Monday, July 30, 2012

As If I Could Forget

Dilip Patel, one of the regulars in the Diva's Design challenges, often uses the challenges to add to his Zentangled Ganesha series.  Dilip, although this design is not a true Ganesha, I did it in your honor.  Namaste!  I am linking this up to Inspiration Avenue, where the prompt is "perfectly pink." 


Since I wrote this post, I learned that Dilip's father passed after struggling with cancer. My heart goes out to Dilip and his family.  May your memories always be a source of joy and the love of those around you always be a source of strength and comfort. 

The Diva's challenge this week was hosted by Erin Koetz Olson.  She has a great blog, and is also a paramedic and is participating in Relay for Life.  She created a mandala to bring attention to this worthy cause.  Here's what I did:

Of course, I HAD to add color, and had fun using my gel pens and markers.  I can't resist bringing my mixed media self to the Zentangling world!  I know some of my tangles are unorthodox, and appreciate sharing them with this great community.

For anyone visiting me from the Diva's blog, please check out Paint Party Friday, where I am the featured artist this week.   I think it would be so great for some of the wonderful artists from the Zentangle world to link up to PPF and share what they are doing. I am also linking up to Creative Every Day and Artists in Blogland.  

Have a wonderful week.  If you are moved to comment, please know that hearing from you means the world to me!

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Keeping Peace

I am so proud to be the featured artist on Paint Party Friday this week!  Thank you for the great interview and shout out!  Each week, amazing artists link up to PPF -- please check them out and link up your work as well!

My mom is an artist.  She doesn't paint with acrylics or watercolors, but with the flowers in her garden, and with her cooking.  She made the most gorgeous and tasty vegetarian meal last night.  I asked her to pose with it -- she is the Julia Childs of Pine Lake Park!  Thanks Mom!

Why Is It So Hard To Keep My Peace? 
All the great spiritual traditions teach techniques for maintaining peace of mind.  But putting these techniques into practice -- to keep my peace and equanimity no matter what -- is very difficult.  Here in Pine Lake, I feel so at peace.  But on Wednesday, during a one day visit home, I felt the stress and pressure of ordinary life creep up around me as soon as I got off the highway.  And then, yesterday, as a difficult relative arrived into the mix, I again felt that tightness in my chest.  This morning in meditation, as I tried to "find" the feeling, it dissipated into thin air and I felt a wash of peace.  But then I heard his voice, and had to start from square one!  Practice, practice, practice.  If I can't keep my peace, I will keep my distance and I will keep my tongue!

I have felt a swell of creativity here, and it is where I will go for refuge today.  Here are two pieces I recently completed, both of which relate to the practice of keeping peace.  The first is a reminder to start every day anew.  Don't drag the past forward.  Cleanse the slate and be open to the possibility of pleasant change.  The person who irked me yesterday might bring me joy today! 

For Everyday Anew, I started with a layer of collage on a long thin piece of birch, and then drew a rough of the design with black oil pastel.  The collage informed me of the design.  Then I scraped paint around the design, further defining it.

And here it is, emerged from the collage!
This little birdie is going to fly over to the Anything Goes challenge blog; the current prompt is "anything but square."
It's not enough to begin anew; It is also so important to begin with love.  If we can meet difficult people and difficult situations with loving kindness, at least we won't exacerbate them.    Here is "Start From Love" in it's embryonic stage, and then completed.  
I have to thank my husband for urging me to add the red flowers in the foreground.  I think it was a great suggestion!

Here is a video that gave me some good perspective this morning.
 
Do you have techniques for dealing with difficult people and situations that work for you?  I thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Dare To Dream

In the book "Five People You Meet in Heaven," author Mitch Albom describes each person's heaven as their favorite place on earth.  (This book is a wonderful and quick read, and will quickly make you realize how important each of are to the tapestry of life.)  If this is true, I know my heaven will be our little lake community in Pine Lake Park.  Our bungalow is truly modest - 2 bedrooms, a bath and a galley kitchen that comprise less than the square footage of the first floor of our house in New Jersey -- but it has all I need.  Our small lake is, to me, water of well-being, peace and healing.  Each day as I swim in it, I feel baptized and blessed.  The sound of the bull frogs and crickets each night are the lullaby of the universe.  I am so lucky to be here!

I have basically moved up here for the summer -- and it is so conducive to painting, meditating, contemplating, and stillness.  Here is a piece I just finished, called "Dare to Dream." 
Scrapping the Music's prompt this time around was the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," which is near and dear to my heart.   I chose the lyric "dare to dream," from the phrase "and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true."  This canvas includes pieces of fabric I designed for Robert Kaufman, collage and stamped paper I made at CREATE, and the zentangle Mi-Mi 80 from the Diva's 80th challenge. For years I've dreamed about spending the entire summer at Pine Lake -- and here I am!

