Book of Days: Cover

In 2011, most of my artsy efforts were directed towards art journaling. I've found that there's a really nice interplay between what my brain can express in writing and what it can express visually. When one or the other just isn't saying what I want to say or isn't getting to the heart of the matter, art journaling, the combination of both, is often the answer. Definitely something I want to keep doing in 2012.

To keep my art journaling habit going, I signed up for Book of Days with Effy Wild. Effy is leading a year-long art-journaling group. If you have an interest, hit the link and sign up. Hey, it's free. What have you got to lose?

Each of us in the group is picking a word or phrase to be our theme for 2012. Mine is "Trust". (Yeah, I put the period on the outside. In this case, the British way just makes more sense to me.) In this phase of my life, I'm rebuilding my ability to trust myself and others after getting a serious smackdown by someone who didn't deserve my (or anyone else's) trust. This year is about getting back in touch with the still, small voice, paying attention to my gut, and giving my own view of myself and what's good for me more weight than anyone else's.

As if the content weren't going to be challenging enough, the book I chose has really small (4" x 6") pages. I've never worked quite this small before. It'll be interesting to see what logistical challenges pop up over the year.

For the cover, I decided to be mostly monochrome. That decision held all through the background and front cover (even painted the brass-colored letters with blue Pinata inks), but I just had to use the glass-mosaic woman on the back. I've had the image in my stash for quite some time. She's from an ad for glass tiles. She had words across her middle, so I collaged over them with the phrase "How do you feel?"

Update...

She looks better in the above picture than she did in real life. The piece felt disjointed to me, so I knocked it all back with more blue. An argument could be made that I knocked it back too far, but it feels more cohesive to me, even though it's a bit darkish.

What Does It Mean to Inhabit Your Story?

As I said before, I'm working through "Life is a Verb" with a group at Wild Precious Studio. Our first official art project was to create a house and fill it with collage elements representing our stories. Clearly, my brain was refusing to face the real issues.

Once I had the basic house shape down, I thought and thought and thought about what in the house would represent my story. I thought about the various rooms and whatnot. But mostly, I'd covered that in my earlier work and I wasn't in the mood to create a house with those elements and then actually put the answer into words.

Part of the instructions said:
Grab images that call to you without thinking very much about why they are calling to you. Don't plan the final product. Just grab and glue until you have an image that works for you ~ even if this means overlapping images or completely covering some up.

So, I started digging through my collection of collage elements and found a bunch by Tangie Baxter. The collection I'd printed out was mostly fish 'cuz I'm a big fan of the underwater world. Anyway, I turned off my rational brain, started cutting and gluing and playing with crayons and whatnot, and here's what happened.

I finished the right-hand page first and stared at it for a long time. What on earth does That mean? I had thought I was going to do a bunch of journaling on the left-hand page, but once I had made flowers out of paper scraps and added ancient book pages covered with words cut with a Slice, I felt done. Imagine that. An art-journal page with no journaling. LOL!

More on the House Theme

Working further through the "Life is a Verb" with the crew at Wild Precious Studio. The question was about seeing your story as a house and what would it be like to inhabit your story. My brain pretty much locked up at actually answering the question, but came up with a smart-ass reply in the form of this page.

Life is a Verb: Inhabiting Your Story

I'm doing a read through of Life is a Verb with a group on Wild Precious Studio (http://wildprecious-studio.ning.com). We're only in the intro pages now, but Effy posted some interesting questions to think about while reading. This is what came out when I considered, "What does it feel like to inhabit your story?"

Funny. Questions like that normally send me running for a journal to write, but this one came out as a visual.

Cats, Can Openers, and That Unmistakable Sound

Some cats will show up out of nowhere if you hold down the lever of an electric can opener. We used to do that when I was a kid to let Sarah know it was time to come in for the night. No amount of calling or looking did any good at all. The can opener, however? Instant cat. I've even seen it mentioned on lost-cat posters. "Answers to Friskie, Frisket, Frisk, Puddin' Pie, and the sound of an electric can opener."

Well, my cat eats crunchies. No interest whatsoever in soft food. Only crunchies. In fact, since I so rarely open cans, I don't have an electric can opener at all. I do, however, have a surefire trick to find the cat. No matter where she is or what she's doing, she appears every time anyone uses the toilet. My theory is that she's figured out that she has a captive audience with nothing better to do than pet her or run a trickle of water in the sink.

I can just see the poster now. "Answers to Mewon, Mewie, Mew Mew, Mewster, and the sound of  a person peeing."

Please don't let the cat out...

Indulge

Last night I wanted to do something in my art journal to celebrate and mourn the last day of my job, but just couldn't get my head in the right place. As I poked around online, looking for inspiration, I found some lovely artwork someone had done for the 52 Pages group on Wild Precious Studio. The prompt was "Indulge." What can I say? The word spoke to me.

I'm a cake freak with a wheat allergy, so cake definitely represents an indulgence for me. It's delicious, wonderful, heavenly... and inevitably followed by exhaustion and foggy headedness cuz it makes me not breathe worth a hoot. Sigh. Still, there are times it's totally worth it.

