I call myself beloved

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.
- Raymond Carver 

*The beautiful bird photographs are from Pinterest.The lovely main bird is by Naoto Kitamura, and I'm not certain who the artist is for the small yellow bird.

What are all these kisses worth?

From my Spark journal. One of my favorite pages.

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?       

 Percy Bysshe Shelley

One flew over the goose's nest

I buy every vintage children's poetry book I can find at thrift stores, garage sales and library discards. This double-page spread unites my love of poetry with a recurring image of wild geese that shows up in all my work.

There are extraordinary things in your everyday lives. There are hidden treasures in familiar shadows.

The Tim Holtz line of Adirondack Alcohol Inks has the most divine selection of colors. The inks are actually meant for coated/non-porous papers, but I don't care. I use them on this Fabriano Artistico 140 lb Hot Press watercolor paper and it does beautiful things. It bleeds through to the back of the paper but I don't mind working with that.

My quote was hand lettered with a large bamboo quill and Dr. PH Martin's Bombay India Ink in "Aqua". I added German scrap, more gold leaf, and more found text.

I almost always add some sort of gold spray or gilded element to my work to represent The Divine.

Harsh and Exciting

 

When the streams of rain pour out of the sky and the sparkles of lightning go flashing by.

 One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the goose's nest.

Most of us know this poem's variation as "one flew over the cuckoo's nest". 

Which always makes me think of the book and movie. I'd like to believe I'm the one who will fly over the cuckoo's nest. 

I Pray

My wonderful friend Vasia Papazoglou on Pinterest recently invited me to pin to her board,

The Suggested.

I thought for my week of notoriety I would share a few pages from my current art journals.
I have two main journals I work on, "Spark" which is kind of a messy experimental journal, and
"Each Little Bird That Sings" which is also experimental but more spiritual in nature. Later on I can talk about how I constructed them.

I think in light of today's events, sadness both national and personal, I'd share this spread.
I usually work in double-page spreads. These pages contain basically the whole panopoly of mixed-media techniques.

"I Pray"

On hot-press watercolor paper I like to drip alchohol inks, add photo transfers, photographs, stenciling, embellishments, and gilt. I use many photos that I download from Pinterest as inspiration. I love the sherbert colors of this palette.  

The red alchohol ink created a beautiful heart on the second statue. So I dedicate today's post to two prayers.

My first prayer is for the people affected by the Boston Marathon today. For the dead, for the injured, for their families, for the 8-year-old child and for the cowardly evil person(s) who would do such a thing. My next door neighbor ran in the race this morning and I burst into tears to discover from his wife he crossed the finish line 30 minutes before the bombs went off.

My second prayer is for everyone on this planet, who, like me, are born with hearts too fragile, too trusting. Hearts so easily broken and unsuited to this world.

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone.

Thomas Merton

It's Amazing...

Wild Geese

 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

 

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

 Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver. Wild Geese. 

Harsh and Exciting

Perhaps this is interesting only to me, but I have ALWAYS found my detritus more interesting than my applied arts. That is to say, the scrap paper under my art projects without fail turns out to be more interesting to me visually, than the applied project I'm working on. Because it is entirely random. So at long last I wised up.

Traditionally I've used a pad of newsprint as a desk blotter and just thrown away each page as I've worked on each project. But I've always loved those newsprint pages. Alas, they are notorious for being riddled with acid. Not unlike my soul (not really).

So, 'lo at this advanced year of mine I finally wised up and bought a tablet of Strathmore Drawing Paper 14x17 inches and I put that underneath my laptop and my art projects. This time I saved
my sheet and was so happy with the ink remainders that I added just a few stencils and 'lo, it came to pass that I actually for once liked something I made.

Point of fact, I live in a dungeon without natural light, so all of my photos look a bit...palid.
But this paper came out so pink and blushing and lovely. And my Cosmo looked so pretty with it.
I shall post the lovely Mary Oliver poem next from whence this page was inspired.

Also, the bracelets. They are from Forever 21. I always feel like alarms are going to screech, "Middle-aged woman in the store! Middle-aged woman in the store!" but who would even know over the deafening shit-soundtrack the store plays ad nauseam. But at any rate, I buy a fair amount of jewelry from them because it's so fun and fresh and CHEAP!  Plus, huzzah huzzah, it actually comes in tiny wrist sizes, as the Lord saw fit to give me tiny wrists but a honkin' ass. Still...for the record. I wouldn't trade for huge wrists and a tiny ass because there's no disguising huge cankles and wrists. Poor dears.

What was my point? Oh...I can't stand bangles falling all over the place so I add just a tiny chain around them to hold them all together. I haven't actually done that in reality but I plan to with that pile of bangles you see pictured. Just in time for summer with my janky fingernails from all the art shit also picture here. What's a girl to do.