Wednesday, February 29, 2012

a butterfly and flamingo in my letter box

I arrived home today and found post! So exciting. A beautiful card from Kushana Bush (more about her coming up on my other blog..so clever!) and this gorgeous wee butterfly with writing and poetry inside from Lynn the quickest draw in the south. 'That little lady sho can make'
I am particularly fond of flamingos at the moment. There are spoonbills feeding in the harbour at the bottom of our place, they are so interesting and are stopping traffic..never a safe thing really on our road. My son tells me they feed the same way as flamingos. Just don't change colour with the diet.

art day with Lynn (name it for what it is)

What crafty Lynn did

Splattered crayon and pencil

musical cutouts

Kat being Lynn's technical assistant -sandpapering it back a little

Paint and gessoed manuscripts for pages in books

what Artsy lynn did next

What I did

and some more of what i did tomorrow

gessoed some board from an old bed head to paint on

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Gelatine Printing with Lynn

Look what I did at Lynn's today. I showed her my page with painted leaf prints and she whipped out a Gelatin plate (as she does) rustled up some beautiful colours...and ooohhh lala, here's the result. Sometimes that girl takes my breath away. Negatives and positives of the same print.Here is a link to her page that shows the technique. http://lynn-taylor.blogspot.co.nz/2011/05/gelatine-printmaking.html

Dandelion leaves

Clematis

Setting the Tiger free

This 'Good' Article I borrowed from writing your way homehttp://writingourwayhome.ning.com/page/about-wowh..I am not sure about the copyright of doing this but as I am acknowledging source and advertising is always welcome, I thought it would be ok.If anyone thinks different let me know.It looked simple and fun and could be applied to images too. I sometimes grab an image and start in the middle of my Journal(always a good place I feel) and work intuitively from that image asking questions and adding words occasionally and sometimes more pictures.

(Picure by Tancred on flickr.com used under creative commons licence, with thanks)

Setting The Tiger Free by Rhiannon Hopkins

The Funky Crone
(aka Rhiannon)

Recently Kaspa wrote about how Ted Hughes likened writing a poem to catching an animal. Finding the words by careful attention on an object or idea and letting them come rather than trying to write about it, “as if you were working out mental arithmetic”. But all too often we capture our word animals only to fence them round with our school trained minds and the rules of grammarians and other pedants. Our creativity then becomes a caged tiger, beautiful but powerless, instead of a creature roaming its territory free to follow its true tigerish nature.
Our first creative efforts in life are messy. Scribbles and daubs as we gleefully discover colours, shapes, textures, in the days before criticism freezes our hands and our creative spirits. Before too long we learn the rules – colour inside the lines and don’t use the lovely red crayon for the elephant, everyone knows elephants are grey. This process continues at school – best handwriting, keep the letters on the lines and never write inside the margins. The cage door is slammed on our creative tigers. The rules of grammar and punctuation turn the key in the lock and many tigers never escape from their confinement.

Just as the rules make the cage, breaking the rules can open it. And, yes, there are reasons why we have grammar, punctuation and correct spelling etc. But writing with deliberate disregard for the established rules is akin to those early messy creative efforts and the results can be truly surprising.

Try this exercise and see where it takes you. Open a notebook at a random blank page. Not the next blank page in the book, that’s another bar of the cage, another rule and the first I am encouraging you to break. Now choose a word or phrase that has meaning and resonance for you or just select a word at random from the dictionary. For five minutes you will write about your word without pausing to think or evaluate the last sentence, just keep your pen or pencil moving. If you do not know what to write or you think this exercise is crazy write that. What you must not do is write neat sentences line by line, don’t worry about punctuation or spelling and write across the whole width of the page including straight across the margin. You could try writing with the notebook turned sideways on or even upside down, you could try going from right to left for a change (that’s left to right for some people, of course) The thing is to keep the pen moving and to give yourself permission to be messy, to disobey every rule you have ever been taught about presentation, and just allow creativity to step outside of that cage.

The thing to remember with a free tiger is that it will not cause harm to anyone if it is left strictly alone to be what it is and pursue its own tigerish ends. This exercise may disturb your habitual thinking and expand your boundaries but you risk nothing more by opening the cage in which other people have enclosed your creativity. In the words of the seventeenth century poet Joseph Addison ‘”There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art than in adhering to them.”

I’d be interested to hear how you found this exercise and what, if anything you discovered by doing it if you would like to send me a message.

(Picure by Tancred on flickr.com used under creative commons licence, with thanks)

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Atcs received today from Gretchen Miller at 6 degrees

Many MANY thanks to Lani Gentry,Kathy Masone, Gretchen Miller, Gayle Crisp, Emma Finch and Trish Robbins

Die Fledermaus and friends

Struggling with symmetry not really my thing Coloured ink pens

This was piles and piles of to do lists and shopping receipts that I glued down and coloured over. It felt good to contain them.represented many hours of achievements that go unseen.Pen and pencil and glue

Collage with paint and watercolour crayon over

I loved the Bats in the sydney Gardens,,I was going to call this 'Pink and the Bats' Piant and collage

The sunlight distorted this slightly at the bottom..should be darker Paint pencil glitter

Friday, February 10, 2012

Poem by Emily Haile

she wrote a yellow answer
you follow time like rain
start each day with home

the storm sings through my truth
i swim in whispers
where fast colours fly

Emily played with the magnetic Poetry on our fridge at the crib a couple of years ago and wrote this.Ruth (her mum) just sent it to me and reminded me of how much I like it.
Ruth and I are going to do some journalling around it and see what we come up with.

AND HERE THEY ARE..NOT VERY GOOD PHOTOS..SOME NOT QUITE FINISHED BUT NEARLY.

Monday, February 6, 2012

33 ways to stay creative

For Anna

I got given this old book by my friend Mary and decided to seal the pages and turn it into a Journal. As I started gessing and sealing the pages, they started detaching from the sides and disintergrating slightly. I realised that the paper was quite fragile(very newsprinty).

I decided to split the spine and apply some serious glue down the spine and take my time with gessoing. I usually do multiple pages, but will need to be slower with this. In the end I used gesso mixed with a bit of modge podge (because that was what was open)..I decide it needed a bit more glue. I used the art spectrum Gesso as it was smoother and less grainy(it is lovely to work with) than the Fas (much cheaper and what I would normally use).