Swirls

"Swirls" is one of my favorite clip art look up words. It always has interesting little pieces that I can do quite a lot with...(I really need to scan some of my destination bookmarks made for our summer reading program Novel Destinations. Add it to the list, Jeeves. Sigh, I would love a butler...especially one that washes windows and dusts.)

Swirls are also a favorite doodle and the way I draw them, they are really a self propagating species of vine...My love of swirls combined with a need to practice (and use, since I spent money on them) with the pastels started what became "Innocent Dreaming".

In fact, I had done this multicolor, softly blurred card then slapped some fixative on it and it proceeded to sit around staring at me longingly while I put together Modern Pastoral, Winter Forest, and Champagne. Occasionally I would look at it and think, well what am I going to do now? Eventually after numerous sorting through my clipping file to work on these other projects, more elements (or cut out images and a piece of swirly purple ribbon) were set aside with my swirly background.

And, eventually, I got this:

Ribbon, magazine cut outs, pastels, fixative and a thin (okay, thinner layer than I usually do...although anyone can see it is still overdone so much so that it hasn't dried completely clear-- oops (see it without the gloss on the Index Card Creation page) layer of gel medium make up this particular piece.

The lesson learned, or more precisely, the lesson underlined three times and highlight in bright yellow, is some creations take time....lots and lots of time, coming together piece by piece and walking away is just as important as sitting down and doing some work.

With my already admitted lack of patience -- It is unfortunate but true, that the length of time afford to this project to develop actually comes from my bone-deep laziness....Oops?

Cool

So randomly came across this photographer (okay so that damn msn page had it as a story) and I just love the stuff she's doing....bonus points as she is Japanese like my other new obsession, Maru:

yowayowa camerawoman diary

Bubbles

Materials for my creations tend to come from a few sources: my mom's quilting scrap pile, random ribbon, magazines, catalogs, rejects of craft projects. Champagne is one such creation.

I could once again harp on the difference between what I image creating and what the end product is but demonstrating is so much more fun....

I had a co-worker at the library punching holes in the middle of cut out flowers and I asked from the remainders...numerous tiny circles. The gel medium was still very new when I requested these scraps and I thought it would allow me to create a piece where it looked like the dots were suspended in the clear gel.

The result is Champagne:

The scan is really really bad. In reality, it's better. I swear. So I suppose I should still give a material run down: pink, white and yellow punched holes, pink and yellow marker with lots and lots of gel medium. It's really cool looking if you hold it to the light (which you can't....darn computers).

I mentally tied the tiny circles to tiny bubbles to champagne to my favorite Dorothy Parker lines from the poem Inventory:

Three be the things I shall never attain:

Envy, content and sufficient champagne.

(From there, I naturally had to send it to a friend who has joined me in killing tat least of two bottles of the stuff.)

Trees, Take 1

...And Action!

So as previously mentioned I have this obsession with trees, in particular the leafless kind and the way they look against the sky (I once had an art obsession that dealt with a disembodied hand and rail road tracks).  I have finally mailed off my first completed piece based on my little obsession.

I know it's going to a good home....(oh so corny and true).

Anyways.

For the first attempt at my leafless trees I decided to go free form. This piece establishes a baseline for later attempts, a way to measure my success in achieving my goal of the perfect leafless tree sky. I am hoping that each attempt will reflect a new medium or approach, resulting in steady improvement. (Of course this is all subjective, thus my opinion is the only one the will matter in my search for perfection)

(This is a highly amusing statement: I don't believe in perfection. I believe in timing, and things that work together and the line from the Rolling Stones song. "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need.)

It was really kind of fun to create this piece, I got to spend time smudging pastels to create the blue sky. (I also believe more adults should finger paint.) It's a pretty simple drawing: create blue sky, draw black twisting lines that interconnect. I found myself trying to think about the way in which wind and time has shaped the tree branches. Imagining the branches trying to grow in straight line but wind and storm over time twisting and pulling it in a different direction as it grows.

There was, of course, a gluing accident. Please note the small white gap on the lower right hand side. Sometimes you come across the perfect metaphor for your life: slow down, don't rush, things take time so try to enjoy it. Otherwise you end up with splotches that don't fit with the rest of your picture.

Mistakes just have to get made sometimes, no?

Books and other distractions

I keep repeating some bad behavior (okay I consider it bad mostly because I do this on a monthly basis, fix it then tell myself not to do it again. So naturally I do it again).

Over the course of a couple days, whatever I'm working on in the library draws my attention to a number of books. I check them out planning to read them and at the end of maybe three days, I have a stack of at least six books on my kitchen table waiting to be read.

