Mundane Entertainment: Harriet The Tear Duct Slug

Too totally funny!!! Shannon is a scream! I recommend her blog and you can find her on facebook and YouTube.

Mundane Entertainment: Harriet The Tear Duct Slug: I have a really disgusting story to share. Common sense tells me to never ever speak of it to anyone. But I decided to share it on the off c...

Living in a Paper Doll World

15.5" x 12.375" Mixed Media Collage

I did this collage to show the struggles and hard work of living life, but it still needed something. As I was going through my stash of collage stuff, I ran across a paper doll that I had printed from Pinterest and it just seemed to fit. It wasn't until several days later, as I was questioning my choice to add it to the picture, that I realized what my subconscious was telling me. Life is a fantasy paper doll world.

I remember when I was younger, how "McCall's" magazine always had a page of paper dolls for kids that I would carefully cut out. I looked forward to each issue eagerly. Those paper dolls spoke of better things to me, happier times, a kinder world. Those paper dolls had an innocence underlined by a subtle direction of thought that guided my young mind.

 This morning I ran across an article about British writer Jeanette Winterson on Maria Popova's Brain Pickings.  The article was titled: "Jeanette Winterson on Time, Languange, Reading, and How Art Creates a Sanctified Space for the Human Spirit," which quotes a book co-authored by Winterton and Canadian broadcaster, Eleanor Wachtel. In it Popova writes:

...Echoing Henry Miller’s memorable assertion that "all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,"  [Winterson] adds:
Art forms must always change… You cannot stop in art, you cannot fossilize art in a redundant form, and you cannot take a point in history and favor it above any other point and say, ah yes, this is the way to do it....Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.

..."the artifice of language and its limitations,"
Yes, it is artificial, but it is, as yet, the best way human beings have found to communicate to one another their deepest, their most difficult, feelings. And that is the preserve of poetry and of true fiction, to put roots down through the surface into the subsoil of the human heart and to draw up those elements that would otherwise lie locked there, unheard, unspoken, perhaps unregarded. Language can do that, and I think that it is the duty of the writer to go on pushing language forward because if it’s not developing, if it’s not growing, if people aren’t using it in unique and different ways while at the same time regarding its tradition, then that language is going to start atrophying.
...For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

 ...[For the artist] it is a question of always going back and uncovering what is already there because the artist is something of a dredger: you have to let down your net and pull up things from the mud, from the silt, that are unrecognizable, that have been forgotten, that have lain disused and ignored for a long time. You bring them up and you clean them off and you look at them and you bring them back into the present where they can speak, where they have a place. I think it’s a dual role of dredging and of cleaning, but then also of re-creating so that you are always offering something that is right for your own time, that is new in itself.

 ...To learn how to heal yourself seems to me to be the most important thing that you can do because at that moment you are genuinely self-reliant, and if other people hurt you — as they will — it won’t matter because you have now in your own hands the tools of healing.

...I can see no reason to be bound by chronological time. As far as we know, the universe is not bound by it; as far as we know, it is yet another construct of ours, this worship of the clock and the idea that there is a past and a present and a future which trot along obediently in line and never swap places. In our own lives we know that that’s not true because human beings seem capable of moving imaginatively, backwards and forwards, of pushing out of the body. I think of it really as an out-of-the-body experience — that’s not something that only shamans and New Age hippies have. It’s something that we all have quite often in our lives. And I wanted to bring that into fiction because it seems to me to be a more honest reality than the rather dull reality of the clock.

...The journey that you make is not one of the clock: it’s an interior one, and in it you travel through time, through space, through place.
 
Winterson's views seemed to fit in with what this picture seems to be saying to me, or more accurately, what my subconscious was trying to say through my art. Words and pictures are intertwined for me and this is expressed in all my collages.

Everything is connected according to current quantum theory. We are what we think. Really. The reality of life begins in the mind, and, as Winterson says:

  "Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself."

 I think that is the real message here. 


 

Art Is Everywhere!

Sidewalk Chalk Art courtesy of the neighbor kids

Art can be found everywhere! My neighbor kids were out playing with their sidewalk chalk yesterday and really scrubbed it into the cement. I love colors! It rained overnight and made the designs stand out even better when I went outside this morning. I had to share the joy!!

Daring To Be Vulnerable

Vulnerabilty, Mixed media collage, 11"x14"

 

 

"To be alive is to be vulnerable."

- Madeleine L’Engle

 

"No matter what gets done and how much

is left undone, I am enough…Yes,

I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but

 that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave

and worthy of love and belonging."

- Brené Brown

 

To embrace our vulnerability is the ultimate "daring greatly."

Bridges, Bridges, and More Bridges

Okay. I admit it. I have a thing for bridges, any kind of bridges—old bridges, railroad bridges, suspension bridges, covered bridges…. I love the architecture, I love the symbolism, I love the designs...you name it. Maybe it's the thought of connecting that appeals to me so much. Bridges are for connecting places, things and people, especially people. Connections. Relationships. Form and function beautifully displayed. Sigh. I do so love bridges. So, I thought I would share some of my bridge photos with you all. Hope you enjoy.

Red Wolf Crossing, Clarkston, WA - I think this bridge is beautiful!

Train Bridge, Lewiston, ID

Southway Bridge on ramp, Lewiston, ID

"New" bridge into Kooskia, ID from Kamiah

Southway Bridge

Southway Bridge

The Blue Bridge connecting Lewiston, ID with Clarkston, WA

Southway

Entering Lewiston from Moscow-Pullman or Orofino

Train Bridge on the prairie between Grangeville and Lewiston

Daring Greatly

 

 

It is not the critic who counts; not the

man who points out how the strong man

stumbles, or where the doer of deeds

could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually

in the arena, whose face is marred by dust

and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly . . .

who at the best knows in the end the triumph

of high achievement, and who at the worst,

if he fails, at least fails

daring greatly.

 

-Theodore Roosevelt

I found this quote on the inside front flap of Dr. Brené Brown's book, "Daring Greatly".  It became the inspiration for this artwork. The black and white photo I literally picked up a year ago when I found it laying in the middle of the street when I was out walking my dog. I couldn't throw it back down. I brought it home and stuffed it away in my file, knowing that at some point I could use it in my art. Ta da! Today was the day! I think it fits the quote beautifully. It also happens to be what I feel I'm doing in putting my artwork out here for all to see—daring greatly.

I think that's what every artist does. I also believe everyone is an 'artist'. They may not paint or sing or play music or dance. Instead, they are housewives and office workers and parents and cooks and poets and janitors...(put in here whatever work it is that you do). Living life is an art no matter what we do for a living. We can all live life with passion and a spirit of excellence in everything that we do. And, hopefully, at the end of our days, we can say that we truly lived our life 'daring greatly.'

Poem by Steve Rapier

Had to share this poem by my sister-in-law's brother, Steve. I could so relate...lol. My dog is named Daisy as well. Enjoy!!!