What is "Truth"?

So, A. has selected "truth" as this month's topic, and I may need to work quickly since we are halfway through April.

How does one illustrate truth? Or make a piece representing it? Could do a mirror with decorative mosaic edge. Ooh, could do a mobile with lots of glass tiles and miniature mirrors, because often truth requires finding little bits of it here and there and then piecing it together. Or along the same lines, do a puzzle (ornamental), perhaps with one piece left to put it. I am liking these ideas . . .

Let's see if I can come up with some that don't involve mirrors. Is truth something that blazes out at you, grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you, saying, "Here I am and you cannot ignore me!"? Or is it something quieter, that steals into your being and makes itself known over a period of time? As always, my question too is this: what color is truth? I don't think it's one of the primary colors--not subtle enough, not enough depth. Perhaps a blue, but why? Because of the blue in the sky, the blue of the water? Definitely not purple. Hmm, and I just contradicted myself, didn't I, since blue is a primary color. I guess I am thinking of a different kind of blue, one with clarity and depth, one with translucence.

Next thing I'll go looking for quotes again. I haven't yet used one, but I enjoy the thinking that comes along with finding them.

End of "Time"

Unfortunately, my group's get-together to show our "time" pieces had to be rescheduled . . . but the plus side of that is that I have a chance to redo what I mounted my piece on. Had a technique glitch with the DecoArt One Step Crackle; I got so frustrated that I wasn't getting the size crackle I wanted, so I poured on a huge lump of it and didn't smooth it down enough. When dry, there was surely a great big crackle in it, but it looked milky and didn't blend in with the rest of the background.

I guess I'm going to have to sand it all off and redo the layers--dark brown acrylic (and I think I'll do two coats this time instead of just one), then Tim Holtz's Brushed Pewter Distress Crackle, then a nice thick layer of the One Step Crackle. Once that's all dry, I'll use the Antiquing Solution. I also think I'll use a tack to mount the faux pendulum rather than a foam dot, which doesn't seem to be holding very well. I *will* get this right!

Finally, Making Something Again!

I have had it with all my stuff being in the garage (our house is on the market for sale). This afternoon I dug around in various boxes and found my toolbox, my Distress Ink pads, my Xmas gifts of some Tim Holtz items (game spinners, sprocket gears), and a few other things. Not too much, just a few things.

Then I made a chipboard clock using some Heidi Swapp items and following the directions on Tim Holtz's blog for the last Xmas tag of 2008 (steps 16-35). It was so much fun! Took about 10 minutes, but the result looked great and I had a neat embellishment for my project. Did I mention that my group's art challenge this month is "time"?

Since I don't have a lot of room or materials available, I am going to try to keep this month's project small. I have inked up a 3x4" canvas with Dried Marigold Distress Ink, then I used one of Tim's new masks and put Vintage Photo DI over the top. Now what I want to do is use some of his new stamps in the sets that have just become available at Michaels, but I can't find my acrylic mounts. Grrr.

It feels so good to be doing something again that is creative, that has a tangible end result--I love it, love it, love it. I feel fully alive again for the first time in two months. Must remember that this is necessary and make sure that it doesn't get shut down like this (of course, we hoped our house would sell faster and our stuff would come back out sooner than it has). But this is a good feeling, a feeling of accomplishment and engagement.

Quotes about Time

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking.
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older.
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
- - - Pink Floyd "Time"

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.
- - - Horace Mann
[I have always liked this because it's in one of the Laura Ingalls books. I'm not sure "like" is the right word, exactly, but I have never forgotten it.]

"Veritum dies aperit" (Time discovers the truth)
Seneca De Ira

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.
(James Baldwin (1924-1987), U.S. author. (First published 1976). "The Devil Finds Work," sect. 1, The Price Of The Ticket (1985).)

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. Louis Hector Berlioz

“Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.”
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Initial Thoughts on Time

Back to me to pick this month's challenge for our group--I went with "time". None of us seem to have any right now, so it seemed appropriate!

While at a mandatory seminar last weekend, I jotted down some notes and thoughts on the topic; here they are.

To begin, I need to decide if I'm going to look at time as neutral, as an enemy--prisoner of time, a limiter--or as positive. And personal level or society level?

Could do a family tree/genealogy theme. Or could use the fog of time that obscures things, yet sometimes it's only time that brings true clarity.

Incorporate mirrors (small ones) here and there in the piece, because you can't escape time, it is relentlessly objective, there is no appeal--it shows you what is, no escaping.

Also use an hourglass somewhere, or the shape of one? Could get the sand medium to use on part for "the sands of time" (might be too cliched). Or could do some train tracks somewhere for "the tracks of time". Maybe just do an entire piece using common cliches about time! Ha.

What are the colors of time? Browns, golden, iridescence, sand medium around edges.

What are the patterns of time? circles, spirals (use the new technique just learned with wireworking to make some--could use in the border)

Elements to use:
chains
mesh
mirrors
sepia tone
spirals
words/quote on side running off the edge

Find a quote about time--something that addresses how it imprisons and frees us at the same time.

