Word of the Week - 42

Van Morrison sings "Caravan" from the Martin Scorsese documentary THE LAST WALTZ.  Van the Man.  Wholehearted.  Not a lukewarm performance to be found in the whole blessed movie. 

Word of the Week - ARDENT

It is the Solstice night as I write this, time of the new moon, beginning of the return of the light.  We have been reminded throughout the day about setting our minds to new ways of being, of doing.  If we remain or become ardent, how can we go wrong.  Ardent, fervent, passionate.  Aflame, unbounded, electric, aglow, burning.

Music and musicians, color and color and color.  Tepid is not the temperature we require to carry us across winter's dark expanse.  Caliente, all spice and tang, flavor and, again, color.  We cannot find our way by candles too dim.  What we need is emphatic, even extreme.  We will not melt our own frozen beliefs without turning up the heat.  Our rigid joints will not loosen without a glow that matches the sun.

If luggage can be ardent, here it is.

Yes, I covet this vintage English watercolor box.  I covet it ardently.

Oh, fortunate possessor.

Oaxaca pillows.

On the longest night of the year, even Los Angeles yearns for a hearth with warming flames.  Heat in its dazzling manifestations expands us, will not let us shrink nor be less than we are.

The Reading Man remembers readings past

Dylan Thomas

As it was wont to do, Mr. Apotienne's mind had again run off with him.  Kidnapped, he thought, Robert Lewis Stephenson, spirited away  He wasn't aware of the abduction while it was in progress, only noticed after the fact, reacting like a chloroform victim just regaining his senses.  All it took was thinking about the fairy lights, how they would not-quite illuminate the dance site.  Summer fairy lights led him to memories of Christmas lights.  He weighed the image of tonight's warm, firefly-like glow against reflections on rain-puddled asphalt.

Photo by Hanna Gordon-Smith.

He had nearly lost heart for Dylan Thomas during his years of membership in one Unitarian Universalist Church.  Each summer before his sabbatical - and don't think there wasn't grumbling about a contract which gave an annual sabbatical - the minister, in costume, gave a reading from Ralph Waldo Emerson.  On Christmas eve, when he could have read them Dickens or the newspaper editor's essay which affirmed, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," or, perhaps, the Bible,  he read to them from "A Child's Christmas in Wales."  Eventually Mr. Apotienne stopped attending. 

Robert arrived at the church near the end of the previous minister's tenure, stayed based on a spirit of compassion and good works that he modeled.  And he continued when Dr. Harmon retired, determined to give the new man a chance. But as each Christmas began to shine on the horizon, Robert's spirits started to sink.  He wished for just a bit more of the absent fragrant greens, "God bless us every one," singing of the carols he'd learned in grade school and less of what came on him like frostbite, an extinguishing of his cheerful flame.  He nearly grew to loathe Thomas and the story.  He developed an aversion. 

His nostalgia was for Perry Como,  department store Santas, decorations from the five-and-dime and a mug of cocoa consumed at a formica-topped kitchen table.  Of course one couldn't blame Dylan Thomas for an emotionless, husk-dry recitation of a work that in the hands of another would be stirring, visually rich and could speak, child to child across the years.  Those nights when he wished for a semi-adult version of visions of sugarplums, even the strands of white lights woven through the parking lot oak tree seemed like part of  a Russian landscape seen from the night train to St. Petersburg.

Then Robert shook himself, or was it a shiver, and focused on where he was - now - and what awaited. He'd allowed himself a respite from thoughts about THE DANCE.  He identified with Jason Robard's speech as Ben Bradlee on the front lawn in his bathrobe in ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, telling Woodward and Bernstein that, "...there's nothing riding on this except, uh, the first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country."  No wonder he needed to wander off for a while.

Word of the Week - 41

Word of the Week:  WOBBLE

From 1940 until 1966, Pasadena was home of the Winter Garden, a vast-seeming, free-standing ice rink that briefly served as location for a live weekly music-and-ice-skating tv show called Frosty Frolics.  That was around 1951.  I think it must have run a bit longer than the one year, for I remember it, and Your Hit Parade, as family viewing.  Frosty Frolics was likely the inspiration, however wrong-minded, for my one attempt at ice skating.  Weak ankles, my neighbor and friend Susie Miller declared.  That I went on, not too far into the future,  to dance en pointe never quite erased the sense of failure brought on by ankles that wobbled.  My very first time, yet my inability to achieve instant perfection kept me from trying again, even wanting to try again.  I also never learned to ride a bicycle.

