Category: Art

The reason art matters to me is because it tells a story.  And I’m a story teller at heart.  At a young age, I was captivated by stories about my family.  At work, the essence of my job is to tell stories.  So I don’t suppose it’s any surprise that I’m captivated by art as a way of telling a story.

I rarely write as part of a piece of art.  But I love the concept of found words — scraps of text that float around on my art table, torn for backgrounds or other purposes until suddenly, at just the right moment, the right words magically show up in front of me.  That seems to happen a lot, especially as I struggle to find my own voice in my artwork.  I want my art to be my story, my words.

ncreasingly, I find that this struggle for authenticity has become easy.  As much as I love Claudine Hellmuth’s
clean, pretty lines, or DJ Pettitt’s soulful women, I could never make the kind of art they make.  My art is a reflection of me — I work, almost subconsciously, in a sort of artist’s daze, and when a piece is done, it’s a bit like waking up, coming back to my conscious self.  My artwork invariably looks like, well, my artwork.  Even when I try to have simple, spartan lines, my artwork is a little bit messy, obscure, full of layers and obscure portions.  It’s my story.

It’s funny that I’ve spent much of the past year worrying, even obsessing, about finding my own voice and making my own art, because it’s been here all along.  I couldn’t escape from it even if I wanted to.

I’m a great believer in subconscious messages, even in receiving messages from the universe.  So I believe this was meant for me:  a little scrap, left behind on my studio table, which suddenly caught me eye.  It’s my message for the new year, a message of promise and of hope and of happiness.  It read, "always remember what is your own…"

It has become this, my new year’s gift and wish for all of you.

Happy New Year!

Today was a day set aside for relaxation and art — my favorite kind of day.  With background music provided by the Judge and Ellie, who played her new autoharp, I put together a basket of supplies in my trashed beyond belief all belief soon to be reorganized studio and brought them upstairs so I could hang out with everyone while I played.

This week’s theme at Wednesday Stamper is an open theme, so I decided to work on a little folded book I’ve been prepping for the last few weeks.  It’s made from a serious of small canvases that have been hinged together, and I had used tones of white and beige to give each "page" a uniform look.

This is the cover page, which is titled "You Cannot Always See Their Wings."

The only other page I finished today — I worked on lots of bits and pieces here and there — is this page.

You can click on the pictures below to see just the tag, the tag back, and the background page with the tag removed.

All of this art made Ollie want to paint, so I pulled out my watercolors for him, and we sat down on the floor, he painting and me rubber stamping on a painted canvas. At some point, we became inspired to paint on the stamps and stamp with them, and got really beautiful, watercolor images.  This made me wonder why I had never tried it before, as the images were really wonderful.

I realized why I hadn’t done it before, when Ollie pulled out a new stamp and I watercolored on it, only to have the paint bead up and refuse to make an image.  It was stamping and then painting on the stamp without cleaning it off that made the watercolor paint take to the stamp.

So there you have it, my serendipitous discovery of a new technique as a holiday present to all of you!  The stamp pad I was using happened to be a Brilliance pad in platinum — I’m not sure if the type of pad makes a difference.  Here is an example to give you the idea.

I also got a cool sort of resist image, by watercoloring on a page, and then taking a dry stamp and sort of twisting it on the page.

I love how the page says "paper doll friends at last" at the top and am sure I’ll be cutting this one up to use in a collage.  I could also see using both of these techniques in the book for altered books — if you play with it just a little bit you’ll find that it is very easy, and gives consistent, predictable results.

If you end up playing with this technique, please show it on your blog or picture trail, and link to it in the comments so I can check it out!   

I’m still behind the eight ball, technology-wise, with a scanner hooked up to a computer that won’t talk to the internet.  So, I’m playing catch-up tonight, showing you all my art from the week, after burning the scans to a disc and bringing them to my laptop.  (I think I need a knight in shining armor to come fix the computer).

First off, I had Susie LaFond’s beautiful house shaped pocketful round robin book to work in this week.  Just deciding which page to work on was a challenge, because Susie did a crackle finish on her house-shaped pages, and they were very intriguing.

I finally did this for the front of my page.

I incorporated my favorite diamond shaped stamp in this piece, making it my piece for this week’s Wednesday Stamper challenge, as well.  The collage of the girl sits inside the pocket.  Here is the entire collage.

While I was working on this collage I heard that they had finally found the bodies of the Russian Tsarovich and one of his sisters, perhaps Anastasia, and the words popped into my head, forcing me to rumage through my current cut up book (one that had its binding chewed beyond recognition by bad-doggie) until I found them.

With the collage out, the pocket looks like this.

And here is the back of the page.  Susie’s crackle finish was absolutely wonderful to work on top of!

I also worked on the envelope rr’s this week, both the regular one and the valentines one.  A certain artist who will remain unnamed but who knows who she is, is incredibly prolific and it is not uncommon for three envelopes to show up in one day.  I absolutely love the freedom of working on this format in an unaffected, spontaneous fashion.  I’m really a background person — I like to work my backgrounds to death, so it’s a challenge for me to look at this as an exercise in composition without thinking about things like the overall background development.

Here are some of my favorites from this week.

This is Vicki’s envelope.  It arrived with the man, who I viewed as some sort of renaissance cleric or government official looking pointedly away from the woman in her crown.  The beautiful briar rose, which seemed to carry out the theme from that period was there as well, along with an all over background patterning in white with some red stamps of row houses.

I really wanted to create a connection between the two people on the envelope.  After trying out lots of different possibilities, I settled on the three eggs and the butterfly.  I’ll leave it to you to decide what it conveys and what the relationship between them is, but I was really happy with the outcome.

Vicki’s valentines envelope, on the other hand, was an exercise in frivolity.  I loved it and my addition is the five pink circles, made from micro-beads, which I hope will hold up on the envelope’s travels.

The last picture I have for you is Jood’s very whimsical envelope.  I have a hard time breaking away from my vintage ways, and didn’t go very far afield here, but I like how my little Paper Whimsy image works and how the stripes I made from cut up text play against the diamonds on the right hand side of the envelope.

That’s all of my art for this week.  I hope you enjoyed it.  My studio is an absolute disaster and I’m going to have to start contemplating a clean up as soon as Ellie’s Nutcracker performances are over.  It’s so bad I think I would almost do better to bulldoze it and start over!