Mixed Media – Page 12 – Mixy's Art Blog

just lurking

Hello lovely friends of the internet, I’ve missed you, where have you been?

I haven’t posted in a little while due to an absence of images.

This is the coming together of a doodly thing I did a few weeks back

Watercolour and fountain pen, intricate and involved but in a stilted inhibited style, so I left it there

My creative mojo has dropped off temporarily, the tide’s gone out, so I’m patiently waiting it out.

Meanwhile, I wish you all a beautiful Solstice, whatever that means to you. Be well, lovely souls X

@madebymixy

Do you Facebook? I’ve just set up a page for my art – Let’s link up and make this big wide world a wee bit smaller 😉

in all seriousness

no , not really, I mean…really!

But in series

A work in progress, featuring more dictionary bits, watercolor, fountain pen doodles. Something of an underwatery feel going on this time.

Working title: Syllabub Four – after the first word I spotted in the collage 🙂

I’m away from home and away from this blog for a few weeks… I’m missing my studio but I know in my absence the ideas are bottling up and there will be opportunity for outpouring before too long. Meanwhile I’ve had time to ponder on where I’m at, and how I got here. From here I can figure out where to go next!

In all my experiments and adventures with mixed media art, there’s usually something that takes me by surprise.

Something amid this endless opportunities to combine, dismantle, re-imagine, reconstruct, with new permutations of media, materials, techniques and style – way more than any one person could exhaust in one lifetime. Sometimes I forget this though. Then I forage around online for ideas, and something amazing happens.

Take, for instance, the concept of an altered book.

I grew up in a home full of books, maybe the last generation for whom this primary source of information, books hold a sense of reverence. Over the years I sought sanctuary in books, a hiding place, a wonder world of mysteries, of dreams and spirits, of characters too colourful to exist outside. A key that unlocks the worlds within another’s imagination, in the words of Stephen King, ‘books are uniquely portable magic’.

I can honestly say, some of my best friends have been books.

So then, altering books…. Although I’ve seen some truly exquisite sculptural paper-folding from books, and some ingenious creations, something still felt uncomfortable. Something made me wince just a little bit. And I know I’m not alone in this.

It was when I saw Brian Dettmer’s TED Talk that my thoughts became altered too. He describes the art of book altering as reinvention, as comparable to a DJ remixing music. He compares books to bodies – living creatures – with a capability to evolve, and as a parallel to the expansion of painting and drawing beyond simple reproduction after the invention of the printing press and the camera, now perhaps books have a freedom to be more than what they were before.

What I did here is nothing like the art that Dettmer makes, his talk opened my mind to more possibility. It liberated my thoughts.

In the resonance of his words I felt my thinking shift from ‘…but why?’ through stages of creeping curiosity, a crescendo of allure to the new level of possibility. These thoughts were gathering momentum to the level of irresistible fascination. Fuelled by online tutorials and videos, with a tatty orphaned volume of short stories I set out to see what would happen with paint, pens and collage cuttings…

After just a short time I found the spirit of the exercise had taken hold: part drawn, part collaged, pieces fell into place alongside doodles and paint splatters. My eye would catch a fleeting glimpse before the sentences were lost under colour. Patterns and ideas formed organically

All of my habitual ways were finding their place in this new sanctuary for busy thoughts. With no expectations I set about seeing what serendipity would surprise me with, and I watched the layers build up. It was becoming an illustrated stream of consciousness. The book was developing a character all of its own.

I worked on this book over the course of a few months, skipping back and forth through the pages with paint or pastels, doodles and drawing. This is where I went when my ideas ran dry – there was always a space to fill and patterns to follow. Ideas fed on ideas.

So the lesson I learnt from this project is that the spirit of a book isn’t just caught up in the meaning behind its text, a book is much greater than its story.

You can see this completed book in three parts, here

mental noise

Amid the hubbub of chatter inside my head I’m sometimes aware of one group of voices much more clearly than all the others.

it’s louder, more forceful than the rest of them.
More strident, it’s shoutier… y’know?

In order to distance my own thinking from theirs,

I’ve named them the ‘chorus of cynics’.

Some days they’re so vocal, they’re so convincing, their opinions stretch the full spectrum of topics. They’ve got a snide sideways aspect on every last subject, if I couldn’t disconnect from their scorn and derision it would still bite like it used to.

I’ve heard our immediate reaction to a situation reflects our early programming. Let that pass and listen for our next thought, that comes from our true self. So I’m learning to let that knee-jerk of harsh sarcasm wash past; a more empathetic aspect will be close on its tail.

That reflex derision does no good to anyone. The insight of affinity is warming to the soul.

The chorus of cynics will laugh and mock this as mimsy.

Now I let them.

I don’t want their fights.

There’s a department in my mind that holds onto criticism and scorns, these memories, filed under P for Potential to Spiral Out Of Proportion, is kept closely guarded these days.

Too vague, too woolly, too dull and simpery soft-bellied.
You’ve got no definition, no essence, no core.
Too proud, narcissistic, all haughty and vain
Idealistic, unrealistic, unaware of your privilege:
That girl – Go Home!

