Category: something else

A week ago I finished a compressed semester of “getting things done.” GTD: the siren that calls us to wrestle all the disparate pieces of our lives into a spreadsheet breakdown that we can manipulate into submission — sometimes luring us onto the rocks of busyness and away from doing what we really want to do.

It’s difficult to get back to listening to myself and working from within. Sometimes when I’m unsure about how to approach the next piece, I find inspiration in digging through my stash of variously decorated papers. The designs are great to look at, but what’s more valuable is that looking at these papers revives a kinetic memory of the me that decorated the papers. I remember what it was like to spread out the papers on the table outside, to cook the paste, to mix up the paint and spread it on the paper and move it around with combs and sponges, to drop ink and watch it spread into lovely patterns, to wait while the ink dries to just this consistency so that I can spread it this much with this tool; to respond to the unexpected combination of these colors, the gestural effect of this mark.

In this digital age, the virtual world is instant, or it is interminable. Click Print and the sheet of paper slides out of the printer in a matter of seconds. Click Movies and schedules for all the movies theaters within x miles appear; click Buy and you’ve got your tickets. By contrast, you can lose hours trying to determine why closing this window crashes that program, or why the background color of this paragraph doesn’t match the background color of that image. Instant or interminable, not much of the outside world intrudes between our brain and our fingers on the keyboard.

Doing art re-forms and reforms my connection to the physical world which digital work can sever. And decorating paper is a good start, much like gestural warm-ups for figure drawing or lettering. I’ll post a couple of examples of what I’ve been doing lately.

I’m supposed to be doing my homework. Got distracted with this fun toy, Wordle. This one was constructed by pasting text from my website. You can fuss with the layout, the colors, and the font. Very cool. Now … back to work.

One of the great things about being a calligrapher is that after you’ve been to someone’s house for an evening which included a really wonderful dinner and great conversation, you can write a thank-you note that at least begins to do justice to the occasion.

Dinner was mostly Romanian, with many, many courses. Appetizers included olives, cheese, trout in pastry cups. Dinner began with crudites and eggplant dip. Then borscht — the vegetarian Romanian version is much lighter than the Russian version. Then three vegetarian dishes featuring mushrooms in phyllo containers, spinach in a crepe type of roll, and a delicious squash dish. Dessert: chestnut creme cake and some kind of raspberry tart thing. Tea, coffee, dessert wine. I probably missed something.

We waddled home late, worn out from eating and talking nonstop. It was lovely.

Yesterday I went kayaking with friends on the Graham Creek. It was a beautiful trip. We were on the water from about 5 to 9pm, I guess, and saw only one other boat. The tupelos were just beginning to bloom and the bees were beginning to gather on them. As we kayaked under blooming tupelo branches, a low drone permeated the air. Last year my friends, who also keep bees, were here on a day when the bees swarmed on the tupelo blooms and the noise was so deafening they couldn’t hear each other speaking. We were a few days too early to experience that.

As the sun went down, the reflection of the trees on the water seemed to have the same weight of reality as the trees themselves. When the bees stopped humming, the air was still except for the occasional paddle.

The spider lilies were in bloom, clumps of glowing white in the gathering gloom at the roots of the cypress stumps. These were growing close enough to the bank of the creek for me to photograph.

On the trip down to the creek, we had been talking about the connection of pagan religions to nature. (Notwithstanding the stained glass of Abbot Suger’s 13th-century Church of St. Denis which followed a theology of God as light. But I digress.) Out on the water, the overlapping roots and cypress knees reminded me of the animal style of Celtic decoration with its interlaced and knotted dogs and lions. I thought about how the monks on Holy Island began including birds in their illuminations in the Lindisfarne Gospels. And why not? They were on an island, and birds were a big part of their visual vocabulary.

So now I’m thinking about a North Florida animal style of illumination or knotwork which incorporates these roots:

Probably I’ll need to do more research. Another kayak trip. What we do for art, eh?

