybe capture something of their facial expressions. I wanted to get the angle of the boat in relationship to the water.

Left: Dan Casado's The Boat (reproduced with the artist's permission). Right: My own little boat.

Along the way some things worked and some things didn't. One of my people (for reasons I don't understand) needed glasses. And the other one wanted arms. And a pocket.  The water became more fluid. But the oar is good, as is the hand holding it. And I adore those freaky blue noses. Only later did I realize that my colourful squares in the background kind of mirror the colourful squares in the standing boatman's body in the original.

When I was more or less happy with what I'd done, I then did something rather cheeky. I emailed Mr. Casado (who, trust me, I do not know from Adam). He lives in the Canary Islands. Never met him. I emailed him my artwork and asked if it would be okay if I posted his excellent artwork next to my own and then write about the process of learning by doing. Inspiration, and not imitation. Not only did he answer amazingly quickly *and* say yes (I wouldn't have posted his artwork otherwise), but he also had kind things to say about my work as well. Which makes me like him, and his work, all the more. If you haven't seen his work, go there now ... I highly recommend it to get you into your paintbox, or at the very least to make you see things in new and colourful ways. 

Another batch of postcards ready to go out for an international swap ...

Another batch of postcards ready to go out for an internationalswap.

One of the things I love about making art is that you can keep re-creating ideas in new ways. The phrase on this postcard has had more than a few incarnation over the years. I have a weird affinity for sentences where all the words have the same length, and in the past I've put this phrase into a tidy little grid. This time around I gridded the background and let the words be funky (i.e. random type and not lined up, lest you think I mean something else).

This background is becoming my new favourite background to work on ... it's made from the reader's digest pages where I clean off my brayer while using my gelli plate. I love that cleaning my brayer gives me huge stacks of colourful text pages to play with - there truly is no waste ... just lovely texty coloury bits to play with. For this background I cut the text pages into 1.75" squares, glued them down in a pleasing sort of spectrumy order, and then gessoed the borders, dry-brushing towards the middle of each square as I went. The trouble with this background is that I kinda fall in love with each step as I go (well okay, maybe not step one ...). A friend of mine at seeing step three called this background "Paper Pillows" and it's as good a name as any I can think of myself, so here are the steps to Paper Pillows in case you want to give it a go yourself:
 

 
The frames are a rubber stamp, and the last step (for my postcards) was to stamp text in the frames. I've also been using this same background in my art journal and then doing non-grid drawings/paintings on top of it, but I'll save those images for a future post because I still want to tweak them and add more detail.

Hope you're all having a colourful day ...

Missing Artfest ...

As spring gets closer a part of my creative self is remembering this is the time of year (in past years) I'd  be getting ready for Artfest, which was hosted by Teesha and Tracy Moore and a crowd of volunteers. I'd be reading supply lists and gathering materials and thinking about how wonderful it is to gather with hundreds of like-minded artists for 5 intense days of learning and sharing. But (alas) Artfest is no more, so for this part of the process memories will have to do.

Oddly, what I miss most of all is making the trades. Given the population of Artfest (500+ artists), I took real pleasure in making small arty items to share with as many people as possible, and would often make something like 150 of whatever I'd decided to make, usually small books (quelle surprise!). I mean, how often in one's life (unless you're in manufacturing), do you get to sit down and make 150 of anything, particularly a small token of your creative self. Even now I find my fingers twitching to buy some little twiddle I've found in bulk with the idea that it would make an excellent start for trades at Artfest.

Fortunately for me, Artfest has brought some deep and wonderful friendships with other artists and I continue to meet (and retreat!) with them on a regular basis. It also introduced me to some fabulous teachers who I otherwise would only have known through their blogs. Like Roxanne Padgett for instance. It was in her class that I overcame almost all my colour fears. In fact, just looking at her artwork before I went to Artfest led me to Be Brave with Colour while making my Artfest Journal to take with me (as you can see by the front cover above).

And it was in her class more colour fears fell by the wayside as I created the portrait above. It's so completely different from anything I'd done before that I still can't believe I made it myself. I enjoyed her class immensely ~ from the warm up exercises that loosened us up, to the actual techniques of creation (this portrait was developed front to back on a sheet of plexiglass), to seeing the amazing variety of the work by all the other students. I've been eagerly awaiting her book "Acrylic Techniques in Mixed Media: Layer, Scribble, Stencil, Stamp coming out soon, and I'm *so* looking forward to it, although it won't be the same as having her right there encouraging me to *explore*, but it'll have to do.

My experience in her class, and in other Artfest classes have continued to feed and nurture my creative courage even today. So colour me bittersweet - missing Artfest, but loving where it got me.

