A is for Alphabet

alphabetica.jpgI’ve had this book, Alphabetica by Lynne Perrella, on my shelf for a long time.

It’s a gorgeous reference for folks like me who play with mixed media art, and who love language, lettering, and for things to be organised alphabetically.

 

This year I’m taking a 12 month course by Carla Sonnheim called Y is for Yellow, where we have a new class each fortnight, one for each letter of the alphabet (26 fortnights: 26 letters)

So here two aspects of my creativity have overlapped beautifully and I’ve dived right into the All the A-things. Abstractly Adding All the A-things that come to mind here……

fingerpainting, music and people (31/52)

From this

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To this

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Collaged in music and people then some proper fingerpainting.

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Real, visceral, icky fingerpainting. You want to play now too, don’t you?

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The whole process reminds me of weaving:  layers show through in places. In and out. Each one adds.

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Collage, colour, paint & words. That’s all.

As always (to me) the beauty’s in the details…………………….

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Wordful Week 7/52

IMG_3801Week 7 turned out to be a wordy week. And full of stuff : New (super) Moon, Valentines, I hit my weight lifting target that I set at the start of the year…. All in all, a week of giddying goodness. And…..

My Birthday,  which involved coffee, cake and kitties at Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium in Bethnal Green. I am soppy in the extreme about cats and since my home has been empty of furry friends for a few years now… you can imagine this was like the ultimate in birthday fun for me!

When I saw this list I knew right away it had a place in the book of 2015 : these are the things that matter to me:

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To Be An Explorer of the World:

  1. Always be looking (notice the ground beneath your feet)
  2. Consider Everything alive & animate
  3. Everything is interesting – look closer
  4. Observe for long durations and short ones
  5. Alter your course often
  6. Notice the stories going on around you
  7. Notice patterns: Make Connections
  8. Document your findings (field notes) in a variety of ways
  9. Incorporate interdeterminancy
  10. Observe movement
  11. Create a personal dialogue with your environment: Talk to it
  12. Trace all things back to their origins
  13. Use all of the senses in your investigations.

It sits neatly alongside the list of new moon intentions (which tbh are not much different from the last few intention lists. Basic stuff I’m trying hard to hammer home in the subconscious).

IMG_3807Love is in the air: Love and Be Loved

I guess it’s fitting that my love of words and lists is really prominent this week! These things that bobbed up on my horizon this week (would love to credit where they came from, but only there long enough to scribble down before getting buried in a million tangential thoughts and surfs and immediately-pressing-need-to-knows that the www sends my way.) The second one is more mantra/affirmationy:

I’m neither doomed nor completely free
But I’m creating my future with every word, every action, every thought.
I find myself in a very dynamic situation with unimaginable potential,
I have all the support I need to simply rIMG_3812elax and be with the transitional, in process quality of my life. I have all I need to engage in the process of awakening.

Thank you to whoever put those words together and sent them into the internet ether. I get where you’re coming from and I wish you happy adventures.

So that was last week… a scattering of butterflies (more next week – new project I’m about to launch into later today), and again with the eyefish. What’s with the eyefish? Srsly?! X

words and colors

If you’ve visited here before you’ll have to noticed two of my favourite things are words and colors.

So dying a dictionary seemed the obvious thing for me to do.

Flamboyant through to Flat, multiple ink stains

30 years ago this month I began high school.
Plea to Plough

30 years ago? Lordy!

ink soaked paper napkin squashed between Shun and Side

Equipped with the essentials dictated by the school, I now owned a Pocket Oxford Dictionary.

from Irk to Irresponible. Coffee painted on with teabag.

(At over 1000 pages and a good 2 inches thick, the average pocket size of an eleven year old child negated its title.)

Lure to Machine. Dripped inks and dye water.

Nonetheless this book has travelled with me through the decades.

Abbreviations to A. Squished inky paper

Repay through to Reproach. More inky goodness.

Battered, dog-eared, with scribbled notes in the margins here n there…

from Pylon to Quandry. Squashed strip of inky paper

… the spine went first but now it’s cover has separated totally from its papery wordfilled heart.

dip dyed dictionary

In it’s new incarnation – a colorful version of the former – it will one day become collage ingredients.

Encode to Engine. Colorex inks

As an aside, I sometimes catch a glance of myself in my art room, as if from an outsiders perspective. I’m ironing torn, stained scraps of paper. Phrases like ‘not doing anyone any harm’ in bemused but sympathetic tones echo in my head. I smile. They just don’t understand. Anyway, I do it cos I have to and it makes me happy. Nuff said.

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