— click thumbnail for a closer look —

For the first time in a long while, I’ve had time to putter around in my studio. I decided to try my hand at Artist Trading Cards. At 2.5″ x 3.5″, they’re quite a manageable project. These are done on Bristol with pastels, walnut ink, gouaches and gel pens, mostly. The theme was a study of a page of a 15th-16th-century manuscript Libro D’Ore (Book of Hours), manuscript BN akc. 12399. It’s in Poland somewhere, and displayed on the Internet here in the “All Roads Lead to Rome” collection.
These aren’t exact copies of the manuscript decoration, since I used paint that was already in palettes and gel pens (for Pete’s sake). It would be more accurate to say that the manuscript page was a jumping-off point for play.

just for fun.

Well, it’s been awhile. Here’s what’s been happening, in a nutshell:

• I have a new computer. I like it. I finally got everything transferred over … I think.
• My last final of the semester was yesterday. I pwned it.
• I’ve been working on an juried artist book exhibit that will happen in October. When the prospectus is ready, I’ll let you know about it. Theme: Florida nature. Deadline for entries: July 11.
• I’ve finished the spring round of piano accompaniment — for high-school competitions and for university music major spring juries.

The final assignment in my web design class was to put together a portfolio of work. I’ve had my website for quite awhile, but I decided to try a completely different design. You can see it here:
www.pixelweavers.org/blee
If you have any opinion about it, let me know. Specifically, I’d like to know how you think the mouse-overs on the thumbnails in the galleries work. Not intuitive? Too changeable? Anything?

Plans for the rest of the week: Today and tomorrow — clean up my studio, which I suffered from lack of time, and housework. Thursday through Sunday — play in my studio. Good plan, eh?

I’ve done a few, very few, things of interest. I’ll post them next time. Which should be tomorrow or the next day, not, for instance, 6 weeks from now 🙂

I’ve been virtually muted, blinded, and deafened– in short, my 5-year-old computer has died. (Side note: don’t you hate it when people use “literally” when they mean “virtually”? I really mean “virtually”.) After doing all the usual things to try to salvage the computer, I’ve given up on it and ordered a new computer. I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, I’m using an extra, very old computer loaded with nothing but CS3 and Firefox. That’s how I got my two big projects done by the March 5 due date. But I have no bookmarks, no email program (isn’t web-based email the pits?), and I’m spending all my time organizing what I’ll need to load on the new computer when it gets here.

Tuesday is the magic day. See you then, unless I can’t stand it any longer and go to the trouble to attach my scanner and upload images here.

Today I took a stab at organizing the books in this set of shelves. My books are overflowing their shelves again … still … always … it’s just hopeless. Besides these bookshelves, which are in my studio, I have a similar but shorter set of shelves in another part of the studio, plus more built-in shelving over cabinets that span one whole wall, broken up in the middle by a hallway. I also have built-in shelves upstairs, and the rest of my art books take up two sections of those — each section is about the size of the bookshelves shown here.

I think it’s time to cull. Who am I kidding? It’s always time to cull. Because I can rarely bring myself to do it, and it’s downright dangerous. Today I came across some gems I want to re-read with new, older eyes, and some ideas I want to try, and some inspiration. It’s tempting to just sit down in the middle of the studio floor and revisit some of these books.

Besides the overflowing books problems, the studio is something of a wreck from recent framing and matting. I mailed off a few pieces for the show at The Painted Fish, and generally got caught up on a bunch of little projects.

Yesterday I opened up my newly purchased and installed CS3 Suite application InDesign. I’ve been using Publisher 97 for … well, since it was new. My Graphic Design class this semester uses InDesign and so I’ve got to get up to speed on it quickly. My first attempt in InDesign was, oddly enough, on January 1 when I printed the one-page book. That was done in InDesign CS2. Since then the semester has started, and it’s been clear that I had to get CS3 in order to be able to work in the classroom on the Mac as well as in my studio on my PC.

Here I killed two birds with one stone, so to speak, by making flashcards in InDesign for my Art History class. I made about 20, although only 6 are shown here.