What I've been up to lately ...

So ... it's been awhile. Sorry. Life happens. And it's not like I haven't been doing *anything*, it's just that I haven't been posting. And, oh yeah, I started another blog, but it's a blog with a purpose.

In September 2016, I started teaching art journaling as part of the health program I belong to, so I started a blog to go with the class so students could still take part even if they couldn't attend every class.

Thanks to some prompting, I've decided to cross-post from the class blog to this one so more people will know what I'm up to and not assume that I've fallen into a deep dark non-creative well.

I'm going to spin the clock back to September 2016 and begin at the beginning ... here's a link to the first post I created for the new class. Funny to look back at it now from more than two years in the future. I'm very critical of my own past work and almost always feel the best thing I've ever done is the thing I'm working on now. Keep that in mind as you read this ... just in case you come across any glaring, laughable errors ...

Here's a link to Week One of the 2016 Class
And here's what it says:

Hello and welcome ... so glad you can join me in this exploration of creative vision journaling. Every week I'll be putting the text from the handouts here for you to read, as well as much visual content as I can. You'll also find the weekly handouts here to print out again.

This series of classes has been designed in the hopes that you will discover ways to use creative self-expression to document your life experience in support of your goals for better health, whether that be something as simple as relaxation, or as complex as setting life goals and working towards them.

Everything I post here will be either something I discovered through my own journaling process or information and links that I've found useful for myself. I'm not an expert, but I 've found over the years that journalling has made a significant improvement in how I value myself and my contribution to the world around me.

Like many people, I used to put myself at the bottom of my "to nurture" list, and although I loved what I did in the world ~ work, family, volunteering ~ eventually this led to personal burnout. These days I like to use the analogy of the oxygen mask in an airplane. You can't take care of the people around you if you aren't able to breathe yourself. So take some time ~ sometimes you don't need much ~ and nurture yourself through play, exploration, and self-expression. Let the games begin ...

Since the intro was a bit slim, here's the next bit you need to get going in Visual Journaling.

Rather than posting the whole thing, follow the link above to get all the info, printable class handouts and everything else. But I *will* post the photo because otherwise, this post will be nothing but a daunting block of text! 

Working in my Black & White Journal.
Yes, I have multiple journals going on at all times ... 

Once you have the link to the class, you can follow the class blog (which has links, photos and handouts for each and every class), or check back here as I slowly add links to past classes, even as I'm adding new classes to this year's series (we're on Series 5!). 

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!

Journal 2015 & where it leads to ...

So ... jumping ahead in the journal ... thought I'd show you how a random jotting can develop into something else, or somethings else (something elses?). Here's a section of the March 20th journal page:

A few days later ... I was thinking about a journal I've been working on for the last few years, La Musee d'Une Vie Inventee, and how I've been creating pages in it in the third person. It's all commenting on the life  of an unnamed "her", as in: She always felt ..., she knew ..., she wondered..., etc. I realized that this little scribble was the seed of another page in that journal, so out it came, and I created this:

And (since I was on deadline with my contribution to the Sketchbook Project) it would also nicely fill that last empty page, and neatly summarize the sketchbook, so it also became this:
 

Okay ... so none of this is earth-shattering, but it all started with that one little scribble, which only confirms my suspicion that I'm onto a good thing getting back to journalling regularly ...

More pages to follow in a few days ...

2015 Journal - Jan 29 to Feb 13

O my gosh how tempting it is to do *something else* when you are on a deadline. Sketchbook Project is due to be mailed out by Tuesday, and what am I doing? Working on my blog, tidying up the ATC collection, working in a journal I haven't touched since last summer. What is it with (my) human nature that so loves to procrastinate? I've even been known to *clean house* when a deadline is looming. Oh well ...might as well roll with it ... here are 3 more pages:

And now for the notes:

Page1:
~ Kosuke Sato & his hamster ... funny how when you find stuff online, it's not exactly as written about in magazines at the doctor's office. Here's a link to the adorable hamster bartender.
~ It was kind of odd (while reading about Kosuke Sato) to look up and see a striking and inappropriately(?) dressed young Japanese woman walk by. All those sequins so early in the morning. Amazing.
~ More from the The Cariboo Alphabet ... thinking about wrestlers and ersatz animosity.
~ Haven't read Daniel Handler's new book We Are Pirates, but it sounds intriguing. As to his watermelon comment and Jacqueline Woodson ... people closer to the situation than me have commented on it (including the two people involved), but I will say that sometimes you don't know when what you say will cause pain for others, so it's best to think twice before speaking.
~ Cartoon characters ... can't remember what they were originally saying, but this came to mind, so I removed the original words and put mine in just for fun.

