Grab and GO!

I continue to grab what's at hand and then just GO!

Today I grab the 1927 Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary originally owned by Mrs. Carr Brackett of Monhegan Island, much later available for the taking at some kind of help-yourself clearing out of books somewhere on the island (perhaps set on a table in front of Monhegan's L. Brackett & Son grocery?), picked up by artist Judy Caldwell, and generously given to me by Judy when we painted together one summer morning.

I tear out a page, grab my Sharpie chisel-tip marker, and I'm off and running. I have a loose 'plan,' a plan that has an intended end 'product' and an intention to go where the painting takes me in the making.

grab-and-go work in progress

The Other Half of Another Then and Now

Again, I play with an old piece from nearly four years ago, a piece whose other half recently became a birthday card while this half becomes a postcard to send to my dad. Alone in my studio, I get completely lost in the textured richness of creating a tiny world on a few square inches of paper. I confess I will feel a little tug of loss when I place it in my mailbox to begin its journey away from me to Maine. Away though it will go, I will cherish and hold onto the little gift of gain that comes from becoming aware of how much making I have done in the past four years—I am delighted by the ways in which the get-messy exploration of those years infuses itself into this revised piece.

A Sequestered Saturday Morning
4 x 6"; acrylic, oil pastel, and collage on drawing paper,
mounted on card stock
abstract
2020 upgrade of a 2016 piece