I'm linking up at Paint Party Friday, Art Journal Everyday and Artists in Blogland too.  And here is one of my favorite poems about dreams, by Langston Hughes:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Dream on!
Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Lessons and Thanks

It has been nearly a week since the CREATE New Jersey retreat.  I have had some time to get my hands dirty and incorporate some of what I learned into my own work.  Before sharing, let me tell you about Julie Balzer's workshop in stamp carving.

I "met" Julie through her blog, Balzer Designs, when I was first investigating the world of mixed media art, and particularly art journaling.  I did Julie's "30 days in your journal" online class, and it definitely transformed my approach to making art.  (The class is ongoing and self-paced, so you can take it anytime.)  So I was excited to study with her in person.

Julie could be a stand-up comedienne -- and I definitely didn't expect that from her!  She is down-to-earth and extremely entertaining.  She broke down stamp carving so beautifully that every person in the class created gorgeous patterning stamps.  Here are some of my creations: 

The coloration in the last one comes from one of the most exciting lessons from this workshop -- learning to make our own inkpads.  Very cool.

Here are two pieces I created since I came back, incorporating many of the techniques I learned at CREATE (you can see how I used the circle cut out of the purple stamped page!): 


I used some of the painting techniques I learned from Joanne Sharpe and Cindy Wunsch, the collage papers I made with Jane Davies, and stamped papers and actual stamps I made with Julie.   Although these two pieces are influenced by the workshops I took, I feel like they look like "me."  Here are some things I took away about myself:

1.  I'm embracing my childhood nickname of "Messy Jessy."  My mixed media style is a bit rough around the edges -- I don't like being confined to neat and pretty lines or having to have things line up precisely.  Some of the women in the stamp carving class made the most gorgeous, intricate stamps -- but I liked it best when my lines were a bit more jagged and uneven.

2.  Even though I don't love my handwriting, I like using it.  Although there are great lettering stamps and fonts out there, I like when a sentiment looks like I wrote it -- even though the lettering might be uneven or messy at times.

3.  I can't help but work in a triage zone!  My work space inevitably looks like a hurricane blew through it, and that's ok with me.  I like having all my supplies out where I can see them, and to me, it is controlled chaos even if I look like I'm completely disorganized!  So even though I clean up after each project, I'm going to stop trying to have an organized workspace as I'm working.  It just doesn't fit my style.

Zentangler Dilip Patel has a lovely tradition of thanking the people who commented on his previous post.  Because I am so grateful for people's comments, I am going to adopt this tradition.  So big thank yous to Gloria, TangleWithLinda, Teddi, Lynn, Debbi, Diane, Natasha, Mary, Marjl, Lisa, Carolyn, Tracey, Anne, Candace, Pauline, Linda, Sabina, JKW, Giggles, Wednesday, Karen, IHannah and Ginny for leaving such kind comments on my last post.   

And finally, a shout out to Veronika, Erica, Sally, Ida, Lyria, Shari, Martha, Ruth and Sandra and all the other amazing women I "arted" with last week!  I hope to see you again soon!  UPDATE:  I forgot to mention Carolyn Dube -- whose blog I have so admired -- and who I had the pleasure of taking a class and having lunch with!  It was SO NICE to meet you.

As always, your words mean the world to me!  So if you are moved to comment, know it makes me very happy!

Friday, July 20, 2012

Bloom True to You!

Today is the third day of the CREATE retreat in New Jersey.  I have taken amazing classes with Cindy WunschJoanne Sharpe, and Jane Davies.  I have learned so much, and have been in classes with so many talented people.  It has been very inspiring.  Here are a few pieces I created in the past two days!

Bloom True to You was created in Cindy Wunsch's class.   Her technique is to first cover the entire canvas in collage:

Next step is to draw your image on top of it, and then de-clutter by painting away parts of the collage to reveal your image:
 
Until the final image reveals itself:
Cindy was a warm and encouraging teacher, and I'm so happy with how this turned out.  I am linking her up to Artists in Blogland's Enchantment challenge.  The garden is a place of enchantment for me -- it's where I most feel the magic of the divine.

Joanne Sharpe had a very different technique.  We had 5 mini canvasses and pieces of paper and card stock.  The first part of class was painting all of these surfaces with acrylic paint and sprays, using stencils, stamps, our fingers and brushes.  Then, we ripped up our papers and glued them on our canvasses.  Finally, we added words, paint, and pens to create a mini canvas journal with inspirational words and phrases.  Here are two of mine -- the others still need a little work! 
 

