Storm Birds

The day before the super storm three robins landed in our backyard looking stunned and more than a little outraged.  The fluffed out their feathers and spun around.  Then they just stood for a while, looking like stranded travelers in an airport.  We rarely see robins here at this time of year, and these three were clearly not just out poking around for hemlock seeds.  They seemed to be harbingers of something big coming.  Our cat Jesse was so frantic from the strange feeling in the air that he ignored the robins and kept chasing leaves.  The storm in the NC mountains was a hybrid of hurricane fallout and winter storm.  We're so far from the coast that we never get the brunt of a hurricane.  But this time we had very high winds, a bit of rain, and then last night-- snow, which is lingering on today.

A Great Collection of Artwork

This post isn't about journals except in a very broad sense.  Last week I made a catalog through Blurb.com for a group of women artists that I used to belong to back in the 80s when I lived in Indana.  I think you'll enjoy seeing the catalog, which should be visible by clicking on the link above.  (I still have to check and make sure this link works.  If not, I'll use a different one and edit this one.) The catalog and the written entries form a kind of group journal that tells about what these artists have been up to the past 35 years.

Well, I can't get the cut and paste code from Blurb to work here, but this is what you can do:  Go to www.Blurb.com and search for the book by name:  IWCA .  or you can search under my name.  When the book comes up on the Blurb site, click on "Preview" to see all the inside pages.

Mousies

Our cats over the years have all been good mousers, and as a result we've been frequently given unwanted gifts of dead mice on our doorstep.  The dead mice seem to us to be a special kind of gift-- something the cats apparently really want to give us, but something we really don't need or want.  We always call them "mousies." A few weeks ago it occurred to me that the pieces of unwanted advice I am so tempted to give to my adult children are really mousies in the truest sense of the word.  My journal group had decided for this next month to each develop a completely different practice for our journals-- to keep track of something we've not kept track of before.  I immediately thought of a mousies journal.

I carved a small dead mouse stamp out of  pink carving material.  I slammed together a down and dirty little pamphlet book to use as the journal for the next month.  And as often as I can catch myself with a mousie of advice ripe for the giving, I stamp a mousie in the journal and print the advice in tiny letters on the carcass.  If I have managed to catch the mousie before I lay the advice on the person, I hang the mousie up by its tail.  If the advice escapes, however, that mousie runs across the bottom of the page.  It has been interesting to see how often I harbor mousies, and using the journal has definitely reduced the number of mousies that I am laying on various doorsteps.

Jesse Finally Lets Me Draw Him

My cat Jesse is completely in charge of when I can draw him.  He can tell I'm drawing him even when he's sound asleep.  If I am behind him while he's sleeping and I very stealthily begin to sketch, he waits until I'm committed to the drawing, and then he slowly rotates to a completely different position.  The other day, though, I hung in there and sketched gesture drawings until finally he must have decided it was okay for me to draw him.  When I was finished, he stretched, got up, and went outside.

Sleeping Where the WIld Things Are

A couple of months ago we had a screened porch added to the back of our house.   The other night I decided to sleep out there because it was really warm and stuffy in the house.  My husband didn't feel like waking up and moving himself out to the porch, so the cat and I went alone.  All was well -- we admired the fireflies that were so high in the trees of the woods behind our house;  there were the usual frogs and other rural night noises (still amazing and strange to me, having grown up in a city and never spent more than a few weeks in rural areas until moving to Asheville, where the countryside erupts all through the town as well as the outskirts where we live).  But then around midnight Jesse and I both shot upright in the bed at the ululating cries of coyotes.  They were so close!  I've heard them before at night but always on the other side of the house, where they seem to be up on the side of the mountain at the end of the block.  But this time I could tell they were in the woods of the house next door, where our neighbor frequently is host to black bears, wild turkeys, and many birds because he has bird feeders, and the ground beneath them is full of bird seed, which attracts the bears and turkeys. I managed to go back to sleep, but we woke up several more times when the cyoytes began singing again.

Last week when we were in New York visiting, a friend had taught me a way of working in a journal that helps circumvent critical thinking and over-intellectualizing.  I had passed the method on to a group of friends that I had met with last night at a journal group. 

The method of working was something my friend learned in a workshop held at MoMA a few weeks ago.  You begin by collecting images from books and magazines with no plan in mind, just a random collection of whatever has some resonance for you.  Then you trim or cut or tear the pieces that grab you the most and paste them down.  Then, still not thinking it through or planning or trying to Make Art, you paint, stencil, draw, write, whatever else seems to want to come out.  I began mine with the image of a building under a deep, intense blue evening sky.  I had also cut out a snarling animal and painted it roughly all across the bottom.  I added a large moon-like slice of sweet potato, then covered it up (mostly) with a little fragile grass hut, also cut into a moon-like circle.  When I looked at the page afterwards I knew right away how afraid I actually am of the backyard at night.  Sleeping on the porch is going to take some getting used to, in spite of how cool and lovely it is!

Tuesday morning I ran from the voting out near my house to the courthouse in downtown Asheville for jury duty.  I amused myself by sketching and writing, as you can see here.  There were several curious things that I noticed and/or overheard.  One curious thing was that when we were sworn in, we could choose to not use a bible.  Those non-bible swearers also had the option to say "I do affirm" instead of the "So help me God" that people say in films about courtrooms.  I can't believe this is a North Carolina innovation;  it must have come down from the feds. 

Today is a lovely soft rainy day, and the cows at the end of our road looked like ships in waves.  Some were sitting down so that only their heads and shoulders stuck up.  Others were standing around nursing babies, and one large and confused-looking cow was mounting other cows in a sort of playful manner.  The babies were romping around like large dogs.  We went for a walk in the woods that border the cow field.  Back home the flowers were drooping in the drizzle. 

Gwen Diehn's Butter Box Journal Giveaway « Lark Crafts Lark Crafts

Lark is doing a giveaway of a copy of my new bind- up/re-editioning of Decorated Page and Decorated Journal.  Go to the link below to get the details, and YOU may be the lucky winner!  They're also giving away a little butter box journal that I'm making for them. The picture above is from a book published in Spain (Use a Book  by Elisa Pellicani: Barcelona: Consulta Libri Progetti, 2011) that the butter box book appeared in a few months ago.  I had made this particular butter box book from a cookie box, but it's the same design, size, etc.

SO if you'd like a shot at winning either of these books, go to the link and do what they tell you to do!

http://www.larkcrafts.com/uncategorized/gwen-diehns-butter-box-journal-giveaway/#.T5cx4cQpG24.blogger
Gwen Diehn's Butter Box Journal Giveaway « Lark Crafts Lark Crafts