Two Tarts

Top: Orange Tart
Bottom: Red Tart
collage

These are the latest two collages for the Vessels book. And, the inevitable finally happened. I knew I would eventually goof up and make a page upside down. Damn! I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. It'll drive me crazy to bind this into the book with wonky pages, but the alternative is to not use it. I guess that's what I get for paying more attention to Fawlty Towers than to what I was doing, eh?

Vessels: 3 x 9

Vessels: 3 by 9 (with detail)
mixed media on paper

This is the latest installment in the Vessels series. It's a combination of Pitt pen, Koh-I-Noor watercolor pencils, Neocolors II water-souluble wax crayons, and collage on yummy Cartiere Magnani paper. I'm much happier with this piece than #17--not so much because I think the final image is all that much better, but because the process of getting to the end result was more satisfying.

I'm especially happy with the leaves. I usually don't enjoy the process of cross-hatching. It's a bloody pain in my behindermost parts to get the sort of result I want. It's a little difficult to tell, even from the detail, but there there are layers upon layers upon layers of cross hatching, which gives a velvety depth to the drawing. The paper held up very well to this sort of abuse.

Altered Photos

I've been meaning to scan these for awhile. These were all altered with just bleach. I used Q-tips, a syringe, and my fingers to apply the bleach. I used both diluted and undiluted bleach. Caveat: if using undiluted bleach, I recommend having a tub of water handy or do your altering in the kitchen sink with the water running. You'll need to act quickly or the bleach will completely eat away the emulsion. I found that using a syringe filled with a 50/50 bleach/water solution, pre-wetting the photo with running water, and running the photo through the water as soon as the bleach was applied worked best.

I really like the way the squarish photo of the snake turned out. That effect was gotten by filling the bottom of a lunch plate with a 50/50 bleach/water solution, dipping the center of the photo in the liquid, then immediately running it under water.

Fire! Fire! Burning Bright

I was suddenly struck by how the bleached photos below look like they’re enveloped in flames. Very warm and toasty looking on what has turned out to be yet another gloomy grey day.

El Papa

El Papa
acrylic, Faber-Castell Pit pen, and gold leaf in composition book journal

There was a segment on the evening news about the Pope. He's been hospitalized again, so I thought I'd do a little drawing in his honor.

Radishes, Again, and Paper

I'm having my mid-morning snack (actually, since I get up at 4am, it's more of a mid-day snack). I'm still on a radish bender. Yesterday's radishes were hot and slightly smoky tasting, but they were nice and crunchy. Today's radishes are sweet and garlicky. The flesh is crisp and delicately veined with red and pink. Mmm.

In artings news, I started on another drawing for the Vessels book last night. It's Pitt pen and watercolor pencil on paper. Oh, and such paper!--140 lb Cartiere Magnani hot press. It's yummy stuff, soft and silky and perfectly balanced. I don't normally like the finish on hot press papers, but I think I'm in love. The act of putting pen to this paper is a joy.

I'm getting ready to begin a journal round robin for the Art Erratica group. Mail out date is March 15, so I need to get started on binding this puppy. (Who? Me? Procrastinate?) I've been putting it off because I couldn't decide what materials I wanted to use. I guess I can check paper off the to-figure-out list. And binding (I'm going with coptic). Now I just need to decide what I want to do for the cover and whether or not I'm going to wrap the spine edge of each signature with a decorative paper or, hmmm, maybe ribbon?

Reading Material

There are a few blogs I've really been enjoying lately.

Vitriolica Webb's ite, observations and drawings from a British woman living in Portugal. It's updated daily.

Madwoman's Lunchbox, writings about "fibers, photos, and stream of consciousness." It's updated regularly, but not daily. That's unfortunate, because I'd like a daily dose and, after all, it is all about what I want, right?

On the Banks of Bay Creek, about composition book journaling. I really enjoy the feel of her journals. She has a nice touch and a knack I haven't mastered for balancing words and images. Plus, Dawn's blog helps keep me motivated.

Letter from a Muse

I, drawing letters to twist thoughts
letters to feed the slackening storm
letters sewn on the sleeve of a good man
letters to direct the dissection of stone
I, drawing letters to define and inform
letters to hone the slivering bone
letters drawn from an unobjectionable pleasure
letters to tether the thought to the form.

And, he imagines the place where the letters began
farther away now and not by his hand,
For I was a fire in some clever imagination
but I, drawing letters from what I could find,
I thought of the ideal: six things I did bind
made of felt, made of bone, made of water and thread,
made of hide and of wind and of all things dead.