Page 2:
~ Have seen this quote attributed to both Francis Bacon and Marie Beyon Ray, so not sure who actually said it. Don't know who did the original artwork - one of the many things I've collected for my Black & White journal. It would be nice to think I had a *plan* when I started working on this, but it was only *afterwards* I realized I'd connected all three things together (quote + snowflake + heat from hand in the picture).
~ More on ersatz animosity for the amusement (read: manipulation) of the populace. Yuck.
~ Upworthy, a palate cleanser for the human spirit after contemplating the deviousness of politicians. More on Upworthy on page 3. The video I saw was Ash Beckham, at the Boulder, Colorado TEDx event. I loved the idea that "coming out of the closet" is any difficult conversation you've ever had to have with anyone about anything. For those of us who haven't had to come out of the closet in the sense it's usually meant these days, it was a great way to plug us into how it feels
~ 9 great reasons to come downtown. Image clipped out of Writers Festival program (I think?). So I wrote my reasons, interestingly enough, I didn't do them in any particular order, i.e. wrote reason 5 first, then 7, etc. No idea why ... knew I'd fill in all 9 eventually so just did it that way for fun.

Page 3:
~ Sketchbook comic. Very funny, wish I could remember who drew it. I picked it up as the local event at Heritage Hall several years ago and it made me laugh out loud, so I kept it.
~ More about Upworthy, another of their inspiring videos. Three girls + spoken word about the realities of America and their generation. And then me writing about how it made me feel.
~ The "girls" ... my nephew's daughters ... have started sending them fun stuff on a regular basis to keep them amused. A new experience for me, and one I'm enjoying.
~ Austin Kleon's weekly summary. If you haven't subscribed, you really need to do that. His comments, links and stuff are pretty cool. Every week I learn something amazing that reminds me it's great to be human, creative and conscious.

Journal Experiment - Jan 15 to Jan 27

Wait? January? Yes ... because I'm posting these pages sequentially, and waiting till they ripen on the page, i.e. till I've had enough distance from them that I feel comfortable posting them. Today three more pages, when I was just getting the hang of doing them regularly. I'm creating them faster now, so the speed should increase as time passes. Or words to that effect. Here we go:

And the inevitable notes:
Page 1: Jan 15
~ Photo of Barbie feet from a zine I did on anatomy. When I was a child I thought you'd know you were "grown up" when your feet took on this shape. Yep, pretty naive.
~ Page from Scavenger by Seth Fitts, who I discovered at the Sketchbook Project when it was on tour in Vancouver one year. I can't tell you how happy I am when looking at his work. Well, I could, but it might be a little awkward for both of us. You can find more of his amazing work here as well. He's up there with Shaun Tan, Nick Bantock and Joseph Cornell in my own personal artist/star rating system.
~ Child's drawing? No idea whose... came to me in some stuff to use in collage. Probably from my friend Rose who brings me little delights to add to my journals. She knows me so well.

Page 2: Jan 19
~ Random jottings, all me I'm afraid.
~ Save the Humans photo clipped from the newspaper. Taken at the BC Parliament building in Victoria. No idea when ... or by who ... just saved the photo.
~ Rules for Public Library (circa 1930's?) ... another gem from Rose.

Page 3: Jan 23-27
~ 7 books for Downtown Abbey addicts. Heard on the radio, probably CBC. I'd already read The Buccaneers (suggested by Mr. B's Mum years ago and I loved it). Since I enjoy Fay Weldon, I think Habits of the House will be the next likely read.
~ Child Motion Development from a Russian Health Encyclopedia I acquired somewhere. I particularly love Figure 11 (bottom right corner), although I can't say why.
~ Knitted polar bear sweater which is unraveling ... as seen in the building I work in as a GIANT poster, so I went to the Admin office and asked if they had it as a smaller format, which they did. I thought it was the perfect marriage of concepts ... wearing a sweater instead of turning up the furnace, which uses energy which creates global warming which means the ice floes the polar bears depend on are melting/unraveling ... genius. Wish I'd thought of it (or a similarly clever concept).
~ DIY reusable gelli plate ... if you are a gelli plate person and haven't looked at Linda Germain's Printmaking Without a Press blog, you really should. I'm just sayin'.
~ Cube books in a box ... an idea in progress. I mention a class with Roxanne Padgett, one of the top three teachers I ever had at Artfest (which I *still* miss!). She's AMAZING (yes, I'm shouting that). Go look at her stuff here.