Could do a progression--distressed at top, progressing down to pristine images--passage of time.

Could make a memento box with tiled top (and sides?)--would have to use all manufactured tiles. Idea from Mixed Media Mosaics.

Shapes of piece:
grandfather clock: a portrait rectangle with a circle hanging below it from a chain (chains of Time).
hourglass: two landscape rectangles with circle in middle
other: square on top, circle in middle, triangle on bottom (could use past, present, future in triangle)

March Challenge Topics

It's my turn to come up with a topic for next month's challenge, and I think I am getting a good list together. It's a little harder since I want to find something that I can produce a finished piece on even with the limitations of our current housing situation (primarily that all my stuff is packed away in the garage in preparation for putting our house on the market!), but I don't want to do another month with me just bringing in sketches and ideas and nothing done.

So far this is what I've got:
transition
home/country
faery
transfer [technique challenge]
writing [incorporate somehow into final piece]
complementary colors on color wheel
triptych
tile [give everyone one to do or use however they wish]
mini canvas + easel

As I look at these, I think that faery is the one most appealing at the moment. It's whimsical, could easily be given many different interpretations, could go into literature for inspiration (A Midsummer Night's Dream!) . . . not sure how I could execute on it but it ought to be doable even with limited tools.

We'll see what else pops into my head over the next week . . .

Being Without

We have spent the last month frantically getting our house ready to go on the market. There hasn't even been headspace to think about any projects, let alone blog about them or explore them in my sketchbook. And now that we are nearly ready and the headlong rush has paused a bit, I find myself at a bit of a loss since all my stuff is packed up in the garage, waiting for a new house and space to come out. I miss all my things, my boxes of beads and charms and ink pads, and wonder how it will feel when I finally get to unpack them. Could be one month, but probably more like two or three, and more if we are unlucky. Fingers crossed for a speedy resolution to the whole process.

I'm finding that since A. and I started this monthly challenge thing, that's all I do (except for making the Christmas cards). That's okay with me right now. It's a function of how much time is available, and with a four-year-old it's still pretty limited.

This month's challenge topic is "experiments". I won't have a finished project to show since all my stuff is packed, but I did get out my new sumi painting set last Wednesday on my birthday and tried a couple of things. One thing I found out is that I had never used a brush to do calligraphy--in the past I've always used a calligraphy pen. I love the way it looks with a brush! And I will try to work that into something soon. Our showing is a week from tonight, and I'd like to do something else but am not sure what. Before all the house stuff started, I had already ordered a miniature chemistry set off of eBay and was going to make a shadowbox, but I just don't think I can do that now. It's too hard to go through boxes to get just what I need and then put it all back up again. I guess I could think it through and set it up, at least. After last month and thinking about what turns something from "craft" into "art" (not that it's important necessarily, I know), we concluded that art definitely involves the personal expression of the artist. So I have tried to think of what I could do with the background to personalize my shadowbox. Maybe use a couple of pictures--the one of my dad as a toddler being held up by his dad to press the doorbell, and print one from last summer with Daddy and Jonathan in the granary with the chemistry set in sepia tone--that might be nice.

In Process with "War" Project

Last weekend I had to attend a mandatory parent seminar at my son's school, and while listening to an extremely enthusiastic person expound on the benefits of kale smoothies and hemp seeds, I started writing about the "war" challenge. Just writing out the idea I had, which was good, but not a spark, really. And then the spark came, and I couldn't write fast enough to get all the thoughts and vision in my head down on the paper. I never thought that would happen to me! And yet there I was, sitting on the third floor of the school building, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do and how to do it. Magical.

Now I'm about a third of the way through, and as plans do, mine is changing. And also, as it usually happens, it is changing because something didn't work out like I thought it would. Turns out it's really NOT possible to collage magazine pictures onto a stretched canvas without them wrinkling . . . at least not the way I did it. But that's getting ahead of myself.

I gessoed an 18x24" stretched canvas twice, then I took strips of bleeding art tissue (Spectrum, available at Teacher Heaven and Jerry's Artarama) and added them on with matte gel medium. I did it in an abstract landscape fashion, with greens and browns at the bottom and blues with a few reds and oranges at the top. Mainly my objective was to have the sides of the frame covered, and it was an opportunity to play and experiment since my plan was to cover the front completely with magazine pictures. I was delighted with how the tissue paper turned out.

My overall idea was to put lots of pictures of the earth in beauty on the collage, following a general landscape layout--rocks and trees on the bottom, oceans and sunsets on top, mountains in the middle. That way when one first glanced at it, the impression would be one of peace and grandeur. But a second glance would reveal that in places the paint was cracking (use crackle paint); I had thought about using the peeled paint technique detailed in Christine Hellmuth's Collage Discovery Workshop in a few places, but since I've never experimented with it before I'm not going to do it for the first time on this piece. So I need to age it a little, not noticeably but somehow, in a couple of other ways. Maybe lightly sand a couple of areas, rub Distress Ink over a couple of bits.

