Spirit Clothe - The Eye

 

This is the Spirit Cloth that my friend Ancient Cloth made for me.  

I picked the Eye as a personal symbol because it represents the Window to the Soul.

The Eye also represents Vision.

I wish to see things clearly, and also at different depths.

  

'The White Wizard' is a beaded barrette that I did for 2008 Bead Art Journal.

(I just wanted to show you something that I made with the symbol of the eye.)

To have Vision is to be able to think for one self.

To chart ones own course.

To be intuitive.

Being an individual.

The Eye also represents a Seeker of the Truth.

The one who questions conventional wisdom.

One who questions authority, 

when the purpose of authority is to remain in power.

And the best way for this to happen is to keep the people ignorant

and to not have the capacity to THINK.

A single eye is an eye with a Purpose.

An eye that does not waver to the left or to the right.

A Bulls-eye, one that is determined to hit the mark.

Maybe the eye has other meaning for you.

I hope that you will share them and 

enlarge the meaning of the symbol of the eye for me and other.

Erosion Bundle

This is a little Erosion Bundle that I made last week.  

Inside it I put things that I had collected while cleaning up in January.

 

I hung it on the fense in our garden.

When the family was looking at it yesterday they were trying to figure out what it was.

Catherine guessed I had made a cat toy.

I enjoyed telling them about it.

Hopefully the cats don't see it the way my children saw it.

As I get older I realize we are each Erosion Bundles.

We need to tighten our strings

It seems what we have eaten or how we have lived starts to "tattoo" our bodies.

Quote:
"One must live in the middle of contradition,
because if all contradictions were eliminated at once
life would collapse.
There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.
You continue to live them out,
making your life a worthy expression
of leaning into the light."

Barry Lopez, "Arctic Dreams"

Personal Symbols - a journey cloth by Ancient Cloth.

 

In January Ancient Cloth asked me what my five personal symbols were.

I had not thought of them in a list before and it felt like I was playing The Cube Sufi Game.

The Cicada is a symbol for death and rebirth.  

 

It has a special meaning to me because of what I learned one summer as my boys were observing a cicada.

The boys were 3 and 7.

They enjoyed watching the cicadas come out of their shells.

They would attach themselves to the side of the tree and then when their shell was attach they would disengage their body.

 

  They would then emerge from the shell and spread their wings, drying them out till they were hard and fly away.

When the boys found one they thought they would just move the critter to the front porch.

Unfortunately the insect was no longer attached to the tree.

He could not break free of his shell as he used the tree or a wall that his shell was attached to to help him.

 

This reminded me of how we may not trust natural progressions of growing up.

I have had adults around me try to help me "grow up" my children.

I was made to do things that I was not ready for and then my report card was marked with

Becky would do really well if she would pay attention.

The wall that I was attached to was taken away...my questions and imaginations considered unimportant.

They put me in a box of their own comfort and then presented me with their own set of questions and views.

It work well for "school" but it left me stunted and in my opinion it was in humane.

Another thing that happened when the insect did not emerge from his shell, was that my son helped him out.

He took off the armour that the bug was encast in.

It didn't help the insect.

The Cicada died. 

 

For me, I was helped out by working on my weaknesses.  

By being put in the slow class.

It did nothing to improve my strengths.

They really weren't interested in those.

I don't know if they knew what they were or what use they would have been in their system of learning.

I felt "stupid".

I struggled to survive in that environment.           

      

One day I went to coffee with a friend of mine and told her this story.  

After we got through I went to the farmer's market.

There was a girl there that had set up a Poetry Store.

I knew that I wanted her to write a poem about Cicadas.

As I got closer to her I saw that on the inside of her arm was a tattoo....

of a Cicada.

How cool is that?

Here is the poem that she wrote

"To follow the course

Of a tune well aimed,

We turn our ears to thosse

Who settle on living below

the soil until their brood

hums them onward.  This song

trumps all those made by metal 

or wood or throat andin this

winding buzz we can hear 

the wisdom of rest, of patience

and of onwardness to come."

Jacqueline Suskin 

October 31, 2009

Cicadas

P.S. This was done on a manual type writer so I left in all the typos as that gives this poem some character...and adds to it's artistic value, for me.

Symbols

AC and I have been talking about symbols for a long time.  I am interested in symbols and trying to impregnate them with meaning so that in a way I develop a personal language.

Back in November I was dealing with a complete breakdown of my relationship with my mother.  I was trying to understand where I was and how I saw my mother...both now and as a child.  AC suggested that I do some collage work around it. 

