This mysterious strangeness emerged when I was thinking with my hands. Late on a Thursday night it came into form, I assume hinting at things still gestating, not yet born. She looks a bit alien so who knows what it means.

Nest Building

A soft brown wren pecks for tiny seeds

strewn from yesterday’s weeding.

On closer look I see

she collects not seeds but tiny dried grass –

slight as a thought.

A beak full of bristling grass,

mustachioed she tilts her head,

making me laugh.

Then she lifts off, flies west toward home

to line her silky nest.

April 24, 2011

When I am in the flow of artmaking and the flow is going very well, I close my eyes when I am going to sleep and I see many visions. Because I have used this black paper for so long I believe my art guides are feeding me the beauty of their dreams. This came to me as a twisting, writhing, dancing bouquet of white flowers on an an inky dark background.

This blot technique is revealing all kinds of layered strangeness. I saw this alien being immediately. Later I realized that if I turn it on its side it could have been a landscape with reflection in water.

I also tried a new expressive technique this morning from a book Peter bought me called “Expressive Drawing” by Steve Aimone. It’s very Kahlo Diary-esque. You write a full page of narrative, journal entry–I did it in mixed black pen and watercolor pencil. Then you use paint to “reveal and obscure.” The handwriting acts as a unifying visual element.

This journal talks about umbrella walks in the the spring, cherry blossoms and daffodils, so all those elements ended up in the painting. The handle of the umbrella made  “J,” so I added my other initial, “S.” Certain words stand out from the texture of handwriting: the light, the light, brief, to hold on, to not forget, memory.”
Posted by Sandy Brown Jensen

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)