Friday, August 31, 2012

Thou Shalt Not....

gos·sip/ˈgäsip/
Noun:
Casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true.

Verb:
Engage in gossip.

Synonyms:
noun.  tittle-tattle - tattle - scandal - slander - rumour
verb.  tattle - tittle-tattle - talk - chatter - babble
 "If A equals success, then the formula is A = X + Y + Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut."  Albert Einstein

"What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth." Jewish Proverb

"Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip." Will Rogers
Spending the last week of the summer here at Pine Lake, I have been thinking a lot about gossip.  Often, when someone hasn't been at Pine Lake for a few days, the first question they ask is -- so, what's the gossip?  It's not that people are mean -- they just don't want to feel out of the loop.  They want to know what's going on.  But where do you draw the line between just reporting about the day, or trying to work out your feelings about something that occurred, and gossip?

The yamas and niyamas are the ethical precepts in the Yoga Sutras.  They are the first and second limbs of yoga and one is supposed to embrace and strive to master them before undertaking the physical asana postures.  Without the yamas and niyamas, yoga is just physical exercise.  By observing the yamas and niyamas, yoga can transform not only your body but your mind and your life.  The yamas and niyamas all flow from the first yama, "Ahimsa" - which means do no harm. 

Divisive speech -- words that cause someone to think ill about someone else -- are certainly harmful.  And I know when I'm crossing the line between just reporting about something and speaking divisively.  I get an icky, sour feeling, the way Edmund must have felt in The Chronicles of Narnia as he ate the White Witch's turkish delight.  You know it's not good for you or anyone else, and yet you just can't help yourself once you get started.  Why?

Psychologists say there are several reasons people gossip.  To feel superior, to get attention, out of jealousy or a desire for revenge, for control or power, or out of boredom.  Among my friends and family, the last reason is a driving force.  When you're sitting around on vacation, there's often nothing better to do than talk about other people. 

Interestingly enough, there are almost as many websites devoted to "How to Stop Gossiping" as there are sites whose sole content is gossip.  Here is a good article about stopping gossip, with a step by step approach.  Let me know your thoughts... 

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A Special Place

"If You Could Be Anywhere" is the theme of the challenge at Inspiration Avenue.  Here's my entry:
The swell of the cicadas is the harbinger the end of summer.  If I didn’t before, I feel an urgency to go to my beloved lake.  Not just “the lake,” but “my beloved lake.”  This water has a particular appeal for me. It is a signature green – a color that I welcome as it sticks to my swimsuit. Here and there a flurry of fish, a surprise of a snail shell underfoot.  The water seems to hold the magic of birth, rebirth, healing, and all sorts of other special powers.  Even today as I swim, the water feels like a caress, an embrace, holding me up and propelling me on.

There is a moment today at the end of my swim where I float on my back, coming as close as I can to stillness.  Above me, the sky is blue and white.  Beneath me, the water supports me with invisible hands.  With my ears submerged, I hear the song of the water.  In that moment, all is perfect.  Nothing is missing.  I am one with the lake, one with the sky.  “This is what it feels like, before the beginning, and after the end.”  I know this without thinking it – a moment of absorption in all that was, all that is, and all that will be.

As soon as I become aware of this thought, the moment passes.  My feet touch the sand underneath as I stand up.  Looking back at the beach, I see the people who came before me – translucent, moving in fast-forward through my memories.  There, walking down the path, is my grandmother in her bright orange robe with her crocheted bag full of treats for her grandchildren. Sitting back towards the fence, my grandfather reads his paper and then folds it away to talk to his friends.  There are the tables of people playing bridge, my dad doing dips on the old ladders, my mother running after my sister and brother as they toddle down the dock, my daughters passing their swim tests for the very first time.  So many memories.  So many imprints in this place we call Pine Lake.

Someday, perhaps my daughters will see a ripple in the water, and see an imprint of me, swimming back and forth in “my beloved lake.”  I hope so.  If I have a choice, this will be my heaven.  In the outside world, the shares of Facebook crumble; miners are shot in South Africa; Syria disintegrates. But here, the water is calm and still, and basketball always begins at 1:30 on Saturdays.

Linking up to my favorite haunts - Artists in Blogland, Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Out of the Journal, and Art Journal Every Day at Balzer Designs. Please check out all the amazing artists who link up at these sites. 

