Solitude and a Room of One's Own

Who knew better than Virginia?  Personal space is so very important.  We will be moving shortly into a house of our own, within which I will have a room of my own.  I've always had a room to work in, but it has always been shared with storage and extra furniture, our library, and so forth because always in the past our home has been too small.  In my past life I had a larger house which I called the library, I didn't feel any need for art space then.  But everyone else in the house would clean the living room by dumping the excess into my room. 

Currently, in my new life, our two bedroom condo/townhouse/duplex/apartment has very little room and very little storage.  My wingspan is far too wide for this and I look forward to moving into the house we are purchasing.  The room you see in the photo above is to be my art room.  It has everything I could dream of, a large walk-in closet, a window seat, some built in shelves and space for tables and chairs and whatever else I need. 

My current "room of shame" has had every possible enhancement to help straighten it out, and the perimeter of it is quite nicely organized, but the remaining 7X7 space is a veritable sea of crap.  Boxes of collageables, paper cutter, unshelved books and magazines, art supplies and more art supplies.  In order to find one thing, three more must be moved.  This detritus will fit nicely into the closet of the room pictured above.  It is a dream come true. 

Solitude is quite another thing.  While I have quite an independent streak (noted early on in a report card, "M is sometimes too independent").  I should probably blow that up on a copier and frame it.  But Gryphon and I are very close.  We spend most of our time together.  I thought early on in our relationship that I would feel smothered by that, remembering being a mother of three and sometimes feeling like an anthill.  I remember one time trying to put on my makeup in the bathroom and being joined methodically by every single family member until I blew my cool and ordered them all out.  But I don't feel that way now. 

I still crave solitude, but I do find it here and there and it is wonderful.  Mostly I just crave room enough to move around in.  I have a recurring dream, a house dream, in which at one point I enter a sunny room, empty of furnishings with a golden oak floor and I turn to my young daughters and tell them, "this is the room for dancing". 

Eye Candy

I've been rather taken with the painting "The Nightmare" for quite some time.  And I like to watch every Clive Owen movie and television series available.  So when the above image turned up on the series "Second Sight"  I just about went squirrely trying to find it online, it was my screensaver for quite awhile.  So I am being rather a pixie by posting it.  Everyone (like all 2 or 3 of you) reading my blog has requested more eye candy, so I am going back through my posts and adding it.  Not more photos of Clive Owen, but photos from my journals. 

I've done quite a few journal pages lately.  I've gotten a bit more experimental.  I thought I would lighten things up a bit by doing a pink journal.  Amazing how dark one can get with a bright pink page.  I have an obsession with black and white photos on my pages.  The starkness appeals to me.  It gives me focus on what the image is saying to me.  I like the drama, the contrast.  I use b&w photography magazines for most of the images although lately fashion magazines have been using more of them. 

5 Card Stud

These are images of a set of tarot cards I made for my former muse, prior to Ianto.  There is an
entry earlier in my blog about that.  I enjoyed making these, they are on silver cardstock and there is a common pattern on the backs.  But each grouping of  cards has a different theme of sorts.  The point of them as a gift was encouraging him to stop smoking. 

Cannot be moved

I have tried to move the entry from December 12 that I mistakenly put on the wrong blog. Copying does not seem to work. It was about a project I started on the balcony trying some experimental dying of books. When I begain it refused to rain for well over a week. There was enough moisture in the air however to have some effect. Since then, it has rained plenty and snowed and frozen a couple of times. I will attempt to get them out to dry without turning the deck blackish purple. Then perhaps I will put some other papers in the "bath" to see what effect it all has. I used some powdered dye and some craft paint and some ink.

Meanwhile I bought a heavily discounted copy of Mapping the World, which is as large as any world atlas, but bound on the short side making the pages very wide. I've removed every third page to reduce weight, it is still too heavy. And I've gone onto Juliana Coles Etsy site and ordered her retreat booklet for the Altered Atlas.

I'm happy to see 2010 arrive under a blue moon. I hope that is auspicious. I would love a year of good solid creativity and the joy it always brings me. I always have a tendency to do too much or attempt to do too much, but I am not going to flagellate myself over that. Some things may be set aside for a time, but time is just an illusion, is it not? While the last year has been a difficult one in so many ways, it has also been a revelation. The past decade, the Aughties, has been as full of joy and pleasure just as deeply as the pain and loss. I am certain that every limit that I will now experience will be the catalyst for something new and wondrous.

