Playing with paper pulp
Under
Redwood trees was the
Penultimate, but not the
Only
Special
Experience
Fulfilling my life.
Until I lose
Life, I hope to be
Living
It
Fully. Life is as
Exciting as we make it!
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” – Kurt Vonnegut
The prompt today was “Purpose.” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/purpose/
This is a piece I did a few years ago entitled “The Circus.” It deals with that part of us that wants to run away and join the circus. The porcelain doll has my mother’s face superimposed on it. Over my mother’s face, I put several layers of Frida Kahlo’s face, peeled off in varying degrees. Over Frida’s face is a miniature antique paste mask that can be pulled aside or allowed to fall into place. In her hands are a tiny pair of silver scissors and around her waist is a tiny bag woven of morning glory vines. She rises out of a toy chest decorated with Loteria cards. On the chair to her left is a small clown figure with wings. He is painting a portrait of Frida. Many discarded portraits of her lie crumpled and discarded on the floor. They are all the same. Below him are circus animals and a juggler who have spilled from the pages of a tiny journal that has a story written inside about creativity, sides of the brain, intuition vs. reason and imitation vs. unique inspiration. The overall piece is about the importance of coming from a unique place in ourselves rather than depending upon judgement and imitation. For me, the purpose of art is that experience of going into new realms of ourselves—to allow ourselves to do what most of us couldn’t do when we were young—to run away to join the circus!
Which do you prefer? A non perfect image can still be fun to play with.
For more flowers: https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/06/flower-of-the-day-may-4-2016-bearded-iris-2/
What Consumed You
Hot wax for your wild boar sculpture
that you melted in my favorite sauté pan.
The metallic smell of your sweat.
Fine redwood shavings
caught in the curly hairs of your muscled arms.
“What is your favorite part of his body?”
a friend once asked––
a strange question.
It was your forearms.
You were a beautiful man.
“Nice legs,” a woman leaving a restaurant in St. Paul
once remarked to you, as we were entering.
“Bernice,” her husband expostulated.
“Well, they are,” she answered.
They were a bicyclist’s legs,
my second favorite part.
When they came to take you,
“What a waste––” I thought,
“that body consigned to flame––”
but appropriate to an artist
who had fired glass and clay and bronze
to join in the kiln all the beauty he had created from it.
When potter friends
asked for a cup of your ashes
for the glaze for your funereal urn,
that is how,
finally, you became
the art you lived for.
The idea was to make ten of these seed-shaped urns to divide my husband Bob’s ashes into–one for each of Bob’s eight kids, his sister and me. A larger pea pod shaped tray was to enclose them all, but it blew into a hundred pieces in the kiln of our friends Dan and Laurie, who were making it. I guess it was an appropriate metaphor, for Bob was the one who brought us all together and he was now gone. Somehow, I wound up with eleven urns, so after Bob’s kids and sister came to Mexico to collect their ashes to distribute wherever they wished and we deposited the ashes designated to me in Lake Chapala, I wound up with one empty urn and one filled partially with the remains of Bob’s ashes. I always thought the empty one was for me, but when I knocked over the one with Bob’s ashes in it a few years ago, we gathered him up so he now resides in my urn and I am unattached in the after life, at least for now. The little urn in the foreground is all that is physically left of Bob. In the background is a bronze nude that is one of hundreds of sculptures, art lamps and vases that he seeded the world with before he left it. R.I.P. Bob. Much of you remains in this world.
This is my poem for today’s prompt. To see it and/or participate, go here: http://www.napowrimo.net/day-sixteen-3/
Cornhusk Bouquet
No less real than those that grow
from soil and water and sunlight’s glow,
these are the flowers the women made.
They are less fragile––more slowly fade.
Fashioned from the husks of corn––
Their food’s protector, now reborn
by women’s hands–graceful and able,
into beauty to grace the table.
Their petals strong as the hands that twist
husks soaked in water lest they resist
the efforts of creators who
have dyed them yellow, red and blue.