Vessels: Tesserae

Vessels: Tesserae
collage

This is another in the Vessels series. I'm not completely happy with it, but that's how it goes sometimes. The title comes from the central image--the interior of a mosque dome. The tiny tiles that make up the mosaic are called tesserae. A Latin word, it also was used by the Romans to describe small plaques of bone or wood that served as tallies or identification vouchers. A multitude of tiles creating a larger picture; a multitude of people creating a larger society. Each tiny piece is important to the whole, but in becoming part of the whole, the pieces cease exist as individuals. The understanding that there exists an unending conflict between individual identity and society as a whole is at least as ancient as Homer's Akhilles. Yeah, he was a whinging mamma's boy, but he did have a legitimate complaint.

There was a recent-ish discussion in one of my groups about old family photographs. Someone said that, after she was dead and gone, who would care who those people were? It's probably true, and I find that incredibly sad. Maybe that's why I've been so obsessed with getting all the Letters to Esther transcribed. I hate to think that no one cares. I'm not particularly religious. I don't believe in an afterlife. Once we're dead, we're dead. The only way we continue on is in the consciousness of others and in the marks we make on this Earth. If we leave no marks and are unremembered, we truly go back to the dust and ashes from whence we came--just one unremarkable grain of sand among millions of other unremarkable grains of sand.

Vessels: Fruits

Fruits
collage

Another piece for the Vessels book.

I thought I'd use up some of the photos I'd altered. I didn't like the way they turned out, so I didn't want to use them as stand-alone pieces. I saved them, though, thinking I might use them in a larger project. The little figure in the center is Baubo. I have no idea what the photo under the olla used to be. The image at the upper left is of a bronze cross. I believe it was made in Africa, though I have no idea where. Baubo was sanded; the two other photos were sanded and liberally augmented with metallic gold wax.

And, yes, the tomato is a fruit.

Vessels: Conceiving the Plan

Vessels: Conceiving the Plan
mixed media

I called my mom this morning and spent three hours talking to her. Where does the time go? While I was on the phone, I took another look at the watercolor I did a couple of nights ago. Ugh. It was just as bad as I remembered. I figured, since I was gabbing and my hands weren't busy, I may as well try to salvage what I could. I diluted some gesso and splashed it over the paper, let it sit for a bit, then blotted up the excess. That lightened everything and left a milky, mottled cast to the image that I quite liked. You can see the remains of the effect in the lower left-hand corner.

I then got out my Pitt pens and played with the shading. I did some cross-hatching, which helped, but not enough. However, I made a discovery. I was using my grey brush-tip pens and decided to do some washy shading on top of the cross-hatching. The under layer of ink melted and smeared. Hmmm. Pitt pens are permanent when water is applied, but apparently the carrier in the pen itself will melt already-dried ink. That makes sense (otherwise the ink would dry up in the pen, right?), but it hadn't occurred to me before.

So then I played around with laying down dark areas and using the lightest brush tip pen to melt and redistribute the ink. Oh frabjous day! I really like how the final image turned out. It's not perfect, but I'm pleased that I was able to salvage it. I think it'll make a nice addition to the Vessels book.

Blue Horizons

Blue Horizons


Cave

I had to use Flickr again. I like how easy it is to upload and manage images, but I'm not happy with the thumbnails it generates. They're a little too small, I think. I prefer 120 pixels instead of 100. Hrmph. So, I decided to use the next larger size as thumbnails. (Yes, I really do obsess about these sorts of things!) Anyway... Both of these collages are destined for the Vessels book I'm working on.

Blue Horizons: As always, I turned to Mr. Dictionary to see if there was anything I was overlooking. One definition given for "horizon" is "The limit of the theoretically possible universe." I like that. It speaks to exploration and a potential to be fulfilled.

Cave: This image came from a scenic/touisty type magazine. I tore it into vertical slivers, then inked the margins (my hands are still stained black) and used a Q-tip soaked with ink to color between the torn pieces. I like the way the vertical black lines echo the errosion lines in the rock face.

In mythology, caves are places where the underworld and the real world meet. The cave, like the cauldron, cup, and chalice, also echos the womb. It is the place from which things are born.


Conceiving the Plan

This is a piece in progress. I'm not happy with the way it turned out (watercolors drive me insane), so I'm probably going to either use the painting in a collage or collage over parts of the painting. We'll see.

Dada Book

These are a few pages from the Dada book I've been working on. It's made of pages from Real Simple magazine. Some of the images in the magazine are great for collage, but I find the overall tone is pretty insufferable. What better use to put the left-overs to than to rip them up and turn them into a Dada-esque journal?

