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 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.

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 return of Hyperbole and a Half ...

Long days ago most of us watched the same TV channels and had some sort of communal experience. If you heard about something, the odds were very good that most of the people in your immediate vicinity heard about it too. And even if you never talked about it you could go through your life feeling like there was a kind of general fabric of life that most of the people around you operated in.

And then came the internet.

The internet is a weird place. I guess we all know that. You can be attached to people you don't even know. You can pretend people you do know don't exist by un-friending them. You can be amazed, amused and instructed by things created by people all over the world who don't know (or care) you exist. You can chip in a few bucks and fund an landfill orchestra in Paraguay (I did). You can be horrified as well. That's how it works.

That general fabric of life that you thought everyone operated in kinda stopped existing at some point. But time passed and you started getting the hang of that as well. You just accepted that your next door neighbour, your family and even your best friend was surfing radically different sites than you and looking up stuff on wikipedia that you'd never even heard of. That's okay ... you hardly spoke to your neighbour anyway, and your family was miles away and your new best friend might be on the other side of the planet because of your deep mutual fascination with some microcosmic detail of a book you both read when you were 10. That, my friends, is progress. Right?

But, at the heart of everything, we're still human (the last time I checked anyway), and the impulse to attach to other people is pretty strong. The need to feel something in common with someone, to be understood, to be appreciated, and to understand and appreciate in return. The good part of being human.

You probably wonder where all this is going. Well ... there's this blog I read. The person who posts on it is entirely unknown to me in the real world. Don't know if it's a he or a she or how old, or where they live. Let's call this person Allie (which I believe is this person's real name). I think Allie may be a she, but possibly because I'm a she, or possibly because so much of what Allie writes about hits the mark for me. But (having said that) the things that most hit the mark for me are things about being human, not about being a she.

Allie never posted very frequently. The posts were always accompanied by roughly drawn and bitingly adorable characters made in a primitive paint program, possibly even THE paint program that was birthed way back at the beginning of our computer age. I would eagerly await Allie's posts. There was so much truth and pain and funny packed in the posts they would often make me laugh and cry at the same time. One post I particularly remember was about accompanying someone to the hospital and this person being handed a visual pain indicator chart with a series of faces on it. The faces ranged from a smiley face "0" (feeling good, I presume) to a crying non-smiley face "10" (indicating a level of pain). Allie felt this was totally inadequate to the situation and drew a new version which would better represent the experience. Allie also wrote a wickedly creepy story about a teenage boy beset by a birthday party's worth of little girls that raised the hair on the back on my neck.

The last time I read something new was almost two years ago. The last I read, Allie was on the verge of having the posts ~ the stories and the crazy primitive paint drawings ~ published in book form. I told Allie (via the comment section, along with a lot of other readers) that I was *so* looking forward to owning her book. And then it looked like a whole lot of nothing happened.

The internet is a weird place. If someone you're used to reading drops off the net, you can never be sure why. Was their computer stolen? Were they hit by a bus? Did they marry someone fabulously rich who whisked them away to a remote island with no electricity? I missed Allie's truth-speaking, exaggerated whirlwind stories. I missed how Allie got to the nub of life in just a few words. I missed the simply drawn but I-*so*-know-what-you-mean little people faces. I wondered what happened ...

This morning I noticed a new post from Allie. It's about depression.

I think everyone at some time or other in their life comes face to face with it. Some of us are able to bring ourselves back from the brink before it all starts spiraling out of control, some not so much. I read through the post. It's pretty amazing. It made me think of times in my life when things looked pretty bad and how I made it back. It made me worry that some day Allie won't make it back. My first instinct was to leave a comment telling Allie how amazing the post was and that I was glad s/he was better now. Then I noticed that 5000 other people were already there (yes, really - 5000!) saying very much that same thing. I read some of the comments and pretty much anything I'd be brave enough to say was already said in the first 200 comments.

I decided to do the next best thing I could think of - write my own post and send a few people Allie's way. Even if you've never been depressed I'd lay strong odds that you know someone who has. I highly recommend reading Allie's post. It may be the most true, useful, uncensored (and yet still awkwardly funny) account of the illogical experience of depression I've read. If thinking about reading about depression is too depressing, start somewhere randomly in the Allie's post archives. Get a feel for how Allie writes, enjoy the biting wit and the quirky drawings and then read the most recent post later.

And then go out and have some kind of grateful amazing day.

