i've been thinking about kindness lately... thinking about how we can bring others down, and how we let others bring us down... i cut the word 'sensitive' from my father's high school shorthand book. that's shorthand for sensitive on the right...
kindness was (and is) feeling like flowers to me. i was seeing myself surrounded by flowers and my words nurturing flowers...
i've been contemplating. i feel just like this guy... thank god for that power antenna on his back! the eye was on a page in the 'rough muslin' book (last week's post). i ripped those pages up and put them to new uses.
i'm still using oil pastels a lot. i really like my new cray-pas set. did you know that they're the original oil pastels?
and still coloring in shapes that are already there on the page.
because i do my best contemplating when i'm walking, i've been out walking a lot. i just love these aspen trees. we don't have many here, only a few scattered stands.
one of last weeks journal pages 'repurposed' as a tree flag. i've been making flags like this lately - i attach three pieces of muslin with a 3/16" eyelet, and then it's ready to hang with a piece of heavy string.
usually i stamp something on scraps and then put them together...
one day i walked out on this log to sit and look at the creek, and i saw a face on the log. wow, i thought, i could color that in with colored pencils!
so i did...
and i just kept doing it!
this heart by mother nature was about 10' from the peace sign above.
they took the guerilla knit-up off of here! heh, i think it needs some new art...
what would you do if you found a smooth white surface in the woods to draw on? uh huh, smile!
this week's words are from an interview with the oiseaux sisters, carolyn rose fellman and susan andrews, in the spring 2005 issue of 'cloth paper scissors'. oh! i love their art! i love that they use so much recycled stuff in their art!
Carolyn and Susan say most of the techniques they use are a variation on the ones we all learned in elementary school: papier mache, crayon resist, painting, and gluing. "We take those early learning materials and mix them up. Take them farther. That's when it's art -- when we use it differently."
While the women would welcome the larger following and greater income that a higher profile might bring, their main goals are to live responsibly in the world, share their knowledge, and do their work. "The most creative thing we do is live on our income," says Susan. "We live in the cracks of the sidewalks. There are great cracks out there."
. . .
one more thing... bobbi studstill (aka cobaltika) is having a grand opening sale in her new etsy shop -- all photographic prints are $10, and her photography is fantastic! in her other etsy shop she's got new artwork and blank altered books. i have two of her books and they're *nice*. i swear i could collect them just to look at... i'm a big fan of everything she does -- one glance at my art room walls will tell you that...
last week i received a beautiful package from teri mahl of working the earth... there were miscellaneous treasures in it, but the most amazing one
was a bag that she made for me... for the front flap she used a piece of fabric that i sent her a few weeks ago in a package of tree flags. i thought she might be able to use the fabric (barkcloth from old curtains a friend recently gave me) -- i had no idea that she and her daughters made bags to sell, or that she even sewed! i just liked it so i stuck it in there. she not only made the bag, she painted the crow and other gorgeousness on it... i call it my 'soul bag' - you know how some people have soul mates, well this is my soul bag. the middle pic is me wearing it just after i got it. it goes with blue jeans *perfectly*.
thank you so very much, teri...
this doll was part of my sister's birthday present, and what i spent a good part of last week working on. here she is sitting amidst the mess at the end of the process, a mere few days ago. (can you hear me telling her to watch out for wet paint?) my sister *totally* ignored the instructions on the box and opened the package today, four days before her birthday!
i also worked in my Barely There Book...
the lines of this face were already on the page, i just filled them in with paint and oil pastels. it was so rewarding that i kept going in that vein...
it didn't work on this page so i set the whistling dogs to it!
finis - the front and back covers... i waited until the end to paint the small front page so it'd 'fit in'...
and then i started in a new muslin book...
it took me until this page to figure out why i wasn't liking the surface of the pages... at first i thought i'd used too much acrylic on them, but then i realized it was because this book was made from a different batch of muslin which has a looser weave, which made the surface rougher. so much for that muslin when it comes to books... i'm gonna add a note to the step-by-step about this - small differences in weave make a big difference when it comes to drawing and painting on it. the tighter the weave the better, unless you want a rough surface.
