Something’s afoot in the studio and outside. It’s still cold outside, snowy even but I can
feel the quickening of conception, growth and the birth of new ideas and new
life germinating beneath the frozen surface of the earth. For many months I have worked hard on a few
different series of ATCs. Now it is time
to trade those and put aside the making of the cards. The cards have stirred many ideas for other
media and formats. I may even be
teaching it in an afterschool enrichment program for children. ATCs are a way of working I hold dear and I
know I will soon return to them. I have
blogged about how they remind me of working with metals and how that similarity
makes me yearn to return to cloisonné. That is one of the new mediums it has
spurned—something I am eager to explore in 2012. I also want to return to one foot square
patterned mandalas. This time though I am going to use some of the ideas I
learned about in a workshop on aqueous media while attending the Illinois Art
Education Association’s annual conference.
I will try the mandalas with gouache instead of acrylic on some new
Ampersand Aquaboard I just bought. I
love how gouache lends itself to water so beautifully yet it holds its opacity.
Gouache is a media I explored on the surface in college in graphic design but I
haven’t taken it very far yet in the studio.
I want to see what can be done with it, in relation to pattern and
mandala vibrancy. What are its blessings and its limitations? I might
incorporate casein as well. I have been
going through my creative resources and inspirational sources, readying
patterns for integration into this new work.
I am looking hard at repeating patterns from the period of 1100 to 1800. Eggs are reappearing in my blog imagery, in
part because they symbolize this idea of germination, conception, growth and
development I am experiencing in studio practice. This Prismacolor pencil drawing on colored pastel
paper I am posting today was done a while ago.
This morning I was called to revisit it.
I was immediately struck by its subtlety and delicacy. As a very lucid
drawing, it holds space well and has a lingering quiet spirit like a whisper.
There can be such strength in silence and pauses. I respond to how it grows out of ether,
revealing some things but still very much a symbolic vessel for what is to
come.
Gran Bwa is a lwa that helps you connect to ancestral roots or the spiritual home of Vodou. A friend of mine, who is an expert on Haitian Vodou, who has spent a lot of time in Haiti with the artists there, told me I had painted Gran Bwa when I made this spontaneous work out of walnut ink and sumi-ink on handmade paper. I had considered this painting a self-portrait. She now holds this piece in her private collection: Quite a few people are afraid of Vodou but it is an awe-inspiring tradition of bringing together plant energy with divinity, spiritual and personal energy. My friend who is very involved with Vodou, especially the art that surrounds it, is from European ancestry. She is light in spirit and bubbly, with a close relationship to nature and her garden. Vodou affirms the relationships between cycles of life, trees of knowledge and spirit. The Vodou vision of lwa , understands them as the intelligence of energy present in humans, nature and thoughts. ...
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