Booster Shot for Your Journal!

My friend Jill Berry has recently published a really
intriguing book called Personal Geographies.  (The cover is to the right.)  I meet regularly with a group of journal keepers, and if you're like our group, from time to time you find yourself bored with the whole process, feeling guilty for ignoring your practice for days on end.  Jill's book will give you a vitamin shot, a booster shot, a lively tonic of ideas and approaches to use in your journal practice.  Jill's own art as well as her journal keeping is full of cartographic imagery, and she defines a map in a slightly different way than the traditional one.  I am quoting from Jill in the next paragraph because she explains so well what her book is about:

You don't have to be a world traveler or a professional cartographer to embark on a grand journey of self-discovery through mapmaking. Personal Geographies gives you the tools and techniques you'll need to create artful maps of your self, your experiences and your personal journey. Chart the innermost workings of your mind, document your artistic path and create an unfolding maze of your future dreams and goals.

Inside Personal Geographies you'll discover:

21 mixed-media map projects featuring artistic techniques like working with alcohol inks and pochoir, painting on a black surface and carving custom stamps

Insight into the world of traditional and contemporary maps and how they relate to and inspire personal mapmaking

A gallery of maps by contributors from around the world to spark your own creativity

From mapping your head, hands and heart to recording powerful memories or experiences, the maps in Personal Geographies are a gateway into the fascinating and meaningful world of you.”

 Above is a page from Jill's book, to give you an idea of some of the examples she has included.  I was one of the happy people she invited to try out her prompts for map-making and to submit cartographic image-based artwork to the book.  The book nicely reflects its collaborative nature, and the many different approaches taken by the artists in the book are a good example of how the reader can use Jill's prompts to produce their own work.

Between now (December 1) and December 10 Jill is holding a giveaway.  If you would like to be included in the raffle of a free copy of Personal Geographies, write a comment below in which you mention some way that you might use mapmaking of any kind in your journal.  On December 10 I'll put all of the names of the comment-writers in a hat and select a winner.  I'll send the name and street address (having first notified the winner via this blog so that you can email me your street address) to Jill's publisher, and they will ship the book to the winner.

One other thing-- Jill has set up a blog for the book, so check it out at http://personal-geographies.com/

Bonus Post: A Secret Shrine

Last weekend my husband and I drove to New Orleans to visit some of my family and for my high school class reunion.  We stayed in a bed and breakfast in my old neighborhood.  On Sunday morning I got to go on my own private sketch crawl.  I was searching for secret places that gave evidence of the inner life of the place.  This small handmade altarpiece was leaning against the base of a grotto in the front garden of a high school on Esplanade Avenue that used to be the terrifying Orphan Asylum.  The grotto itself is interesting with its small collection of stuffed animals on shelves under the statue of the Virgin Mary.  But this altarpiece was wonderful.  It was made of a piece of what looked like old birch plywood with two turned chair legs for sides.  The roof was a curved piece of wood thoroughly encrusted with old jewelry and Mardi Gras beads.  There were also flattened bottle caps and pieces of silvery stuff.   Behind the small plastic statue (St. Anthony?) there was a rusty escutcheon with two key holes. 

Bonus Post: A Secret Shrine in New Orleans

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Tannequins! (for my old friend Joan G.)

One more mannequin piece and I promise I will move on to something else!  But I saw a high school friend the other night at our reunion and she told me she actually loves my mannequins!  I was so excited I promised to post my latest drawing of them and here they are:  the Tannequins!!  These are real mannequins, I am not making this up.  I am having a hard time imagining them in a department store somewhere, but they are great looking at the Tobacco Barn in all their gleaming tanness and musculature, even though headless.  (If you turn your head sideways you can read a little bit about them.)

The Decorated Page to be Back in Print SOON!

Those of you who have been trying without success over the past year or so to find copies of The Decorated Page will be happy to learn that Lark has brought out a new edition of this book in combination with a new edition of The Decorated Journal plus what they call "bonus content."  The new edition, which should be out in April 2012, is going to print this week!  It's a hefty volume, over 250 pages, and it contains all images from the two original books as well as all of the original material (minus a few sections that were more or less repeated in Dec. Journal-- materials and writing prompts-- and were combined for the new book).  It also has thirteen profiles written by journal keepers in which they show images and tell about their own processes.  There are also a few pages of completely new material, including binding instructions for a journal made out of a butter box.