so i 've made another book with the Nice Muslin... : )
this is what happens when you go to michael's because you have a 45% off all paint, pencils, oil pastels (etc. etc.) coupon. you come home and use all your new stuff one page!! i got some new oil pastels, soft pastel pencils, and, and...
i found another gregory grenon face in a magazine this week. i'm crazy about gregory grenon's faces...
i'm all over the place with the quotes i'm ending with lately, but i guess that's okay. i read these words by annie dillard this week and they really resonated... Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The work's possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks. Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life
is there anything more satisfying than going to bed having finished *three* art projects?! a journal page, a Barely There book for roxanne, and a flag to hang at the green shrine tree. yeah, i had to take a picture of them...
roxanne came to visit last friday and i must not be able to talk and take pictures at the same time, because i did a lot of talking and not much picture taking. here she is ahead of me on the way to the green shrine tree. before we left to go walking we shared our recent art discoveries with each other. she told me about her workshop with nick bantock...
she gave me some stamps and showed me how to make a (small) landscape with them. you have to stand way back to see the landscapes in mine, but i still like them! we virgos love this kind of thing, hee! she also gave me a cool *old* metal tool caddy that i just remembered i forgot to photograph. we had a good time!!
the next day i walked up past the green shrine tree and checked out a part of the creek i've never really explored before. i found this tree and took about 50 pictures of it... the grain spirals around the tree...
on the back side this looked like insect asemic writing to me. i left the pic big -- click on it for the full effect!
you've gotta click on this one too... look for the tiny white dots to the right of the tree. these are very small insects about 80' above the ground, flying around. hundreds of them... what do they do up there?!
a 'forest' of horsetails... oh i love horsetails...
this one was downright ethereal.
i finally sat down to paint here. the water cascading over a rock shelf - it was one happy spot...
this moss was happy!
as i was walking away i saw this shasta lily - usually there are 3 flowers on each plant, but this one had seven. and the pods are so healthy and gorgeous. this wasn't a good year for the shasta lilies -- they came on strong but many of the buds succumbed to disease. anyway, i walked up to the road after i saw this lily so i could figure out how to get back to them next spring. and then headed back home... i went to bed early that night - i swear i think i had to rest from all of the amazement and wonder.
i'm still working in my second Barely There book. still loving working on muslin...
most of the shading of this face (and the one below) was down with portfolio watersoluble oil pastels. it's such a different effect than watercolors and i'm pretty thoroughly fascinated with it.
i've been reading 'dear theo', vincent van gogh's letters to his brother theo. oh my... so much i could say, so many passages i could quote. i've read that he sold only one painting while he was alive... and of course he only drew and painted for seven years of his brief life. for the first two of those seven years he didn't paint at all. he wanted to perfect his drawing skills before he began using color. the following words were written not long after he started to paint... You will see that I am not afraid of a bright green or a soft blue, and the thousands of different greys, for there is scarcely any colour that is not grey -- red grey, yellow-grey, green-grey. blue-grey.
As far as I understand it, we of course perfectly agree about black in nature. Absolute black does not really exist. But like white, it is present in almost every colour, and forms the greys -- different in tone and strength; so that in nature one really sees nothing else but those tones or shades. There are but three fundamental colours, red, yellow,and blue; 'composities' are orange, green, and purple. By adding black and some white one gets the endless varieties of greys; to say, for instance, how many green-greys there are is impossible.
But the whole chemistry of colours is not more complicated than those few simple rules. And to have a clear notion of this is worth more than seventy different colours of paint, as, with those three principle colours and black and white, one can make more than seventy tones and varieties. The colourist is he who, seeing a colour in nature, knows at once how to analyze it, and to say, for instance, that green-grey is yellow with black and hardly any blue. In other words, he who knows how to find the greys of nature on his palette.
from 'dear theo', by irving stone, 1937
one complaint about 'dear theo' is that the letters have been too heavily edited by irving stone. this site claims to have his complete letters, as well as those of his mother, sister, and theo.
in contrast to the above passage, in later years vincent speaks of buying many colors of paint. i think that most of us just can't resist...