I had intended to use it mostly for collage, but I've ended up using it for "evening pages." Some of the folks in one of my art groups are working through The Artist's Way. I had planned on working on it with them, but I decided that waking up any earlier than I already do--just to journal--would be cruel and unusual punishment--4am is plenty early enough, thankyouverymuch! So, I've been doing some very quick pages right before I go to bed. I'm finding that it's a nice way to cap off the day--sort of like getting in the last word.

This is a crappy picture, taken with my ubercheap digital camera. The book is small and chunky: 5.5 x 4.5" and about 1" thick. I used a coptic stitch to bind it, which was a bit of a challenge. The clay-coated magazine pages are weak and brittle, so they crack easily. I had to remove a couple of signatures because the holes ripped open as I was sewing the binding. I ended up with 13 signatures of 20 pages each.

Vessels: Attun

Vessels: Attun
collage

I tried to upload this last night, but I couldn't get online. So, I'm trying out Flickr, because it's accessible from work. It seems easy enough, but I'm not sure I like the size of the thumb-nails. I'm also not keen on the the way images are displayed. I really like the transparency of Hello. But, beggars can't be choosers, right?

Anyway, this piece is yet another in the new Vessels series. After I had the basic lay-out sorted, I started playing around with some letters I'd cut out of an architecture magazine. My options were limited, word-wise, so I settled on attun. Hmmm. I was sure I'd come across the word before, but I couldn't remember the context or meaning. A quick Google turned up this. Oh, serendipity!

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-hebrew/2000-January/005986.html

Dr. Marcus Jastrow defines 'attun /'attun'a as "fire-place, stove; a fire-place of which the fire has been scraped out." ... However, it is also used in Targum Onqelos to translate the Hebrew word kavshen at Exodus 19:18, which is a "kiln for lime or pottery," (BDBG) and was used to describe the smoking mountain of the theophany. Or as some translate this Hebrew word also, a "furnace." It would appear that the word 'attun is not explicit, except to refer to a large place used for burning. Yet ordinarily, that might favor furnace or kiln over a bread oven.

The Star Maker

The Star Maker speaks volumes, in Greek
a wise man with rational principles,
inventing new methods for calculating prime numbers
a man of ethics and ellipses,
the Star Maker studies orbits,
dreams of satellites, planets, and comets
and mapping the sky.

The Star Maker, alchemist and geomancer
binds thought to water,
weaves halos of tin,
and summons bone from air
the Star Maker
speaks in circles of his theories of life,
of gravitational pull
and the swell of the waxing full moon.

The Star Maker, seer and cunning deceiver
divines portents from meteors and scatters of light,
ceaselessly searches for a unified theory of life
the Star Maker, keeper and monster slayer
watches over memory,
haunts dreams, never sleeps
the Star Maker thinks the unthinkable thing
and keeps the unknowable hidden from sight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I guess I'm in the midst of a poetry writing binge. I recently pulled out my book of Homeric hymns, which is probably what spawned it. I love the Homeric hymns. I've always envied the the ability to know one's gods so intimately that they are an unquestioned part of everyday life; that the gods could be as real and familiar as one's friends and relations. I've never had that sort of faith.

I also envy people who have created their own mythologies. It's not that I don't have recurring threads, thoughts, and dreams, but until now I've never bothered to try to gather them together give them tangible form.

Vessels: Memento Mori

Vessels: Memento Mori
collage

The purpose of memento mori images is to remind the viewer of his or her mortality. In the Victorian era, memento mori commonly took the form of photographs of corpses. Other popular momento mori subjects are skulls, skeletons, decaying flowers, clocks and hour glasses, the crucifixion, and cemeteries. And, perhaps the best known momento mori is the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration.

Another Crispy Saturday Morning

Another Crispy Saturday Morning

After days and days of rain, sleet, and snow, the sun came out to play yesterday. The sky this morning is hazy, but the sun is bright and sparkling. The frost was quickly burned away, leaving a muddy brown-green landscape behind. The dogs played for a couple of hours, chasing rabbit tracks and digging for moles. Harriet is still outside, sunbathing. Elliott came in to cool off and get a drink, and is now lying under my feet, sleeping the sleep of the well and truly tuckered out. Ah, puppy bliss.

The cats are enjoying the sun's appearance, too. After making a pile of all the socks, washcloths, and various pieces of paper looted from my art trash bin, Pandora is sitting on her nest, basking in a sunbeam. I love the way she faces into the light, periodically squeezing her eyes half-shut.

