It is not unusual for me to see full blown images behind my eyelids just as I wake up in the morning.
I am not sure if this has to do with the strong light that comes through my window, filtered by our Broad Leaf Maple. Maybe it has to do with an overactive imagination wanting to get to the colored pencils. Are these images teasers to push me toward my black pages and my idea book?
Black Pears
I do not know, but Salvador Dali said that he would not mind solitary confinement because he could spend his life painting the images behind his eyeballs. We share this odd phenomena.
“Acid Green and Manganese Blue” appeared to me as a fabric or woven disc, backlit with brilliant blue. Black Pears hearkens back 15 years to my “black things” series. Art has an uncanny life of its own, and it am amazed when it asserts itself. “Paint Me! Paint me now!!”
Junipers, the Steens Mountains, Oregon – watercolor by Cheryl Renee LongCliff Swallows, Canyonland, Utah,- watercolor by Cheryl Renee Long
Many artists notice that their best work emerges long after a visit or an experience. Two paintings above are a synthesis of my memories. I did not use a photo reference, preferring instead to see what colors, what shapes emerged just from remembering. I did not use just one scene, Junipers is a composite. The landscape shows a repeating pattern of dotted sagebrush, always a good element for a composition. I have many Juniper stories. I remember the Pariah Canyon country; a juniper loaded with opalescent pale blue berries fluoresced in the starlight. I see junipers as sacred trees and possibly sentient in some way.
Cliff Swallows continue to be a persistent image for many years. We call these long term pictures in our minds Source Imagery. I seem to have a thing for repeating dot patterns. I have seen these nests in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. I am not sure why they hold such appeal for me. Cliff Swallows are free and beautiful birds. Their flight pattern is fascinating and they build nests from permanent materials, and high on the cliffs, far from predators. I resonate with that.
As my Meditations on Gratitude online class with Laura Valenti continues, we are encouraged to look around us at everyday moments and objects as worthy a moment of gratitude. I have been taking photographs around the property to celebrate this little corner of the world one quiet corner of June 2016.
I am very grateful to have married into this house 22 years ago. Here, I am outside shooting through the living room window with a close up on a grouping of masks and other sculptural objects. The window glass is reflecting the trees behind me.
I like this shot because it conveys the sense I always have of our house being like a longhouse, full of mythological beings, adrift with stories and dreams.
When we were having our car breakdown and accidental extra nine days of vacation in Carmel earlier this year, Peter bought Bunny for me. I have become very attached to Bunny, and sometimes she sits in the living room window and waits for me to come home.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, by the way, if you’d really like to know, he went that way.
Perdita in the Window. My sister Cheryl gave me Perdita for my birthday, made by a Mexican doll-maker. My photography teacher said she looks like a visionary or seer, and I agree.This is the exterior of our house, guarded by a Native American Sisiutl or double-headed sea serpent, which is the Guardian of the House of the Sky People, painted on there by Peter one fine day.
Using my Go Pro, I shot from the outside of our living room looking in, accentuating the fish eye quality. I like this picture because it is odd and yet sees right through the house.I love this photograph of our house from the living room window straight through the airy spaces to the garden.Peter’s totem poles out in the garden are starting to settle into their places ever more deeply, here disappearing into the fennel.
What is around you in your everyday world that YOU are thankful for?
This little drawing was done first in the Paper 53 app then moved to Bazaart to add the image in the upper left and the text.
In today’s Daily Create, we were asked to draw our childhood home. I have done this drawing many times over the years, and I notice it has gotten less and less specific as time wears away at the bright stones of memory, polishing them down to their glowing centers.
Now it is mountains, trees, tracks, river, house.
I grew up on the Wenatchee River in the foothills of the Enchantments. The image of me upper left is from an underwater shoot a couple of days ago and seems to me a face full of memory.
Even a rudimentary sketch like this seems beautiful to me, and I stare at it falling into a reverie of a time both long ago and yet still a room I can walk into that is as close as breathing.
The Mysterious Night Journal for me used to be gel pens or Prismacolor on black paper, but as I work in my art journal and so often disappear into the many rooms of memory, I see it is the canvas of the soul.