It occurs to me it's no bad thing that I'm annotating my journal with online notes here ... like having my actual journal be hyperlinked and searchable for myself. Such a good idea ... so glad I thought of it.

Journal Experiment? I think it's a go ...

Well, it seems to be working. The journal experiment, I mean. I'm creating pages on a regular basis ... 2-5 per week, and the more I create the more I want to create. It's a weird thing but I get a real fondness for whatever finds its way into my journal. Kind of like the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. I could chat on forever here, but think I'll just post two more pages and let them do the talking. Here they are:
 

Notes (sort of inevitable, I guess):
Page 1:
~ The Story Collider: new podcast I've found. Personal stories from the world of science. Very short and listenable. Not as gripping as The Moth or Radiolab, but still good.
~ Assessment of On the Road by Kerouac. Some great poetry, but very much of its era. You have to wade through quite a bit of stuff that is not very woman-friendly and/or thrill-seeking and/or somewhat racist, but there are some great poetic lines. I also have a print copy, so may go through that and see if I can assemble the more poetic stuff into something more concise and less squirm-inducing. Did research online to find out more about him. Intrigued by his method of continuous typing by taping sheets into rolls to not break his creative flow.
~ Yes, my co-worker and I *do* talk about physics and time travel. My knowledge on this: zero, so I tend to go to Mr. B for answers, most of which I also do not understand, but I probably know more than the average bear due to the sheer volume of discussion.
~ Shaun Tan's alphabet for The Arrival? Makes a longer appearance in a future page, so will not add it here.
~ Cariboo Alphabet: long-term ongoing project, turning my childhood experiences into an abecedarian.
Page 2:
~ Tattoo/Mendhi ~ an ad torn from a magazine. Love it! Don't know the magazine or source - sorry!
~ Ideas for this year's Sketchbook Project: O.M.G. Have finally settled on something, similar to this new journal experiment you won't be surprised to hear ... :)
~ Shinto broken needle ceremony, as seen on the smallest forest blog. Not recent, but recent to me. The world is indeed a strange and marvelous place.

A new experiment with journals ...

Been thinking about this for awhile ... how to get back to my everyday journalling the way I did before Pinterest. Don't get me wrong ... i *love* Pinterest, but I miss my old habit of curating, collecting and commenting on the world around me, and having that as a physical resource I can refer back to. I can't tell you how many life-changing insights have come from re-reading old journals. I've been keeping journals since I was 20-ish, so that's a good 30 years of who I was and what I saw, did and felt ... hmmmm ... writing that just made me feel terribly self-centered. Something to think about.

Anyway ... here's the plan: I've decided to post the pages of my 2015 journal online here. Except for this intro I'll try to keep the wordage to a minimum and let the pages speak for themselves. I've never been in the habit of writing very personal things in my journal, but I think I still better leave some lag time between the actual creation of the pages and my posting them here ... sometimes (as with my art) I need a little temporal distance to figure out how personal it is. And there's always the blur function in pic monkey as a backup. :)

So, here are today's images, 2 pages from Dec 29, where I was contemplating the form my new journal would take. FYI, I've always worked in 5.5 x8.5 size, and this new journal is somewhat larger. You'll see why when you read page 2. And off we go ...

*NOTES* - Top half of page 2 are Miriam Wosk's inspiration books as shown in her book Sequins and Skeletons. You can look at some of her scrapbooks and a video of her at work here.

More pages to follow, and on a more regular basis, too. I promise.

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 ...

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.

Looking back at our shadow selves ...

Today's post is a page from the Time Traveler book I contributed to the Sketchbook Project back in 2012. I was thinking the other day about how long an idea can stay with you before it finally surfaces in the form of art and/or writing.