Portia Dreaming

Day after day she forgets
the long run
the thief, stealing from her
rain drops spilling down glass
not lost, not sold, not given
the compass was hope for the scrubbing
How do you touch the dark?
Nasturtiums and a large bag of knitting and felt
but they are of charm and she would never see red
my heart, Portia to an artist in training,
remembers
the bone of a thought that was hid long ago
in a place only dreaming could know.

Ely in Paris

Ely in ParisÂ

(Creation Myth for a Muse)

Ely in Paris sent Pandora the hide
that matched my forty hours
Ely makes books and sundials
publishes treatises on perspective and collected theosophical works
Ely, keen on The Creation and the natural history of comets
makes up dances containing rules for my inspiration
my relations with you, the painter, and the poet
the alphabet chaser and curious baker,
disordered phantasms, all
in the unknowable place where I dwell
with our collective achievements.

We heard drums, but my palette also talked
of the old mossy bough, of beautifully drawn color
we saw happiness-to-go and looked all around
the ghosts were threatening desertion
Will I believe? Ely must tell me
we sat there for five days
five days wading through shit
and memories that follow rain,
follow bone, ground to dust
each day Ely fashions a furious storm cloud of woe
everything harder than anything.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday's musings about Pandora and hope led to today's musings about the creative process. Where does inspiration come from? The ancient Greeks believed they were inspired--literally--by the muses. The creative act was seen as an act of spiritual possession. The gods inspire us to create and in creating we become gods. This presents a chicken-and-egg problem: Man creates Art creates Man; God creates Man creates God. Where does it start and where does it end? And, who's in charge here? Does the artist control the muse or does the muse control the artist?

Whatever the answer, I figured that my muse was owed a creation myth.

Asswagons, Network Outages & Letters to Esther

Just kill me now. I didn't want to come to work this ayem. The county roads were icy and, even if I weren't worried about sliding off the road, I would've been worried about random asswagons committing random acts of asswagonry. I was not disappointed. When I turned off HWY 46 onto Arlingting Road (from 4-lane highway to 2-lane road), some jerk decided to try turning left at the same time. I looked up and saw that there was a car to my right. Now, I'm not a brilliant physicist, but I do recall that there is a law stating that two masses cannot occupy the same space at the same time. I braked and let the Mr. Asshat get in front of me. I'm not in a big enough hurry to get to work that I'm willing to get involved in a game of dueling sub-compacts with an uberasshole.

Then, because a 45 minute white knuckle drive wasn't exciting enough, I got to work and the network was down. God clearly hates me. Because the network is down, everyone is milling about and chit-chatting. There isn't really any work we can do, and staring at the ceiling is boring, so that leaves talking. One woman has been on the phone for over an hour, whinging about her family problems. The phone is rightbehindmydesk. I'm stuck eavesdropping on what is turning out to be a very private converstation. I am not amused. I resent having to listen to her tale of woe. And, so much for anyone else who needs to use the phone or any incoming calls. Sheesh! On the bright side, I stayed home yesterday and got a lot done. I thought briefly about going back to bed, but decided I should make the most of my unplanned day off. I did a little arting and scanned and uploaded what I'd done, I worked for awhile on the Dada Book, and I transcribed some more letters.

About those letters. Oh my. When I first started this project, I didn't realize there were so many rough drafts of Esther's replies (so far exclusively to Richard) included in the envelopes. I'm grateful that she was so organized. However, the replies themselves are difficult to read. Because they are rough drafts, there are numerous cross-outs and insertions. The punctuation and spelling are not as careful as they likely would've been in the finished drafts. They were written in pencil on cheap, pulpy tablet paper, often on the backs of school lessons. The pencil has faded and the paper has darkened. The paper is also extremely brittle, so unfolding and refolding it is tricky. All this makes for slow going in the transcription department.

I did a little more digging and came up with an old post to a geneology group from someone looking for information on Esther's brother, Clark Munro. The poster's e-mail address is no longer active, so I can't contact her directly, but I left a reply. Hopefully she'll check back.

The pièce de résistance was finally locating a bundle of letters written after Esther married. I now have her husband's name: Robert H. Cooper. I did some quick Googling and found that he taught at Ball State University. The Cooper Science Building was named for him. I've spent an awful lot of time in that building. It's funny how the threads of different lives become interwoven.

Dr. Cooper was a conservationist. The regional chapter of the Audubon Society was named after him and one of it's most prestigious awards after him and his wife. Ball State University has also named an award in honor of the couple, as well as one of the its field sciences study areas.