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It is a rather dull fall season here. Not much color. And today it is raining. I feel scattered. Unable to settle. I took all the dead and dried up Eucalyptus leaves placed them along some lovely wool scarves to see if any color would come from it. I might have just turned the whole bunch into a dark and dismal brownish grey with no leaf definition.

Nobody ever shows putting dead dried up leaves on their contact prints.  Maybe I should go out there and see what it looks like. Yep I will do that now.

Well that was better than I expected! I rolled it up quickly so as not to disturb the leaves doing their best and stuck it back in the pot. I will wait until I return from Asheville on Wednesday and then undo the two scarves. I might even bring home some more Eucalyptus from Trader Joes. I think the orange-ish ones are from a dried up bunch left from a box shipped from California a couple of months ago. So that is good news…not ruining two of the perfectly good wool scarves I ordered from a textile artist in Ohio.

But doesn’t it seem that everybody is doing contact prints with plants? And the funny thing is that no two look the same. It is impossible to duplicate. So when you have some leaves, some paper and/or cloth, you just have to try it again. So simple. So thank you again, India Flint!

I also went back to my Specimen Journal to do some more of the discoverer’s drawings.

He must be documenting a hatch on this page.

And then looking closer to the surface on the water there appears to be gelatinous masses with small eggs. This will be the beginnings of the large brown water bug, I think.

Sadie likes this page.

The other day I went outside the studio to look for something inspiring to catch my eye and noticed that this is coming up the second year of the fish outside the studio. Just a bit more rust on the wires, the rocks holding them from swimming too far are all in place and I still like them. Hard to believe that I drank the dreadful wine that was in them.

I really need to find something else to do in the studio. Sometimes I wish I could be like so many others and just crank out the same thing over and over for forty years. Settle on one thing like baskets, pretty watercolors of flowers, blank journals, even Nature contact prints….and then do it over and over and teach everyone else to do it over and over. But I can’t do it. I make no new discoveries about myself and what I am and am not capable of if I go down that road.  I am bored by it, that constant repeating.

I think that after last week with the completion of the Australian piece, I need to go back to the press. There are more images in my head that might just work out as etchings.

And there is writing to do. On rainy days like today it is hard to not just pick up a very wet ball point pen and a pad of yellow dog paper. They feel so much more natural than a keyboard.

Anyway, enough. I am headed upstairs to fix lunch and think about meals made in crock pots like we did almost fifty years ago. I am seeing more and more recipes for crock pot cooking lately. And it is getting to be soup weather.

Tomorrow it is off to Asheville for an overnight. When home I will unwrap the scarves and show you how they came out.

Til then.

It is that time of year again. Things are fading. Going away. Finding other directions. Personally I am going for the “other directions”. I am going to alter the way I do things. It is time to change a little.

New works in the studio are going to be based on the Driveway Messages from a couple of weeks ago. There is something appealing about how much story (narrative) can be built in a piece made up of separate sections. And how those separate pieces cling to each other with a seam forcing them to stay there. It is more about the relationships than design and color juxtapositions. It is about relationships and dependency to be complete or at the very least agreeable to the whole.

So I will show another of those Driveway Messages that have got me to thinking.

The next one will be a long horizontal landscape piece with not only etchings but drawings and/or paintings using watercolors made from soils. I think even woven patches of spun papers. More plates will need to be etched. More fabrics with some sort of history will have to be printed onto. Like whenever I start something new, I see it in my head and then just go there until it is done. But what I am attempting is collage and to do that I need lots of the parts strewn about to pick up and hold next to each other.

Which makes me think of so much of the collage/assemblage work I see today. If you look at them, what makes them appealing is not any sort of narrative but how lovely the parts are and how well they go together. Let’s say a Japanese themed piece. You can’t go wrong with this. Just some Japanese script, some beige, preferably some torn bit of corrugated cardboard, smear of gesso, a bit of jute string tying something rolled up. Slip in a bit of black cloth or paper somewhere and there you have it! Lovely!

All you need is the stuff to make a design with. No need to tell a story, just hint at some magical message in the Japanese writing, which could be saying almost anything. It could be from a grocery list to some private correspondence. But one thing is for sure, it will sell and be easy to offer workshops on how to glue it all together.

Sorry about that. There really is some good collage out there….just not enough that speak of the maker more than the materials.

And admittedly I am so much more interested in the makers point of view than a bunch of lovely bits and pieces artfully arranged.

On another subject, my husband Lee turns 80 years old this week. And by the end of the month we will have been married 50 years. Such large numbers that I never even considered when we started out together. And of course always the question, “Where did the time go?” Over that time I was at least ten different people while he stayed the same. He adjusted to my changes and I was glad he was still there. I suppose that is marriage in a nutshell….adjustments and joy.

Here we are at about 30 years in. A detail of the large quilt-like piece using our clothes.

And part of the pieces now as we adjust to his dementia.

It is strange how some work never goes beyond the makers need to create it. I think of Lin who I wrote my last blog about. Her stunning neck pieces of well placed found objects will probably be on many bodies, be quite visible and commented on. But the hard wrought work about the old testament stories told with tattered dolls will likely forever be in boxes. She might be remembered artistically as a very clever designer while her statements on war and religion remain still. But she made the work. It mattered enough to her to make the work.

And that is my inspiration to continue in the studio. Have something matter enough to make it.

In the meantime Lee and I are off to a brewery for a beer and lunch with friends. More friends taking classes at the folk school pop in this evening for a good catch up. Tomorrow I head back into the studio intent on making more pieces to assemble into a larger work.

Corrugated cardboard and scraps of a Japanese ledger will not be part of it. That I am sure of.

Til next week with new pictures.