Further Unruliness

It looks as though I will have to subdivide "The Tome" as the Gryphon likes to call it. At this point it could easily be two large volumes. I think I'd better go with three, I am not done adding things. It also appears I will need to reinforce the holes as well. I have "completed" about 6 pages in the rear of the volume. By completed I mean that I have finished glueing and painting, have added areas to write in and gone over it all with a coat of heavy gel. When I finally use this journal I may add other items as well as writing and drawing (mostly doodles). I love these pages and sit there petting them. The Gryphon says he fears rolling over in bed and finding me, the tome and the glue.

Reversing the order of applications as mentioned in the previous post has worked out well so far. I keep grabbing things out of various bags and boxes and going through adding bits here and there. How do I select what goes where? I put things down on several pages and then when it "fits" I glue it down. I like to add elements to as many pages as possible, so far I've done that with a sun rubberstamp and the Martha Stewart (not a huge Martha craft supply fan, but her punches are quite marvelous, I'm coveting the dual starfish/sand dollar punch presently) bird punch, I'm not punching the pages, but punching magazine pages and glueing them down on every page. I probably pay far more attention to color or lack thereof than to putting things together thematically. The fact that one page has a rain photo and the opposite has a rain check ticket is either pure coincidence or unconscious brilliance (cough, cough) on my part.

Unruly

A friend once described me as a brambly, overgrown sort of woman. I really like that description. I try not to impose rules on my journalling which makes unruliness the order of the day/year/century. This year, especially since last summer, I seem to be feeling more and more chaotic. I have a lot of different journals for different things, from reading journals to my chronological "americas-test-kitchen" free-for-all experimental do whatever I please journals. I like to work within constraints, but I've just (thank you, Ianto) had to slap myself for trying to impose rules on myself again. A few months back I thought of the idea of using bill and junk mail envelopes (especially patterned safety papered windowed ones) for journal pages. I made covers out of used manilla envelopes and used a zutter machine to bind them together. It was a pretty amateurish attempt, the holes are less than perfect and I didn't trim them at all. I've used layers of crackle paint on the cover to make it look like an old cabinet door that had been repainted several times and abused and left out in the rain. Then I started gluing pieces of handbills pulled off of Hawthorne SE and 21st NW wooden power poles, the more weathered, the better. I used Uhu for awhile, but it didn't get magical until I switched to Yes! which added just the right amount of stiffness for pages. I tried to utilize the windows as well. It was looking just raunchy (not a bad start) and then I started adding borders which pulled the open pages together. Some of the borders are wide strips done with Copic markers, some are the computer feed hole strips pulled off of invoices, and whatever else I might come up with. I liked the idea of repurposing the materials. But then the inevitable conflict arose of when to say enough is enough. I got there today. It can't be entirely repurposed material unless I want to alchemically turn something into glue and something else into paint. So, I'm going with the tide on this one and just feeling the direction as it occurs.

I'd considered finishing volume seven (which requires binding) first, but it's just become an arbitrary constraint. So, I've been painting and wiping (Juliana style), and utilizing my collection of nouns in it, getting ready for another layer. I'm not exactly sure what the next layer will be. I ran out of paint halfway through, I could either use another color or get more, but when I started writing in purple Caran d'Ache neopastel, I kept writing even when the painting ran out, and even on pages that didn't have anything glued on them, so it will be interesting to see what happens on pages that get the order reversed.

Mindful Textillian

I had a quiet hour this morning and spent part of it layering sewing pattern piece tissue in my journal. The paper is very fragile and Yes! glue is the consistency of honey so it was a slow, deliberate process. I found myself silently chanting a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow quote that I find timeless:

All things must change, to something new, to something strange.

It was a pleasant and mindful process which is something I love about journaling. I've begun doodling flourishes, lines, and other things with extra fine markers just for the slow, mindful process. I love the feeling. I love the way things feel both tactile and physically. I am a Textilian. One of things I like to glue into my journals is rose petals (an idea I borrowed from my beautiful daughter, Bhride--first you convince them to art journal and then you borrow their ideas). If you flatten them (unabridged dictionary works for me), then gluestick (oh, holy gluestick) them down, and do not put any thing over them (I tried botanical glue, it did not work) you can touch them and they are like velvet on your page.

Lately I have been laying paper on paper, and I love how it stiffens like paper mache. I love the feeling of the starchiness. I could glue pages together, but it doesn't really appeal to me (one day it will--I just haven't found the right situation thus far). I've been mulling over how to add fabric to my pages, so far I've used ribbon. But I tend to go for a grunge look that I haven't figured out yet for fabric, maybe tea dying and iron burnmarks, spilled coffee and bits of lace, apron pockets and hankies. Or just a book for swatches and a magnificent cover. A fabric fondle book of sorts.

It amazes me how much just spilled out of my head just then--putting ideas down tends to make them morph and grow.