today marks, literally, making the first mark in a new journal finished exactly a year ago at Backyard Art Camp
the old journal swollen with-- observations to-do lists calendars paintings musings collages
the new journal’s blank pages await marks & fullness
Backyard Art Camp takes place in just a few weeks under a tent in the backyard of writer artist bookmaker Suzi Banks Baum. There are two sessions and each has just one spot left.
I can’t wait to make past paper and then construct a new Coptic stitch book. We make other types of books as well. Message her HERE for info if you are interested.
words on the side of the road as in the Shaker “Wayside Pulpit” words found in advertisements as in the work of Corita Kent words about to be printed at Melanie Mowinski’s studio words printed, read, used, perused aptly, just begin
White
Yellow
Orange
Scarlet
Green
Blue
Crimson
Violet
Arranging found color today and thinking of the newly published, ‘Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour’ invaluable scholarship by Dr. Alexandra Loske.
Mary Gartside’s eight colors illustrated “Colour Circle, from the Borrow Copy of Mary Gartside, An Essay on Light and Shade 1805, engraving with hand-colouring.”
Not only did Gartside write about colour theory, but she brought in abstraction with her ‘colour blots.’ The ‘white blot’ captures the tints of our grey skies as of late.
2 Images from Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books.
Find more information on Alexandra Loske and her colour research, here. Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books
morning collage/watercolor
responding to the objects on my table
Geoff Young chap book
paste paper folder
tangled threads
or the grey outside
greyed:
palest grey to white
violet grey
pink cosmos grey
violets dropped in milk grey
a drop of cobalt blue grey
orangesicle ice cream grey
sunpoked through yellow grey
old yellowed newspaper grey
grey green sky portends rain
series of ‘butterflies & moths’ collaged works over the past 6 months
.
and a Mary Oliver poem . . One or Two Things Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.
The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud; up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk of some ordinary flower.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening
to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind.
One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning—some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.