I am grateful to have survived childhood without any bullying that I can remember.  I was capable of creating that sense of insufficiency unaided through harsh and unreasonable comparisons.  Susie and I were sidewalk roller skating pals and I did not wobble on four wheels.  I was solid and not accident prone.  I was also timid about activities that seemed - and sometimes were - dangerous and felt myself shrink in stature as others plunged into new adventures.  Unknown at that time was my future assignment as a contemplative.  The things I couldn't do well mattered more than talents I couldn't name or understand.  Had it not been for ballet, for dancing in general, for hopscotch, jump robe and being moderately okay at baseball, I would have been an elementary school dud.  Dodge ball was scary and playground equipment (probably now against the law) like the rings, and bars (the dreaded "skin the cat," in which I hated being upside down), and such gave me the heebie-jeebies.

There is, I swear, something about emotions that accompany the onset of Christmas that bring up memories, welcome or not.  For the moment I trust that these thoughts of, if not humiliation, then certainly not triumph have come to be acknowledged and released.  They've been taking up shelf space for far too long.  I still wobble, only now I wobble better.  I have become the definition of wobbling.

Covering buttons with image transfers

Some of my fabric covered buttons created with iron-on photo transfers.

Seeing the hand-embroidered buttons shared yesterday on FB by curator extraordinaire, Folt Bolt, reminded me that I used to dabble in buttonry.

A wealth of glorious embroidered buttons, not done by me.

The photo transfer samples shown at the top of the page were included in Lynne Perrella's rich volume, "Artists' Journals and Sketchbooks."  Following are the directions I gave.

Fabric-transfer-covered buttons

For this project you'll need forms for covered buttons in assorted sizes.  If you haven't covered buttons before, be sure to follow the instructions on the packages.  You can get starter packs, which contain the pattern size and the mold into which you press the fabric and button blank.  You'll need plain cotton fabric, such as muslin, and photos of faces.

1. Plan the look of your buttons by selecting images of faces and sizing them to fit.  Include enough of the image to fill the entire button, plus the margin that gets turned under to construct the covered button.  Make color copies of these images.

2. Cut out and paste these copies onto a master sheet of paper, allowing sufficient space between images for the diameter of the temple you'll use for each one.

3. Copy the master sheet of paper onto iron-on fabric transfer stock.  (In the old days, I had them copied at Kinko's.)

4. From the fabric transfer stock, cut each button-cover-to-be to size using the template from the kit, centering the face in the middle.  You can copy the paper template onto clear plastic or acetate to make placement easier.

5. To transfer, set a dry iron on the cotton setting, place the transfer stock image side down over your fabric, and iron with a blank sheet of paper or bit of fabric covering the transfer paper, moving the iron in a circular motion for about 20 seconds.  You can test an edge of the transfer to see that it has worked.

6. Peel the transfer stock away from the fabric to reveal your clear image.

7. Follow the directions provided in the button covering kit, cut the fabric to size, press in mold and, voila.   You can use images in addition to photos, such as your own illustrations.  Be mindful of copyright.

Lynne's book has a two-page spread about image transfers, text and samples of each technique.

In the years since Quarry published "Artists' Journals and Sketchbooks," there have been many fine volumes produced on the practice of journal-keeping.  Because of the vast diversity of styles and techniques shared, I think Lynne's book is timeless.  It presents the work of 40 artists and, in browsing through it this morning, I remembered how many projects I've yet to try.

Word of the Week - 40

All art today is the work of Australian Cate Edwards.  The link shows her work much larger than it can be displayed here.

Word of the Week:  TONIC

The art of Cate Edwards revives me, it puts back together parts that have gone asunder.  In her color, lines, shapes, patterns, figures, faces and wordless stories I regroup and find the world as I wish it to be.  There are precarious rides, curious submergings and what appears to be considerable wild abandon, in the best, most life-affirming sense.