The page is super simple. Remember that whole can't-get-started thing? I laid down some color with Inktense blocks, then drew the cake and covered it in gesso. I was so spacey that I forgot that gesso is normally a first layer under paint. Um, paint... Yeah... Forgot to paint the cake. I did remember that cake needs shadows. Those were added with watercolor. I outlined the plate, tiers, and candle in Pitt marker and Gelly Rolls.

Considering how spacey and uninspired I was, I'm pretty happy with it. I realized this morning how very un-art-journal-y it looks - no layers, no spray, no stenciling... Guess I was focused on cake and not indulging in art supplies. LOL!

On the back, I stamped the word 'Indulge' and then stared at the page for a long time. What is there to say about cake that cake itself doesn't already say? Eventually, I decided to list other things that might be considered indulgences. Again, tired won, and the page is not terribly complicated. I managed to write the words in a few different ways, but none of them are what you call fancy.

So there you have it. Proof that art can come from a muddled, tired, brain in mourning. Or maybe shock.

Elements of Art Journaling: Fire, the Spread

For fire, we worked with the burning emotions (as opposed to water's wet emotions). A few years ago, I'd gotten to a place where I'd worked through my burning emotions and would have had to choose ambition or some such for this assignment. Not so, now. Events of the last couple of years have left me awash in physical, mental, and emotional pain.

My pattern has always been to convert pain to anger and burn it as fuel. So, I figured Fire would be easy for me. I'm angry as hell, thought I. This'll be easy.

I laid down a fire glow on the diagonal with Inktense pencils. It probably wouldn't show at the end, but at least it made the spread Not White.

The rest of the assignment was to figure out what the burning emotion (anger, in my case) was telling us to DO or LEARN and, Not to do it, but to figure out how we would need to FEEL to actually take that step. As Effy pointed out, "We're just arting here. We're not burning our houses (or lives) down." Phew! So I only had to figure out the thirty-thousand-foot view of my next step, not the actual implementation. We were then instructed to take that feeling and create an hour-long playlist.

I have to admit, I never felt like I was doing the assignment "right." I wasn't sure I'd gotten the right marching orders from my anger. The playlist was full of things I like to sing (my primary art form), but what did it have to do with my next steps....? When I sat with it, I knew it was the right bunch of songs, but still had no idea WHY it was the right bunch of songs. Oh, well.

Tuesday night, I got to bed early, turned out the light... and tossed and turned 'till after one something AM. Fine. The experts all say to get up and do something when you can't sleep, so I went to my studio and turned on the playlist.

I thought, for sure, I'd end up with an energetic spread suggesting ambition, movement, power, etc. After all, when I'm angry, I ingest that energy and use it to go DO things. I sprayed through stencils, brayered around laminated magazine images and across other stencils, finally tried Texture Magic through a brass stencil... And found myself wanting to draw a big eye with tears...

I swear it took 10 minutes to convince my brain that, even though the instructions said "abstract," drawing an eye wouldn't get us thrown out of class. Sigh.

Well... The eye needed a nose to direct the tears. And the nose needed a mouth to anchor it in space. And... Well, it's only HALF a face. That's abstract. Kinda... Sorta...

I cracked open a jar of heavy gel medium and mixed in a touch of blue airbrush ink to make the tears 3D and shimmery. Getting it to glop in the way I wanted and eliminating most of the brush strokes was quite the challenge. The result was nothing like the smooth tear-shaped globs I'd envisioned. Worse, they were opaque light blue, it was 3:30 AM, and I was fried. I went to bed.

I barely glanced at the spread on my way to work Wednesday morning. The tears had gone transparent when they dried, so that was a relief, but the two pages didn't hold together as a single spread, the silhouette was lost in its page, and the features were floating in space.

I thought about how to fix the spread as I went about my day on Wednesday. By afternoon, I'd decided watercolor spray and outlining with a gray watercolor pen was about all I could do without endangering the work already done. (An "I am not worthy" goes out to the artists I've seen on YouTube who hit this point and respond with something NOT transparent. Wow. Wow. Double wow. Oh my God. Wow.)

Wednesdays are long days for me, and I didn't get home 'till after 11. I sprayed the whole spread with magenta watercolor in a mister. Nice, but... The next round was a yummy raspberry. NOW we're talking! How I love that color, let me count the ways! The pages finally looked like a single spread, but they looked like a background waiting for a foreground to happen. I outlined the silhouette with a gray Pitt pen and used the same pen to define the outline of the face.

Ahhh... Now it feels good to look at the pages...

BUT... BUT... Oh, crap. We were supposed to represent what our burning feeling was telling us to do next. Didn't I just get stuck in frustration and puke it out on my journal spread? I wondered if the next step involved vast quantities of gesso. I stared...

And then I figured it out. While chronic pain provides a steady, even flow to the anger distillery, A-bomb trauma overflows the vats. What anger comes out of the process isn't enough to both fuel normal life And clean up the pain overflow. The pain-to-anger process I'd relied upon for decades wasn't gonna fly and has likely outlived its usefulness. It's time to open my heart. It's time to get to know anger for it's own sake, not as a dumping ground for pain. It's time to stop hiding the pain, allow the vulnerability. It's time to cry.