The first time I thought about shadow selves was about 30 years ago ... my 22-year-old self was having lunch with a group of friends in a hotel restaurant in the town I grew up in, but where I hadn't lived since I was 12. We'd driven 125 miles, from the town we all currently lived in, to consider renting a house together in this new location, and I hadn't told anyone that I'd once lived here.

Through the restaurant window I could see the elementary school my 8-year-old self had attended. Since it was lunch time, the school field was alive with active, noisy children playing games that probably hadn't changed much since I'd been out on that field myself. It was like looking back in time, and what came to mind was a particular sports day when (not being athletic) my 8-year-old self volunteered to help the teachers organizing and handing out ribbons and water and bandaids. I remembered the day very well, and at lunch time on that day, I'd been sitting at a table putting ribbons in order, facing the very restaurant my 22-year-old self would someday be sitting in.

And if that wasn't odd enough, my 12-year-old self had taken music lessons in one of the hotel meeting rooms, so now there were three of my shadow selves, all within easy reach of each other. Even at 22, my awareness of this overlapping of shadow selves made an impression on me.

The second time I thought about shadow selves was while traveling in New Brunswick in my mid-30's. I'd made a trip back east to meet my parents' families, and at one point was traveling by bus from one small town to another. I was dropped off at the pickup point (a gas station) to wait for a bus that might be along in anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. It was a pleasant sunny day, and the gas station had provided a comfy, sheltered bench outside for waiting passengers. I did what I always do in times like these ~ I took out my journal. I started writing about the people and places I'd seen so far, and a half hour later the bus came and I got on board. If there's one thing I learned 'back east', it's that hurry is not in the vocabulary. The bus was not in a hurry to get on the road ~ we were there for at least another half hour. In that time, other people arrived and boarded, and I continued writing. From my seat in the bus I could see the bench I'd been waiting on, and I saw myself there, on the bench writing, and I was now, on the bus writing. I was thinking how unlikely it was that I was there at all (so far from home in BC) about how insubstantial all these past selves are, and since I was writing, I wrote about it, mentioning not only that current experience, but looking back on my 22-year-old awareness of it as well.

Fast forward another 20 years, and in my journal I'm making page after page of notes for the Time Traveler project, realizing we all travel in time, we just do it one day at a time. And in every second we leave ghost imprints of ourselves wherever we go. I was thinking about this: where are we most solid and what does this tell us about ourselves? What can we learn from where my shadow selves have been? Can we go back there and relive our experiences in other times? Of course we can ...

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.

Creating time for the unexpected (part one)

Just back from another weekend away with my favourite art journaling group at the Red Farmhouse. Unlike art retreats with classes, teachers and schedules, our little group arrives with a whack of supplies and (usually) no specific goal in mind except to create a space where we can work on (play with?) whatever projects, materials and tools are taking our fancy at the moment. One of the many things that amaze me on our quarterly retreats is that I always seem to come home with something that wasn't even in my mind when I set out. And unlike at home, the projects I work on at the Red Farmhouse arrive almost as a package ~ and while there, I'm pretty driven to get them as complete as they can be, knowing that when I go home, I'll be pulled away to other responsibilities and I worry that I'll lose the thread, and they'll never be completed.

All my life, I've had strange dreams, and sleeping in strange places gives me even stranger dreams. Stranger, more vivid, live-it-like-you-were-there kind of vividness. This happens every time I go to the Red Farmhouse. I wake up one morning with *something* unusual spilling out of my head and onto my journal pages (usually verbal), and somehow over the course of the next few days I'm able to turn it into something visual that I wouldn't have created any other time. This weekend's experience was no exception ... Saturday morning, I woke from a dream about a wonderful creative relationship that comes up against an all too familiar obstacle.

But I'd (foolishly!) left my journal downstairs Friday night, so the trick was to stay sleepy enough to keep all the details in my head, but awake enough to maneuver the stairs down and then back up to my room where I could write everything down. Seven pages and an hour or so later, it was all spilled messily out onto the page. Satisfied, I went downstairs to see what was sort of creative stuff was cooking at the big art table, but for some reason the story just wouldn't leave me. I kept falling back into the environment, the characters, the events. The project I'd intended to work on seemed flat and distant compared to the brightness of the dream. But, at the same time, I didn't know what to do next. It was obviously just a short story. Funny ... I say that like I write short stories all the time ... trust me, I don't. Well, not short stories that *other* people would recognize as short stories. This one I could almost imagine reading in a real book.