The Frog and Cat poems and photographs on the left page of my Gratitude Art Journal
Cat curled around stone
announcing “POETRY! in case
we had forgotten.
A view of the Gratitude Art Journal double page layout.
Gratitude Art Journal page with my “Gratitude Jar” poem. The Tumbling Jars sketch on the right is a Prismacolor pencil drawing I did in 2011 that I suddenly remembered and retrieved from my Flickr account, where for once organizing my photos paid off!
Canning Grats
After canning peaches, I had one
clear jar left. I put my grandmother
in there along with the apples
she was peeling. I added a sharp
handful of mint from my husband’s garden,
a tube of Opera Pink Paint
and the shadow of a summer
fern on a slate rock face.
The sound of a train,
dawn light over the Three Sisters.
I found five memories that would fit
and slipped
a whole head of garlic down the side
along with a feathery branch
of dill and something
like a song. Pressure
cooked by time,
labelled, shelved, ready
to be given away.
NOTE: In a previous post, Creating a Gratitude Art Journal, I posted a short video explaining that I am taking a Meditations on Gratitude Photography class online with Laura Valenti. She asked us to find a repository for our “grats,” or items for which we feel gratitude on a daily basis, and I began with the Gratitude Art Journal, although I’m not sure how I’ll go forward. She suggested a Gratitude Jar, which gave me the idea for the poem “Canning Grats.”
then a sheet of yellow tissue paper to cover most of it to add texture.
Across the top I carefully stamped “Meditations on Gratitude; Poems N Pixs N Such.”
I drafted the poems in my regular journal then wrote them directly on the prepared surface.
I printed out my photographs, and they came out looking a bit sketchy, but I thought that added to the “folk art” quality of an art journal.
I used Mod Podge (sealer, glue, and finish) to glue the images down,
and then I covered the entire page with Mod Podge. BIG MISTAKE! And I knew better! I should have used a spray fixative first but forgot and the ink on the stamping and photos ran. I replaced the photos and started over, but the stamping was a write off. So…
I re-did the photos
Added strips of tissue paperand sprayed it with Windsor Newton Professional Satin Varnish
THEN Mod Podged the whole…letting it dry between stages
I am documenting my journey through Laura Valenti’s Meditations on Gratitude Online Photography class with short videos. This one introduces my art journal as a place to collect my moments of gratitude.
My favorite moment in it is when I totally serendipitously video my cat Pookie curled around a stone called “Poetry.” I took a screen shot of it, and I’m going to put it in as the first image in the journal.
My cat Pookie curled around the Poetry stone. She will go in my art journal.
This is an overview of my current art journal page. It’s a landscape-oriented big watercolor Moleskine book.This is the right hand page of Lake and MountainsThis is the left hand side of Lake and Mountains.
I just returned from a pilgrimage to her two houses in New Mexico, one at Ghost Ranch where we stayed a few days to explore and photograph “O’Keeffe Country.” Then we visited the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It was there that I bought the book as well as many prints, cards, and additional art books focusing on this artist.
My trip was so visually rich that I have been floundering, trying to figure out how to integrate all the visual and intellectual information I’ve taken in. One thing I did was buy a big landscape view watercolor Moleskine sketchbook and began art journaling.
I title all my journals, and this one is called “Working Into My Own,” with an O’Keeffe quote that is meaningful to me at this stage of my life:
Now that I’ve finished the biography, I am looking deeply at her paintings. For this art journal page, I was studying the composition of her “Lake and Mountains” because I was fascinated by the egg shape. It took me a long time to figure out it was supposed to be a lake:
By trying to copy O’Keeffe’s composition and color scheme in “Lake and Mountains,” I was trying to learn from her about soft rounded shapes pushed up against sharper, jagged shapes.
O’Keeffe is the Queen of Simplicity, of smooth, pared-down abstractions and a flawless surface application of paint, all of which I admire but do not personally aspire to.
I added mysterious dark shapes into my landscape using torn tissue paper. I love the spontaneous, unexpected effects of torn paper and the full range of playful collage tools and techniques that typify the art journal aesthetic.
Have you been doing any art lately? Discovered ay new artists or fun techniques?
