I Suppose I Should Write a Real Post About Art

Well, I do write about my work in progress, but life issues have a large role to play too.

What I wanted to share today, though, are some journal pages I've done as part of the project my friend Lisa Busch and I have been doing - exchanging art journals and working in each.  I'm just about at the end of Lisa's journal, and I myself started a new one.  I just wanted to share some of our pages.  

First, I'd like to show Lisa's because I have learned a lot from her work and she has given me so much wise advice over the years.  She may be gritting her teeth as she writes some of it in her emails because so much of it is encouraging me to play more in my work while I whine about not being able to play.  There are no titles, so I'm just showing them as a group.

Lisa works with paint and marker quite a lot, then layers paper and 3D items on top of the painted surface.  She works often with a Gelli Plate and is really good at it.  I have one, but haven't used it much.

 I really like her work.  It has so many dimensions to it, and she uses a lot of inspirational sayings, which is something that I don't do much. 

My work is mostly paper based on the foundation, while I add my layers on top of the paper.  Lisa tends to do the opposite.  I've been told, in a not so complimentary way, that what I do is essentially scrapbooking, which is not what I do at all.  Once, when I dropped off some canvases to be framed at a place that shall remain nameless but it's a national chain that begins with "J" and I don't mean Joann's (where I've gotten stuff framed beautifully), the clerk wrote "scrapbooking" as a description and I've never had my stuff framed by them since.  Too bad, since they do good work at a good price. 

But I digress.  Here are some of my pages, some which may have been posted here before.  I wanted to share the ones with the wire binding because I won't see them again after I post Lisa's journal (waaah) back to her.

With this one I started with pages painted a sort of deep pink, to which I added orange (not sure why, even though the color combo works for Dunkin Donuts - which reminds me that I need a strawberry Coolatta), and then blue squiggles.  I wasn't at all happy.
In the meantime I was experimenting with paper weaving for my continuing self-portrait project, and decided to use two of my practice pieces.  Made with vintage book pages, I then stamped all over them.  The bird images are from Lisa, and I colored them with marker, gluing them on top of the woven paper.  I'm not sure where the quote - if it is a quote - comes from.  It was something I remembered and wanted to add since it seemed appropriate.

The final set of pages I'm sharing from Lisa's book is a little more visceral.  I'd done them at a time when I was feeling particularly unhappy with life.  The knight in armor represents me hiding behind barriers and not letting people see the real me, while the other page's emotion really dates back to a realization I'd had 5 years ago after almost dying from an asthma attack, that I'd wasted so much of my life just existing - at least that's what I thought.  In a way I do feel I've wasted a lot of time, but am trying to think of this as a journey.

 And art is a journey of self-discovery, after all.  At least the best art is.

later,
lin

P.S.  Whenever I mention Lisa, I like to also mention that she owns a particularly great online shop for mixed media and collage artists with lots of cool vintage ephemera and also new items from Tim Holtz, Dina Wakely, and others.  It's at http://www.collagestuff.com, and I urge you to visit.  I've gotten myself broke shopping there.  In a very happy way.