The Diva's challenge this week was to draw your own string with your eyes closed.  I tried it, and after I finished it and turned it this way and that, it reminded me of a snake.  So I gave it a pomegranate to bite into!
Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

I Will Find My Way Back

I am in love with Artist Trading Cards!  I previously received adorable ATCs from Marcia Beckett, and then on Friday I received these beautiful cards from Michelle V. Alkerton, who does digital photo-painting with her original watercolors.  Aren't these cool?  Thank you Artists in Blogland for hosting this swap!
This weekend I had an ATC party with me, myself and I, and made these!  I'm ready and willing to do some trading so let me know!  These are all made with bits and pieces of original watercolor paintings and are one of a kind, never to be repeated!
The end of August is approaching, and I still had a design I wanted to create for Scrapping the Music's 5th Anniversary party.  There are 5 songs to choose from, and I've already done two.  (See here and here).  But the song "Summer Paradise" was also calling me.  That song perfectly evokes the longing to go back to a special time and place.  I had a very special summer in 1973, falling in love with my First True Love the summer I turned 15 at Westchester Music and Arts Camp.  For years, I pined for him and for that summer.  Thanks to Facebook, many of us who were at that camp found each other and had a reunion a few years ago.  In the Harlequin novel version of my life, my FTL and I would have walked through the old camp grounds, felt like we were teenagers again, and then run off together. Instead, we shared a lot of laughs, as well as photos of our spouses and kids.   

Here's the painting I made:  first, a collage of scraps and pieces of a background page I didn't really love, so I ripped it up and glued it down:
 Then I knocked it all back and blended it together with some gesso:
 Think I'll use these stamps....
 Until it looks like this:
Now for some stencils using acrylics in sea colors...

Add some warm colors.  
And a fish and a face!  
The text says:  someday i will find my way back.   I will be listing it in my Etsy shop after I resin it!  (LOL!)

The memory of the summer of 1973 prompted me to create this art journal page.  Thinking about the trajectory of my life, and how all of my experiences led me to this moment, with my wonderful husband and two amazing daughters, I am forever grateful.
The picture of us is from a few summers ago -- I asked Freddie to bleach his hair blond for the summer, which is how he wore it in his 20s when he was a lifeguard at Orchard Beach, and he did it!. (Awww)  The photo with my girls is from a trip we took to Florida in 2002.  Samy was such a chubby baby -- so cute.  Here we are now.
I'm linking up to Artists in Blogland, Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Out of the Journal, and Art Journal Every Day at Balzer Designs.  Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Failure: Important

Failure: Important:  Lately, I've been painting a lot on canvas.  When I took Cindy Wunsch's class at CREATE in July, she kindly resined all of our canvases.  It looked so amazing.  That layer of resin just made everything all shiny and the colors richer and more intense.  I wanted to try it.

Paul, a sweet friend of my older daughter Mariel, came over to help me do the first piece.  I am always nervous to try something new by myself -- especially if it includes mixing combustible liquids and having to use a blow torch!  Paul's an engineering student with resin experience.  He helped me with a small canvas, and it looked so pretty and seemed so simple, that after he left I decided  to do ALL of my canvases.  The prudent person would have waited for this first one to dry, and assessed the situation.  But one of my mottos could very well be: "Instant gratification takes too long."  So before you could say "take a deep breath and count to ten," I had spread newspaper all over the floor of my studio, and was mixing and pouring away.

Resin is messy -- it is goopy and sticky; it drips and clings.  Having not thought this through, I didn't leave myself a good path for moving around my studio and essentially resined myself into the corner farthest away from the door, trapped by a goopy, sticky mess; by the time I inched my way out, there was resin on the bottom of my shoes, my canvases were resined to the newspaper underneath, and many of my painting supplies, which I hadn't put away, were sticky and gooey.

The next morning, it took me nearly 3 hours to cut away the newspaper from my canvasses with a box cutter and exacto knife.  The good news is that they look SO PRETTY and SHINY!  Also, I learned some valuable lessons:
  1. When instructions say to test out a small area first, test out a small area first.  If you're like me, you have probably had disastrous experiences with hair color because you failed to follow this direction.  Ahhh - when will I every learn?
  2. It is very important to elevate your canvases before applying resin.  The resin will drip and adhere your canvases to whatever is underneath.  Then you will have to spend time cutting the canvas away.  This time would be better spent doing just about anything else!
  3. Use plastic, not newspaper, to protect your surfaces.  The resin that dripped down my canvases went right through the newspaper and glued a lot of it to the floor of my studio.  Now, I have little triangles of shiny, hard newspaper speckling my floor.  
  4. Make sure the area in which you are working is well lit because you need to see the tiny bubbles that rise to the surface of the resin that you must annihilate with your blow torch.  Resining at 1AM with just a desk light doesn't allow you to see these pesky bubbles.
  5. Be patient!  The resin takes about 7 hours to cure.  Poking your finger at your canvas after only an hour because you think the directions must be overstating the drying time will only result in fingerprints and poke-marks on your canvas!
It was very apt that I had recently started an art journal page around two partial newspaper headlines I had cut out:  "Merging Textures" and "Failure: Important."  I learned a lot!  If you decide to resin your work, go to ArtResin first and watch their videos.  I wish I had!