Green for leaves and sepals formed
from nature trimmed and soaked and warmed
by the knees they shape them over––
hyacinth, roses and clover.
The breath of life stirs leaves and thrums
sunflowers, lilies and mums.
The gentle waving of petals hung
over paper scraps, bottles and dung
of a courtyard made from life and duty
and therefore not reserved for beauty.
Squalor from which beauty comes.
See how their bougainvillea hums?
Thunbergia’s petals and fragile pod
are lovely as if made by god.
Carried to market where they sell
to tourists who will love them well.
Crowded in vases, baskets or
in jardiniers on the sala floor.
These flowers will not tell the tale
of scissors and the soaking pail.
They stand completed, sure and tall
in a copper bucket in my hall.
As I pass, my garment’s hem
gently brushes over them
and stirs the powdery summer dust
that covers them in a fragile crust,
releasing a subtle bouquet
of corn and soil and the light of day.
Hidden
The parts of us that we conceal
as well as parts that we reveal
make up who we really are.
Our eye fixed on that distant star
in dark of night that no one sees
and what we think while at our ease––
these hidden aspects of our lives
that we tell neither friends nor wives
might be more of our history
than what you hear and what you see.
We recognize that special sense
that some let slip when feeling tense––
an energy that goes unseen
during life’s banal routine.
It hints perhaps at inner life
divided from the roil and strife
of doing what the whole world does
from day to day simply because
it’s what moves our world along––
the business, be it bread or song
that we produce to fuel each other––
what we provide to give our brother
in trade for what he gives to us––
the “stuff” of life––the trade and fuss.
Our inner gardens we keep inside,
their harvests richer if we hide
them deep within to grow and thrive.
They are what keep our souls alive
to grow more bountiful day by day
until we choose to give away
all we’ve grown there in the shade––
theorems and the sonnets made––
all those thoughts and sounds and seeings
that seem to come from other beings
living somewhere deep inside
where they have chosen to live and hide.
These hidden parts that we conceal––
that through our art we may reveal––
these parts reached by our daily delves
into what feel like other selves––
these places that produce the yield
are treasure houses we’ve concealed.
So at those times we break the seal
and let out how we really feel––
sing the song we’ve kept inside,
paint truths from our inner guide?
It is not God, muses or elves.
We’ve simply shared our hidden selves.
(Click on photos to enlarge)
Empty Studio
My memories
are footsteps
leading me to you.
I smell your scent of wood,
your sweat with the bouquet of bronze,
remember the finger you sacrificed
to impetuosity and art.
Finally the world fed all of you to the blade––
our severance as final as one of your straight sure cuts––
making you into memory I follow one step at a time,
my passing visible through stone dust
and wood shavings on the floor.
This is how you and I
create patterns
even after you are gone
from memories as fragmented
as what you left behind
when you created art––
stone chips, sawdust, pebbled glass,
curls of metal and winged shards of paper––
my footprints
pushing them farther apart
each time I pass through.
Leaving more of me
and less of you.
Up a very steep hill to the very top–and you’ll find a Shangri-la worth the climb. It is the adobe and palapa home of mosaic and mixed-media artist Mazinka Rutherford. Her art is such an integral part of her house that the entire environment is like a mixed-media assemblage. Here are some of its ingredients:
(To see the photos in an enlarged format, click on first photo, then click on each arrow to proceed through the gallery.)
All of the art pictured is by her creation. One of the homes on the site is for rent. The adobe was hand built by Anaxazi’s competent hand with Mazinka as helper. She did the gorgeous tilework in the bathroom floor that is pictured above. He also built the adobe/bamboo/palapa treehouse that I stayed in five years ago that is the setting for this video. The woman pictured is, of course, Mazinka.
Sculptor in the Sand
Mario Gagnon is retired from his life as a hospital maintenance engineer in Quebec, but when we retire from our profession, we do not retire from our interests, and his lifetime fondness for what he calls “decorating” comes with him when he comes to the beach. Like most of those camping beachside, he has made the palapa living area of his campsite “homely” in only one usage of the word. From hammocks to wall sconces fashioned from fruiting bundles of palm trees, his environs are beautiful in addition to comfortable.
