Sacred Ground

Every three weeks or so some friends come over to work on our faith journals. It's a visual art journal combining art and faith. Tonight we met and our topic was one of my favourite authors, Frederick Buechner. We listened, we laughed, we shared meaningful quotes, and we got a little bit done in our journals. Just a little bit.

I persuaded them to watch my Hawaii slide show from just before Christmas. Some of the colours and textures made me catch my breath as I viewed them again after a break of not seeing them. Maybe it's the grey skies and the rains that I am immersed in these days that make the colours stand out so vividly. Maybe it's just sharing it with friends and having them notice things I had not noticed before.  It's a bit surreal to see these photos and realize I was there, and not that long ago. 


Maybe that's why I love taking photos. So when I am surrounded by grey and rain I can remember the colours I drank in not that long ago...and anticipate colours to come. Sometimes even within the grey. 


Next time we meet our theme will be Finding Colour in Life, using collage. How perfect! 

collage #2 of 2011

PURPLE

My collage for the week. Includes: hydrangea photo, paint chips, scrap paper, corrugated paper, handmade paper from my wedding invitations, ribbon, button, negative die cut, stickles.

So much inspiration!

So this blogging business is suddenly opening up to me all kinds of inspirations from artists who blog and share ideas. I found a new blogger today MARGE MALWITZ. First I wanted to see her quilts. I find quilts and quilters inspiring. Why is this all caps now? Wow, I have so much to learn.

SEriously, I can't change the caps.

Back to Marge Malwitz, who also has a blog. She's a quilter. But she also works with collage. She uses photos, fabrics, painted papers. I just enjoyed viewing her tide pools collage and her quilts made on trips to china and Rwanda. Wow, this is so inspiring! Then I found she also turns her collage into books.

This week I taught students how to make accordion books. They made holiday highlights books, with five significant events of their holiday. I can't wait to read them all. We will make more books this term, for sure. They had a lot of fun and couldn't believe that one time all books were made by hand.

One of my goals today was to add to my blog. (check!) But I'm also starting my next collage. I decided to use a technique I saw Marge using- paint chips mixed with photos. It's fitting, since we were painting a bedroom this week and the colour chosen by the room dweller is purple. Actually, berry syrup to be precise.

You can see a sample of it here. So we had a lot of purple paint chips around. So now I am trimming pieces, tearing pieces, and thinking of adding some purple hydrangea photos and some purple handmade paper that I made years ago.

Here's what I have to work with tonight. I'm going to go work on it. I also have to learn how to load my photo at the end of the blog, not the beginning. sigh. so much to learn.

Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg. This looks like a great book!

Can I do a Collage-A-Week in 2011?

I've been inspired by browsing through some artist blogs. One blog I follow, One A Day, is terribly inspiring. She makes me want to stop whatever I am doing RIGHT THEN and try something she suggests. So yesterday when I was talking about starting a blog, I also told him that I would like to to try more collage in 2011. Jo Reimer makes a collage a day. I know that's not real for me. But how about one a week? I found a smallish spiral journal on my shelf, just waiting for a purpose. Spiral is good for collage, because it can expand comfortably. Like yoga pants. But that's another issue.

Last night I found a new journal too. On my shelf. Waiting for a purpose. So I wrote down some goals. Not for the year. That's not real for me. For the next day. Which was today. And then, because I'm kind of a nerd, I check them off when I accomplish them. So today I already accomplished 4 out of 7 goals. And it's still early in the evening. I still have some time to get to the homework.

One of my goals was to make a collage. So I collected some things. Today I went to the gym and bought a three month membership and then worked out. I kept the wrist band because I wondered if it would work in my collage. It was full of smiley faces. I also tore out some of the gold foil wrapping paper that was around his Purdy's chocolates. I was sad to come to the end of my Islands calendar, which had colour pictures everyday for 2010 of beautiful islands from around the world. I pulled some of those that reminded me of our recent trip to Hawaii. I had a brochure that showed fish we snorkelled with in Kona and the Puna coast. Because really, what else was I going to use it for? There was some beautiful textured red paper that I liked and some collage gift tags I made last year, and then finally, some blue paint chips that I used to pick the colour for my craft room.

I call it 'endings and beginnings'. There are things on there that represent my last days of 2010 as well as the first days of 2011. It's not perfect, it was kind of rushed, but I like it. A little bit of colour for today.

First post

I told him I would learn to start a blog after I finished my Master's program in the late spring. I told him an hour ago and yet here I am. I am delaying my homework for the evening. It's winter. It's dark early. I'm in my new craft room that I have painted 'Deep Ocean'. The first thing I had to do was come up with a name. I wasn't sure what it is that I want to put in my blog. Maybe it's about art. Maybe it's the things I learn while being with kids. Maybe it's about what I see through the lens of my camera. Not sure. But I do love colour. And I do love life. And yes, I love finding colour in life. So here goes!