november 5, 2008

here's to the joy that so many of us feel on this day... pure joy and unabashed relief that the winds have shifted, the times they are a changin'.

my joy is tempered, however, by the fact that prop 8 banning same-sex marriage was passed here in california. but onward, i say. one day all humans will surely have equal rights; rights that will not be withheld because of the fear, or moral and religious beliefs of others. i hold a candle for that day...



sam cooke

a change is gonna come

she can sing the song...

of any bird

pages from my journal this weekend -- so happy to have mental and physical energy again! this is a photo of a shop sign in santa fe, taken by a friend on a recent trip.


and this is me at 11 years old, one of the many pics that i brought back from virginia. braces were a year away and not a minute too soon as far as i was concerned! i like this photo because i've got a genuine smile on my face and i dearly loved this dress -- in my mind's eye i can see the colors of it clearly. and the glasses -- have i ever had another pair this cool?!

i decided on saturday night that i wanted to try to paint it in my journal... i drew and painted it quickly so i couldn't get too perfectionistic about the whole thing.


well, the teeth don't stick out like they do in the pic, but i was happy with it -- definitely made my eyes smile...


then i cranked up the contrast, hue, and saturation in photoshop and printed out this version to put on the next page.

now i'm working on art cards to exchange at our art group gathering this weekend. how did 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" get so small?!! hmmmm... i pondered what on earth i could do in that amount of space. i looked back at some bookmarks i made last winter and in the process came across this...


common mental weeds... heh, yeah i know those villains.


the weather's turned cold and rainy. the usually adventurous amelia has turned into a bona fide house cat. i'm delighted... i get to hug, pet, talk to and just generally throw myself at her day and night now.


i took the background out from behind


and otherwise messed around with this buddha in photoshop this weekend... i'm putting them here in case you'd like to grab them (right click and save on a pc). i have several of them currently reclining near the colorful version of me in my journal...

emerge from woods

these words were cut from my father's "guide to the applachian trail in central and southwestern virginia" -- he was my biggest teacher about the natural world and he loved to hike the appalachian trail. i brought this book plus a bunch of other old books, photos, buttons, etc. back with me from virginia...

these are the last pages that i painted before i came home. they look so crazy and even downright scary here on the screen, but not in person. no, in person they feel friendly... looking at them i remember many things that were happening on the days that i painted them. i smile, and feel very grateful for the act of painting.

the amazing bonegrrls

when i got home there were two packages waiting for me, packages from fellow bonegrrls, jen and grrl. did i open them right away? nope. i gloated over them. i knew they contained bones. i felt wealthy.



first i opened grrl's...



what the &%$#??! it's FULL of vintage fabric and ancient paper -- i just sent her bones wrapped in muslin for crying out loud!



she sent me a boxful of amazing stuff...



i sort of dumped everything back in the box to take a pic of it -- believe me, you can hardly see half of what's in there.



bones? damn, i'd forgotten about the bones, but they were there. jaw, vertebra, femur (?), and a broken piece of bone that she so nicely wrapped with a piece of her knitting.



jen's package sat unopened longer than usual because by that time i was fully under the influence of The Krud. but finally i opened it



and oh my god! she did the same thing as grrl!!!! these bonegrrls!!



the coolest napkins i've ever seen. the one on the left says 'domestically disabled', and on the right it could well be kwan yin -- on a napkin!! there was lace and other cool paper too.



yes, she sent this tooth set in resin... last month a friend sent me the pewter bird's head for my birthday- it immediately went to live beside the tooth.



oh yes, that's right -- bones. and some teeth and claws... the teeth on the left are roughly four inches long. i have mouse sized versions of them. amazing...



two skulls. after sitting in the dry air here for a few hours a lot of the teeth fell out. more amazement...

can i adequately express my gratitude to you, jen and grrl? i think not... can i adequately express my gratitude to all of the kindred spirits i've met in the blogging world? and seth, who's brought so many people, including the bonegrrls, together? no... i don't think that words can do it. but if they could, know that i would write them here with all of my heart and they would say,

thank you...

regularily scheduled programming

will now resume...



flying east -- somewhere over the central u.s.



my sister and brother-in-law's house in the woods. i stayed not far from here in a little travel trailer that i made my own for three weeks. these are the blue ridge mountains... i grew up about two hours north of here and got a degree in forestry at Virginia Tech, about 45 minutes to the southwest. these mountains are in my bones.



i saw these signs a lot as we came and went. i wanted to photograph them every time...

our days were mostly filled with going places and doing things, most of which i did not document. on the whole i'm not a very good documenter -- things like road signs and magnolia seed pods grab my attention; family events somehow fly under my visual radar...



