Trashquilt portrait

In Maine my making was mostly limited to cooking.  However, at both ends of the day I found myself in the kitchen bursting with the need to experiment in some way and an hour or two with everyone in bed.  I carved stamps and combined them with coloured markers and zentagle-like black and white patterns. I carved figures and lobsters, butterflies and flowers. 

The only things I brought back to England were some walnuts, a few plastic bags and some wonderful cheap shaped erasers as well as a stack of adhesive foam.  You can press into the foam to create stamps and the figure in this stamp is made with that. I cut out the shape of a figure I glanced at in a magazine and decorated her with patterns. The way the stamp prints is determined by the pressure - each print varies quite a lot.

Tonight I decided to sandwich a couple of the prints in some fused plastic.  This is about 4X4.

Enough inspiration to last 'til summer...

Maine in the off-season has a different kind of light.  The colours are different, surprising, more fleeting. Some trees feel positively asian as they bud.  The houses need painting. 

It's quieter and there is more time, fewer people, more rain, a different pace altogether. 

When most everything was done, I spent far too much time hovering over images on Pinterest, my new toy, but I also went out to the barn, quite cold in the off-season, and arranged my supplies.  

There was a tatty piece of shelf liner that made it into my plastic stash and in a frenzied moment I tried it out. It is the melon colour and did you know a straw can be ironed flat?

There's some travel ahead and I have the sad feeling that the summer is over when it hasn't even arrived yet.  I have the sense that perhaps that prick of loss is a good thing and will inspire me, along with the light and the colour and the beautiful objects that are so familiar but that I forget in between. Spending time with my artist mother will stand me in good stead for the next few months.

They warned me I'd have to choose

My Academe Mind

Splintering, unfettering, my academe mind

is choking on words.

I watch it slip, drip, congeal,

coagulate in dark flaky patches

on the parquet floor.

Mono-syllabic as a prick of blood,

I think anecdotally, unquantifiably

eye off the lure, beyond the school,

bashing ideas in fish tail swipes,

gulping sea mouths of Harmattan sand. 

RG May 1st, 2013

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I have been two-footedly in the visual world lately. It's as though my thinking brain is atrophying and if I try to think about anything too deeply it's disorienting.  It has been a long time since I lived in my head in that way. Today I found a whole bunch of notes from my dissertation. They were precise and  thoughtful. The primary material was fabulous but I had to read it a few times to remember the significance and to glean the meaning.  I spend lots of time convincing others that the visual and written can converge but when you are two-footed in one it's harder to shift than you think.