Live in Love: 

Last week, the bulb on my special daylight worklight blew out.  My husband promptly volunteered to go out and get me a new one.  Sometimes I take for granted how sweet he is and how much he supports my creative life.  Right then and there, I told Samy, my 11 year old, "make sure when you get married, it's to a man who will go out and get you a replacement bulb if that means you can keep on painting."  If I ever forget how much he loves me, I have only to look at the carpeting on the stairs and hallways that connect the three floors of our house.  This is my "Freddie loves me" carpeting.  Not many husbands would let their wives do wall to wall leopard!  As a thank you, I made a painting inspired by my kind, sweet, supportive husband. 
I'm linking up to Artists in Blogland, Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Out of the Journal, Inspire Me Monday, and A Year in the Life of an Art Journal, where the theme this week is kindness.   I hope you'll visit some of the links on these pages -- there are so many wonderful artists showing inspiring work.

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

See the Wonder

My younger daughter Samy worries.  If you met her, you wouldn't believe it.  She is so outgoing, warm and connected.  She is a wonderful actress and singer, and wouldn't hesitate to launch into a song if you asked her.  The last thing you would think is that she worries, but she does.  For example, while doing her summer assignment on The Giver (a great book btw!), Samy had to list 12 milestones or traditions that children in the book celebrate.  She couldn't even begin, because she could only think of 9.  What about the other 3?  She couldn't stop focusing on what she didn't know -- even though what she did know was so much greater. 

We all do this -- we focus on what we're not -- not thin enough, not pretty enough, not good enough.  Even many of the amazing artists whose blogs I follow are hard on their work -- and I think it's beautiful!  We all have so much to offer -- so much to give -- and so much to celebrate.  Embrace your positive.  That is my message for today!  In that spirit - here is my contribution to The Diva's challenge to use Mooka and Assunta in a design.  I hope you like this butterfly, a caterpillar no longer.  Ta Da!

I am participating in Artists in Blogland's ATC swap.  I never made an ATC before.  In fact, I had never even heard of them and wasn't sure what the point of doing them was.  But then I received these adorable cards in the mail from Marcia Beckett and I was so thrilled!  Aren't they just beautiful?   UPDATE: ATC means "Artist Trading Card" -- a phrase I only just learned myself.
Receiving them made me so happy, and also inspired to create the 6 I needed to make for my part in the swap.  I used these fashion ladies I painted once upon a time, and embellished them with bits and pieces of some of my other paintings and voila!  I liked them so much that it was hard to part with them -- but off they went to Utah, Kentucky and Germany.  It is so fun to think that my artwork is going around the world!  Receiving and making ATCs was so enjoyable that I'm going to make some more!

One of my big fears is painting big... Because of my work as an illustrator for greeting cards and tableware, I've never painted bigger than what fits in my scanner -- so 11 x 14 is the max.  But I have decided to tackle this fear, and also explore the intersection of yoga and art by taking Flora Bowley's e-course "Bloom True."  I just signed up!  It starts September  10 and I'm very excited.  
Imagine; mixed media on canvas.  16 x 20. $250
So that this course is not too much of a shock, I bought a few big canvasses.  This one is 16 x 20.  It's called "Imagine," and is mixed media on gallery stretched canvas.  Digitally, I added the words "you see the wonder of the fairy tale," which is a lyric from "I Have a Dream" by ABBA, one of the songs in Scrapping the Music's August challenge.  (The original only has the hand painted "Imagine" on it.  And it's for sale!!)  If you haven't visited Scrapping the Music yet, check out their August challenge -- it is so much fun to be inspired by music and lyrics, and the Design Team is so supportive.

Linking up to Creative Every Day, Paint Party Friday, and Artists in Blogland (links are on the sidebars).  Cheers!

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

A Journey

Yesterday was my daughter Mariel's 21st birthday.  She has turned out so well -- I am so proud of her.  Here is a picture of her with Samy from last weekend. 
What I want for her, more than anything in the world, is that she listen to her own voice.  She is so kind, considerate, thoughtful and her heart is so big.  In addition to navigating the usual booby traps of childhood and adolescence, she has had to navigate between parents who split up when she was only 1; it hasn't always been easy.  I know how long it has taken me to recognize my own voice, let alone listen to it - to know and embrace who I am.  I hope it doesn't take her 'til 40, like it took me, to figure that out! 

