Countdown to Italy

I just handed in my final paper for American History to 1815. I had to write an essay about an aspect of David McCullough's book 1776. That was a really good book, a page turner, even. My husband read it and found it very interesting. Here is a quote from the book that I love:

 "It was an army of men accustomed to hard work, hard work being the common lot. They were familiar with adversity and making do in a harsh climate. Resourceful, handy with tools, they could drive a yoke of oxen or "hove up" a stump or tie a proper knot as readily as butcher a hog or mend a pair of shoes. They knew from experience, most of them, the hardships and setbacks of life. Preparing for the worst was second nature. Rare was the man who had never seen someone die."

So that's it for another quarter. I now have nothing major to think about except our trip to Italy. We leave in 38 more days!!!!!!!! On Sunday we came across a doomed Borders Bookstore and purchased two guidebooks and a map of Florence @ 30% off . We are going to pick up our online Italian lessons again. I figure if we can ask for a glass of red wine we are OK.

As for art, I haven't touched any in quite a couple of weeks. I have some sheets of paper prepared for the next art journal. I used water color paper and did various water color washes on each page as a base. I can already see it isn't for me. It looks nice but you can't go over it with any kind of liquid as it smears the color. As they say, there are no mistakes, so I will just push on. I have been messing around with some photographs I took myself to avoid that copy right thing. I have pondered the question of what I have learned from making an art journal, and I still don't have much to articulate. I loosely put pages together based on theme, not date, but then I was pleased to find that they somehow went together aesthetically as well. That might just be serendipity. I learned that when stamping out words with rubber stamps, no matter how hard I try to concentrate, eventually I will space out to the point that I will stamp a letter sideways or upside down. Working in little chunks like that suits me. This is all I got right now.

 

Here is a picture of a stump that I see on my walk along the old rail bed in town. I took the heart shape in the middle and grayed it out in Photoshop. Someday I am going to paint that part of the stump pink.

Have I lLearned Anything?

I've been away for the weekend, just visiting with friends, and work has been so busy. I just dumped all of the photos of the art journal on Friday after work and ran. Idaho Beauty has asked me if I have learned anything from this project. The short answer is yes, but I'm going to have to ponder that for a while. It will give me something fun to think about while I toil away today.  I'll report back later. One thing I will say is that I already have the next one started.

Art Journal Completed

I'm Hot...

...still.
As you can see from the collage in my last post, I am having hot flashes and night sweats that prevent me from sleeping enough. I also feel cranky. I haven't busted out crying yet, I feel more on the angry side. I work with someone who is lame at best, and I am not able to deal with her well these days. I feel like screaming, "What the fuck, you've been working here 10 years!" She tends to act stupid about things in an effort to get you to say, oh, never mind, I'll do it. Often, it works.
But anyway, Art. It's about art. I've been working as much as I can on my art journal. I'm enjoying it very much. I'm usually too busy to do much during the week, but I try to slip into the cellar-studio and stamp a word on a collage, or iron a piece of fabric I know I will use soon, or file some color copies I made at work. I came across the absolutely cutest picture of a dog in the newspaper. I'm going to use him in at least one collage and maybe on the cover of my journal book, but I don't like using news print. Not sturdy, not terribly archival. I generally don't worry about that, but newspaper is over the line. So, I took the clipping to work to copy it to better paper. I'm also not usually a fan of cute, but this dog is too much. The headline of this article was, "Who are you calling ugly?" but that dog is so not ugly. Here, let me show you a link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/fashion/13DOGS.html?scp=2&sq=mexican%20dog&st=cse

 

Look how worried he is! Don't you just want to hug him and tell him everything is OK???? I think his main problem is he has no hair, otherwise, he is fine. Anyway, he is my new buddy/ icon and I will use him in collages. I was thinking about submitting my art journal to one of those magazines for consideration when it is finished, but they warn you not to use copyrighted images or words. What constitutes that? I mean, someone took this picture, and it wasn't me. I don't think that there is a problem if I cut this out of the newspaper and use it, but what if I make a color copy? What happens if it appears in a magazine? Is it OK if I haven't made any money?  These are my questions. I will go ahead, but I don't know what it all means. There is a long tradition of artists using clippings in collage.

Meanwhile, keeping the idea of copyright images in the back of your mind, it does compel us to make and use our own images. We can take our own pictures, alter them by hand and by hand, and we can draw. Or, I can try to draw. I think that even if my drawing is kinda sucky, it is authentic.

I have a lot of finished collage, but I keep forgetting to bring them to work for scanning every day. Pictures soon.

