tags and pages

i don't know which i was more excited about last week - painting on tags or the fact that the thin pages in 'war and peace' can stand up to watercolors...


this is the back side of the page, and, as you can see, there was practically no bleed-through, not to mention buckling. i had stalled out on working in 'war and peace' because i really wanted to use watercolors, but i thought the pages were way too thin. a few days ago i decided to see exactly what would happen, and once again i'm impressed beyond words by the paper that's used in books (at least some of them). it's like magic paper...

big if you click

here's most of what i put on the page - the water bowl is in the shot because i used *a lot* of water. besides using it while painting the face, the last thing i did was dip my finger in it (over and over), and smear everything around. and still the page lays almost perfectly flat. i also used oil pastel and colored pencil. just amazing...

casein paint, watercolors, gouache, colored pencil and oil pastel on mail tags

the other thing i've been delighted with is painting on tags, an idea i got from sarah wallis. thank you, sarah! i believe i have a tag addiction now... i love that they're practically indestructible and useful! perfect for leaving them around out in the world, or for sending with packages. i'm leaving them leaned against the back of my watercolor box because it seems a perfect easel... (and they can talk to me while i'm painting)


on tumblr i found the art of ilka gedo. i don't think there's one piece that she painted in her life that i don't love with every fiber of my being. this sketchbook drawing is from her childhood, and there are many pages of them to gaze at here.


her oil paintings are here...

and 'colour patterns' here...

the quote below seems to me to apply to art making as much as writing.

i love it...

* * *


“Kierkegaard said, ‘Drink from your own well.’ And I like that, taking it to mean that each of us has an individual source for our best work, and that to reach deliberately elsewhere is to neglect something essential in our writing.

So when I get up in the morning and settle down to write, I do not reach for what is timely or in style, but for something that suggests itself to me right at the moment. It can be any trivial word or even syllable, or a sound from the tree outside, or what day it is, or that the sun is about to come up—anything. And sometimes I feel that the more trivial it seems the better, for with nothing to live up to I can relax and catch onto a current within me.”

~ William Stafford, from his brief essay “Reaching into the Well” in Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation (The University of Michigan Press, 2001), via tumblr

XO