A Beautiful Circle Begins

Sometimes a project comes along that is a "must-do", an opportunity that is sure to fill one's life with lessons, laughter, and in this case, lots of art! Awhile back, I proposed a circle journal exchange to my dear sweet friend, Kelly. Kelly has not only been a wise, kind shoulder to lean on through my health challenges but an amazing artistic muse. My painting will never be the same after having had the pleasure of seeing her work in person through a variety of swaps. If there was anyone that I wanted to do a circle journal with, Kelly was it. Can you tell I'm a huge fan?!Well, now is the time and we are moving forward with this project! I am so excited! I've been zigzagging canvas pages, stitchin' on stars, slinging paint and rockin' the house with 80s music while I prepare my journal. There's no set theme, just two gals working in a pair of raw canvas journals that will circle in and out of our lives and studios over the next few months. This photo shows the journal I'll be tossing into the ring and the cover as it stands at this very moment. I may play with it some more but I am stepping back for a while, letting it rest in my head before I throw too much at it and ruin what I've got. Look for scans of more pages from this journal throughout the week as I prepare for the first mailing.

Balancing Act

Here's another page from my "World Within" journal featuring Traveling Tallulah who, this time, has free-wheeled her way onto an airbourne tightrope. This girl does love to travel! I dug this page out of the archives of August 2006 because, as all good things and thoughts do, the message on this page has come back around to the forefront of my brain in these past few weeks. With the upcoming school year and art shows, the job of singlehandedly raising my teenage son and my ongoing health issues, I have to find balance in each and every day. It is critical to my physical, emotional, and mental well-being but it is not always an easy thing to discover for oneself. Tallulah seems to do just fine...maybe it's the outfit. Hmmm...where does she shop?

Pink Dream

This one is for pink lovers and girly girls everywhere! I do bounce around, don't I? LOL From surreal to sweet, that's me lately. After the wrist fusion in March of 2008, I was faced with relearning everything and retraining my hand to do the simplest tasks. In physical therapy, I started out by just working my hand into a fist that could hold something. Luckily, after much pre-surgery research, I had requested that my surgeon fuse my wrist at a slight fifteen degree angle so making a fist is easier. As things gradually progressed and got moving again, I tried a little bit of everything, every material and tool I could think of in order to retrain my hand how to hold and use what I needed to be an artist. Since I couldn't (and still can't) stay with one activity or motion too long without causing pain, I move from project to project so I can work longer (and with less backlash) than if I tried to pound out 20 of the same thing in a day. I have several "stations" set up throughout the house, upstairs and downstairs, so I can continually change what I ask of my hand. It results in quite a hodgepodge of completed projects (and a bevy of uncompleted ones) but it seems to work for me. Pretty good since that the surgeon originally told me my art career would be over after this surgery. Ha! Take that, stodgy medical establishment!

Anyway, after this piece receives a protective (and yummy-smelling) coat of beeswax, it will be available in my Etsy shop.

Escape the Cages

It's Wednesday and time for a new challenge over at Three Muses. The word of the week is surreal and that pretty much describes every page in this journal, including this new page. I have just about ten journals in varying stages of completion and just in the last few days, I have revisited this one, thumbing through its pages and catching up with an old friend. Some have asked why I have so many journals going at once and the answer is twofold: If one page needs to dry, I can work on something else and two, I love to compartmentalize. Daily diary stuff in one, red & black art in another, collage style in yet another. In an altered atlas, I've created a storybook journal where I use make-believe characters and their tales to tell things about my own thoughts, dreams, and experiences. One journal is entirely for illustrated quotes and there's one devoted to all my health issues. The journal page I've shown here is also full of characters that I use to represent various parts of my conscious and sub-conscious self. I do a lot of self-affirmations in my journals, reminding myself to dream, believe, hope, strive, and fly free. We all have those nasty little inner critics living in our brains, whispering mean commentary on our lives. My journals give the nurturing, positive side of me a voice and they give my creative side a soft place to land. I've been journaling fairly regularly for about six years and I can't imagine my life without them.

Just Taking My Bushbaby for a Walk

Tomorrow, the new challenge over at the Three Muses blog will be "surreal" and so I'm jumping the gun just a tad but this hot-off-the-presses journal page seems to fall under that particular category. I've started work in this journal again...if you're curious, the entire journal, called "My World Within" is available to view over at my Flickr site. I haven't worked in this journal since before my wrist surgery as it is highly detail (and thus fine-motor) oriented. However, I blew off the dust and managed this page featuring one of my journal alter egos, Traveling Tallulah, who has decided to take her best bud, Bushbaby Jane, out for a stroll to soak up some vitamin D and chase away the blues. Sounds like the perfect prescription to me!