Then what I wanted to do is to place magnifying glasses in various spots on the collage, and the picture in the magnifying glass would be one of the destruction and devastation the human race is waging on the earth--birds covered in oil from a spill, dead coral reefs, clear-cutting in the Amazon rainforest, etc. I thought of tying a single metallic embroidery thread between all the glasses, partly to contribute to the misleading initial impression that it's just about the earth's beauty, but it occurs to me now that it would also bring out the theme that everything on the earth is connected, and sometimes that connection is quite fragile indeed. So maybe I will still find a way to work that in.

The reason I have stopped and haven't done anything for a couple of days now is the wrinkled pictures. It actually gave me a great idea because the wrinkles remind me of one of those relief globes, where the mountains are really raised. Would have been neat to figure out how to do that underneath and then have the pictures on top of that (although I can see that would be tough in practice because the paper wouldn't go on evenly over a raised mini-mountain). But that then led to the idea of getting some small, teeny mountains--and maybe also some forests--from somewhere like a hobby shop that sells that kind of stuff for train sets. Their mountains might be too big for my scale of picture though . . . just not sure what I want to do about this and how to work the wrinkles in. I actually kind of like the wrinkles because it's the beginning of showing that all is not perfection, but I need to make sure it looks purposeful and not just like my pictures wrinkled during the adhering process!

At any rate, I'm having quite a lot of fun with this. I was delighted to find a way to do something on war that wasn't going to be immediately depressing to look at--it can carry a message and be serious, but it's also still pleasing to the eye. Hopefully it will all work out in the end.

What to Do about War

So our topic for the January challenge is "war". No limits--could be conflict on a national level such as the current Israeli/Gaza issue, internal conflict such as that between person and role (self and wife/mother), a battle such as the battle against cancer--anything viewed, I guess, as one force opposing another. That's really what war is on the simplest level--two or more forces in opposition that do not compromise and seek to gain leverage over the other(s).

My challenge especially is going to be how to approach this and make a piece that isn't troubling for me to create and that is still something I wouldn't mind having in my house (along lines of last post about what my personal criteria are for my artwork). And I do think that it would be easy to create a piece on war that is disturbing to look at and hard to make. Perhaps the real challenge is finding a way to do a piece on war that is not personally difficult to create and one that is not something the viewer wishes to turn away from upon seeing it.

Not sure yet on which level I wish to approach this. H., who came up with the topic, said she did so because of what is going on in the Isreali/Palestinian conflict at the moment. I thought of something on WWI, with the poppies and headstones of family members who fought in WWI, but as far as I know I have none and Dale has only one, and that just feels a bit pretentious or saccharine anyway. This afternoon I remembered that last summer I'd had thoughts of doing something to illustrate that continual struggle between self and wife/mother roles, so maybe I'll go back and look at that post if I can find it. The personal war--not to illustrate a resolution, just to acknowledge and give voice to the conflict itself.

I am finding it hard to think about this in a way that doesn't feel fake or self-important. Perhaps this might be a good month to do a couple of different pieces for the challenge to see how each comes out and what I think about them. I don't even know how I want to do anything yet. I could maybe use the ration book I got from Duxford last summer--do heat transfer and put multiple copies on a background . . . it just seems that what comes to mind at the moment is "clever" but not honest somehow. Will keep thinking about it and trusting that I will get through to the honesty.

My Goals for Finished Pieces

The more I think about what to make for my challenge pieces with my local friend, the more I find myself thinking about what I like and do not like in my own finished pieces. Even just thinking about what I'm creating has helped me think differently about the pieces I see in a museum. I think I'm broadening my horizons!

One thing I am definitely becoming certain of is that I am firmly in the mixed-media category. Anything else would bore me, but this offers such a wide variety and the potential to keep learning new skills. I also am increasingly that I want all my pieces to have dimension to them. This began even over a year ago when I was still in my homegrown cardmaking workshop year, learning a different technique for each card I made. Just adhering something with foam tape so that it was on a different level than the rest of the piece was brilliant, I thought, and I am now finding that I am always looking for a way to add some dimension or extend something across a border.

Tonight I was contemplating the piece I'm working on for our "beginnings" challenge. It is certainly my most ambitious and I am not at all certain it's going to work out, but even if it doesn't I should learn something from it, so on at least one level it will be a success. Anyway, I realized that it is a personal requirement of mine that first and foremost, I want what I make to be pleasing to the eye. I'm not sure how to put it in any more exact terms--harmonious? pretty? [no, not that]? But some artists want their work to be disturbing on first glance, and I guess that at least at this point, I'm not one of those people. I want what I make to be something I or anyone would want to look at, something that if glanced upon on one's way from room to room, it would give a smile, a sigh of appreciation/pleasure, something like that.

Secondly, after one has simply found the viewing to be pleasing, I'd like the details of the work to be interesting for those (like myself) who find that intriguing. So there needs to be a backstory or amplification of the work that if explored is also satisfying in some way.

I still find great resistance in myself to having words on my pieces (seems way too twee), but this evening I read about Soul Soup and loved some of her poetry that is on her paintings. So maybe sometime in the next two or three months, I will add my own personal stipulation to our monthly challenge that I have to include words on my piece. It would be good for me!