True dat ...

Just back from another creative weekend with some of my favourite people on the planet ~ my art journalling group. We've been meeting a couple of times a year for about 4 years now, and when we began I struggled with the art journal form. Sure I love books, love making them, love writing in them, and can't help arting up the pages, but it seemed to me that everyone else's journals were so much more art journally than mine. I longed to be able to see the colour, pattern and texture of the images I was using without feeling bound to use the image for what it was, a boat as a boat, for instance, instead of upside down and turned into a person's leg. On this trip I edged closer to having that experience, but obviously not on the journal page above.

"Time is the thing you can't get back" has been running through my head for weeks now, and it came together on this page with some nice 1950/60's-ish images from a magazine and a school textbook. This page is from La Musee d'une Vie Inventee (Museum of an Invented Life), a journal I made at another of our retreats, as I posted here. It sat empty for quite a long time until I figured out how to tell the story of an invented life.

It isn't my life exactly, but since my life is the only one I know intimately, then it's probably closer to mine than anybody else I know. Each page reveals something about an unspecified woman ... where she lives, how she sees things, bits and pieces of her memory and the experiences that made her who she is. Like me, but not exactly me, which turns out to be a comfortable balance point somewhere between fact and fiction. At a Q&A after a book interview I heard Margaret Atwood say proclaiming your book to be 'non-fiction' brings out the obsessive fact-checkers. She said every true story contains some fiction, and every made-up story contains some fact, and it's more interesting to have people think you've cleverly hid some truth of yourself in your fiction than having them distracted from the story by the search for false facts.

Time is indeed the thing you can't get back, not only that we can't get back to childhood, but also that wasted time is wasted time, and can't be bought or bargained back at any price, so it's important to use the time we have wisely. True dat fo real.

Sketchbook Project time again ...

So here's what I've created as this year's contribution to the digital library at the Sketchbook Project. Even though I've had my blank journal since the 2012 tour came to Vancouver, it took me *forever* to decide what to do. I suppose there are worse predicaments than having *too* many ideas ...

It came down to two ideas. The first was an abecedarian of sorts, an A to Z where the pages of the journal had been cut and folded to form the letters. I actually got a pretty good start on this one ... until I realized that I needed to tweak the binding in order to keep the pages together so they could survive shipping and multiple people reading it. I haven't abandoned this idea, but I need to (ugh) do more math.

The second idea was to take a very very very short story I'd written in my journal that I thought might be interesting to illustrate using torn paper collages. And in one those weird accidental forethought situations, it turns out that I went through an unexplained photography phase last summer taking pictures of pebbles, stones, rock walls, sand, water and other natural surfaces. So it was a mere matter of printing out my photos, making a bunch of photocopies and tearing them up. Oh yeah ... like illustrating a book is a mere matter of anything!

The only problem is I'm pretty bad at drawing people ... and there is actually a person in the story, and eventually she has to appear in some form or other ... and no amount of torn rocks and water will pass for a person. I thought I might get away with only showing a hand or an arm, so I did a few drawings. They were ... passable ... but instead of helping the story I felt they were more of a distraction and a let-down.

So there I sat .. staring at my own hand in the position I wanted to draw it and wishing I could transfer it just as it was onto the page. Then I remembered I'd recently I read about a young artist, Sara Lando in Italy, who was crowd-sourcing the funding to have her Magpies book published. Her book was made by photographing herself (and other people, objects, etc), then printing out the photos, cutting everything out and placing them in 3D paper diaramas. She'd then re-photograph them and use the photographs as panels in a graphic novel. What I needed to do was simple ... photograph my hand, print out the photo and glue it into the book. Et voila ... !

The gist of the story is that a woman goes every day to the edge of the river and places a stone till she can build a bridge to the other side. Even as I wrote the story years ago it seemed to me that this was an allegory of sorts, that the bridge was more than a literal bridge ... it was a bridge between more than two physical places ... so I decided to represent the stones as torn text rather than just as ordinary stones.

A few other tidbits ... the sleeve in the photo above is actually the wrong side of some black quilted satin I received in a fabric swap about 15 years ago. Another one of those beautiful little things I've hung onto thinking it might come in handy one day ... and again ~ voila! As usual I've made two copies of this journal ... one for myself and another to be permanently added to the digital library at the Sketchbook Project.

Back in the saddle ...

You may (or may not) have noticed I haven't blogged in awhile. Not sure why ... just got busy with life ... and it was sort of a "last thing in, first thing out" kinda deal and blogging was the thing that got neglected. I didn't stop making art or anything ... I just didn't blog about it. But recently I've been feeling the itch to share what I've been up to, so thought I'd start today while it's snowing outside (what? how did *that* happen?).