Above is a view of both the back cover and front cover as well as the spine of the new book.  I believe it's a paperback and reasonably priced.  But if you already own Dec. Page AND Dec. Journal, be aware that this book is basically a new edition and reflow of those two books and not something radically different.  The new material is good, but you have to decide if it's worth the price of the whole book!  Oh, and the title is The Complete Decorated Journal.  I can't seem to shake the word "decorated," even though it's not at all what these three books are about!  Marketing does seem to rule when it comes to titles. 

                                                                 A Decorated Journal

I'm on a Roll Now: More NH Adventures, Including a Quest

My son Mike found a book at the American Precision Museum published locally that was a collection of quests around the area of NH and VT where he lives.  Each quest included directions to get to the starting point and then clues to find as you hiked along a trail.  We decided to follow the quest that was based in Enfield, his village.  We had seven-year -old Luca and three-year-old Barnaby with us.  This journal page shows the map we made as we walked the trail, which was actually an old railroad bed.  There was a poem in the quest book that told the history of the railroad along the trail, with a verse for each clue/stopping point.  It was a fine trail that took us along the banks of a beautiful lake, a wetlands, and some old buildings.

At the end of the trail our final clue involved finding a date (1893) carved in the road cut that ran alongside that part of the railroad.  Railroad workers had carved dates and initials in many places along the cut.  The kids loved scrambling up the rocky road cut, and at one point Mike had to talk his daredevil Luca down from a pretty high point, which he somehow had managed to get to without our seeing him fly up the rocks.  Our final clue told us to look for a twin oak behind the petroglyph.  Luca and Barnaby found the treasure box!  In the box was a rubber stamp of railroad tracks, shown on this page.  We each got to stamp our notebooks with the stamp and then we signed a log book in the treasure box.  Hooray for the Girl Scout troop that wrote the quest!

Every time I go to New Hampshire I go searching for loons, which I never see.  My daughter-in-law tells me she spots them occasionally at the dam near their house;  my son sees them when fishing at a nearby pond.  But they always elude me.  So this trip I dragged people to a supposedly loon-populated pond every chance I could get.  The first three trips were on drizzly days and there were no loons.  Finally my husband and I and a Vermont friend who was visiting us went out to Grafton Pond on a sunny, breezy day and we were rewarded!  Three loons!  They didn't do their loony cry, but they were wonderful to see, low in the water like heavily-loaded barges, really big ducky things.  And while the loons were diving for food out away from shore, we also spotted an enormous snapping turtle in the pond right below the rocks on which we were perched.  Finally!

Will There Ever Be a New Post Here?

Yes!  My excuse for such lame updating is that I've been traveling as well as having guests for the whole month of September, AND I didn't bring my laptop along when I traveled.  I did bring my journal, though, and have many pages to use as blog fodder.  This one is from the ten days I spent in New Hampshire visiting our son and his wife and three little boys.  On the day shown on this page, we were visiting a fine little museum in Windsor, Vermont-- The American Precision Museum. It's a collection of early machinery and pictures of factories.  It has a nice collection of primitive sewing machines, and the one I drew here was a pre-runner to the sewing machine called a revolving looper. 

After we visited the museum, we were looking around the grounds.  The building is mid- 19th century brick and is situated on a small river (which was close to flood level that day due to recent floods in that area), from which the machinery in the original building was run.  Most interesting to the boys and me were some chunks of old bricks scattered around the parking lot in the weeds near the banks of the river.  We decided they were old bricks as they matched the bricks in the building perfectly.  So we collected a few chunks and took them home to grate on a paving stone in order to make paint.  The kids and I took turns grating the brick chunks and then carefully brushing the brick dust onto sheets of paper to transfer to a container.  After a long afternoon of grating (which was very satisfying and during which the boys actually had little fights over who got to use the stone when) we had collected enough pigment to grind with a mortar and pestle and some gum Arabic from an art store in Hanover.  We added a drop of maple syrup to improve the elasticity and wetness factor of our paint, and the resulting paint can be seen on this page.

We also mixed some of our red orange paint (Windsor Red Ochre) with some white gouache that I had in order to make a pretty apricot colored pastel, also shown here.  Stay tuned for more pages from New Hampshire!