so I am playing with mixed media non representational images

Sounds a lot more pretentious than I intend this to be.  These started out as gelliplate prints with collage on top, more gelliplate, more collage, some painting with a brush and a lot of staring at them and sighing.  I am not convinced that any of them are done, but at some point you have to take a break and walk away for a while.

I am only showing a couple, because I am still thinking about them all, and these may return in different combos later...

I have looked at them too long......... These were started in a class with Jane Davies, and her classes are amazing.  There is a plan to her process and she is very helpful in an online class.  This was the first online class I completed and actually looked at what everyone else was doing and enjoyed the experience.  The fact that I am still playing with a lot of the things I made in the class now (nearly a month after the class ended) says a huge amount about how much Jane manages to convey in the class. 

Day Five of Learning Something New - Past/Present

Past/Present .. I was having a hard time with this and then it just "slapped me upside the head" as they say in the South.  I love this quote from Adam Gopnik talking about Joseph Cornell --  one of my alltime heroes...

"The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing."

I suddenly related that quote to the small rectangles I have been doing every morning for several months.  I never really thought about them as relating to the passing of time, the decaying of signs on old buildings, the fading of memory. 

The turtles, somehow, are part of that in my mind, not sure how, but there it is, the unconscious is a different country.

Zuni turtle fetishes represent the earth, a centered self.

 

Day 4 of Learning Something New -- Home

This one was hard because I am VERY home centered.  I would never leave if I had total choice and could import friends, restaurants, theaters, flea markets and museums.  

SO .... I wrote everything I did in and around my home for 2 days (not really everything but the reportables and importants and pet related).  I did one day vertical and the other day horizontal.  Then on top of the words, I drew the view out my studio window.  What you see are (top to bottom) the sky, the Palisades of the Hudson River (the New Jersey side), the Hudson River and the trees of the Hudson River Parkway in New York City.

I have a little personal project I have been doing since January in the calendar from the Alexander McQueen show here in New York.  For the first 5 months I drew the view out the window every day, fog, snow, rain, green etc etc.  Then as summer stretched on I got bored with unchanging green, so I started doing little graphics that continue daily.  You can see THEM, if you want, over on my photo blog, link on the right of this page.  Remember these are in little tiny rectangles... about 1.5 inches by 2 inches.  I am going to go back to daily views when the leaves start to turn.  

Also, I am doing this project in an already bound book, that I am using in landscape mode generally. The "thought" part goes on the left page and the "image" part goes on the right side.  Looks like this:

And like this...

 

Day 3 of Learning Something New - Steps

Steps, the prompt talks about taking steps as a way to build a habit. If your "habit" is art, there is another part you need to remember. What I learned when I started taking art classes and really working at learning painting, drawing, photography, collage, printmaking etc, was that steps are not linear.  I thought "If I learn A then I can go on to B and then to C etc and I will get better at each step."  

Seriously not so.  Art is far from linear, it is circular.  Learning a bit about B reveals the flaws in your mastery of A and C does the same for both A and B when you try that!  Printing feeds into painting and both of them feed into photography, which feeds back. Art, for me is a huge circular staircase designed by Escher and you never come to the end, to "mastery".  Also, you have to step back now and then for distance to provide more clarity than the close up study gives. You have to learn to love circularity.

Below is a staircase from inside the Vatican.  A gloss medium transfer of an inkjet print. 

 

Day 2 of Learn Something New

I have had a lot of teachers in my time, but something I read in my early 20's has stuck with me and, I think, shaped me more than anything else.  I learned the power of "Yes" from the autobiography of Armand Hammer.  As I remember it, when asked if he could build the trans Russian railroad he said yes, although at the time he probably knew next to nothing about it.  He just trusted his gut and his instincts.  Later, I had a friend who helped me clarify that what I regret in life are sins of omission, not sins of comission.  "Yes" in a different format.

The image is an image transfer of a two bear fetish from New Mexico.  Bears carry strength, self knowledge, courage, adaptability, healing and the ability to read spirits. These two carry bundles on their backs and I see them every day.

 

Last Big Adventure

I updated this to put in a picture that shows the gold I used behind the trees... maybe better, maybe not, but I think if you click on it to biggen it shows better.

Shimelle has an online class called Learn Something New Every Day for the month of September.  She is very much a "scrapbooker" and I wasn't sure I knew enough about that to participate, but my friend Gill encouraged me, and I decided I could try it and interpret it my way.

The first assignment was to consider your last adventure.  I interpreted it as the most recent adventure though some people in the group considered it to mean the last one you will ever have... hmmm ... very interesting.

In any  case, we were also encouraged to think what this had helped us learn.  And it didn't take much thinking to determine that my latest adventure was Tinta and to begin considering what I learned by thinking about her.

What I realized was that my relationship with Tinta has been not seeing the forest for the trees.  I focus on the ways she is different from Sienna and that I think she will never be really reliably housebroken and her incredible chewing and I miss that she is spunky and annoying and funny and determined.  I also miss that she is a snuggler, and a stubborn little girl who will probably eventually make a great adult.  (Of course only if she does not ingest my whole rug first!)

So, above is the first assignment, a collage of frayed burlap, glassine and paint about the forest and the trees...

letters and pictures

I found my father's letters from his sisters and brother and nephew in Germany. All are in German, and most are in a spidery old style handwriting that is unreadable by us moderns. I have no German, so the chance that I can decipher anything at all is too slim to mention.

I did have a friend who speaks German well look at some of them, and he struggled but got little out of them. I have resorted to creating a catalog and sorting by year and combining with pictures from the same year, but I guess that the content may well remain a mystery. It is sad in a way, especially since they were written to the US from Germany in the late 20's through the 60's and might have some interesting stories to tell.

That said, they may also be dull as dishwater, but they make for interesting photos..

Once more, with pictures

Company coming all week, so I may be among the missing for a bit, but one more quick trip through the Gertrude Stein apartment filled with art hung in salon-style that I now am living in and loving.

The wall over my desk holds Japanese wood-block prints.
There is the view out the window of the GWB with the sky turning turquoise.
Down the entry hall are cyanotypes and hand colored versions of my photographs. Two of my collages, with another over the shrine, above.

Black and white photography.I think the nicest part of this is that most of the art is my own creation, except for the Japanese prints. They have always had a big influence on me and now they are all out where I can see them. When I get the next spurt of energy, I am going to hang my big pastel paintings of figures in the bedroom.

I did windows

I played with windows today. Not THAT kind, this kind





























It was SUCH a grey day in NY. Yet another one. There has only been, it seems to me, one sunny day in a month. All I can do sometimes is put one foot in front of the other and slog on .... the alternative is to stand still... isn't it?????? Sometimes standing still is appealing. Today lying on the couch being fed peeled grapes was appealing. Alas, Sienna, Romeo and Clementine do not have a single opposable thumb among them, so peeling is probably out of the question. Damn!

They might manage the feeding part though.