9 June 06
Self?
Me, today, in the garden with Charlie
Me, today, in the mirror. I don’t look like this at all. The face is too long.
Me, today, in the mirror again. I look my maternal grandmother and my father.
Blaugustine and crackskullbob are encouraging us all to do self-portraits, at least one a week for the next month.
7 June 06
Portrait
Every day
I draw
my left hand
the lines
get deeper
the knuckles
grow rounder
the nails
still strong
at forty-seven
Clutching at
illusion
foreshortened globs
my hand says
no hiding
The women
south of here
pay millions for
young faces
but you can’t
botox
a hand…
Paired journey:
one records
the other
is
Submitted for Illustration Friday’s theme: Portrait and prompted by Leslee’s musing on her age today
14 May 06
Skiving
“Skiving” is a word I learned, like so many others, my first term at boarding school in Derbyshire. It means to goof off but there’s more of an element of deception implicit in the term. Like you’re really getting away with a LOT.
This afternoon I skived off from my class in the most impromptu way to go to a baseball game at the newly renamed and surely to be renamed in the future ATT Park. Class itself was skiving off from chores at home which would otherwise have been skived off from by going to Whole Earth or gardening or going for a bike ride or a swim.
Skiving’s good thing to do. In general. And in specificity.
Tomorrow I’ll post a couple of boards I made at my class. What fun that was… [done, Monday May 15]
24 April 06
Doodling in the Morning
Danny Gregory recently did a lot of work on brown paper. I like the middle ground, the fact that this paper is really cheap (so not intimidating), and the fact that you have to find the mid-tone and work up and down from that.
I haven’t done this too successfully, here, but it was fun.
24 April 06
New Medium
Wanting to have a go with painting in a medium other than watercolor, the other day I went to the campus bookstore and picked up the cheapest acrylic set they had there. At left is the first acrylic painting I’ve ever done. The view is looking west from our house, towards Berryessa Gap.
14 April 06
Lakewood Rabbit
Here’s one of the sketches of the cooperative rabbit (and Federal employee) I saw Tuesday.
12 April 06
Dreaming
While Numenius was away the catalog came for the San Francisco Center for the Book. There was a week-long class I thought he’d be interested in taking, Mapping as a Creative Strategy. He always ends up with a lot more vacation time than I do. (If I had a week to spare I’d probably take the Weeklong Letterpress Intensive.)
Encaustic painting, pochoir, surface techniques, Turkish marbling, flag books, nature-print books with hidden hopenings: I want to take them all. Some are during the week in the evenings which is not practical and helps weed out some, but not enough.
I am left with longing and difficult choices…
10 April 06
Letters From My Adolescence
In boarding school, in Derbyshire, we were corralled every week to write letters home. I enjoyed writing them, I think. I know I wrote often, more often than the weekly corralling.
Looking back on these letters now, if I can bear to (oh you’re not supposed to READ them, says my mother, who had handed them to me in bound packets the week before), I see a lot of experimentation: inks, papers, hands. Not much experimentation with what I said, because it was all in what I DIDN’T say (this was a co-ed boarding school, it was the seventies).
Am I that person, unrecognizable? Yes. I’m thinking of ways to contain her, this adolescent so frightened of authenticity. Collage with paint over it, my current handwriting, different calligraphic hands.
Another project. Like I need any more of those…
7 April 06
Earthquake In Jello
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. In an exhibition at the Exploratorium entitled “Magnitude X: Quake Science and Survival”, artist Liz Hickok has created a model of the City in multicolored Jello. (From The Map Room.)
6 April 06
Designing for Post Office Requirements
I attended a class this morning: Mail Design 101. It was the last thing I wanted to do. We had our first sun in days and our classroom had no windows. It’d be more interesting to watch paint dry anyway, I thought. Still, I enjoyed my bike ride onto campus.
For someone who spends a lot of time online I do seem to send a lot of mail that involves a stamp, or several. Turns out I’ve been slowing myself down a bit, or the mail I send out.
I will not entirely give up my calligraphic envelopes with wavy lines that might be illegible to young post delivery people who’ve never learned how to write cursive, never mind OCRs. But I won’t expect them to get anywhere in two days. Now I know why. Anything lumpy, anything that sloshes around, anything non-standard goes in the “non-automated” pile, where it languishes.
Much more fun this afternoon was working on design ideas for bookmarks and wallet cards featuring mountain lion pawprints for our upcoming booth at Picnic Day (April 22).