I had actually been planning to nearly two years before this and had collected a box full of images that appealed to me at that time.  I think that I was still into too many words about she said, did etc.  But in November I just felt but didn't have the words necessary to convey that in writing.  Art Collage was a great way for me to see my internal world.

Today I was reading a post that Erika refereed to in her post about Facing Our Personal Walls: 10 Cool Links.  In her first link she talks about Cathy Malchiodi, who started a new on-line organization called the International Art Therapy Organization. I was reading her article in Psychology Today called Cool Art Therapy Intervention #10: Magazine Photo Collage. 


She talks about using images to convey your thoughts.  It is a kind of play therapy because you can manipulate the pictures till they are where you want them before gluing them down.  When I did mine at first I just picked three images that spoke deeply to me and glued them down.

I found a new blog this week Jafabit's Art Embroidery.
She has used her sketchbook that she took to Washington, D.C. and used one of the pages to make an embridery art out of it. Here is the first post that shows her journal entry that she has started with.

How have you found symbols or used symbols in your art?  May be you know someone who inspires you with their use of symbols, I hope that you will include a link. 

 

Page 14 of my Miro inspired Journal.

He confessed later that hungry hallucinations were his muse. “Compared to the use of ether, cocaine, alcohol, morphine, or sex, Miró’s hunger-hallucinations look almost like a monkish fasting.” (p.44 in Joan Miró. By Janic Mink. Benedikt Taschen Verlag. 1993)

Setting the Stage - Vision Calendar

 

I have finished my January

While cleaning up I found these little triangles that

I  paper pieced.
It was a fun way to make a stage for I .

flag of my Vision Calendar.

January was about setting the stage for improvements.

I worked on cleaning and organizing my house, so that

straightening up the house would not be so taxing.

 I also created good habits of picking up everyday.

I made a grocery list that I had laminated so that 

I could put it on the refrigerator and check off the items I needed.

  I just picked up the list and was ready to go.

I wonder what February's flag will be?
It is like a treasure hunt for the month, trying to find  improvements.

Aging Woman Hand Carved Lino

I have been busy hand carving this bookmark called "Aging Woman".

 

 

These are some of the proofs.

Proofs are the prints that you do to get the images that you finally settle on.

 

  

 This is a bookmark about a woman as she ages.

She tries to look young or act young by putting on a mask and putting on a role.

The mask could be literal or figurative.

She feels young, and she can't come to terms with the fact that their is a leak...

It reminds me of our resistance to change that creates a more unreal mask as we age.  Some people do this literally and some do it by "acting as if" they were young and happy....when they are lonely and have not realistically connected  to the dreams that they wanted and the realities they have lived.  Some are so used to playing the part that the mask has become part of the psyche.

We all have to look and see the person we are, the person we would like to be. 

The face we give to the world.

We all feel there is a leak.  We feel young, but our body tells us a different story.

If only we knew what we know today and could begin again.

How we would live differently?

Soon I will have one of these bookmark posted in my ART SWAP, BARTER and TRADE blog. 
 

Charlotte Gibson's Magic Folding Cube

 

  

  

  

  

This is a hand carved stamped on wooden blocks.

  Has to be the coolest thing I have seen yet.

Here is a link if you would like to make your own.

Thank you Charlotte!!

Feburary 1 What Is On Our Desks

I am working on the I in my Vision Calendar prayer flags. 
The little Select Tomato box came out of a box of tubes Joe got today.
I think it will make a cute sewing caddy.

 

Working on printing book mark, I have made a lot of proofs.

If anyone wants one of my proofs just email me for my address and send a self address stamped business sized envelope.

Isaac was building a "new" computer for his mom and dad.

This is Joe's antenna table.

Joe's project on his table.  It is either a receiver or a transmitter or an amplifier.

Joe got a box of goodies yesterday.  The large tube is a television tube for a camera in the 1950's.  Joe said they would rotate these tubes.  After a while the tubes would start to see through the persons clothes and they had to be given a rest.  So the TV stations would have about twenty of them that they would rotate through like a snake in the box.

The other little boxes are television tubes that are also used in Ham Radio gear.

This is Winston's desk.  He is learning how to program his new Micro processor design board.

I didn't get Catherine's desk....another day.

Low Tide

 

It is dusk and Winston went out and took this picture.  

 

As you can see when the tide goes out the boat just sink into the mud.

Reminds me of this quote:

Warren Buffett quote - It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.