Still Tweaking

I thought it was time for a change here, what with the fresh breezes of autumn clearing out the squirrelly parts of my mind. Time for a new phase of the blog, one marked by some cleaner design with more emphasis on the artwork, and a clean up of some clutter that I thought were necessary when I first started blogging nearly a year ago. The redesign isn't done and I have to admit I'm very frustrated by my inability to go the distance and use MoveableType, which is would give me the look I really want. I'm a total dweeb and have to stick to the templates, having no clue or time to learn how to write HTML. I hope to have it all done in a day or two, as soon as I can clear off the table and get to the scanner!

The photos are of the first artist book that I made. The book is a total flight of whimsy, a story of young lovers and a magical journal that falls out of a tree hit by lightning 300 years later. I didn't know how to make an artist book (and thought there had to be one, right way); I didn't know how to bind a book; and I'd never done an art project like it before. I had a drift of a story stuck in my mind of lovers living in eighteenth century England, and arranged marriages and death and magic and a young woman learning the power of her art.

I began with the art, filling tiny tags with imagery of bugs and beetles and butterflies, and little bits of moss and sticks covered with lichen, and flecks of gold leaf and gilded wax. I painted papers with layers of acrylics and gesso, creating the look of leather on watercolor paper. I aged handmade paper, staining it with tea and dirt, then writing out the letters between the lovers, which I tied up with twine and sealed with sealing wax. I bound the book with a simple wrap around cover held together with a ribbon binding, added trinkets that I'd collected for some reason over the years, and sent it off to Somerset Studio for possible submission.

I had never submitted anything for publication before and didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing. They accepted it and sent me a note that it was one of the best pieces they'd ever received for their "Storyteller" feature. I walked around in a dream for several days and bought most of the copies they had for sale in the city of Memphis.

Since then, I've had many pieces published in that magazine and others, but somewhere along the way I'd strayed from telling stories in my artwork and lost the whimsy and fancy of my first attempt. This summer, I got the feeling of butterflies back in my stomach when I began painting with gouache and after two months, began to see images that I could vaguely define as paintings appear on the paper. If I had the time, I'd be signing up for a class this fall, but I can't manage it this fall, but that may be a good thing. I still hold a paintbrush like a magic wand, not sure how to control it, sometimes feeling like I'm dragging it through dust, sometimes feeling like magic is pouring out of the brush. Some days it's enough to mix colors and make up palettes of juicy bits; other days I'm intent on getting some image stuck in a corner of my mind down on the page. I want to keep this feeling of magic, before I begin to learn the “rules” and “do’s and don’ts” of painting and have the wonder ground out of it.

So this fall, look for more stories being told here, stories told in paint and paper, as I remember how good that red, ripe pomegranate feels in my hand.