Lately, I've been in a dry spell. Things don't seem to come together very easily, as they usually do for me, and I'm not feeling that same "compulsion to create," that's been familiar to me for months. This one felt better, created last night while Darvin played X-box. But then nothing after it, despite another hour of playing around. It's as though I can't "see" anything in the pieces around me. Maybe it's time for a break, or maybe this is what happens right before a "breakthrough." We're expecting over a foot of snow this weekend, so I'm hoping it will result in something creative. More likely I'll end up lying around, watching movies and reading books and watching the snow fall. Darvin bought me a new journal (beautiful, handmade) so I've been writing more. I'd been writing in my art journals, but I need some place "safer" for my more personal thoughts because I can't let anyone see what I've done when it's also surrounded by my most private feelings.  

As with many things, a happy accident. I pulled a page from a magazine to get the photo of the lost-looking girl from "Got Love?" At the bottom of that page was the photo of this girl, who worked perfectly with a background I'd already prepared. LOVE how exotic she looks. 

I liked how lost this girl seems in this glue card--seems to go with the caption. 

Another glue card . . . (apparently I'm on a purple theme) 

Another gluecard . . . not as edgy as the one I just uploaded and I'm not sure where it's coming from today, as I'm mostly feeling edgy and crabby. Looks like there's still a corner of my soul that isn't wanting to hurt someone. 

Playing around with 4x6 cards, per an idea from my Gluebooks list. I'm having one of those days where I'm going back and forth among projects, letting glue and paint dry in my journal and working on gluebook cards while I wait. This is actually a negative of my card, which I think I'm king of liking even more.  

A bit of a departure for me--not the "normal" image I would select. For the background, I had cut out a picture of Jess taken on the train to NYC a few years ago and used what was left behind the image. I scratched the photo and it has a sort of space-like quality to it that goes with this picture . . .  

I went to Borders yesterday and bought several French and Italian magazines. Someone on one of my lists had suggested that it helps to keep you from being distracted by the articles themselves so you can just focus on the pictures. Of course, for me, my eyes are so drawn to text that mostly I just felt frustrated that I can't read French, but they do have some interesting images that are a little different than in American magazines. This was actually done on a 4x6 card, but then when I wanted to include the caption "SedurRe" (what this means, I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it has something to do with seduction), the caption went off the card, so I glued it into my comp book to get the full effect.  

So does it count as a "gluebook page" if you fill in some spots with your paint program before you upload it to your blog? Does digital enhancement take away from the spirit of the thing, which is really (at least to me) to create something where I'm not worried about being perfect? Gluebook pages are more like quick sketches for me. I try to put less thought into them just to see what I come up with. Playing in my Paint program seems to be cheating a little . . . anyway . . . I like silence--HATE loud noises. My dysfunctional childhood, when loud noises usually meant hours of verbal abuse or the dealing of a blow to the head, have made me cherish quite and calm. . . The other thing I wanted to say . . . I was excited to remember that I had two drawers--TWO DRAWERS--full of pictures, magazines, etc. that I haven't looked at in over a year. It's like finding a treasure trove. This entry came from digging through the detrius of a collage frenzy from before my divorce. It was nice to create something that wasn't angry from the images I found there.  

I was thinking that this should either be the cover to one of my journals or on my front door . . . or both. 

One thing that I've really struggled with in therapy is accepting the good and bad in myself. I like to imagine that I'm this calm, serene woman who handles everything that comes her way with grace and style. But the reality is that within all of us--myself included, although I still hate to admit it--is the capacity to cause incredible damage. When I did this page, I first had the ship, then I found the woman's face and just tried it on for size, liking the juxtaposition. That was last night. Then tonight I was working on some things and saw the word "everyone" and it seemed perfect for what I've been thinking about. So here's to accepting ALL of myself . . . with grace and style. 

I had fun with this one. . . your basic page with some gesso thrown in and then some digital manipulation. I like the "posterize" effect in my graphics program because I get a sort of Andy Warhol-type thing going on. Not that I'm as TALENTED as Andy, but at least I can use the "posterize" button to persuade myself that I am. 

I'm working in my larger journal again, having just about finished with my composition journal. This is actually part of a larger spread. I played around with gesso in this one. I'm exploring the possibilities of gesso and how it can obscure and help highlight through what it obscures. Like life where what we can't see illuminates what we can and somehow points our attention in other directions. Yet what we can't see is still there and perhaps even more important than what we chose to highlight. Gesso as a metaphor for the subconscious. That is NOT the Eiffel Tower, BTW, although it has that look for some reason. It's actually a miscellaneous strip cut from something else and painted with . . . you guessed--gesso. If only my subconscious could make me think I'm in the Eiffel Tower . . .  

