Thanks to John D. Rockefeller....

I have told the story so often about John D Rockefeller, Jr. assuring that the view from the Cloisters area would always be of the Palisades only, not of buildings.  According to the Times today, that may not always be so.  I have benefited from Rockefeller's foresight, when I look across the river, as I do every day, I see the Palisades and the George Washington Bridge.  The view is one I treasure. To be able to see the Hudson River water flowing both ways (it is a tidal estuary still up this far so it reflects the tides) and the snow on the rockface across the river and even the green of summer over there, although winter is much, to me, more beautiful, is something I treasure. 


 

 

 

 

Ok, so a small case of OCD has resulted in this.....

This is a second "before" picture, I have a huge mishmash of clear-ish boxes and rescued cardboard boxes from a variety of sources.  Everything from pizza style boxes from Staples to recycled shoe boxes .... mostly Danskos...
So it looked like this:
 

And now it looks like this>>>>>>

 

I bought NOTHING.  In the apartment building recycling I found some Deco-ish wallpaper in some pale shades with faded circles.  The stash of that paper was one big complete roll and a roll plus a little more of trim paper that was 6 inches wide.  I just glued it all onto the variety of existing boxes and standardized the labels on those boxes and the plastic ones (which I didn't cover with wallpaper).  I didn't have enough to wrap the whole box, just did the fronts and a bit over the sides, but ... for me... the change is so nice and soothing!

I am still a packrat, and it will never be totally pristine and Martha-esque but it does help my eye a little

This is part of my studio. I did something fun with it

Stay tuned to see what a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder can do to something that looks like this...

 

and today I embellished part of it....

These are the gessoed pages from yesterday.  Today I scraped acrylic paint into them, and then did it again and took some away.  The paint chip side was the side I did first on all 13 pages.  Tomorrow I will, I hope, do the other side.  What you see here are 2 full size pictures of pages and 2 close-ups.  This technique leaves pages that are not sticky when closed because the acrylic is pushed into the pages and scraped off.  Once one layer is done, a second layer is treated the same way and then spritzed with water, stamped with wet pieces of sponge and brushed and then scraped dry.

The shapes you can see in the closeups are the paint samples that were attached to these pages by the paint companies.  I am looking forward to have the semi-visible grid to work against once I get the journal bound.  The other side of these pages is generally smooth, so this should be an interesting journal -- can't wait to start using it!

 

 

 

What I did today....

I am going to make a record of what I do in the studio, and I hope I do something pretty often.    This is what I did today.  These are brochures from paint companies etc.  Some are trifold, some are four-fold.  I have selected 13 of them.  Don't know why that number, but that is what got done, and gessoed them all to get them ready to paint on with acrylic paint.  LK Ludwig has a free tutorial on her site about how to do this and make these freebies into journals with multi fold pages.  This is a little bit of a variant on her process.
They are all drying.  Tomorrow is paint day, I hope.