boxes, boxes, boxes

(Last blog post: Oct 22, 2013...)

My friend and amazing artist Terry Grant gets the credit for this blog waking up again. She tagged me as a link in a blogging chain focusing on the creative process. I have been following her blog for a couple of years, and find it delightful. It is an added plus that she knew my mother in their fabric artist world.

A bit of summer whimsy from mom at the side here.

 What inspires me the most is deadlines. Real ones, not the ones I create for myself. I am the queen of procrastination; this blog, for instance, was "due" yesterday, so I am already a day late. I googled the causes for procrastination, and discovered I have a fear of failure and am worried about being perfect.

I will have to think about that; it doesn't feel like a nail being hit on the head.

But deadlines are inspirational. I would be a bit embarrassed to let Terry down. I try to not commit myself willy nilly because of this chance of embarrassment. Mostly I choose a deadline that challenges me a bit beyond my comfort zone, but not so much that all the fun is lost in the commitment. I work full time, and volunteer here and there, so time is of essence.

The focus of my work these days is simply to create a studio space. In the past, it was a dining room table. Although I have the table still, I do not have the dining room. Even better, I have a new little house that has a family room that will become my studio. I naively thought this move in process would take weeks instead of the months it has become.

Here we are a few weeks into moving in...still boxes boxes boxes.

Studio Cat checks out the new area...

Verrry frustrating. I unpack and still find more STUFF.
I think it they multiply over night.

And last weekend I baptized the workspace by actually working in it....

I took a weekend workshop from Yukimi Annand, which was about making calligraphic marks in a textural way. I wanted to stretch myself beyond legible text, to text with feeling in the line and composition.

We used unusual tools to make marks; my favorite was a wisteria pod.

Can you read my text? Of course not, so I will read it for you:

Oh, for the wings of a dove, for then I would fly away and be at rest.

It is purely personal; I do not even know why that phrase keeps cropping up when I write, but it has been doing so for years. I suspect it is a desire for my life to be different than it is, to be peaceful and restful. When I am working on my art, I am close.

just pictures, no words

Just words, no pictures

Time flies whether you are having fun or not,
so you might as well have fun.

A year has gone by from my first blog post, and although I have not kept to my commitment of one post a month, I am grateful for what I did manage to write. I have a few blogs that I follow, and I am constantly amazed at both the quality of writing and the frequency. How do they do that?

Today finds me exactly where I was a year ago: getting ready for the Open Studios tour. My life has been busy in the last 365 days, and even hard, but here I am. Anniversaries are a good time to pause and reflect, so I have been doing a lot of that amidst the window washing and clutter removal. The two processes help each other move along.

I am helping my dad get ready for the tour as well. He is at a point where the camera is almost too heavy to hold, and that is a sad thing. But having this chance to show his work has kept him going, in spite of the multiple hospital visits, lack of mobility, and constant doctor appointments. I am glad we have this project to do together.

In the last few months, during all those glorious summer days, I did not get much time in the studio. Life has a way of making your agenda for you. I did not go camping or hiking either, or make jam, or write a blog. What I DID do was make some difficult decisions and changes that are still in process, and am confident that they were the right direction to go. All my time, energy and emotions went there. 

So it is both comforting and encouraging to be getting ready for another Open Studio, anticipating seeing my sisters and friends, and sharing what I do with anyone who walks through the front door. This year I will have a project for those who want to try their hand at bookbinding; the preparation for that has got me so fired up that I can't sleep tonight. Aarg! It's 3 am! Life LAUGHS as it rearranges your agenda.




 

Dishes in the sink

Someone asked me recently what is the best part I like about my art. Of course my first response is ALL OF IT, but as I was working a bit today, I realized that is not true. I do not like having to do things over and over, much along the same lines as laundry and dishes. It feels great when it's done, but in the meantime, it is such a drag. No satisfaction in cutting out the same paper over and over again, but it was really fun figuring out which paper to use, what size it should be, and how it should all fold together.

When I make a book, I usually think about how I could reproduce it. Sometimes it just is not feasible. But I like to make more than one if I can, mostly because I spent so much time in the planning and design. Why not make a dozen?

Because, dear reader, it becomes a lot like doing the dishes.
I have learned that a more realistic number for me is 4 or 5 before I become miserable.


Once I was part of a book exchange with 15 other eager book artists, and boy was that torture. I got mine done the day they were due. It was a great party, though. 
Still, only 5 of the 15 were up to another exchange.

So where I am today is reproducing a book that I made this spring. I found a great quote about stars by Van Gogh that instantly made me think of the images I had seen at the Washington County Museum taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I knew that somehow they belonged together, Vincent and Hubble. 

The result is a flag book, an invention by Hedi Kyle, which is a deceptively simple structure using an accordion fold to support alternating "flag" pages. The trick is to fold and cut accurately, or you end up with a book that won't function properly. It's a fun and whizzy book to make, even with kids, so try one out.

Van Gogh and Hubble lead me to looking up images of stars in space, playing with images of Van Gogh's work, deciding on what script to use, decorating paper, planning

how it would all unfold, even writing and rewriting the calligraphed part over and over again until I had it "right"...

But before I put it all together, I made some quality copies and here is me making 5 more, which I plan to have done for the Artists' Shop at the Book Arts conference in a week:

You can see I get a lot of help from the studio cat.
And you can't see, but there are dirty dishes in the sink.

A bad day in the studio is better than a good day with housework.