Twisting out from some comeback,
Flips extremes to befuddle, bemuse and condemn.

Try harder, work harder, do more in less time.
Be valid, be worthy, be helpful, have value, be more than you are.

Of course, the older I get, the less I care.

What I make, what I think, what I care about and focus my life around, these are my choices. I’m gratefully blessed to be alive in a part of history and geography where I’m free to express these without fear.

But the older I get, the more experience adds volume to the chorus too.

My nativity gets dinked and dented as I discover there are more people more capable of more hatred, more inconsistently judgemental, more out and out mad. And their voices accumulate.

Their comments can bubble up from time to time in the clamour of the committee and I can choose whether or not to listen.

hidden in plain sight

Sometimes I’ll notice a thing, it’s been there all along, just hiding from my awareness.

Case in point: I ran a year long project a few years ago, where each month was dedicated to a colour.

Conveniently there are 12 months and if you use the Primary, Secondary, Tertiary groups there are 12 colours. I called it ‘12 in 12‘, beginning January with Red-Purple cycling through Purple, Blue-Purple, Blue…etc. finishing up in Red.

For the whole month I filled a few pages in this book. I feasted on the colour and resisted straying into another month’s territory (not easy for a colour glutton). I was strict and disciplined and it meant all the other colours exploded into my art outside this book with a new found gusto.

The year produced a lush rich rainbow of mixed media and collage.

I’d thought of doing this many times before, but for some reason I hadn’t gotten around to starting it. It wasn’t until around 3 colour/months in when it dawned on me… the year was 2012…so this was 12 in 12 in 12!

I bring this up now – not just as I love a bit of subconscious synchronicity – and this one still makes me smile years later – but because this project has inspired new ideas too.

I’ll be reviving this idea later in the year, and this time you can join in too! Watch this space, I’ll tell you more about it in the summer.

derailed logic

You know me well enough by now – you know not to expect a simple train of logic, don’t you?

When I found this anonymous model, the leopardskin, that sultry seductive look, and all the glamour of the 1940’s ‘do — and I don’t remember the exact connecting train of thought that same next –– I just straight away thought mermaid.

Of course, right? <welcome to my world!>

spinning into spring

A few days past the Equinox – whichever hemisphere you’re reading this from – we’ve all just tipped a balance of seasons.

I’m typing to you from the north, so my days are now eversoslightly longer then my nights.

Which makes me glad.

It suits my intermittent insomniac tendencies – if it isn’t cold and dark when I wake up my days are more likely to begin earlier – and in turn rebalance my days and nights into natural circadian rhythms. (Until next time…)

Last week my sleep was completely unsettled.

Beginning with the night I had all the nightmares that children get where beasties and monsters are chewing my feet. And my tired mind forgets it’s just a dream and refuses to go back there just in case.

Popular science de jour supports the belief that missed sleeps can’t exactly be repaid at a later date, and rather than try to catch up, it’s better to enforce a bed time and wake time, forcing the body to comply. Good sleep hygiene. All that stuff.

I’ve tried that.

The obstinate donkey that runs my brain doesn’t like that game, so won’t play.

We (me & donkeybrain) have to lay there all restless and thinky for a long time when we try this. Unmedicated early nights are effective only when preceded by some fairly appalling regard to rest for a good few days by way of a build up. Even the donkey doesn’t think that’s wise.

If I do get to sleep by my ideal of 11pm I fall into what feels like a deliciously deep, eight hour, dream fuelled, well rested slumber. Mmmmmm…

But in reality turns out to have lasted just 90 minutes or so.

And is followed by any combination of thinky/over-thinky/wide-awake/best-ideas-ever-just-not-quite-awake-enough-to-write-down-or-record-somehow/what-the-crazies-was-that-dream-meant-to-be-about?…………….

I mean – it’s rarely worrisome thoughts – I’m not that ball of anxiety (had that in previous chapters, thankfully free of that now). So it could be worse.

I say to myself: Shush, it will be morning soon, you just need to shush back to sleep for a little while til then… continually for 5-6 hours before another 90 min nap.

Last week I had two consecutive nights on just scraps of rest and a few really busy days with a lot of fresh air and walking. So that should be an effective reset, right?

Then the weekend was almost totally filled up with sleep.

Like the rest of my life, I think I’m probably quite well balanced on average – but looking at individual episodes I’m mostly to be found on the outer edges of everything.

There we are.

This isn’t me, but she can be my representative in this tale of chaos. Standing there in her mismatched legs, holding onto her head (keeping the donkey in – he has his uses) and leaning – all casual like – against the one edge of this so called reality. Just for now.

the str-e-e-e-tch

This guy was in a yoga magazine before he got here. In between times he’s been hanging out in my collection of cut out magazine snippings.

I haven’t attempted this asana for a long while, it’s one that feels amazing at full stretch with straight limbs like this, but limbs and joints don’t always want to cooperate…