All posts by Sandy Brown Jensen

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A Pocket Museum

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A Pocket Museum

March 5, 2008

I gave each of my Creative Writing students at Linfield a 5x loupe and told them to go out into the beautiful spring weather. They were to collect natural objects to create “a pocket museum,” then to use their loupe to draw what they saw, and then to write analogies.

This purple periwinkle looks like an Easter bonnet,
the purple star of Perfect Repose,
a violet kiss in oaky weather,
a tattoo I might like to have on the back of my left knee,
the violet membrane protecting Inua, the feminine soul of a whale,
a lavender smile I saw out of the corner of my eye….

Source Imagery

The Spiral Source

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March 3, 2008
Last night, I asked each student to write down a time of day (like twilight, dawn, high noon, etc.) on a scrap of paper and put them in a hat. We all drew one and the prompt was to express the mood of that hour in art while letting memories, dreams, and reflections related to that time of day come to us for writing about afterward.

I have a lovely student with emerald green hair. Last night, her ripped tee-shirt revealed the words “Lost Girl” tattooed across the top of her chest. Libby has multiple piercings including a bar across the top of her spine that looks painful, but in spite of her ritualistic accessories, her dominant facial expression is best described as gamine. She is big-hearted, sweet-natured, and artistic. She gave me the word “revolutionary,” which began the spirals.

However, as the “leader of the pack,” I am always aware of many souls focusing and creating at the same time. In a previous scribble drawing called “Holding It Close,” which I also did while drawing with my students, the object being held close and growing was the spiral of an unfurling frond. I see that same cosmic spiral symbol of the psyche repeated here is a source image of many hearts working together in one space, “rocked in the spiral arms of the Milky Way,” as Lisa Aschman’s song says.

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Spring Moon

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SPRING MOONCHILD

The first of March, and our garden is purple and gold with crocuses, and the tiny miniature daffodils act out Wordsworth’s poem in the chilly, bright blue breeze. I imagine the fields by moonlight like a great Moonchild coming up out of the body of the Earth.
Memory

Strutting His Stuff

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Now here we have a stock character that has lived in my imagination for my entire life. I painted him for the first time when I was only 19 when I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. Tristan has the picture – it is most interesting. Oil paint and graphite on paper. It has held up remarkably well.

Anyway, I digress. Our grandparents, Doris and Lester had a small family farm in Mt. Vernon, Washington. As a small child I spent many weekends there with time on my hands. Chickens are entertaining for adults and fascinating for small children. I liked their feathers, the way they had free run of the plowed fields to cluck, peck and scratch for bugs all day. I didn’t understand the roosters; they seemed pushy and demanding and mean to the hens. I told my grandmother she should only have hens but she said, oh no – without a rooster the hens stop laying eggs. I ate grandma’s giant breakfasts of scrambled eggs and biscuits smothered with gravy, so the roosters had to stay. I knew that the roosters did not lay the eggs though, so that seemed odd to me. Strutty rooster showed up in this scribble drawing once again. He is among the oldest of my stock characters.

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Holding It Close

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Holding It Close
Feb. 28, 2008
I returned yesterday to a scribble I did in class with my students earlier in the week. What emerged was this lovely older woman with long hair sitting cross-legged in turquoise harem pants on a tasseled pillow. She is holding something close to her heart, securing and protecting it. My thought as I was working on it was that it was something I created that was to be held close. Later, I thought it might be the soul or a dream. She is sitting in a zazen lotus pose, so perhaps what she holds close in the result of long practice.

At first, I thought she held a spiral shell, Peter said snake, but now it seems like the strong unfurling of a frond, but larger, like a tiger lily or a monkey-faced orchid.

It is growing and unfurling naturally from the core of her zazen practice, and as I have just started to read and introduce to my classes Natalie Goldberg’s new book, Old Friend From Far Away, which as always emphasizes writing as a spiritual practice, and because the image emerged from the classroom, I think it is the soul of my teaching and writing practice unfurling into the light under my protection.

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After Many Days of Flight She Arrived, Message Delivered

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I paint and draw from forms created by indigenous
peoples because I believe that I may feel what they felt; maybe begin to know what they knew. I am trying to capture strains of knowledge from the akashic record. This is not an outlandish idea. Art students have copied the great masters for centuries. Their goal is to sense, to intuit and to learn from the great artists that have now passed.
I can do the same for much the same reason.

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Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun

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Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun and, I might add, they appear unbidden when I am trying to get to sleep. Birds posing, flying, eating, pecking, chasing, somersaulting for no apparent reason. So I assume they just want to have fun and they come to me because I am willing to give them a form on paper on a Friday night, to reside forever in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal.

I sometimes worry that I might run out of images. OMIGOD, what if I go to the well one day and it is dry. It is a profoundly irrational fear – what can I tell you. I have more ideas for paintings than I can possibly produce in this lifetime. The ideas sometimes come from a place I visited – or a particular experience. But more often than I would expect, they emerge from the ethers, rather fully developed and all I need to do is put what I see behind my eyeballs on paper. So it is with playful black birds. A sketch now – and almost certainly the ingredients for a more developed piece later.

Perhaps they are giving me a tip: winter is nearly over. Buy some pink and yellow tulips and put them on the dining room table for your husband to see. Prune the roses, clean the winter drudge from the windows, let the February sun stream through the open door onto the hardwood floor.

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Spindrift (My Limited Vocabulary of the Sea)

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When We Were Cedar

Hot basalt
Green salt
Spindrift
The light and hammered surface of the sea;
the guessed-at life of gulls;
pale chalcedony calm
of anemones locked
in the orange death embrace
of a starfish arm.
Agates: only think
and the light catches the blood egg red
in the black sand—
What is still? The rock.
What moves? The sea.
What blows? The surf.
What blazes? The sun.
What rises? The moon.
What gathers? The dark.
What thinks a long, slow thought through time
up through moss? Cedar ascendant and red.
All childhood, all tragedies,
all things both broken and complete
rise up the resinous thoughtlines of wood.
You and I are flat
cedar fronds for this season only,
extending over a remote bluff,
itself millions of years old ,
itself crumbling into the sea.
Fronds the shape of spindrift,
the way we catch the light—no one
sees us and yet
this cedar rises. We point her anonymous fronds
at the sea and the sun and the moon and the night and the dawn and the day and the sea.

–Sandy Jensen
Spindrift, Yachats
Feb. 17, 2008

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Fists Into Flowers

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February 13, 2008
In my Creative Writing classroom at Linfield College, we are using the book Writing and Being: Embracing Your Life Through Creative Journaling by G. Lynn Nelson. He poses an exercise: in personal quiet, search your body for places of tightness, feel where pain has created “fists,” and write that fist into a flower. I invited my students to first represent that fist in image, then transform it into a flower, and then move to writing that process.

I always work in the classroom with my students. This time, I imagined all of their fists together in the center, hands in different stages of unfolding to the flower they are, and as I thought of them, I drew.

I have often had the eerie experience of feeling that the classroom was my brain and the students all held within it, that my action of drawing or writing with them affected us all, moved us along through time as a more coherent whole, as I did on this day with this drawing.

This image, “Fists Into Flowers,” was like a Navajo or Tibetan sand painting–created in a room where I was centering others who were moving their emotional fists into flowers.