Where did I leave off?

It is March 25, 2016. I've lost my link across the Atlantic - for now - and I feel a sharing loss. I have been working on art all along. I'm ready to show a few things I've been making.

You may remember (see earlier posts) I created in December and early January Make It Yours books using 100% Irish linen paper; but, nothing has happened with those for the last 3 months. 25 to 30 of them sit in a storage box while I figure out what to do with them...whether they are worth continuing or just using them myself to work in and give as gifts. I really don't know. However, after a 2-month fling with oil paint and cold wax painting, I decided to come back to that wonderful linen paper - especially some scraps I had from making the MIY books - and create something with the scraps and left-over unpainted paper. Over the past week or so, I've created with scraps some pretty small books that fit in the palm of my hand. Here are some images of two of them.

These are made with scraps of paper already painted in watercolor - in this case blue/blue-green. I let myself meditate on each open spread to come up with a large abstract image that invited me in to wander around a big plot of land where my son built a beautiful BIG house for one of his clients in New York state several years ago. I used a page from the landscape blueprint to help inspire me. I pasted small, torn sections onto "random" pages. Then I used black pen and graphite pencils to mark the pages in ways that connected everything together, as you can see from the photos above and directly below. The one below includes a section of the blueprint that locates a "concrete walk" in my fantasy landscape. The darker black lines on the left of the book in the photo below come from a B/W photocopy of a blown up version of a manipulated photo I took of an early spring Jack-in-the-pulpit I spotted in the woods in Massachusetts in 2014. It seemed appropriate to bring in this blueprint-like -image of a flower, which adds dimension-and-scale wonkiness to the pages.

Next, is a book I am working on - actually one signature of a book I plan to make into 3 signatures - that is small enough to fit into my hand (smaller than the blue-green book above). I like the weight of the stacked signatures in my hand and the soft texture of the linen paper. I like the color thread in this set of signatures - a bright but soft yellow that I am pairing with black and blue marks and a few red accents that are part of the original watercolor paintings I'd made on the paper I used to make these pages.

Because I started thinking of these tiny books as pages to meditate on instead of Make It Yours books (I think people are 'stuck' trying to figure out how to approach my MIY concept), I continued my exploration of focusing on an open spread to pull it together into one cohesive abstract image. I imagine sitting in a quiet place contemplating on one of these open pages while reflecting on my emotional state - or not reflecting at all but letting the image draw me in to find meaning to the colors or lines or, in some pages, words that appear (notice above the series of connected and repeating words "seeseaseeseaseesea" something like a mantra if softly repeated aloud in a whisper. You can also see from the photo below that I punched holes in one of the pages to invoke who knows whatever other thought and reflection from the user.

Anyway, I like making these. My iPod music, as always, inspires the way I approach each of the pages and I really like how one of these books is very subtle and the other is quite bright and bold. I'd love to keep them for myself; but, I know I can make more and I already have specific people in mind who might like these...or, maybe a stranger would like one. Who knows.

I'll show some of my oil and cold wax painting in another post. They are so different than these and so much more frustrating to me.  These are fun and the paintings are ...well, they are not going anywhere for me.

Helga, if you are out there lurking, I miss you. This one-sided conversation just doesn't feel "right" to me.