Visual Journal 1

I love books – reading them, making them or just appreciating them.

About ten years ago, I received a wordless book as a gift.  It’s black cover shows the marks of fading in the sun from the various perches it has occupied with other “art books.”

In the process of rediscovering my studio inventory after our move,  I thumbed through this stunning folio of empty pages.  Beautiful in and of itself.

Its hand-pressed, boldly-colored papers that had previously been “sanctified” as untouchable, cried out with inspiration.   I mused the notion of pushing against that fear-of-the-first-stroke creative wall (times 30) by starting to use this tactile codex as my canvas.  Daunting thought.  I tend not to doodle well on demand, so I set the book on the shelf again.

This week in my “research,” among other amazing things, I came upon a quote by Rumi that accelerated my journey into this personal journal project.

“A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation, and how one gives birth
to oneself slowly. Patience with small details
makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings alone will do
for your gradually growing wholeness.”

With a few simple rules,

First thing I do

All materials welcome

No tearing out:  pages or pieces or stitches

Every day, until the book is full.

I began…

With the full moon,

a stomach ache

and a promise…

Digging

I sometimes question why I keep  coming back to this platform (the blog) for writing. But I know in my heart that somewhere I might leave a spark when someone receives my humble words with gusto.

I am a teacher – “by trade,” I always add.  I was trained and have the degree to pass along information.  But I am a sharer, by nature, wanting to pass on a seedling of small value that may grow in the imagination of the right soul.

I am also a storyteller.  With words and my camera, I catalog for self-reflection the mysteries of my journey before the truths are realized.  And maybe, someone out there can identify.

I was driven (by car) from my homeland and dropped (by faith) into this new country, the Low Country of South Carolina.  The homeland of friends, of profession, of identity behind, this new country beckoned with it’s gentler climate, it’s unique beauty and a pace that was most necessary for me to learn at this point in life.

I am acquiring a new language, surmounting personal obstacles, discovering meaning as I dig and gather.  Nothing new.

I am often alone, which allows time for pondering and creating.  Lots of making, experimenting, analyzing, not always in that order.  It’s a circle, all connected, rotating in either direction to the most essential point at a given moment.

In“The Alphabet of Trees”  Margo Fortunato Galt’s writing exercise uses a circle as a mind map.  She says “On the circle, every place is equal and every place is important and every place is the same.”

Yes; no matter where where you land.

 

This weekend I was faced with rethinking a decision to landscape the beds in front of our house.  Each time we decide to change or renew an outdoor feature, we must submit for permission from a governing board.  They questioned the distance from the bed to the road and my puzzlement, became frustration, became opportunity, became bounty.

We decided to forego more shrubbery and plant grass.  So I busied myself with salvaging some bulbs before they were bulldozed away.  As I dug small holes and moved dirt with my hands, I felt something unexpected.

It wasn’t the airy soil of my vegetable garden, but a dense and spongy clay.  I was amazed by the random marbling of red ochre in the grayness of the glob.  I added potting mix to the bulbs and collected a flower pot full of clumps to dry.  From gray to red to golden.

I know the eco-folks gather soils on their jaunts and use it to color their papers.  Here, in one spot, in my front landscape is a palette of earth ochres and Helen Fitzgerald’s video shares the ancient connections and explains how to make watercolor paint from it.
And another thing.

This weekend I added something very special to my circle.

A simple message.  Just keep digging!

Yellow Perspective

This month I am searching for YELLOW with Jennifer Coyne Qudeen and Julie B. Booth.

I thought I would start with a rather yellow page from the 1961 text,                                                Elements of Design by Donald M. Anderson.  His research indicates that Yellow has a bad rap.

More recently, YELLOW spins positive.  Color Matters notes that yellow is the “most luminous” on the color wheel.  I’m not surprised that as I searched for yellow, signs were popping up everywhere.  It’s a real attention getter.

It also seems to blossom earliest of the spring flowers.

Beyond that…this is what I spied from around the globe in all its yellowishness.

All You Can Art

“Who knows, maybe the root is the flower from that other life.”                   Mary Oliver

Being an artist is sometimes like having an endless smorgasbord of inspiration and ideas. I try to tend to it. I never take it for granted. I like to share regularly. Most days I can’t help noticing the density of life around me, the lushness of sight and sound, making note, taking shots with the camera, cataloging and processing in darkness and silence.New work can emerge from playful splashing in muddy puddles – in the garden, in the palette or the dye pot.

Like the germinating Japanese indigo seeds in my kitchen window that warm and incubate, imagination simmers, distills, materializes.

Even my seedlings enjoy a view of the mountains.

Some pods birth today. Others will relish the soil a bit longer before promise turns green with fuchsia stems.

How will I tend to the seeds of imagination today?

Piles of raw eco-printed paper-mordanting

Raw Material

Turned into something

Done or not-so-done.

Making sun tea. Or rose dye from the wabi-sabi petals.

Marks on paper, paint, pencil, stencil?

Over leaf impressions

Straight to paper

Plotting for the “Roy-B-Giv Game.” with Jennifer and Julie.  A hint…

Tutu’s on the brain.

Tree climbing tutu.

Digging with bare hands into the microbes of well-balanced soil.

Reading: The Alphabet of Trees Rearranging the furniture to make more room for the creative mess.

Finishing some stitching from “yesterday’s” bits and starts.

And stitching and stitching.

It must tell me “done.”

Let the floss bin spill thread formations in perfect bends and turns.

Fabric wisps blowing into position.

Looking at friends projects on the internet – stirring my duende.

Going to work at the little quilt shop up the road.

Pleased and pressed to celebrate lots of babies with sewn confections of another sort. Binding, binding, binding, Thimbles aren’t enough to save my fingers this week.

