Confession

I can't keep up with posting to this blog! I seem to be behind in everything. This is the latest entry in my art journal. I belong to an art journal group called the Journal Journey at the Roses on My Table Ning site and it helps that we are given prompts to motivate us every two weeks. The last prompt was to journal about a favorite quote. I've always loved this one by Camus.

I am loving this over sized journal I picked up. I took a handful of my favorite Golden heavy bodied acrylics, a palette knife, cranked up my IPod and went to work just spreading paint. I may just paint a ton of pages this way. I love the look of the colors blending together; so vibrant!

I've been really inspired by poetry lately. We subscribe to The New Yorker and the first place I always turn to and read is the poetry. I have discovered some great poets in the last couple of issues and am anxiously awaiting their books from Amazon. Sometimes I'll read a poem and it just punches me in the chest: BAM! That's how these last few poets I've discovered have been. Their words have really spoken to me and given me some deep insight. And there is this continuing theme that they have all had that is running parallel with my own theme that I'm grappling with how to explore in my art. So it's all very exciting and serendipitous.

Plus I really want to explore all of this more using my encaustics. The first day it gets below 90 degrees I will head up to the hot plate. It's been unbearably hot here...not something I deal with very well. It affects my mood...I am a cool weather person. I just tolerate summer (barely) until it goes away. I am so ready for it to be over. Yesterday the heat index here was 104. Blah...

So that's a little of what is going on here. I will try to keep up better with posting! Hope to have more to show soon.

Risk

Risk

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.

--Anais Nin

I found this poem on a great poetry website. I go through spells where I read a lot of poetry, write some poetry and just get immersed in it for awhile. This poem stuck with me and the images just came together pretty quickly for this digital piece. Lately I find that poetry has been very inspirational for my art and my journaling.

Speaking of journaling, I found a wonderful journaling class on LK Ludwig's blog. If you aren't familiar with her work, she is a very inspirational photographer, journaler and author. She has written some very good books on art journaling and keeping a journal. I was thrilled to see that she had just now started this class (Oct. 1).

Serendipity is at work. I was just thinking yesterday about how much I love journal prompts and how they can really get you thinking about so many different possibilities for a page. That's one reason I'm trying to get my studio space finished up today. I'm itching to get back to the journal and try some new techniques. I also want to write more in my journal and was looking through a couple of books on the subject. Then I started blog hopping and lo and behold there on LK's site was the class. Coincidence? I think not! ;)

So today I'm going through my photo archive and picking out some photos for my first spread in this class. I'll post a few of the pages as I go along. Another serendipitous finding: browsing through a thrift store I came upon a blank, hand-made journal filled with the nicest watercolor paper just waiting to be filled... the gods are speaking to me! I'll include a photo of that, too, in my next post. I just now thought about it or I would have included it here.

So, enough talk. Time to play.