And they sit there, sit there, sit there...still there about a month to six weeks later.

I've been trying break the cycle, so instead of creating little pieces of mediocre art to mail out, I've been reading....and reading and reading....

So, two cheers for me, I cleared my latest pile. (Of course some I simply returned, others I read the first paragraph and said no way....) but the important thing here is for once I made it throught the stack and half of it got read. (Instead of sitting around even longer and then getting returned without reading).

So here's a list of what was in the pile (I won't tell you what got read or re-read or returned without being opened or skipped due to disgust to the first paragraphs -- that might be helpful but why should I be helpful here?):

• The Whisperers, John Connolly
• Raziel (The Fallen), Kristina Douglas
• Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowels
• The Physic Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe
• The Darkest Secret, Gena Showalter
• Quicksilver, Amanda Quick
• Blood Oath, Christopher Farnsworth
• Predatory Game, Christine Feehan

Not included are the two books I checked out but never made it off my desk at work....
(St. Lucy's Home for Girls raised by Wolves or the Peanut Butter Murders)

Fin

So another piece has found its way to an owner. This was one of those times that I had a thought and started collecting different materials to be considered, then as I was trying to fit things together just to eliminate some of my selections it was suddenly an hour later and I had done the initial gluing. 

Normally I start with an image based idea (tigers and circles, oh my) then a person pops into my mind and it builds upon both the original idea and the individual. This time it started with a person followed by a piece of ribbon...

The rough-ish composite with ribbon (the black and white, pastoral scenes (which is awfully full of beggars and crosses)), random magazine clippings and marker was confined under a  heavy coating of gel medium. (The sealing coat felt so thick I glued two more index cards onto this baby to reinforce it --- hence, this is also the piece that caused the post office lady to raise an eyebrow.)

I think I went a little wild with the marker and I can't remember my reasoning. I remember picking out the section of green and purple based on the feathery appearance of the plants then I picked out the pseudo-sun images thinking of faces the person (yes yes, one sun is grumpily frowning --- so does she, upon occasion, when people (that general mass of public person-hood who you don't really know but are still annoying), irritate her.). I do know why I kept going with the markers: trying to fix it after the first messy marker marks I had added. 


(Say messy marker marks five times fast....now look at your self in a mirror and repeat after me: "I am normal." If you can succeed in doing this last thing, I probably don't know you.)

At the center of this creation was the ribbon. I want to say it's French Provinical-ist but I'm not sure that's the right term (sounds cool)  but it is an older design with a European feel to it. I began to pull from my random clipping file (a large manila envelope in which I have stuffed willy-nilly stuff I've clipped out) that would let me create a  modern countryside setting for the ribbon. 


My favorite touch to this is the fact that I didn't use a strip of ribbon but cut it up and dispersed its elements. I rarely stray too much from my comfort zone or routine and each time I've reached for ribbon in the past, (kind of the future for you, dear reader, as some pieces I am referring to have yet to be posted) I end up using a strip of the stuff. Now I just want to see what I can do if I cut the ribbons down to their smallest design.

Well, that's my Modern Pastoral (or as I sometimes think of it, Hill's Modern Pastoral). Anyways, I have repeatedly delayed posting this because I have nothing conclusive to say, nothing profound or meaningful, no moral to wrap up this tidbit. 

(I really wish I had Wakko, Yakko and Dot's Wheel of Morality in order to conclude this post. Something totally randoms that makes no sense whatsoever fits my mood.)

Crude?

Needless to say, (which is a very silly phrase because if it was true I wouldn't waste my time saying it.) I managed to mail off something this Thursday. (Probably not a needless to say thing really as there was just as good chance that I wouldn't because deep inside me, okay not deep, is a lazy person. For instance, it took two weeks to get up the energy to put my recycling in the car trunk and then another two weeks for me to make it to the recycling center.) So there will be another post coming with a new piece to display. Eventually (you know when I get up the energy from my lazy self to do it.)

Until then you are stuck with the following thoughts.

When I stopped by the post office, the lady behind the desk once again examined the piece, giving off the vibe of " I don't know if this will make it". As she held it, she ran a finger over the edge where the layers of index cards used to create the piece were visible. I just widened my eyes and used innocent face as if I couldn't understand the concerns she was trying, non-verbally no less, to express.

(I, of course, have always assumed I do a good innocent, or as others may call it, playing dumb face. Some would say it comes naturally. I don't talk to those people too often.)

I ended up looking over what I have lying around at home. It's all pretty crude work and I thought about what I would have to do to make it better, refine it a little, produce work that had if not more class, a more finished air.

That lasted about a second before I mentally shrugged it away...no sense in trying to be something I'm not.