Some things never change:  Birds, feathers, houses rear in abundance.

Minor mechanical malfunctions: resolved.

Making a list.

Trying to find meaning.

“Who knows, maybe the root is the flower from that other life.”                   Mary Oliver

Orange Matters

We are moving along the color wheel, once again with Jennifer Coyne Qudeen and  Julie B. Booth :: this month, ORANGE.  So look left-ish, around 10 o’clock  for the color of the month, with a peek at what lies ahead for the coming months.

look left

 

I have always been attracted to color and orange is one of my favorites.   This is a piece I finished in 2002, before orange had thoroughly returned to it’s 70’s popularity.

kimono art qult

Artists use orange to attract attention or make a point.

Nature has it down pat.

Orange hangs with other orange.

fiber exhibit yafo, israel

Sew orange.

Ride orange.

Shuk orange

Read? orange.

Rust orange.

Night orange.

caesaria, israel

 

Cloudy with Mushrooms: Week 18

Making the best of a rainy day

Digging in the hidden fabric places,

looking to discover.

It’s a good day when I find feathers.

Better when I find a red mushroom on a walk with Nellie. (Thanks, Nellie)

Best with two.

Patterns: Two Ways

South Carolina storms are intense with patterns. They come in quickly, starting with a canopy of clouds, then a light patter, a flash of lightning.  I count the seconds like a child. How far away will it strike? Then the bolt of thunder.

Six, seven miles. I’m not that accurate when my heavy head is pressing hard into my memory pillow.  It’s the middle of the night.  My mind wanders several miles to say the least. And I start talking to myself about patterns.

In my “awakeness,” I had admitted to someone in Week 16 that I don’t like patterns, following patterns, that is. I don’t like the constraints forced upon me by a list of directions to make something that looks like the original.

With two baby girl quilts in my gifting queue, I must consider a design. There is room for improvisation with this pattern.

Six or seven times I’ve constructed Marston and Moran’s Garden Party Ladies for little girls.

But the longer I’m at this craft, the more I prefer to discover the end at the end, playing with the parts, the pieces of cloth, untangling the surprise of their fit.

Letting it evolve…

It is not the simplest way to the finish, but the journey is more interesting, for sure.

So I took another look at my sketchbooks.

What I discovered in revisiting my designs is that blanket assertions are foolish and potentially dangerous.

I do like patterns. the kind that recur organically, intuitively, almost genetically.
So here is a short list:

The semantics of words, for one thing
and puzzling over a design
the unbound dress,
the silly little bird,
the feather and the house.

I constantly return to these icons ( and a couple more) on the circuitous thread that is my creative search, that is, in itself a pattern: the recurrence of an image, a theme, an idea.

Where do you get ideas? What are your patterns?

Week 15: From Farm to Table

 

Said dumpster from my favorite sawmill of Week 14’s post.  I love the wabi sabi of its rusty (red) sides and the mystery of what’s inside.  The search for a farm table has continued right back to the sawmill, where we found the perfect mantle board a while back.

Earlier this week, my table sat at the top of this particular stack. How did we decide?  On any given day, wood for much larger jobs than ours is laid out for review.  We had come across some antique heart pine a couple of months back, when we had popped in.  The project seemed dreamy but daunting at the time.  After exhausting our search for the serendipitous thrift shop score,  we returned to this recycled lumber trove to reconsider.

About a dozen split, knotty, nail-holed beautiful boards were waiting for us.   After doing the math, we needed three full boards from which came the middle and ends of our table.

Daniel cleverly cut around precarious grain and knots to give us the necessary length and width for the table. (the hardest part of the job)  The spray of sawdust and scent of pine sap escaping from the cuts brought tears of emotion.  The wood is alive again.

And it became this…

so far…

CyberPlay: The Search for Red…

 

Mushroom: Bluffton, SC

Coastal Discovery Museum:  HHI, SC

Street stencil: tel aviv, israel

Flea Market: Savannah, GA

Dog Park: Bluffton, SC

Thanks Jennifer Coyne Qudeen and Julie B. Booth!

 

Week 14: Rain

This morning I went to my favorite reclaimed wood place (Timberstone) to discuss buying some heart pine planks for a table we’re making for our tiny dining room.  The young man who keeps the place running while his boss scouts for wood to buy, seems to have the gentlest of hearts.  Daniel encourages our ideas for projects, pulls wood down from big stacks for us to audition, waits patiently while we decide on grain,  and generally responds with a positivity and grace that inspires my whole day.  We made an appointment to come back on Saturday.  They are a bit behind in their orders, he told us, because vandals stripped their electrical conduits of all its copper and shut them down a couple of weeks ago.  Before we left, he generously jumped into a dumpster to toss us otherwise useless wood pieces for the raised beds in our garden.

I took some of the beams to our garden today, anxious to see how they would lay out.  Some, I’m saving for the garden gate I plan to make for the entry.  The storms of the last few days and nights have flooded our space.  The edging I had carved was six inches deep with rain water and and the remaining soil is as greedy as quicksand.  It actually made it a bit easier to etch the  ground for placing the wood.  I used the longer pieces I was gifted and backfilled with sandy, very degraded mulch, some stones that had been left near the mulch pile and the slushy soil clods I had started to till before the rain.

 

It drizzled a bit, as I worked, but it feels incredibly good for my back to ache a little as I collaborate with mother nature.  There were a couple of other farmers working among the gardens today, but I feel cozy in the damp solitude.

An hour, three wheelbarrows of mulch and lots of slushy digging flew by.

 

Very wet and abundant leaves were collected for bundling.  Some might say “too dead,” but they still have life in them.

 

And before I left, I planted the gate post.