The Book!

Volume Two of my book, Art Journal Pages is now available:
180 full color collage pages from my own Visual Journals for inspiration, instruction, enlightenment, and just fun. When you are stuck in your own visual journaling process, just open this keepsake book, and after a few pages, you will be running for your own papers, inks, pens, and photos, and be right back in touch with The Muse.

This link can show you how to order, and provide a full color preview of the whole book, you can see lots of my journaling pages all in one place on-line, (and you might even decide to purchase the book so you can flip though these pages while you ride the train to work, or wait in the doctor's office, or sip tea in bed, or while waiting for inspiration in the coffee shop . . . )
Visual Journal Pages

and thank you for the well wishes and positive thoughts while I am healing, and thank you for supporting the ARTS and especially the Art of Visual journaling.

"Create beauty. Give everything you have to creating. No matter what you have to do to get by each day, never stop creating. If it is an actual art form, you will likely master it. But if it is just how you live, you'll be very alive and far happier."
--J. Bruce Wilcox

birthday card

Recently at a birthday brunch for a dear friend, I gave her this card. My friends said I should sell it on Etsy, and share it with the world -- it is an accordian folding 24" x 5" card which celebrates any important birthday. It reads: "wisdom, power, love, beauty, abundance, may all this be yours on your birthday." It depicts Ganesh, Rama, Krishna, and Lakshmi. The card comes in a celo wrapper with white envelope. This is a very unusual card, more like a banner, which is suitable for framing after opening, or hanging by your desk to assure the blessings of the Gods and Goddesses for many birthdays to come.
(note: the watermark words will not appear on the card.)
link:
Gods-and-Goddesses

Taking a Break

Hello, dear readers.
a bit less than two weeks ago, I underwent some surgery on the three "B's", bladder, butt, and babymaker. (yup, this included a hysterctamy.)
I wasn't going to write about it here, too personal and actually, a bit gross, even to me.
But I want to explain my absence.
My body is working differently.
What goes in must come out in one way, shape, or form, and I am having trouble with this. Its not easy, and there is pain and lots of time in the bathroom.
Healing is my priority right now.
Also, I am taking this fallow time to rethink my work focus and choices.
I had three galleries show my collages this year, with only one sale, and this might mean I need a new direction.
I am looking at some new options for how I spend my work time, and although taking the time to make art will always be what I do, blogging everyday about it might not be in the best interest of moving my work forward into the world.
I get so many hits here, and so few comments, this might be the Universe letting me know to move on, or maybe just post only now and then.
your feedback is welcome, I'll gather my thoughts and work and healing, then make some new plan for my artistic and work life.
Namaste.

"I thought my mountain was coming this morning. It was near to speaking when suddenly it shifted, sulked, and returned to smallness. It has eluded me again and sits there, puny and dull. Why?" --Emily Carr

flowers, not journal pages

Healing.
Taking time off.
Enjoying the amazing flowers blooming in my garden, and I wanted to share some with you:





"Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate." --Chuang Tzu

Visual Patterns

I will be giving a talk at Jefferson Unitarian Church in Golden, Colorado on my art and shamanism on Thursday, with some audience experimentation in looking at visual patterning -- I am super excited about this!
and then I will be out of commission for some time with some surgery coming up next week, so as soon as I am well enough, I will be back and sharing journaling pages again.
in the meantime, Happy Art!

"A repeated shape is not actually the same – the more subtle, the more poetic this repeat is, the more we feel that resonant pulse." --Suzanne Northcott

********

“I don’t like art that points at a thing. I like art that is the thing.”
--Tania Bruguera

. . .

"If you see a whole thing, it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But up close a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern." --Ursula K. LeGuin

bits and pieces

One way to process your day is to collage it.
Take some bits and pieces of your life and arrange them.
Maybe add some color and words.
This is profoundly gratifying, in part because it makes beauty out of the daily stuff we have to deal with, and partly because it validates that play is worthwhile, and your brain while playing accesses some other, deeper place.
Repetitive drumming, meditation, being in Nature; we all have ways to connect, try making a collage in that state and see what happens.

"An artist doesn't really create anything - he just rearranges what is already there." --Paramahansa Yogananda

Jeans Skirt Journal Video

3 minutes of pages of my Jeans Journal on YouTube
This is a short film of very bad quality, to show you some pages from the latest journal.
This is a totally messy journal, made from random scraps of ephemera and paper from the "trash" box. I sewed the signatures into an old jeans skirt. Sometimes I just need to push the boundaries. I showed this to a journaling class and they thought it was sort of a mess ...... but somehow I am happy with it. It expressed what I needed to express, and felt really good to work in. This is not a How-To video, I just flip through the pages to show you how it turned out.

maybe bewilderment is the answer.

"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition." Rumi

say YES to yourself and your work

"Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes."
--Dave Eggers.

Where do you put your intention?

"One looks, looks long, and the world comes in." Joseph Campbell

today . . .

"Let us learn the secret language of light again. Also the letters of the dark. Learn the flight patterns of birds, the syllables of wolf howl and bird song, the moving pantomime of branch and leaf, valleys and peaks of whale calls, the long sentences of ants moving in unison, the combinations and re-combinations of clouds, the codices of stars. Let us, thus, reconstitute the world, sign by sign and melody by melody. Let us sing the world back into the very Heart of the Holy Name of God." --Deena Metzger

Buddha

"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there." --Rumi

Happy Mother's Day Mother Earth!

"Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with." --Mark Twain

keeping at the journey

"You can only come to the morning through the shadows." --J. R. R. Tolkien

Mail Art

Journal Pages make great postcards, and a great way to share art.
Some of my best collages have come from adding bits of mail art, both received and sent.
Try sharing your work this way, and see the inspiration blossom.

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples, then you and I will each have an apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." --George Bernard Shaw

chickens

"The young artist... will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated." --Allan Kaprow

Success

Even though the world makes you think money, fame, and praise are the signs of success, I and you know differently.
We know that showing up each day in the studio, picking up that pen or paper or cursor, making something expressive and wonderful despite a lack of the feedback, THAT is success.
We know that showing up for the Muse day after day, honoring the act of creating something personal, meaningful, rich with expression is worth more than most work acts of pushing paper, or selling this or that to earn some money.
It doesn't matter if you are the one everyone praises as a great artist and throws money your way.
It matters that you do this work.
Go
Do
It.

"We should not feel obliged to constantly fill up all the air of our lives with the insane desire to achieve something. This just creates anxiety. It is the spaces in between our work and thoughts that can be the most creative." --Sharon Knettell

Sometimes . . . .

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." --Helen Schucman