a magnolia seed pod... wow. they were about 3" - 4" long.



this is what they look like before they pop open. things like this amaze and intrigue me.



i did take pics of our canoe/kayak trip on the james river. this is my sister in her beloved kayak.



my brother steering and paddling our canoe. i sat up front, paddled half-heartedly, took pics whole-heartedly. as kids we grew up going on canoe trips in this canoe. where on earth did we all sit?



the beautiful james river.



treasures from the river -- sitting on top of cormac mccarthy's 'the road', which i read on the trip out.



my sister, carole, on the left, my brother, jeff, in the middle, and me. that's a restaurant in the background -- what?! you're going to ask the hostess to take our picture?!!



it was strange journaling at first -- where were the acrylics, beeswax, and drawers of ephemera?!! this is the first page in my new journal -- basically glued down stuff and words i'd just read. i think i felt like that little boy at the prospect of proceeding with only watercolors at hand!



after a few days i painted, but no words. i've thought about going back and filling in the pages, but nah. for me the idea behind journaling is that the pages reflect where i am at a given point in time in a way that only the nonlinear part of my brain can decipher.





more gluing down. i love the radically different page sizes, an idea i got from roxanne.



carole journals too... she painted this page one night in 'my' trailer. it's of my river treasures, a painting from a friend that i took along with me, and a necklace. i would never have taken on such an ambitious subject!



'my' table -- it looked like this unless i had to make room for carole to paint...



a rock (actually we're not sure what it is -- maybe the byproduct of a mining process?) that carole found in the james river and gave to me. somehow it seems the perfect way describe my trip and a fitting photo for the end of this post...

glad to have gone away, glad to be back. glad to be back where there's fast internet! i'd forgotten there are still places in the world without access to fast internet... the things that traveling teaches us!

the honey bee tree

this week i've been getting ready to go to virginia to see my family... i leave day after tomorrow.

i painted this page in my first art journal more than two years ago... i was 'back east' visiting my family, and i sat under a tree absolutely covered with honey bees painting with my sister. it was a gratitude journal -- around the edges of each page i wrote lots of small things that i was grateful for, and at the bottom in big letters i wrote the biggest thing that i was grateful for that day... i drew everything with my left hand so i couldn't get into 'perfection mode', and on this day there was no doubt what the main thing would be because i'm a honey bee lover! what a delightful morning it was -- drawing in the presence of thousands of buzzing wings... also on that trip i bought a couple of yards of silk with chenille bees on it. omg! i was ecstatic at the find! i've used bits and pieces since then, but not much. finally with my newest journal i'm using more than just a bit here and there. and these chenille bees will get to go 'back east' again. (and why is it that on the west coast we go 'back east', while on the east coast they go 'out west'?)



my new journal -- i've just bound it and am beginning to paint the silk.



inspired by roxanne i made the pages different sizes -- the largest is 5" x 7". it was harder to stitch together this way, but worth it. i also put four pocket pages in it for things like feathers and ticket stubs, and two signatures of white printer paper for gluing photos onto (that way i can use the heavy watercolor paper just for painting). both of these ideas are the result of putting together The Book.



the finished journal. boy do i love not only the bees, but also the texture of the silk under the paint. i unraveled the edges of the silk before i started to stitch the book together and it was aggravating to constantly have the silk unravel even more and get tangled up in my stitching. but man oh man, it was so worth it in the end. instead of a button or other closure on the front i decided to just wrap it with a piece of funked up muslin. ever since wrapping kate's box of treasures i can't get enough of the wrapping thing.



more wrapping -- the back of my art group journal. this ribbon wrapped a recent birthday present... it made me smile then and it makes me smile now.



are you wondering what happened to The Book?! here's what it looks like now. the pages have been sewn to the binding -- the back cover's being glued to it here. i was all set to cover this with some barkcloth that i have, but it overwhelmed the covers so i've set it aside until i come back from virginia.



i've only done two collages since my last post. i think i worked almost one whole day tearing up this one!! the main photo on the page is of a room on ellis island. i don't remember exactly what the caption said, but it had to do with immigrants who were not allowed to immigrate once they got to the u.s., so the closest that they got to the statue of liberty was the photo hanging on the wall (or is that a mirror? i can't remember). evidently the sadness of the photograph transferred itself to my psyche because i dug up everything here. the roses growing out of the sink have exploded.



'the sacred tank'



i'll leave you with billie holiday singing 'i'll be seeing you'. oh my...

i'll be gone for three weeks, but i think i'll take my computer with me and blog when i can - i'll only have access to the internet periodically. if i don't see you while i'm gone, i'll certainly be seeing you when i get back.