Dear Diary

I knew this would happen: I would commit to writing once a month and then find I have nothing I want to write about. 
Dear Diary, nothing much happened today. Love, Me.

Of course many things are happening; my father has been in and out of the hospital, my day job has been very busy, I moved The Tiger's Whisker from one exhibit to another and went to both receptions, I accepted the position to direct the 2015 Focus on Book Arts conference, I have been helping put together the Washington County Open Studios tour, I got my hair cut. 

So, let's go down the list.
Dad. Major bladder infection which stressed out his heart, and he was in the hospital for 5 days. Once home, the antibiotics gave him the runs. Today for my weekly visit he wanted to go out, which was encouraging, but then he was too weak to get into the car safely. This concerns me on many levels.


On the flip side, there was a beautiful patio garden on the cardio floor of the hospital which I needed to visit several times, and it inspired my husband to start fixing our arbor on our deck and inspired me to go get a plant I saw there. We have a unpleasant view of our neighbor's house on one side, and I have been trying to find a plant that would be tall, but not too tall, very narrow,  and have multi season interest. Answer: columnar barberry. The birds can feast on the blueberries in the summer and the barberries in the winter. 

There is not a lot I can say about my day job other than my feet hurt.

Peace: The Tiger's Whisker received the "People's Choice" award in the Portland Society for Calligraphy Spring Show, which did not make my feet feel better, but sure made me happy. It now lives at The Focus on Book Arts exhibit is at the Washington County Museum, and it is rubbing elbows with quite a number of beautiful handmade books. It is an exciting exhibit. Here is a spread from Vivacious Versals, another book I have in the show:

Laurie Weiss has directed the last five Book Arts Conferences, and she will be a tough act to follow. Actually, her leadership has inspired me a lot in putting together the Open Studio tours. She and the whole team will be supportive, so I am only very anxious indeed instead of extremely anxious. 

Oh, my, this is sounding too much like a diary.
And then I got my hair cut.

Why is a haircut in this list? Because the last time I got it cut, and it looked like the same old haircut I always get, I vowed I would not cut it again until I decided on what to do that would be different. That was over two years ago. I also quit coloring it then, because my mom had just died, and I found many things pointless. So I had gray hag hair.

Lucky me, I have a daughter who said, "let's go get our hair cut at the beauty school together" and any date with her is fun, so I said yes. Again lucky me, asymmetrical cuts and extreme A-lines are "in", so that is where I am at with my hair.
And it makes me look a bit like my mom.

My cat thinks he is a tiger

The Tiger's Whisker is finished! It was a technical challenge throughout, from the choice of calligraphy, the use of new materials, to a new kind of book form to learn. I spent a great deal of time looking at old scrolls on the internet--Chinese, Japanese, and Korean--and reading about processes to make them. I knew that I could not make something in the traditional manner, but wanted it to have the feel of the old scroll manuscripts. The biggest obstacle was the calligraphy, since English is written horizontally and the beautiful brush writing is written vertically.

I settled on narrow columns of text, to give an implied vertical, and modified humanist bookhand into a monoline script, which to my eye has a less European-based feel. 

This is a sample of bookhand:

Here is a sample of the 

modification I used: 

It was a effort to keep the writing consistent throughout the piece. I thought that if I wrote it all in one sitting (with several breaks) that it would be uniform, but my hand and eyes got so tired that it became difficult to write at all, even with the breaks and my faithful studio dog cheering me on as she hogged the space heater.




The book will be on display along with other Portland Society of Calligraphy work in the Library at Marylhurst College April 4-30th.

This is my cat, who modeled for the Tiger.

Tell me a story

A few weeks ago, my daughter shared with me a story she had read online in The Smithsonian about a family in Russia who had fled to the wilderness to escape persecution, and were "discovered" years and years later. The parents by then were elderly and they had acquired four children in their life of living away from anything and everyone; they knew nothing of the events in the world around them. It was fascinating and sad at the same time.
What did they do for entertainment, I wondered, knowing that most waking hours were spent in basic survival. Apparently, they told each other accounts of their dreams.

I think that this is so insightful about the strength of our need to tell stories. Somehow it is part of our human-ness. It is a small leap, I realized, from sharing dreams with the only half-dozen other people one knows to exist to sharing dreams with an anonymous millions of people on a blog. It is mind boggling.
Suddenly, blogs and facebook and dare-I-say-it twitters and tweets fit into an ancient tradition of story telling, and I GET IT.

I am working on a book right now that is a Korean folktale, and what I find fun is that because it IS an folk story, I can retell it in my own words. This is important because I am writing the text in calligraphy, and I would like it to be as short as possible, and because I have a specific message that I want to convey. There were so many versions of this tale, and they all seemed to emphasize a slightly different point. I wanted to make this be the third book I am making in my "Elements of Peace" series, so I focused on what the story could do further that concept.

As it turns out, "The Tiger's Whisker" covers several elemental components of being a peacemaker. Facing fear, determination, patience, acceptance...I leave it to the viewer to glean what is the element that speaks to them.

The book will be in a scroll style, and I have just completed the illustration that will be revealed as the story is unrolled. I spent a lot of time looking at old scroll images on the internet, and then decided that since I didn't have time to learn the ancient art of  sumi wash painting, I just needed to plunge in. So the result is my nod to the many wonderful painters from Asia who with a few brushstrokes could show you an entire landscape, mist included.

I will tell  the plan behind the calligraphy another time.

This is my blog. This is my story. It doesn't even matter if someone is listening.