I revisited him yesterday, partially because I’d forgotten to take a picture of him when I met him on the second day I visited, but I was also there because of my curiosity over whether he altered his sculpture each day. I did find him fussing with the tail of the iguana, but that was perhaps just staging for the bypasser who was currently taking his picture. When the “interloper” (kidding) departed, it was my turn.
This time it was a female neighbor who translated for us and she explained to me something that I had not cottoned on to the first time we’d met. “He can’t understand you because he is deaf and he can’t read your lips because he doesn’t speak English! Formerly, I had thought his friend was interpreting only because of the language barrier, and when I spoke Spanish, thinking it was closer to French, it hadn’t helped much either. Trying to imagine what the beach would be like without its sounds to accompany it, I asked him if he could feel the pounding of the surf. “Yes, he told me, “because I am deaf, my other senses are stronger. When I smell a fire, I can tell how long ago it was lit, what is burning and what was used to start the fire.”
This dapper, handsome man was generous in sharing his art, his home away from home and his time. Here are some of the pictures I took of his world:
(Please click on first photo to enlarge and view gallery.)
If you didn’t see the first segment I did on Mario’s wonderful beach sculpture of the iguana, to see it, go HERE.
Dream Jobs
I have been lucky enough to have several “dream jobs” in my lifetime. First of all, I was a teacher. I loved teaching kids and enjoyed the other people I worked with. My first teaching jobs were in Australia and Ethiopia, which additionally gave me the chance to travel and live in “strange” environments–things I had wanted to do since very small.
I taught for ten years before finally deciding I needed to change my life to enable me to find time to write. I then moved to Orange County, California, to live with a dear friend and spent two years studying a number of areas I felt had been neglected in my earlier education. I would go to the library with lists of topics I wanted to know more about: art, artists, places, concepts, psychology, philosophy.
The writing of Carl Jung was of special interest and I allowed synchronicity and the unconscious to guide my life. This took me to Los Angeles and into film school at U.C.L.A., an apprenticeship at a Hollywood agency and eventually to a job working in p.r. and publicity for Bob Hope’s production company. It was a job where I was laid off for 5 months of each year, between shows, and this enabled me to write and travel.
After three years of working here, I married and moved northwards to the Santa Cruz area where I became a silversmith and paper maker. For fourteen years, I traveled and did art shows with my husband. This was as close to working for a traveling circus as I would ever come, and I loved both the studio work and the traveling. The people we would meet in various locations across the U.S. became our friends and we slept in our motor home or van in convention center parking lots from California to Ann Arbor to Boston.
As the area of our travels narrowed to the west coast, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Colorado, I accepted a “job” as the curator of a new art center in the San Lorenzo Valley near Santa Cruz. Although this was a volunteer position, it was both time-consuming and extremely gratifying as I met and worked with artists throughout the Santa Cruz area. I loved coordinating and hanging eight shows a year as well as teaching classes and handling show themes, admissions, publicity and openings. It was practically a full time job in itself, but we continued to handle a full show schedule ourselves. By then, in addition to my making silver and copper jewelry, Bob and I were making art lamps together. He did the stone and wood work and some of the framework for the sail like shades whereas I made the handmade washi paper and some of the framework for shades and covered the shades.
I’ve been lucky my entire life to always have a job I enjoyed and believed in and this continues to this very day as retirement has brought time to write more and to shift my focus from jewelry and lamps to mixed media assemblage, which I continue to this day. While at the beach, I concentrate on collages of found objects from the beach and city streets. It also gives me time to write this blog which consumes an ever-increasing amount of my time.
Here is a gallery of shots that capture, I hope, my process in collecting, assembling and mounting found objects into my assemblages. If you click on the first picture, it will enlarge the photos and show them to you one by one:
Prompt: Describe your dream job. https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/money-for-nothing/
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 