Finding my way

I find that I can't do much in the summer when the kids are off of school, nor can I do much exploration when at my parents' (I was there nearly a month this time), but I have found time to make some baby steps towards finding out what I have to say rather than frantically absorbing techniques and tutorials and then not knowing how to make them mine.  This has become an intensely personal process of discovery and frankly one that has not been terribly comfortable--but if not now, when--right?  So I have persevered, at a slower pace than I might wish, but a realistic one given the circumstances (children ages 7 and 12).

I am making good progress writing a little something every day.  I found a great--free--app for the iPhone called Momento, and it has allowed me to meet that goal.

I am taking the advice I would give to someone else:  identify my long-term goals (if I even have any--just playing is a perfectly valid choice) and then figure out how to manage my short-term and mid-term time to achieve them.  Using the Weekly Shaper tool has really helped me be realistic about what I can accomplish over the space of a week or two, and I love the way it divides the day into three sections.  Simple but very effective.

Hopefully I will find something that lets me add pics from my iPhone.  When I can do that, without the hassle of hooking my camera up to the computer and transferring images, running them thru Photoshop, importing them into Blogger, I think I will be a lot more likely to blog again.

But I am very clear now about why I am blogging.  It is for me to document what I am accomplishing and what I am trying.  Looking back on entries from months and years ago is beneficial and rewarding.  I am not expecting Followers or commenters or even making friends.  That's nice, of course, but not my expectation.  That way I cannot be disappointed.

Life as Geometry: Shorts Book with Origami Pocket Envelope

Too much fun! While my son had his fencing lesson next door, I sat in an empty classroom and made a little book. Following Alisa Golden's excellent instructions in Expressive Handmade Books, I made a little Shorts Book out of notebook paper and colored a rainbow spiral on it (I could definitely see that making this with double-sided paper would be very attractive indeed).

Then at home this evening while watching the Tour de France (taped from this morning), I quickly wrote a few silly lines about circles and got enough for the four pages of the book. Took just a few minutes to write them in, and then about another five to cut a strip of paper from an oversized art calendar that my aunt Margaret gave me and fold an easy pocket to hold the book. I love it! Ms. Golden's folding instructions and accompanying diagrams never got me lost, and as I am quite spatially challenged, that's a feat worth mentioning.

The book style is preferable to the instant book I did earlier; the page thickness doesn't get in the way. Or perhaps that's because I was using such thin paper? I'll have to double-check that with thicker paper when I do one with more thought.



Running up a quick prototype--as that's what I viewed this as--was extremely useful. It will be a great example to show one's students why one needs guidelines on the paper for writing, it helped me decide which style of writing worked best within the book and with the words chosen, and I realized that I really needed to treat the facing pages as one long spread rather than separate pages (which would be my preference).

11 July 2008

Or maybe the thing to do is make a piece and then make up a story for whom it belongs to or where it belongs. Although if I could do that, I guess I wouldn’t need the story at all. . . .

Notes to self:
--use a bleach pen
--gold gesso
--get some Frisket

Idea: Collage with pictures of bread, old-fashioned ovens, wheat growing in a field, cheesecloth [use pics of my bread]. Sprinkle salt, use eggshells.

College with bouquet garni bag, herbs dried and fresh, seed packets, smoke swirls (for aroma), pots (big ones, like for soup), pictures and layouts of herb gardens. Sprinkle salt on part of it.

Mica idea—glue down in one corner and cover up with gold or copper flakes (p. 97 A. Cartwright book).

Conflict of being parent/wife—incredible heart, hope, love, but with a cage around it, or part of it; maybe use wire to anchor it down. Something that conveys the spilling over of so much love and emotion but the constraints of responsibility and duty enclosing, surrounding, encaging.

--Scott Davis Jones (gallery)

10 July 2008

Here’s something to try—so right now I create for a specific person or specific location, but I’d like to move away from that limitation, free myself. An interim step, and one that would use both my imagination and my writing skills, would be to create either a character or a setting and sketch it briefly, say one to two paragraphs, no more. Then I could always attach that to the back of the completed piece.

I like this idea more and more. This way I could end up with multiple pieces for the same character in many circumstances, have stuff for a whole set of people with a whole mythology around it, supporting and cradling the art and bearing its weight up to the surface.