A rather more playful mode, here. This happened by accident (as many of my things do.) The face is Beyonce's from a cosmetic ad. I'd actually cut out a picture on the reverse, which left me with a partial Beyonce. Then I had a left-over sillhoutte from another photo and I added the woman's arm, a Target logo for the other eye and some red hair. I like how she turned out. 

I created a negative of "Mothers and Daughters," using my paint program. I REALLY like how it turned out. I printed it, too, which looks pretty cool. 

This morning I was looking at gluebooks done by some more "avant garde" artists. I feel like I'm trying to do things that are too "pretty." Not that this is in any way ugly . . When I first started doing collage, I was a lot edgier, had a lot more social commentary type things going on. But in the past few months, I've lost that. Maybe it's trying to focus on being "happier" or using brighter colors or whatever, but on this rainy day, I miss my edge. This, at least, isn't so neat or something. I'm feeling like I need and want to move back into things that are serious, that say something. I'm worried that I'm losing some of what got me doing all of this in the first place and that I'm not digging in very deeply to what goes on inside me. So this is meant to move me in that direction. 

So the gluebook challenge of the day was to use the letter "T." Yes, my choice of subject was obvious, but I stumbled across the two black and white photos that I loved and then with the punch of the yellow, I couldn't resist. Maybe not an "official" gluebook piece, since I also painted a black background, but since when do I have to abide by the "rules" anyway? I will point out that I got a little impatient with the left side of the spread, which is why there's black paint smeared. I hate it when I can't wait for the paint to dry . . .  

Another gluebook attempt. I've decided to try yoga as my new exercise routine. Jess is taking it at the YWCA and raves about it. I want to feel more grounded and at 41, I probably need to focus on gaining flexibility as much as anything. So what I tried to convey here was that leaning AWAY from the schedule madness of work and leaning INTO nature and some "breathing space. Now if I could only have thighs like this model . . .  

So I joined the Gluebooks group on Yahoo, something to challenge myself to try a differen technique. I'd read about it on some other blogs and what struck a chord with me was being tired of seeing all of these vintage images featured in art journals, collage, etc. I know that I've fallen into a rut with that--I even seem to somehow shun more modern photos and images as being inauthentic somehow. I love them, but I also want to experiment with other things. So this is one gluebook page I did--no painting or embellishment (hence the few "bald patches" where you can see the lines from the composition book). I wanted to push myself to create a few pages using only magazine images. As the caption indicates (Live Your Best Life), this one is from Oprah Magazine. There are few magazines, actually, that don't drive me crazy with either too much "houswife stuff" (like Better Homes and Gardens) or a total focus on beauty and finding a man. So anyway. . . I can't say that I PREFER this to other pieces of work, but it also pushes me in a different direction--or at least to work a little differently than I usually do.  

This is different from my usual work--a scene, rather than being sort of abstract. I'd had the picture of the treehouse for a while and had wanted to make a tree from it. The balloons are from my birthday party in September
 

I got this quote from a creativity site I belong to. It seemed to perfectly capture some of my feelings about art and how the process goes for me. Doing "work that's not my own," and repeating myself seem, in particular, to be my downfall and it was good to read that other artists have the same experiences. I'd actually begun to feel that those were reasons for me to not consider myself an artist, rather than as things that are part of the process. The quote serves double duty, blocking off what was actually a successful attempt to do a gel transfer, but the photo I chose to do the transfer really didn't have enough white space to give a sense of what it was, so it needed to go. You can faintly see the lines of the composition journal in this one.  

Here's the other side of the spread (with the picture below). I've been doing these in a composition journal, actually--the cheap black and white kind that you use for school. I glue the pages together to give myself a little more body to work with. I'm also going across the pages to create a 2-page spread, something I wasn't doing in my spiral bound journal, which seemed too dauntingly large
 

This page and the one above are inspired by Teesha Moore. They are part of the same spread, but I couldn't scan the whole thing at once, so I did the two pages separately. These are probably my most complex pages--harder for me to do, I realize--I tend to go with the more simplistic stuff, but I'm trying to branch out
 

I haven't added anything in a while. My most recent obsession has been my art journal, which has been a wonderful release, but also very far from being "finished art." I decided, though, to put some pages on my blog, though, since this is supposed to be the record of my artistic journey. This is a page I wrote about Jess and Ali and how much better my relationship is with them. It includes a Post-It note that Ali wrote her name on while she was at the computer.