Circles Within Circles

Our exhibition,  Beholding the Ephemeral, is over and Johntimothy and I have brought the work home and spent the weekend reorganizing the studio....for the next phase of work. We plan to continue the collaborative pieces, which are a combination of layers of patterned screenprint runs (Johntimothy) and drawing and collage (me). Now that we have them home, we'll get them photographed and I'll post some photos here. The next step is to try to find some new venues and travel the show, or at least parts of it. In the meantime, I've photographed the daily drawings from the second week of January and am sharing them here before posting them for sale in my Etsy shop, MissouriBendStudio. I'm posting here the close-up shots, so you can see the image better....remember that these are 4" circles on a 10"x10" page. The drawings are made with a combination of pencil and various inks. I don't know why they appear so dark here....the photos didn't appear that way before! They are on bright white paper!!

In case I didn't mention it in my last post, I'm having a 50% off sale over at MissouriBendMusings, the Etsy shop that was dedicated to the daily drawing practice. I don't plan to post anything new there, but rather find homes for the work that is there and phase that shop out.

January 8, 2014

January 9, 2014

January 10, 2014

January 11, 2014

January 12, 2014

January 13, 2014

January 14, 2014

The next phase of life is about to unfold, as I leave my library job in early August to go back to school to get a masters degree! I'm excited about the shift in focus with my future studies in Adult and Higher Education. I was very intrigued by the adult programming part of my job at the library and have decided to move in that direction. Who knows where it will take me....a new future awaits!

Of course, my studio practice is so much a part of me that it will always remain a solid core of my life....so we'll see how I am able to integrate everything. For those of you who have followed this blog for some time, you've seen how the frequency of posts certainly dropped off as I became more involved in my job at the library. I am hoping, even though I'll be involved in school, to have a little more control of my time and get back to giving the blog more attention along with reading the blogs of my fellow artists....I have missed the interaction with my friends across the globe!

See you soon....hope you are enjoying the spring or fall, depending on your locale! Cheers!

Delicate Dots

Hello, I'm back to share the first daily drawings of January....well, these are the first week of the set made in a circle format (circle diameter is 4" on a 10"x10" sheet of BFK Rives). The drawings from January made in the square format are hanging in the show. The exhibition ends next week (already!) and eventually, I'll get them photographed as well. The drawings are all available for sale, as single days or even as a month (discounted!).  I'll be listing these over at my Etsy shop MissouriBendStudio. These are daily drawings and I would list them at MissouriBendMusings, which is the shop I created that is dedicated to the daily drawing practice, but I'm planning to consolidate and go back to just having a single shop to make life easier. There is now a big 50% off sale at MissouriBendMusings...be sure to use coupon code CLOSEOUT when making a purchase there. So, I hope to have these new drawings listed this evening....just finishing up the photos. The progression of the drawings, if you follow them week by week, is kind of interesting, as they become more complex over time. At the beginning, I was trying to just work with dots and circles, but eventually that system completely broke down and the each day's drawing took on a life of its own with its own personality. More drawings to come!

January 1, 2014

January 2, 2014

January 3, 2014

January 4, 2014

January 5, 2014

January 6, 2014

January 7, 2014

The drawings are made with pencil and ink....there is actually some color there (earthy red, warm grey, payne's gray), but it's not coming through so well in these photos.

Hope you have a great weekend....hope to see you back here, as I post more of the January drawings.

Cheers!

The Echoing Circles of Time

Hope you all had a fine weekend! I'm back reporting from the studio today.  I must give thanks to Fiona Dempster of Paper Ponderings (a wonderful blog you can find here) for a quote from Madeleine L'Engle she posted on the 13th of this month.  I haven't gotten it out of my head and it continues to wind it's way through my being and now I see it coming out through my hands.  I requote it here so you'll know what I'm talking about with the rest of this post:

"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again.  The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."


The Small Rain by Madeleine L'Engle


I've always been aware of the cycles that run as constants through our lives, giving us continuity, a certain comforting predicatability, but this quote somehow grounds me as one soul in a continuing ever-growing circle of time.  Even though things move in cycles, I'm somehow used to thinking of time as linear and that I form a link in a chain whose beginning and ending I cannot begin to see.  And yet, life is circular, not at all linear and in the studio, as these things percolate, I begin to draw simple forms which make me think of tree rings....circles of time...or ripples on the water...more gentle circles flowing out, sometimes imperceptibly, toward infiinity.


The other day I was in our little stacked-wide-and-high studio storage area...there to fetch another handful of the yummy Johntimothy hand-made paper and I saw peeking out from under the stack an old unfinished drawing.  This was a ghastly thing, from a brief moment in time when I thought I should be working bigger, and so I got it into my head to stitch four sheets of this 11x15" handmade paper together.  Just dumb....I knew then that my work was about intimacy, but you know those moments of making something you feel should be made rather than the thing that needs to be made.  Of course the piece was ungainly and I'd folded it up and stuffed it into this bin.  When I pulled it out, I immediately saw the circles everywhere, the gingko leaves (even then symbols of time and memory for me) and knew that I was looking at the start of maybe a dozen small drawings.  I immediately commenced to cut the thing up and have begun a new series of work.

Not surprising, it's meditative and intuitive as I make marks and draw, thinking through my hands. I'm trying to have three of these little 5x5" pieces ready in a couple days to photograph, so I can send them to the show in New Hampshire. There will be a larger series of them and I'm not sure what it will be called, but I will know when the name announces itself.  It's best for me not to try to think of what it is to be called, as naming is a thing that should come from the work itself. I know the name will quietly knock on my door to announce itself when the time is right.

a work in progress

Meanwhile, the afternoon was spent (FINALLY) taking down the Christmas tree and putting everything away.  Everything is circular....didn't we just go through this activity of quietly wrapping each ornament in tissue paper that is now quite falling apart (yes, just about a year ago) and wasn't I looking out a window at the deep snow, light fading on cottonwood trees, the frozen mist floating over the river...it's just like last year and the year before.  

I'm reminded now of my blogging friends, some of whom have recently lost loved ones, other of whom have watched natural disaster threaten their homes.  These are the cycles of nature at work and we must recognize them for what they are....part of the endless circles forever revolving.  At once a comfort and a terror...nothing is permanent...everything evolving.  See you tomorrow...