In the world away from images that support my soul, I find these to be dark and troubling times.  It may be that times are always dark and troubling.  What I know is my energy and a version of sanity are better served by stepping back from public debate.  I choose not to express outrage through social media.  I prefer to bring light of a sort.  As a friend wisely wrote a day or so ago, art will not save us but it may cushion the fall.  Art gives us everything it has, whether we create it or observe.  Ghandi said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."  Right now, this is the way I can practice such advice.

I would love to be one of Cate Edwards' humans, to inhabit a flowered bowl, pose with my swimsuit-clad sisters near a pool or the sea, commune with other Earth creatures, continually surprised by the circumstance in which we find ourselves.  Her work proves to me the connection between eyes and heart for as I scan her leaves and flowers, ornaments, marks and groupings, I have a physiological response, a quickened pulse, accompanied by a sense of longing.  I want this to be our world.

Back to basics

They say there are things you never forget how to do no matter how long it's been.  I was beginning to wonder if I'd lost my drawing mojo, untapped for more than a year - or so it seemed - after nearly two decades of designing rubber stamps.  It had been that long since I'd drawn.  It was a fumbling, discouraging start for I stepped away from what had always worked best.  Instead of starting out with the Micron Pigma .005 and just going for it, I tried sketching in pencil.  I am a chronic over-sketcher and my heart began to sink.  Then I tried working with the pen on too-textured paper and color pencil and the results, in a word, stank.  High anxiety.  I found a different pad, a good heft to the paper but not too much texture on the back side.  Pulled out pencils in colors that had never been used - Albrecht Durer from Faber Castell in light cadmium red, among others - pure heaven.

It may be that I, or most of us humans, are chronic amnesiacs and need to return again and again as though for the first time to what grips us most passionately.  We need to fall in love anew, afresh, with what nourishes us at our very core.  Winter sun on the sharpened point of an Albrecht Durer light cobalt turquoise was as pleasing as cafe au lait sipped above a clear Mediterranean inlet.  I am not hard to please.

No matter what or who has been left too long on the shelf or in the rain, return.  Resume.  You will find your path.  What you need will be there.  A self-proclaimed fool in countless survivable ways, I truly believe it is never too late for anything that really matters.  Trust in mysterious ways.

Word of the Week - 39

Painting by Spanish artist, Dino Valls.

Word(s) of the Week: SEASONAL AMBIVALENCE

Even before Thanksgiving the fidgeting part of my brain started making trouble.  It decided the only thing that would feel like the Christmas it thought it needed was to have it be 1958 again.  I could be 13, my 8-year-old sister and I could ride the bus downtown to shop at the dime stores, then have cokes and grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch at Woolworth's counter.  Even though I'd be past the age of actually, actually believing in Santa, I would still be years away from being able to sleep through the night on Christmas eve.

Not the Pasadena Woolworth's, this was downtown L.A., "longest lunch counter in the world."

It is the same fidgeting subdivision that started a feud with Christmas after my son was terribly ill in the hospital for most of December eight years ago.  The lights, the music on the radio, the sight of shoppers or diners through restaurant windows as I drove home to our empty apartment all those nights became intolerable.  I didn't want to be reminded of a fear so deep.  Christmas became the fall guy.  Which, as I was cluelessly unaware, made his first, second, etc., Christmas less than festive for my son who only wanted to celebrate as normally, joyfully, as possible after his ordeal.  He was thrilled to be here in fine fettle as each new December rolled around.  I wanted to sleep from October until April. 

Painting by Amanda Blake.

Time, meditation and coming to my senses have helped lift that soggy blanket from my shoulders.  While my energy and health, our fortunes, are not as they once were, our capacity for gladness seems robust.  Since love is one of my year-round antidotes for sinking spells, along with beauty and music, I am aware of an even stronger urge to fling it far and wide, a continually thrown bride's bouquet, as the year closes.

We all become confused at times, forgetting that nothing is ever really as much about what we receive as what we give.  Seeing familiar and difficult dates cycle back to us on the calendar does not mean they will batter us anew.   That I am not 13 is no impediment to glimpsing, sensing the magic I've always connected to these days when night falls early and the nostalgic glow of Christmas lights (I could never decide which was my favorite color) keeps warm the dreams in our child hearts.