More Journal

I have been working in this journal for around 4 months.  I am not a planner.  What I do is look through the book for a page that interests me and do something on that page.  Then I might well move on to another page and do something on that page. Then I circle around through the book doing bits and pieces until a page feels done and then I stop with that page for a while.  Often I come back to that page after a couple of weeks and leave the book open and back off from it and sometimes I go back at it.

This page for example, became this after much playing around.  The right hand side was originally blank and then I did a Purell transfer of a photo I had taken of some letters to my father from his family in Germany around 1930 or so.  I just wanted the writing to be graphic when I did it and had no clue what I was doing next.   When I was looking at the pages like this one day the photo I had taken of the Reservoir popped into my mind and over the next couple of days it got transformed.  The left side is half of a Gelliplate print that I didn't particularly love, so I included it into the book. 

Often I tear off things that I have glued to a page thinking I liked them.  This next page is one of the first that I did in this journal and after a while I came to not like it at all,  At first it looked like this:

This was in late December and I was marginally pleased with it.  You will see that the next page has also changed a LOT since then but that is for another day.

This is what that page looks like now:

I tore off the little Siamese figures, and the magazine cut out girl also.  I like this better but I am not sure if it is done.

Since there is a little page in the middle I will show you how it looks with that page open also

That is where we are on those two pages right now.  I will turn the page again tomorrow...

another page..

I'm not too sure this is done.  I think the left side and the small insert page is done.  The right side... not sure about that yet so I am holding off on showing the whole thing.  It has gone through many versions and I have pictures of some of them.  I think with that one I might do a series of pictures showing some of the earlier states.

The insert page is more found poetry from Jane Eyer.  I love that book and the gorgeous way she expresses herself. It gives me a lot to work with when I am looking at words to join in different ways.

More journal pages

This page came about when I was playing with packing tape transfers.  I had a two page spread with an almost heart on the left side and a blank page on the right.  I think that the almost heart was a wing shape from an angel silhouette, but I'm not sure.  In any case, I painted, gessoed, glued and ended up not quite anywhere. There was, in the back of my mind somewhere a memory of a photo from about 10 years ago or more of the fence around the reservoir at central park and a woman with a hat and a lamppost.  I tracked it down, it was originally a black and white photo from when I was printing my own photos and scanned it in.  I printed it in several orientations and styles, colored her hat and off we went with a piece of clear packing tape.  Originally she was only on the left side of the page but all of a sudden I could see the mirror image and there we were.

And this is a third part of the journal

This was a strange page, I was playing with the right side, and the dog appeared.  It was not a dog when I was looking at the ink already on the page, but when I finished messing about with gesso and ink, there he was.  Additionally part of what I was using for backgrounds on this page are bits of pages from a very disintegrated copy of Jane Eyre.  In the process I found a bit of poetry in the page I was covering up, so I recreated it.

The left side of the page came together when I was playing with some photos I took from the second floor of MOMA when I was there to see the Matisse Cut Outs.  I took a whole series of people talking to each other in the garden and then turned them into silhouettes.  These two didn't start off like this, she was talking to him originally, but then she walked away and I realized she had been going to do that all along.  When I was trying to position them as if they were talking the distance between them was hard to find.

The Delicacy of Pride, ...

Another Journal Page

This page is a bit further on in the book.  It is something that defied me by coming together in about two short sessions and refusing all further work.

The page background is from silver Joss papers with some various other bits of scrap from my scrap bag.  I try to limit myself to a single small bag of bits and pieces of interesting paper that might fit in a collage.  I have a couple of boxes of larger pieces of paper, wrapping etc. but one bag of little bits.  

when I had the paper pieces glued down I thought I would try a transfer onto the Joss paper.  It didn't take well, very faint and smeary, but it let me play on it with an italic fountain pen and some generally semi-permanent ink. When I was through playing around with the pen I strengthened some of the dark spots and declared it done.  I have looked a number of times but I am pleased to leave it as it is...

Book 2 is nearly done.

I am still pleased with the decision to make the "leftover" prints and other types of images into small books to play in.  I hesitate to say they are "journals" since They don't reflect my day to day life, but rather my eye and where it goes, and those two things are different.  I have shown pages one and two before on this blog, but here they are just to start me off from the beginning.  I don't work in order, I work where something catches my interest and play around on that page until I decide to move on for a while. I never seem to finish a page or a group of pages, in one sitting.  I have worked at this book for several months and I rarely leave a page on the first stab at it and continue it until it feels done.

My joke is that I am a process knitter.  I don't care WHAT I am knitting I only care that I AM knitting.  It seems that is how I have been about these two books.  I just do things until I feel like it is done without, I hope, being overworked.

OK,  These are the first two pages: They should get larger if you click:

I am skipping the next two pages... they belong in the "nearly" done section and I am not pleased with where they are yet.  However, this single page is especially interesting as it is a quote from the book We are All Completely Beside Ourselves  by Karen Joy Fowler.  I have now read it twice, and it was better the second time.  The quote in the picture is what I refer to when people ask what the book is about.

In case it is not readable: 

"This doesn't mean that this story isn't true, only that I honestly don't know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it.

Language does this to our memories -- simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies.  An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album, eventually it replaces the moment it was meant to capture."

Hmmm... do you have to be old before this resonates?

much ado about a little snow...

but it IS pretty.