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.