By lunchtime I still couldn't shake the story. As we sat in the kitchen after lunch, I asked if anyone would mind if I read my story, and they were all up for it. I was pretty nervous, I'm not the kind of person who enjoys reading my work aloud. And what's really weird is that I realized I wanted to read it to them almost because I wanted witnesses to the fact that this extraordinary thing had fallen out of my head only hours before. I was afraid if I took it away "under wraps" that something bad would happen to it in the editing stage and I might never share it with anyone. Ever. And that seemed like a shame, not because it's such a marvelous story (hard to tell what it might be once properly edited), but because it's existence seemed as much about our being all together in that space as it was about the original dream. Like it kind of belonged to all of us, and I was just the channel it came in through.

The story continued to stay with me all that day, and the next, and in fact, here is it Tuesday and it's still with me. I think this is because it badly needs editing, and I'm afraid to get too far away from it before I do that. Or maybe I'm afraid to be too close. Or something. I've put one of the unedited sections of the story here for you so you'll see something of it's current state. I know soon I'll be brave enough to edit it. I know it'll find the right form eventually. In my next post, I'll show you what happened next, and for that too I credit my friends at the Red Farmhouse.

What fairy tale characters *really* carry in their pockets ...

Perhaps I've been working in printing too long. Perhaps my access to fun clipart is too easy. Perhaps my brain has too much time on its hands (wait ~ brains have hands?). Whatever the reason, here are a few quirky little business cards I designed for a fairy tale themed project over at swapbot.

The project actually only called for 4 cards, but the mercurial bot at swapbot assigned me two people who live at the same address, and I thought: well, how much fun would it be to get *exactly* the same thing as the other person you live with, so my brain went into overtime and designed 10 different business cards for fairy tale characters. The first six cards came easy peasy. The next two ideas required a little coaxing. The last two were extracted painfully from the dim recesses of logic (who *hadn't* I thought of in fairy tale land that really needed their own business card?). I'm only showing four of the ten here (so as not to spoil the surprise for those on the receiving end), but I assure you there are ten in all.

My favourite is SHOD ~ Our Shoes are Magic. I love it's simplicity. And anyone who knows me knows that I *so* need some magic shoes. My feet and off the shelf shoes have never agreed. And when I do find a comfy pair, they never last. Sigh.

Cloak & Dagger was a fun card to make. Modeled slightly after Mr. Big & Tall, only my version is more like Mr. Big & Tall & Mean with a Very Pointy Stick. I agonized over how to describe their specialization ~ not wanting to be politically incorrect and assign any real-life people to stereotypical henchman status. I quavered over hunchbacks. I still wonder if I chose right. My apologies to any hunchbacks I may have offended.

I blame the plethora of eHarmony commercials for eMagicMatch (tm). Let's hope their legal department has a sense of humour and knows when they're being *homaged*. But how could I resist communication fortnights and personality inquisitions? They were ideas simply begging to be used.

Stepmother Counseling was one of the last two (that were painfully extracted from the dim recesses of logic). They really have got the short straw in fairy tales, I think. Not *all* stepmothers can be bad, can they?

A few hints at what you didn't see ... Cauldrons 'R' Us has a Boil & Bubble special discount ("Now you're cooking!"), Wand-a-Riffic is located (of course) on Waverly Place, and you simply must use Mercury Messengers for when it absolutely, positively has to be there in a FLASH!

There's also an enchanted food detection service called How About Them Apples? specializing in rooting out tainted teas, poisoned potions and fiddled fruit. Crown Cleaners will handle your messes like magic (you can reach them at 555-PAY-DIRT), and Merlin the Mapmaker promises to be precise in scribing a route for your quest, but lists his own location as "next to the tavern, knock twice", which seems oddly vague.

As you might imagine I had quite a lot of fun making these. When the ideas start to arrive I describe the experience as a kind of "free-fall" through my brain. One of the many things I've learned over the years is not to let a good idea get away. You think you will remember ~ but you won't. Which is why I have a shelf full of journals that take me back to moments when I was on a roll idea-wise.