Faith

Feeling restless in the studio...I'm all over the place, playing around in different journals, working on a painting here and there, trying to unearth my focus. I have a ton of stuff to do in the next two months and it feels like time is slipping through my fingers. Where has the year gone? On top of everything, my 40th birthday is looming. Talk about time slipping away...hmmm...is this what a mid-life crisis feels like? I am super-duper excited about all I have going on and coming up, no question about that. Maybe it is just the amount of stuff that I have on my plate. I am used to being this busy but sometimes I forget to breathe and to have faith that everything will fall into place. Faith...oooh...that's the toughest part. That's the part where I let go and let destiny take over after all my hard work. Oy! Letting go! That's pretty tough too. Ok, maybe it is just this life thing in general that is hard but all in all, I seem to do alright. "Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark." I'm the little bird, heart and soul bursting with song. And, metaphorically at least, it's dark here...not pitch black...but hazy, foggy, unclear. Time to let those songs loose and trust in the simple fact that the sun will rise.

Into the Gale

Over at Three Muses, the challenge for the week is "Up, Up, and Away." I haven't had time yet this week to generate a brand-spanking new entry for the challenge so I present a journal page I completed some time ago as a tip of the hat to a great topic. (I love themes that haven't been done a gazillion times.) This particular character is Traveling Tallulah and she appears many times over in this particular journal, always with a odd conveyance of some kind. She represents that part of me who longs to travel beyond my boundaries, both external and internal. I love thinking up new ways for her to get from point A to point B. Come to think of it...I haven't visited Tallulah or this journal in some time (there are so many). I must make an appointment with this particular muse and see what develops.

Hope is the Thing & A Winner Too!

Here's another in my new "Little Ladies, Big Thoughts" series...this one has decided to live with me as it is one of my all-time favorite poems (and poets for that matter.) For me, everything about this piece came together in just the right way and that is a rare thing.

In other ramblings, I have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. You'll find my Twitter feed to right in my blog sidebar. I sort of think it is just one more thing to keep updated but maybe someone out there wants to keep tabs on the life of an artist, teacher, single mom, daughter, sister, overall crazy person. My lone follower at this moment in time is my brother who can call and talk to me any time so go figure! We'll see how long I ride the Tweet train...it is oddly addicting!

And I just came back from random.org where I inputed numbers 1 through 11 to represent the 11 comments I received on my 100th post...and the winner of the mixed media piece is...NUMBER 11! That's Lyn Green (aka Lacy's mom)! Congratulations and thank you so very, very much to everyone who stopped by to celebrate with me! Your sweet comments are deeply appreciated! There's more giveaways in the Post's future so stay tuned!

More Beautiful Messes

In happy, happy news, I found out that in the fall I will be teaching art three days a week instead of one at my son's school! I've taught at this small charter school for three years now and I am so excited as this spells an expansion of my role as artist-in-residence and since my classes will run the course of the entire school year (instead of a semester at a time,) I will have much more time to help the kids make beautiful messes.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, I will have 15 to 20 high school students for a class exploring Hispanic and Spanish art (Latin American & Spanish art was my emphasis for my art history minor.) I've already worked on the syllabus for this class which will include a brief introduction to an artist and then an art project inspired by that artist's work. In this class, we'll study Mexican graphic artist Jose Posada and carve our own stamps. We'll create fantasy landscapes in water soluble oil pastels using Argentine artist Xul Solar as inspiration, create cubist self-portraits after studying Pablo Picasso, make mini mixed media quilts in honor of Frida Kahlo and finally, complete a paneled mural after studying about Diego Rivera and the Mexican Mural Movement.

On Fridays, I will have 33 middle school students! These guys are studying geography all year so although I have yet to write things in stone, I believe we will study an artist or artistic technique from each of the continents (excepting Antartica). There are so many fabulous artists to choose from and so little time! At the end of the school year, this school always takes a school trip that sums up what they've learned during the year and 2010 will be no exception. The students will be spending a week in San Francisco, practicing their geography and navigating skills throughout the city, eating foods from different cultures, and visiting art museums.

I am so honored to be able to contribute to a school that is refusing to cut their art program in these tough economic times but is, instead, expanding it! Hooray for going against the current!

Mr. Peacock is Complete

OK, the picture is a little dark around the edges and the iridescent paint caught and held the light from the flash but this is as good as I could get...this is a rather large painting for me - 2 feet by 3 feet - but yay! I managed to finish it! It features a popular quote from Rumi - "Let the beauty you love be what you do." I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it other than adorn my walls. Most pieces need to live with me for a bit anyway before I can send them out into the world. I've been doing quite a few bird paintings (see my Etsy shop) and I'm tossing around a show concept called "Souls in Flight." My show venue in October is large enough to accomodate two separate shows should I choose to go that route but oy! The canvas! I need to buy stock in a stretched canvas company, I swear. Guess I'd better decide soon as the fall seems to be coming up fast!