While both Cindy and Joanne had completely different approaches, their styles were wonderfully organic and free. They both encouraged finding the perfection in your imperfections, and letting mistakes transform into opportunities.  I loved both of their styles and classes.

With Jane Davies, we worked on various techniques to create background collage papers.  But I haven't taken pictures of them yet so I will post later about her.  But she was great, and had fun stories about the chickens she raises for eggs.  Quite colorful!

The Diva's challenge this week was to use the interlocking circles from the Olympics to create a design.  Here's my work in progress (the interlocking circles are supposed to read "PEACE"), which I hope to finish this weekend.


I've got to run -- time for Julie Balzer's stamp carving class!

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Why Crawl Through Life When You Have Wings to Fly?

If you are coming from My Desert Cottage you are in the right place for the blog hop!  Welcome to my blog.  Pics of my studio, such as it is, are at the end of this post.  But first:
12 Hours of Yoga!
I woke up today with every muscle in my body aching.  Yesterday I participated in the Garden State Yogathon.   Garden State Yoga is is the studio where I teach, and the studio gathered together teachers from all the area studios for a 12 hour yogathon (YES - 12 hours!) to raise money for 3 charities.  My team raised money for Off the Mat and Into the World. The Yogathon was very successful -- we raised over $30,000 for three terrific organizations.  Here are some pics (that's me in the pink top!).
Let's Go Fly a Kite:  
Inspiration Avenue's challenge this week was to do a design inspired by "flight."  The question posed was what do you think of when you hear the word fly or flight?  My first thought was "Let's Go Fly a Kite," from Mary Poppins.  I know it's not a particularly profound or deep association, but I over the years, I have watched Mary Poppins about 30 times (I have 2 daughters - 21 and 11!), so a kite is what immediately popped into my mind.  I had been wanting to work more on auraknot for the Diva's challenge, and this prompt inspired me to create a kite from that tangle.   As for the saying, my yoga philosophy has taught me to look at everyone around me as a holy angel, sent from "command central" to either show me the way or, through difficulties, teach me a valuable lesson.  As my teacher says, once you see everyone around you as an angel, you're an angel too.  (Here's a video link for seeing the divine in your everyday life.) So "why crawl through life, when you were born with wings?"


Here's a beautiful butterfly that was on my buddleia bush yesterday - a reminder that we all have the potential for flight inside of us.

Love Comes in Many Colors:


In 2009, a young man, Codie Blake, came to live with us.  His mother had been our babysitter and my friend, and she died on December 26, 2009, of complications from breast cancer.  Codie has become part of our family.  In a few weeks, Codie will be getting married.  On Wednesday night, we met his fiance's family.  Like Codie, she and her family are from from Jamaica.  Meeting them inspired me to create this in my art journal:  "Love Comes in Many Colors."   Because indeed, it does.  One Year in the Life of an Art Journal had sun in their prompt this week, so this design will be visiting that blog, as well as Creative Every Day and Paint Party Friday.  I also reformatted it for a greeting card for Mojo Monday's sketch challenge.  Let me know your thoughts about putting a mixed media page on a traditional background... I'm not sure if it works...
Where Bloggers Create:
Karen, at My Desert Cottage, has created a blog hop party called "Where Bloggers' Create."  We had until July 14 to spiff up our studios and photograph them.  If you click on the links in the right side bar of her page, you will be amazed at all the beautiful studios.  And Karen's is amazing! I'm embarrassed to say that mine is not spiffy at all -- I just kept going from one project to another, so when I photographed it, it was a mess.  But I create best when I am surrounded by all my materials.  So here it is:
In all the little drawers are designs created from my illustration work.  You can see stencils spilling out from some of the open drawers under my table.  Most of the books are reference books in different styles, and I have a lot of books about Jewish history, art and symbolism since that's a big part of my licensing work.  A big clean up is clearly in order!

Finally, thank you to Scrapping the Music, for naming me the winner in Challenge #202.  I am very honored.  If you haven't done STM challenges, the next one was just posted and involves the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," and/or a song your mother sang to you.  I highly recommend visiting them and participating.  Song lyrics are such great creativity prompts!

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

PS - Here's my itinerary at CREATE New Jersey, starting Wednesday, July 18 (how nice of them to hold an art retreat on my birthday!):
Wed. July 18, 9-4: Find Your Beautiful Self Portrait
Thurs. July 19: 9 - 4:  Mini Masterpiece Canvas Journal
Thurs. July 19 - 6 - 9PM:  Scribble Paint
Friday: July 20: 9 - 4PM:  Carving Stamps for patterning
Let me know if we're in any of the same workshops!

