Eccentric Spirit

Breaking out of my rut, by cleaning up the studio! That seems to be the what my muse demands of me today. I’ve done extremely little in the way of work in my journal today; I wrote a list, and I added a couple of stickers. Yes, I use stickers in my fancy altered art. Sandylion, no less. I’m such a rebel! ;)

Seriously though, my muse must be pregnant or something, she is nesting like crazy. But I suppose a pregnant muse is better than a barren one – I just hope I don’t need to eat pickles and peanut butter to get her to let me make art! I’ve sifted through a small mountain of random bits and pieces today. In the process I’ve thrown out at least 7 gunked-up and painty foam brushes, unearthed approximately 26 fortune cookie fortunes saved over from the past heaven-knows-how-many takeout dinners, filled a grocery bag with assorted paper items to be recycled, and piled up a good sized (but much smaller) heap of paper items to save for collage. To keep myself company, I’ve been listening to podcasts and YouTube videos, in particular this podcast interview with Kelly Kilmer and willowing’s YouTube video of “10 Rules for Life“. I’ve listened to both of these twice through today, I am enchanted by both of these new-to-me ladies. I am seriously considering signing up for one or possibly even two of Kelly’s classes when she is here in MA at the end of the month. And I may just have to reward myself of a print of the 10 rules when I finish cleaning this studio of mine!

I would have embedded the YouTube video, but I crashed my computer when I tried – yikes! So instead there is a link to it, and for your viewing pleasure I’ll give you a lovely picture of my new and improved mirror shrine. I’ve had this awesome mirror for many years, with the cool swirly frame and a little shelf below, but lately it’s been neglected. All my pretty little doo-dads were overflowing and strewn every-which-way and stuff had started to pile up in front of it. I moved it to the wall behind my computer a few days ago and finally spruced things up today. I tidied up the various knick-knacks, stuck my shiny little “dream” star to the mirror, and twist-tied a broken plastic tiara to the top. The art doll is not my work, she is the result of a round robin my super-fantastic artsy momma participated in, and she gave her to me for my birthday a few years ago. My mom rocks. (And made the head, crown, and the -oops- slightly battered wings… gotta spruce those babies up!)

I’m feeling very stuck lately. I don’t like any of the art I’ve made or worked on in the past few days. I’m feeling restless and irritable, with a thousand little ideas flitting about my head like gnats and I can’t get them to coalesce into a useful whole no matter how hard I try. I have this nagging yearning, like a growling stomach, bogging me down and filling my head with cottonball confusion and self-doubt. I can’t seem to shake it, I can’t seem to settle to anything, no matter what I try to do to break out of it.

So here I am on my brand new blog, venting about it. I’m hoping I can improve my state of mind a bit by blowing off steam and sharing this collage, made about a year ago during a similar bout of indecision, hopelessness, and confusion. I’ve shared a portion of it before, on my old blog, but like I said, I don’t like any of the art I’ve made lately, and this certainly captures my current mood fairly well. I think the main difference is that now I’m feeling just the slightest shift, a feeling of things just starting to gel for me into a cohesive idea of What I Want To Be When I Grow Up (a fairy godmother, by the way). It’s only the faintest taste, the germ of an idea – and it’s aggravating me, like a scab that itches or the feeling of not being able to think of the word you mean. I can almost see a vision of the future, of where I want to go, but I can’t quite get the picture to focus. Like my heart and mind need new glasses, or a hearing aid, or both.

Often my favorite techniques are the ones that start out as accidents. Take the example to the left, with the interesting lettering. I’d created a spread in my altered book journal, with a magazine image of what looks like some sort of magical fairy tent and a sharply contrasting image of rhinestones, intended as a space for me to journal. I softened the rhinestone texture by adding a couple layers of pearl finish, a fun find amongst all the other cheap two ounce bottles of craft acrylics. But it was still hard to tell if black paint pen would show up well enough to read later, so I wrote my page in lime green instead. Even before I’d finished writing, I could tell the color wasn’t going to be as legible as I would have liked. I didn’t want to break the stream-of-consciousness flow to correct it, so I finished what I was writing before trying to fix it. I waiting until I was sure the writing was dry, and then went back over each word with a black pen, slightly finer point than the green. This worked out well from a visual standpoint, leaving me with an interesting two-tone look to my handwritten words. The bonus from a journaling standpoint was that it was a lovely meditative process, giving me a soothing opportunity to contemplate my own words.

Click on the image to view the full journal spread in my Flickr photostream. If you’re curious, the products mentioned in this post are Creamcoat pearl finish, and DecoColor opaque paint markers – Fine Line Light Green and Extra Fine Black. DecoColor paint markers are one of my favorite writing instruments for visual journaling, they have a remarkable ability to write on gesso or acrylic paint where many other markers tend to dry up.