Collaboration

Elizabeth Gilbert has this to say:

The only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human's efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual. Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners.

The teeniest little snippet of a stenciling demo posted by Jacqui Beck on Instagram swirled around me, searching. I was available, willing, off to experiment.

experimenting

Giddy

I continue flitting and whirling and skittering from one exploration to another. I am besotted with creating bare bones and then poking around to see where I might take the shapes and lines and connections that have emerged in front of me.

Bare bones.

Bare bones plus watercolor paints.

Made Giddy by the Brilliant Cacophonous Sunshine 4.5 x 6"; ink, watercolors, oil pastel, and acrylic on drawing paper abstract landscape 2022

Noodled by Doodling

I'm eager to research neurographica more fully and put into words what I learn, but right now I'm way too busy creating neurographica to research neurographica. I confess I am thoroughly noodled by doodling at the moment, totally hooked by the calming effects of rounding corners and the intriguing challenges of working within the given parameters of the form—no room in my brain for anything else.

In my first foray into this art form, I used markers for the color element. In today's exploration, colored pencils.

I Wander for the Sake of Wandering
4.5 x 6"; ink and colored pencil on drawing paper
abstract
2022

Smoothing Rough Edges

Wendy! Thank you for thinking of me when a friend of yours introduced you to the concept of neurographica, also called neurographic art.

More later on neurographica and what it is. 

For now, just two tidbits:

1. I made my first foray with granddaughters Caroline and Emmy over the weekend. 

Such a sweet time we had as we created side by side—sitting together at a table, simple art supplies strewn about us and changing hands repeatedly; companionable chatter, companionable stretches of silence, and companionable laughter filling the air waves.

2. Neurographica involves using your marker to round off all corners that occur in the intersecting lines of your doodle, a step taken with the body that smooths psychological rough edges. The best!

Gma's first foray

Caroline's first foray

Emmy's first foray

The Unexpected in the Intentional

I'm basking in bright, higher-in-the-sky-everyday sunlight streaming right now through a skylight onto my face.

I'm also basking in the unexpected that pops up out of the intentional when I paint. 

The intentional: I can't bear to wash away even a small bit of unused paint when I'm working in my studio so I very intentionally make use of it one way or another. Recently, I've been skittering from one project to another, playing with multiple tiny-art projects and one 36 x 36" canvas that's nearly finished. As I work on the tiny art, I inevitably end up with a bit of extra paint in my brush or on my palette and tiny paintings that would become overworked if I subjected them to any more paint. What I've ended up doing several times is taking the extra paint and finding a place for it in my evolving 36 x 36.

The unexpected: If not for the intent to waste no paint, I would never think to purposely use many of the colors I've been offloading to the 36 x 36, but I am bewitched and gladdened by the surprise of how that painting is coming alive.

detail, work in progress
unexpected pops of periwinkle!

Still Skittering

 Still having fun.

work in process, fourth pass

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partial history:

third pass

Anything Goes

I'm grateful for the times when (a) I know I'm in search of something, (b) I don't know what, (c) I trust I'll know when I find it, and (d) I do!

A newsletter from artist Carol Nelson announced last week that she'd created an Anything Goes Project as a challenge for myself and other procrastinators to produce one painting per day during the month of April.

I haven't produced a painting per month of late, let alone one per day. But I sat up and took notice. I knew I'd found something I'd been restless to discover.

The fact that the announcement didn't even reach my inbox until April was already half over was somehow perfect! 

I find myself skittering all over the place—adding touches to my 36 x 36" canvas in process, starting something else on a half sheet of drawing paper the next day but not returning to it the day after that, cutting up old starts from months ago, leapfrogging back to something after five days to muck about with it again, and so forth. It's a haphazard approach, but (a) I'm getting to my studio to paint daily, and … (b) anything goes! 

I haven't been this active nor this unfettered in a way long time.

work in process, third pass

5.5 x 8.5"; acrylic and collage on drawing paper

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history thus far:

first pass

second pass

My Happy Place

Put my paper trimmer into action again today, chopped another segment from a January start, and headed to my happy place of making a bookmark. Making bookmarks never grows old!

Please laugh with me, though. For a confluence of reasons, over the past nearly two years, I began reading via audiobooks and ebooks almost entirely, something I would never have predicted. Let's just look at the data for the past 100 books I've gobbled up: only four were physical books.

I barely use physical bookmarks anymore!

Still, I am in my happy place every single time I paint a bookmark or use one from my collection.

All of the World's Weightiest Questions
Have Passed Through These Rooms
2 x 6" bookmark; acrylic, ink, and collage on paper,
mounted on cardstock
abstract
2022

 

Organic Randomness

Way back in January I poke around with color and stenciling on paper one afternoon, experimenting lightly with this and that, soon moving on to countless other undertakings both in and out of my studio.

I bump into that page of play off and on. I move it absentmindedly from one place to another in my studio to clear the way for other projects. In a recent studio clean-up, I accord it a more intentional space in a drawer where it can hang out companionably with other starts. 

Then, no sooner do I give it a designated space than do I pull it out again, lifting it today from the drawer up to my paper trimmer where I turn it face-side down to allow for organic randomness as I cut the start into several smaller pieces.

One of which becomes a birthday card!

Deep in Inner Space, Extraordinary Knowing

3 x 3.5"; acrylic and collage on paper,

mounted on card stock

abstract

2022

These Littlest of Pointers

 So much gratitude when I notice the littlest things: 

    • the miniature tchotchke Meg gave me years ago—a half-inch-high wooden planter holding tiny faux sprigs of pussywillow perched on my desk beside a miniature wooden bench on which two dollhouse figures sit smiling at me;

    • garlic bulbs whose leaves are nosing out of our side garden;

    • a patch of sunlight created by the skylight over my workspace, framing the 120-year-old pine floorboards in the study where I sit typing;

    • the blades of grass sprouting on the canvas in my studio.

These littlest of pointers open my heart in nearly imperceptible increments to a grand sense of mystery. 

work in progress,
little pointers to life in my studio

As the World Turns

I sit in the living room of my grandparents' home in Connecticut as a child of maybe seven years. An ironing board is set up in front of a television. My grandmother's part-time housekeeper, Bertha, presses a hot iron to dampened cloth, creates hisses of responding steam, and brings each item of clothing to crisp wrinkle-free majesty while I am simultaneously introduced for the first time to a soap opera, As the World Turns. 

As the world turns, and turn it does, change is the name of the game. As 'my' bit of this world has turned, a year has now passed since my last 'routine' overnight visit to hang out with my dad in his home in Maine. An emotional touchpoint. So many changes.

detail, work in progress
one change after another as I move along

Toe Pleat

From Without a Map, a memoir by Meredith Hall:

My mother teaches me a lot … 

She tells me I make lovely hospital corners on the beds. But once, watching me change my brother's bed, she scolds me as I lay the top sheet out, smooth and tight. 

"Meredy, a man likes to have room for his feet. You always make a pleat for him like this." She draws the sheet into a ten-inch fold at the foot of the bed, then tucks it in tight. 

"See? You don't need to bother with this on your bed, but you need to learn how to make a man's bed."*

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How has this lesson never been presented to me before now, me with my husband who kicks a rough tent space for his feet every night and complains every time I pull the covers taut??!

What else do I not know that is hiding in plain sight?

detail, work in progress;
maybe it needs a pleat?

*Damned if I can figure out or find helpful info online as to how to actually make such a pleat.