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.

And here's a little more from the Science of Story ...

 Here are two more spreads from The Science of Story. As you can imagine, I had quite a bit of fun combining scientific charts, graphs and diagrams with text about writing. I've always been fascinated with "infographics". Not sure why that is, although I've heard that women are strong visual learners, and we very much like to see the relationships between things rather than just absorbing masses of information. I'm no expert, but I do know I often feel a bit at sea learning something new till I have a visual framework to hang all the info on, so it makes sense to me.

The Science of Story is part of the Sketchbook Project - Limited Edition, which means that at least one of my pages will be chosen for publication in a series of books the Brooklyn Art Library plans to publish. When I signed up I saw that the range of topics for the Limited Edition was quite a bit shorter than  previous projects they've launched. I'm hoping this means they'll be publishing a book for each topic and someday I can look forward to seeing an entire book on The Science of Story through many different artists' eyes. And wouldn't that be fun? Oh yes ...

The Story of Science of Story continues ...

Just popping in to post two more page spreads from my current project on deadline for Monday (eek!). Okay, not eek, because I'm *nearly* done ... just looking for an old photo of me in a lab coat for the About the Author page at the back. Did I mention I'm trying to make it look like an old textbook? Okay, not a *real* textbook, but you know, an artist's interpretation of a textbook on the science of stories as if stories were a science. Okay ... I'm gonna stop talking now ...

Creating time for the unexpected (part two)

Meanwhile ... back at my art retreat and the "short story" that wouldn't go away ...

So ... there I was ... completely unable to concentrate on the project I'd brought to work on, and significantly distracted by the short story that had just fallen out of my head when I woke that morning. But having written it, there was really nowhere to take it, except perhaps to an editor (if I only I knew one!). Creatively speaking, I needed a fresh direction to travel in ...

In the last few years, several of us have been fortunate enough to have taken classes with Roxanne Padgett, and pretty much we all agree that she's one of the most inspiring and generous teachers we've had. Her recent Journalfest class on faces inspired some of us to make multi-plate prints at the retreat.

I'm just gonna say outright that I was a little intimidated to try this, but since everyone else was having a go at it, I thought I'd join in. I've noticed there's a kind of energy about doing things in groups that I can't replicate at home. Not to mention that if I was at home I would have found a zillion other things I "ought" to have been doing and therefore print-making just wouldn't have happened. But since the materials are so darn cheap (Sticky foam sheet + thrift store board book: $2. Acrylic paints: $5. Making your own amazing multi-colour prints? Priceless) this was obviously both the time and the place to do it.

I started with a simple sketch of a woman's head, then I redrew it using wide sharpie on the sticky foam. The process of visualizing and cutting the separate layers of colour in the foam was a bit of a mind twister. It looks easy (once it's done), but actually cutting the layers? You really have to concentrate. And positioning them on the board book so they would be in register? Sheesh! It occurred to me while trying to position everything that working on plexiglass sheets would make lining things up easier, but hey - who randomly throws some plexiglass into their art bag "just in case they need it"? Okay, some people might actually do that, but I hadn't, so I worked with what I had. And it all worked out okay in the end ~ I actually think the non-perfect register of these prints is what makes them look more interesting.

I wanted to record the separate stages of the process, so I decided to stamp each "plate" into my journal, and hey - it just so happened that I had 7 blank pages ready and waiting (opposite that darn short story!). So I carefully stamped and labeled each of the 3 separate plates in my journal, and filled up the following 4 pages with various combinations ... plates 1 & 2 together, plates 2 & 3 together, all plates together, etc, etc . Done!

But not done. It kind of bugged me that the pages were still so empty ... just a single, boring print on each page. Hmphf. Fortunately, what I *had* thrown into my art bag was some really really fun washi tape. I, like many of my arty friends, have recently fallen under the spell of washi tape. I've even been making my own custom washi tape. Maybe I'll tell you about it some time ...

So I decided to put a washi tape border around each of the prints, and added a bit of colour here and there using caran d'ache crayons. And since that still left an empty box under each print, I also hand wrote or stamped a few lines from the bit of the story on the facing page. Now I was done. Every single page was as thoroughly visually covered as the scribbly written page that faced it. And yet again I'd had the experience of the retreat giving me an extraordinary gift - a complete package - a story, plus the perfect visual component to go with it. Will wonders never cease? I hope not.

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.

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.