Birthdays - and looking forward & back ...

Well, it's happened. I've just celebrated one of those milestone birthdays. You know - the ones that are supposed to give you pause, make you examine your life and see where you've been, where you are and where you're going. Oddly enough, having spent my whole life not celebrating birthdays, this one passed in a similarly uneventful way. As it happened, we were on vacation at the time, and we managed to find a low-key (but charming) heritage house turned restaurant on the extreme western edge of Vancouver Island where we had a lovely dinner. I had the steak, it was wonderful. They did everything to a steak that I can't do, or more accurately, they DIDN'T do to a steak what I would do - which is turn it into shoe leather. There was a shocking absence of singing waiters, presents, cake/candles and the like. Which suits me fine. Honest.

On the other hand ... I HAVE been reviewing my life in the last few days, but not because of my birthday. I've been working on a swapbot project about fairy tales. One of the options is to write your own and (coincidentally) I actually wrote a fairy tale of sorts lo, all those many years ago when I thought I might become a writer. The only trick was to find it. Somewhere in my many journals - I knew that much, but what year? Good question.

So I've spent a few evenings reading back through my journals looking for the story ... essentially time traveling backwards through my life, becoming younger and younger, more and more naive, more and more self-centered the further back I go. While it's sometimes excruciatingly boring (and even embarrassing) to read what my younger self has written, it is heartening to see that I have actually progressed in my life. I'm not saying I wish I hadn't written it all. I'm just saying that most of it will be burned in the event of my death.

The other shocking thing (and a positive shock at that), is the sheer amount of *writing* I've actually done. I've been sticking a post-it note on every page where I think I've written something of interest, particularly poetry, or a pithy bit of prose, and I now have a virtual forest of post-it notes poking out the tops and sides of my journals. Weirdly cool and satisfying to look at. And some of it I hope to gather in some form, since the idea of indexing my journals makes me queasy (oh my heavens, the sheer *volume* of content is daunting, let alone trying to think of keywords for most of it!).

I don't want to sound self-congratulatory, and I wouldn't want to get anyone's hopes up about the *quality* of my writing, but I find I have quite real affection for the body of work, as flawed and unfocused as it might be. As I read each bit, I get a vivid picture of the where and the why of the writing, and I see myself as I was then - young, naive and self-centered sometimes, but always trying to see the good in things, to see the way forward, to find my purpose, to make sense of life, as I believe we all do.

So maybe there's something to this milestone thing after all ... the two events are merely coincidental (birthday + a project that has me reading back through my journals), but I do feel that I've been looking forward & back, and (for the most part) liking what I see.

Creative rewards of another fabulous art retreat

Just back from another wonderful artist retreat ... four days of nothing to do but Make Art (and share and laugh and eat, too, of course). Imagine nine creative women with WAAAAY too many art supplies in a idyllic saltbox farmhouse on a sunny island. It's always amazing to me how relaxed and casual it all is - and yet how productive we wind up being. I find I create things that weren't even in my imagination when I arrived.

Ever since we started these retreats, I've been inspired by Celeste's handmade journal - which is this amazing ongoing collection of quotes, labels, lists and other interesting stuff from her everyday. There's something so rich about putting your real life on the page - including the things that touch you, not editing out what is usually deemed to be trivial, letting yourself play intuitively as the page and the moment decree.

I love the structure of her journal - the "looseness" of it - the fluidity of the stitches, the non-preciousness of the page material, the seeming randomness of its content, and I decided this was the retreat to make one for myself. Since we had an ample supply of red rosin paper (thanks, Michelle!), and magazines to collage from, (and did I mention the WAAAY too many art supplies?) so I started folding and slicing and reinforcing folded page edges and stitching .. and then a few little twists and turns later, it turned into something similar-ish, but not much like her journal. I realized that if you change the size, the page materials, the stitch construction and a few other things - you get something entirely different - in my case "La Musee d'une Vie Inventee" (that's Museum of an Invented Life, by the way).

But the next day Celeste (and Paula!) decided they liked my new journal size, and created their own versions. Celeste's version used maps for the page-edge reinforcement and was stitched with oh-so-appropriate red thread, so now I may have to make one of those, too. I love this group!