A friend of mine sent me this poem yesterday.  It really spoke to me and what I want for Mariel:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

This poem, and the occasion of Mariel's birthday, inspired this:


Happy Birthday Mariel!!

Linking up to Out of the JournalArtists in Blogland, Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Art Journal Every Day, and Just Journals Link Party.  Please visit these sites, give some love to the amazing artists who post there, and link your work up as well.  Also submitting this to the turqoise and lime challenge at Artists' Play Room

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Wonder of Summer

I am honored to be Artists in Blogland's monthly challenge winner for July.  Thank you!  I love being part of the AIB community.

One of the things I love most about summer is watching my garden.  In the Phantom Tollbooth (one of my favorite books), a conductor leads an orchestra each morning at daybreak and twilight.  But instead of music, the musicians and their instruments play the colors of the sunrise and sunset.   Each season, as first my irises, then my roses, and then my black eyed susans bloom, it is as if somewhere, a conductor, is calling them forth.  It is pure magic, and each season, I marvel in wonder at the beauty of nature.

Coming back to New Jersey from Pine Lake yesterday, the sight of my garden lessened the sadness of leaving the lake.  Here's what greeted me:
In honor of summer, and my garden, I painted this canvas.  The words say:  I look in wonder at the magic of everyday life.
It's funny -- yesterday I felt so blue.  Perhaps it was knowing I'd be leaving the lake for a while and my vacation was over.  Yesterday, the weather was pristine -- the sky was blue and clear, the humidity low and the sun shining.  And yet, I felt dull and flat. The beauty of the world contrasted sharply with the sourness and impatience I felt inside.  No matter how much I tried to remind myself of the charmed life I lead, I did not feel blessed.  I felt adrift and without purpose.  (I hadn't painted in 3 days...hmm....)  The best I could do was stay quiet and remind myself that things change -- this too shall pass.  Thankfully, it did.  I swam some laps in the lake before leaving, and then was greeted by my beautiful garden upon returning to New Jersey.  Nature has such a way of lifting the spirits.  All was right again!

Artists in Blogland Challenge for August is "Wonder."  Anything Goes' current challenge is "Summer Days."  And Try It On Tuesday's challenge is "Anything Goes."  So I'll be linking up there.  This piece was made with 5 elements:  canvas, acrylic paint, a stencil, stamps and stickers, so I'll also be linking up with The Second Floor Challenge and Out of the Journal.

Here's a tangle for the Diva's challenge this week, which was to use Shelley Beauch's tangle "Brayd."  Zentangle is the name of the game at Inspiration Avenue this week, so linking up there as well.
UPDATE:  I had so much fun with Brayd, that I did another.  Again, I couldn't resist using "paradox" inside the triangles -- my pen just wants to go there...  Thanks Shelley for such a versatile tangle!
Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Heros and Heroines Among Us.

On Friday, I played in a round robin tennis game with my dad.  Midway through, I had to use a restroom, and one of the men watching offered his nearby bungalow.  His mom was inside.  She's a sweet, tiny woman -- probably barely 5 feet tall, who visits every summer.  As we exchanged pleasantries about how lovely it is here at Pine Lake Park, I noticed the numbers tattooed on the inside of her forearm.   I had had no idea.

It turns out that Regina and Victor Lewis, my neighbor's parents, survived the Holocaust in an amazing story that intersects with Schindler's list.  You can read about it here.  What struck me was that I have known her for many years, and had no idea of the horrors she endured and the miracle that she survived.  It made me think about the people we encounter every day -- we have no idea of their back stories.  We think they are ordinary when they are probably extraordinary.

Reading the Lewis's story, I wondered whether Regina looked at the starry skies over Auschwitz and wondered if she would see Victor again.  The unlikelihood of ever seeing him again must have been overwhelming.  Even if she had known of his daring escape from the cattle car bringing his family to death, to believe that she would survive and that they would reunite would have surely been too much to bear.

Immediately after reading their story, I created this collage with a rough sketch of an angel in the stars:

I painted in the background using paint chips (more fexible than a plastic card) to drag various colors across the textured background:
And then more collage, more paint, some stamping and stencilling, and the words "I think of you in starry skies" from the song "Sound of Winter."  The next part of that lyric is "I keep you so alive."  Regina and her beloved Victor found each other after the war.  Perhaps it was their love that kept them alive.  I hope you'll read their story.
"Sound of Winter" is one of the songs in Scrapping the Music's current challenge.  It's a really cool challenge -- 5 songs with great lyrics.  Any art medium is allowed, so check it out!  Also, linking up to Paint Party Friday, Creative Every Day, Inspire Me Monday and Artists in Blogland -- great blogs for sharing your art!

Thank you for visiting! If you are so moved, please leave a comment. Hearing from you means the world to me.