So I won't talk much and I'll just get on with sharing artwork I've made in the last 6 months. Yep ... it really  was six months ... in the words of Pink Floyd .. is there anybody out there?

Today's collage was something from a little retreat I attended last October. We had a short amount of time, limited materials, and a specific writing exercise which preceded making the collage. Which obviously worked for me since this little gem emerged very intuitively. It's way simpler than my usual collages - funny how putting a limit on time and materials can force you to be creative in new and rewarding ways. This one was made with only 3 items: a sheet of 70's stationery (aqua ovals), a page from a magazine (girl + title) and a postcard of Italian doorknockers. I used the symmetry of the photograph as my cue for the composition, and also balanced the ovals in the stationery on the top with the ovalness of the doorknockers on the bottom. But I think my favourite bit is the single golden doorknocker which forms a halo over her head.

I enjoy writing exercises but lack the self-discipline to make myself do them on my own, which is why I love  art retreats, collaborating with others, taking art classes and joining time-limited projects where I expect myself to produce something worth sharing at the end. Whether it's a brief time of contemplation, writing and collage (as this one was) or multiple months with the Sketchbook Project, give me an external deadline, a direction to head into and I *will* create something I wouldn't have created on my own, and probably surprise myself with some kind of useful insight to boot.

You never know just where you'll go ...

I've been meaning to get back to the blog for awhile now. I mean, life keeps happening, and I keep saying to myself: Oh, I should blog about that. And then I don't. I get busy or do something else entirely and the moment passes. But I really really should put this stuff out there ... so here goes:

Way back a couple of weeks ago ... on my birthday, actually, Papergirl Vancouver rode out on their bikes and gave away hundreds of pieces of artwork, mine included. I DID actually manage to blog about it here and here. And I even managed to blog about the Papergirl exhibit launch here. But something else came out of my Papergirl experience, something kinda cool that I didn't even know existed until I was contacted.

Here's what happened ... at the Papergirl exhibit launch I got into a great little conversation with Jeanette. We walked around a bit together and showed each other the stuff we liked, and (without seeming too cocky) I'd have to say she really liked the collage I'd done, and I'd happened to bring a couple of extra prints along (just in case - you never know!) so I gave her one.

Now the funny thing is (and I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this) but I usually feel that what I've done is Not So Special. Oh, I like it fine, and I'm pretty happy when other people like it, but when other people Really Really Like It, I'm always a bit mystified. This topic came up at our art retreat, and I was finally able to find the words to describe why some of us are so hard on ourselves when it comes to our art ... basically, it boils down to: Other people see what we've done, while we see what we weren't able to do. For others, it's like we've made something out of nothing (where DO you get your ideas!?), but we see all the places where we "fudged" the process trying to get whatever it was in our heads onto the page, and even though we might *like* the result, it might not be exactly what we were hoping, so we doubt ourselves.

Anyway, big big thanks to Jeanette, who very kindly passed my info on to Jason at Illustrated Vancouver, who kindly asked me if he could add my artwork to his ongoing project to collect 1000 pieces of artwork featuring Vancouver. His collection is quite amazing, and even though I've only lived in Vancouver for 25 years, I know (and love) so many of the places featured in the pieces he's selected and I'm thrilled to be included. Also, now that I'm following his site regularly, I'm thrilled to see that not only is one of the blogs I regularly follow (Design Sponge) having a book launch October 1st in Vancouver, but they're holding it at Anthropologie (wait!? we have an Anthropologie store and I didn't know it!? Man .. I have *got* to get out more!). Just so you don't think I'm a design snob ... my favourite part of Design Sponge is where people post little cards saying what they love about their house, and the department I'm planning to hit at Anthropologie is the book section (of course!). So, all in all, double thanks to Jason for all that.

From the moment I saw the Papergirl Vancouver poster hanging in a store window in my neighbourhood just a few short days before their deadline, I knew I wanted to contribute something so they would be around next year. I knew exactly what I wanted to make, and how I was going to make it. And (luckily) I left the next day for my art retreat where I knew I would have the time and materials to pull it off. Their deadline was the day after I got back so I quickly had it scanned and printed, and then couriered to their office (I would have loved to deliver it in person, but I had to work!). The whole process from discovery to creation to delivery seemed magical in some way. Maybe magical isn't the right word ... but I felt like I was tuned in to something ... a flow ... a connection ... a pulse, yeah, that's more like it ... like there's a river of energy in the world all the time, and for some reason, for the duration of the project, I could feel it, and let it guide me. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a pretty down to earth, if-you-want-something-done-give-it-to-the-busy-person, here-let-me-organize-that-for-you kind of person, so having such a great result and having my artwork acknowledged that little bit further than I was ever expecting is pretty darn cool. Thanks again to Papergirl Vancouver, Jeanette, Jason and my ever-encouraging art retreat compadres (you know who you are!).

