Thanks, Velma!

I got home from a trip to Brooklyn to visit our son and his wife and their two-year-old, Nate, very early this morning.  Unfortunately, my husband and I came home with the same wretched cold that had dogged our heels the whole time we were in Brooklyn.  We had spent the whole time in Brooklyn sniffling and hacking and sneezing and whining and feeling pitiful and sorry for ourselves.  Our daughter-in-law had the same cold and our son and Nate had a minor version of it, so many of the things we had planned to do got cancelled.

So I opened email this morning (after sleeping a few hours) and what did I find but a wonderful comment from someone named Velma about a posting I made last year when I first started Real-Life-Journals.  I went back and read the post Velma was commenting on, and I realized there IS a point to keeping a journal and even to blogging about the thing, even when it's as thin and pitiful as my journal from the past two weeks is.  So this post is for Velma, to thank her for inspiring me.  I dug into my journal from this week and it looked pretty lame, not one bit like an art journal or even a visual verbal journal.  It looks more like notes taken on the back of envelopes.  And I decided, well, that's what it is and that's what real about it.

This first entry I made the day I came down with the cold.  I had hiked to the Brooklyn Museum, one of my favorite places in New York as well as one of my favorite walks (and our kids are moving in two weeks from Park Slope, where they've lived for twelve years, to Maplewood, NJ, so we will no longer live in this neighborhood when we visit them).  I really wanted to be out and about as much as possible.  But it was icy cold and very windy, and by the time I got home  I knew I had made a big mistake.  At any rate, this drawing is of a very fine divination and healing piece in the African collection.  I would like to place my cold in a clay vessel and be done with it.  I have some clay. . . .

The next piece reflects the fact that we spent a lot of time sitting around the kids' apartment.  On this day I had cooked a calzone from a Nonna Stella YouTube (lezione 14) and a kale salad.  Nate and I had had a conversation about the subways that his dad takes to his job in Midtown.  Nate loves all train things, including subways, and is currently fascinated by numbers.  I was trying to figure out how to get to Erik's office by subway, thinking we would go there the next day if we felt up to it (we didn't), and trusting Nate to be a good source of information.  It turned out that he was exactly right!

This third page reflects the continuation of the wretched colds.  We were slumped over tea in a neighborhood cafe on the morning of 12/31 watching pigeons fluff out their feathers as they roosted on top of a building across the street.  I ran out of energy and never finished the drawing.  The recipe was from the night before.  I had copied it from Kerstin's recipe journal as I remembered it from another trip, way back when the kids lived in DC the year after they finished college at AU.
So, yes, these are pretty pitiful entries, but I think they're worth making.  And my vow for 2012 is A Page A Day and a posting once a week.  Pretty daunting, and I've already skipped yesterday.  But onward.  Someday this cold will fade away and the days will grow longer and the mornings will be warmer than the 15 degrees we had this morning.

And the Winner of Jill Berry's Book Is:

Monkey Mind, from Cave Junction, Oregon!  (Please send me your name and address, Monkey Mind, so that the publisher can send your book to you.)
And thanks to all 85 of you who posted comments to enter into the drawing.  Your comments were wonderful and mind-expanding!  If you haven't read each other's comments yet, I urge you to do so.  You'll get so many great ideas.  I wish I could have answered them all individually.  If you want to order the book, it's available on line as well as in bookstores now.  Thanks, Everyone, for being a part of this.

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