New Journal Work

Traces Left Behind

Joe and Kate and I went to an antique mall yesterday, Gristie's in Buck's County. I was excited, because, not only had I never been to this place, but I had been itching to go antiquing for a while. I wanted to find some interesting ephemera for my collages. I found this little book with the name of a club on it, kind of like an record of dances with people. I believed that I had something from a country club, maybe with some record of this archaic ritual. The handwriting looked old, and the graphics in the book looked old. When I got home, I realized that the entries in the book started in 1982. That's not too old in my world. It has to be from before I was born to be considered old. I was reading the entries, and some of the people who signed the book had rubber stamps of themselves! One guy had glued a mini picture of himself. He seemed to be on stage with a microphone.
I Googled the name of the club, which is The Century Club in Westfield, MA. So, get this. The century club is a square dance club. Here is a quote from the website:

"The Century Club was introduced to Square Dancers at Ralph Sweets Powdermill Barn in Hazardville, Conn. on August 26, 1960. It was the idea of two couples who had graduated in May of that year. After having danced to twenty callers already they deemed it possible to dance to 100 different callers and perhaps get other dancers to circulate and dance to other callers at different clubs."

So, you send them a couple of bucks and they send you this little book, which is like a passport, and you get signatures of the different callers. It is designed to encourage people to travel and meet different square dancers. It says on the website that after you fill one book with 100 callers, your next book is GOLD! Well, my book is gold and it does indeed start with number 101. It's got the couple's name right in the front of the book, Lyle and Helen. The first 2 pages have signatures that were written on a separate piece of paper and glued in. I am thinking that this was done because they had to wait for their new book. I pulled one of the separate pieces of paper off, it was Lyle's business card. He was a travel agent. When you look through the book you can see that these people did indeed travel far and wide to square dance. Milner, North Dakota, Aurora Colorado, Bethlehem, PA, Los Angeles, California, Abilene, Texas, Altoona, PA.

At the bottom it says, "Song about a Pig."

The entries stop abruptly in 1992, at number 175. I was wondering what happened, so I Googled Lyle. I did not find an obituary for Lyle, but I did find one for Helen. She was a school nurse at Metuchen High School, and she died in 2008 at 85 years old. Lyle died in 2002.

I find this fascinating. First of all, that you can find this little thing that someone left behind, and  that you can discover a little snippet about their life just with a few keystrokes. I wish like hell I had a picture of these folks. As it is I am excited about making a collage with these pages. I've also figured out that this is why I am so interested in old things. People used them in their lives. Everyone dies, life is so short, what is left of us? Just these little traces. If we haven't done anything amazing, there is maybe a tombstone, some photographs, and now digital records.

Happy VD!

Here is another Journal page. I have had the pictures of the shells running along the left side, I am not kidding, for probably 8 years. See that blue circle grid thing? I've had that at least as long. I have about ten more of those. Here is the story about those.
When my son was still in high school, he was fascinated with industrial ruins. We had a huge abandoned GAF factory in the town we lived in at the time and he was always trespassing in there. I was afraid he would fall down a hole and we'd never see him again. One time we were driving somewhere down a back road, and we came upon an abandoned quarry. I agreed to stop and look around. I must admit I am also interested in ruins. We explored all of the buildings and in one room was some kind of recording equipment. By that I mean people must have punched something, or a mark was made on these circular sheets of paper when "something" occurred. As you can see a circle represents a 24 hour day. I have used these things in a number of collages over the years. I feel happy about using stuff that I have had around so long. I've maintained a rather precious attitude about these things in the past. In other words, I've liked some of them so much, that I didn't really want to use them. Now, if it is the perfect item for a piece of art, no hesitation, I am just going to use it.

One More Thing...

Here is a little addition to my recent post. Someone sent me this link.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20110209/us_time/httpnewsfeedtimecom20110208smartphonesinscatholicchurchapprovesconfessionbyiphonexidrssfullnationyahoo

I find it rather amusing.

Pray, Hope, and Don't Worry

 

I uploaded this picture and I'm thinking of how I am going to explain it. It is the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. How does this fit as a journal entry? I don't know. When I started this collage, I just had the background. I have 8 boards for this project, and I painted and/or put transfers on the front and back of each board right at the start. So, I took this one background and started looking for an image. Wait. Maybe I had the image and started looking for a background? I forget, but these two were meant for each other. So now what? Something made me think religion. These people look like they don't have it too easy. I would bet they pray for help. So, I began to look through my saint cards. Some of them are in Spanish. I was thinking  Padre Pio. It turns out that though the card is in Spanish, he was Italian. In the end I chose OL of G. She is just so colorful, and what a great story. You simply cannot beat Catholicism for colorful stories and saints. So in the end, I wrote out a condensed version of the story on the collage. There is no direct connection to the imagery, but I feel OK with that. I feel like it isn't hard for someone to make a connection by themselves.

Back to the beginning, when I was thinking of how to talk about this collage, it occurred to me that I could do a book of Saint collages. I'm all over the place with this, no telling where it is heading. But seriously, if you click on the Padre Pio link and read his story... amazing. I could do a book just on saints that had the stigmata! If that isn't enough, Pio is the "unofficial" patron saint of stress relief and the January Blues. WTF??? (You've heard? January 22 has been declared the most depressing day of the year. There is significant research behind this) This is because of his famous saying, "Pray, Hope, and Don't Worry."