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Wednesday Mashup & Gratitude

Think how snug it'll be underneath our flannel;
When it's just you and me and the English Channel!
In our cozy retreat kept all neat and tidy,
We'll have chums over ev'ry Friday!
By the sea!
Don'tcha love the weather?
By the sea!
We'll grow old together!
By the seaside,
Hoo, hoo!
By the beautiful sea!

I had the song "By The Sea" from Sweeney Todd stuck in my head (here's the track on You Tube) as I sat down at my table on Wednesday.  I have had a set of 4 6x6 canvasses from Michael's for months, and decided I had to use them.  It's a little scarey for me to actually commit to a canvas, but what are Wednesday Mashups for?  I stared at them for a while.  They were so white and pretty.  I didn't want to mess them up....  But then, I jumped in, covering them with matte medium and tearing off pieces of paper that were left over from other projects and gluing them on.  On the upper and lower left hand squares are pieces of paper from the modeling paste experiment a few weeks ago, and on the lower right square, some paper on which I tried out some reverse stenciling techniques with spray mists.  The mists I had used were green and blue, and that tinted my water turquoise, and the squares began to take on a sea like color.  BY THE SEA!!
I decided to go with that theme, and squirted on blue, light blue and green paint:
and spread it around with a credit card.
 and grabbed whatever stencils were handy (you'll recognize Balzer Designs' leaves), as well as some bubble wrap and the plastic mesh from yesterday's bag of clementines, and laid down darker versions of those colors. 
Then I cut some whales, anchors, lobsters, and fish out of card stock. ( I've had in my mind the beautiful graphic image Julie Fei-Fan Balzer posted of a lobster sign she saw in Provincetown.)
 I sprayed and painted the cardstock shapes over some newspaper (and saved it for a future project), and also glued down some shells and beads I've been saving, and here is my collage of paintings!
and some close ups:



I'm so happy with them!!  And to illustrate my happiness (and to use up the leftover paint I had on my pallete, I painted some more! I had a background in my journal that I hadn't known what to do with.  It looked like this - yuck.  But inspired by the challenge to use lavender and lace over at Anything Goes, I added a lavender vase, stenciled it using a lace doily (apologies to my grandma...), and paint-doodled some flowers and letters to spell out "Oh Happy Day!" to celebrate my good mood.  (Obviously, I still have those Wild n' Reckless sherbert colors in my head from Summer of Color!)  Because the sentiment is the main focus here, I will enter this happy design in Moving Along With the Times' challenge to make it sentimental, and of course all the work will visit Paint Party Friday!
On a personal note, as some of you know, my dad has been dealing with some health issues.  He seems to have a handle on them and is back to playing tennis and enjoying life.  Still, it has been a sobering experience and a reminder of how easy it is to take life for granted.  And all around me, the parents of my dear friends are struggling with some much more serious health issues, like strokes, alzheimer's and heart disease.  So I am dedicating my work today to sending out love for our parents.  If you're so moved, please stop and take a moment to be grateful for the people in your lives, like parents and other teachers, who have given you so much love and support, and who have taught you so much.  If you would like some inspiration, here is a video by Lama Marut about gratitude:


Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Who Are You Not To Be Fabulous?

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.Marianne Williamson. 
I first heard these words in a yoga class in 1998.  These beautiful words gave me permission to fully embrace my gifts and talents, which I had long tried to keep "small" for fear that others wouldn't like me.  I have since learned that true friends are also the truest champions.  It is one of the greatest joys in life to be cheerleaders for one another.
I had already started a journal page based on this quote, but hadn't known what to do with the border.  The Diva's challenge, to use the new zentangle "Auraknot", provided the answer.  Inspired by Try it on Tuesday's Bingo Card challenge, I made her using lace to stencil the little blue dots next to the jewels/bling, several background papers, flowers, and of course butterflies.  I love this lady!  I feel like she has emerged out of a magical mist.  Her color inspiration is from Summer of Color week 5, which is based on the ice cream flavor Wild n' Reckless.   She's also going to visit Paint Party Friday and Inspire Me Monday.

While we were away last week, my younger daughter Samy and I had several conversations about group dynamics, both in our summer community and in school.  Eleven is a tough age for girls... I created this picture with the the message I hope she took away from our conversations...
 Last but not least, here are a few vacation pics:
Samy and two of my nieces taking in the sun!
My dad reading from the Declaration of Independence at our July 4th parade:

My beautiful girls:
Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.