... then there was the collage

My plan from the beginning was to reproduce the collage for the Papergirl Vancouver project in black and white, which meant the papers I used would need to be a variety of patterns, but similar in value and tone. My solution was to use security envelope linings, of which I have quite a few collected.

Having cut up my traced and numbered drawing (see previous post), I started working from the background to the foreground. I laid each numbered template piece onto the selected envelope lining, being careful to match the top edge of the piece exactly but extending the bottom edge so there'd be something to glue the next layer onto.

The North Shore mountains were easy, and once I had them in place I could feel my confidence growing that my idea was going to work! Next I put in the forests of Stanley Park, and then moved east along the cityscape, putting skyscrapers in the background and layering lower buildings in front of them. There's no way I could be even close to accurate about the buildings given the scale I was working in, but I was highly amused to find an envelope lining from Telus (one of BC's largest phone companies) in my collection, so there is a Telus Building. The building just behind the Telus building is made from an envelope lining from the Hudson's Bay Company (thanks, Rose!), and if you know anything about Canadian history, you'll know why having an HBC building is very apropos.

The waves on English Bay are made with a series of lumpy almost concentric half ovals, starting with the largest on the bottom, and then all glued down at once, covering up the edges of the forest and the city. In the foreground, a path from a grass and shrubbery-edged manicured lawn leads down to the sandy beach.

Although I'd planned the cloud from the very beginning, I came across a zigzag lightning envelope lining that seemed oh so appropriate for how quickly the weather can turn here (yes, it can rain on a moment's notice!).

When it was all finished I realized the North Shore mountains needed *a little something* to break up their dark dominance, and while a few little snips of white would've given me seagulls, I thought if I was viewing the city from Jericho Beach or Spanish Banks (surely the location from whence this scene is viewed), what I'd mostly likely see is a floatplane headed for Burrard Inlet on the other side of Stanley Park. It took a few tries to get it down to a small size (it should probably be smaller, but my fingers kept getting in the way of the scissors) , and adding white wings made it uber-recognizable as a plane.

I'm just so tickled at how it turned out. I don't think I ever got from concept to completion on anything quite as fast as this (approx 8 hours), and it's something I'm happy to contribute to the Papergirl Vancouver project. If you live in Vancouver, keep an eye out for girls on bikes!

Sometimes retreating can be a good thing ...

Just back from another of my quarterly art retreats with a group of friends in a little red farmhouse on an island not so very far away.

We started doing these retreats in August 2009, and I love how we've grown together as a group. As a person who plans overmuch, it is a real joy (especially the last few times) to turn up with the rolly cart full of supplies and my head empty of plans ~ letting whatever ideas come to me in that time and in that place be the thing I do.

Along with our mountains of art supplies, and an equally healthy supply of food (or is that supply of healthy food?), we also bring our favourite books to provide inspiration, and this time I let Sabrina Ward Harrison's Messy Thrilling Life give me the visual courage to create a series of 16 collages about the complications of growing up in a dysfunctional family. What I create at these retreats is often a surprise, even to myself. Immediately after I get home I am struck by the fact that something *interesting* that didn't exist before has been created, either by me learning a new technique ~ there is plenty of sharing around the table as we all work on our various projects, or by exploring some heretofore unknown nook of my heart and brain in the process of creating.

Those of you familiar with Sabrina Ward Harrison's work will see at once that I am nowhere *near* as loose and spontaneous as she is (planning overmuch rears it's ugly head again!), but you'll just have to accept that this *is* a step in that direction for me. The 16 collages tell a little story, and I relied on a very limited supply of materials to work from ~ no access to computers or the internet ~ mostly a few magazines, some washi tape, gesso and caran d'ache crayons. I *tried* to write as loosely as she does and make it look good, but I don't think I even got close. But am I happy with my series? You betcha.

A bazillion thanks to the women who make this experience possible ~ for their organizing skills, for their openness and generosity and creativity and even the cooking. Even? Surely I mean *especially* the cooking ~ I may learn a thing or two in the kitchen if I'm not careful. As a person who has stood on the outside looking in for a lot of my younger life, to be inside the circle is amazing ~ it just took me awhile to find you.