Art Journal Love Letters... More Textures and surprisingly, lots of Love.

It never ceases to amaze me the number of truly valuable lessons I can, have, and more unfortunately, probably WILL forget in my relatively-brief lifetime.

THIS IS MY BIG JUICY HEART

Somewhere... I have always adored art, creating art, okay, maybe more to the truth would be, I have always adored art supplies and the reckless usage of them until they begin to turn into something that does not seem so reckless.  Art things I remember fondly: Playschool easel and finger paints, construction paper and crayons, water colors and paint brushes, India ink, water and spray paint reliefs, glass etching, sand casting, attempting to use my Mickie-Mouse portable record player as a pottery wheel.... that one didn't work out as I planned, Oil Pastels and water colour pencils...

All of these things remind me of some time, some place where I sat in concentrated effort and lost myself.

Experiencing a Vision Quest for 3 days with nothing but the world around me, a journal and a pen I spent what I believe was several hours just sketching a little group of trees.  I remember drawing, but I do not recall the passage of time.  In preparing for the Vision Quest we were required to make 'Hands'.  These were representation of our physical hands that had in them images, words, colors, whatever that were ultimately guides to our souls at that time.  Again, a project I completely lost myself in, lost any awareness of the passage of time, but throughout the project was completely aware I was on some inner journey.

And that's what all of this is about - the inner journeys.  It doesn't matter HOW we go there, or even WHEN we go there, just that at some point WE GO THERE.  The important part is that we take that inner journey, but what may be surprising to the majority of the world out there is HOW MANY WAYS there are to take that journey without ever even realizing that's what you were doing.  For me, the unintentional inner journeys are the deepest.  The ones that catch me unaware until I'm already stepping out of the plane door with my hand on the rip-cord.  The one where I wake up and suddenly realize I am in the middle of an epiphany I didn't know I was anywhere near discovering.

This is what Creativity does.  Whether you are dancing, writing, painting, singing, playing a musical instrument or actively daydreaming - creativity sneaks in and pulls down your pants while you're not looking.  Okay, maybe that was a poor analogy, but for me, that's how it feels...that immediate, gut-punch, breath-intake, shame and fear... followed by a wave of hysteria, giggling and freedom.

All of these thoughts I pondered while working on my new texture pages in my Art Journal of Love Letters... and the things I've forgotten?  Well, I've mostly forgotten them again, but the important thing was to remember that the Juice is in the process.

                                                                                                       

Here are a couple of short videos showing my juicy process

Raw Spirit pages

After I made the video I realized what were songs playing in the background.  It's a funny, unintential 'commercial' for Art Journal Love Letters :)  This was how Shelly and I spent Creative Time Together... he was running through possible cover-songs for his band, and I was Art Journaling :)

Impish Goddess pages

                                                                                                     

The first page is "SPIRIT" the second "RAW"
Materials used: Gel Medium, watercolors, Gold Tissue Paper, Cut up Credit Card, Tissue Paper blotter, black Sharpie pen.

I loved these pages so much when I'd finished. I just had to write ... I kept hearing the words "Raw" and "Spirit" every time I looked at the colors.  These became spur of the moment poems.

Spirit:

Like flecks of gold

drifting to the surface

Bits of my soul dis-lodge
From somewhere...
-Depths I did not know-
Setting my spirit
Free

RAW:

Flesh

Cuts through this

Human Experience

Dragging out all

Human stories

Until bare,

Finally,
We are left

Raw

So, I have a reputation as the Pied Piper.  Pretty much I can get anyone up to dance, anywhere, anytime...mostly.  And these two pictures together, the Goddess 'laughing' and me 'leading them into temptation' really does represent how I feel about my role as a dancer.  There's a whole lot'uv sneaky going on, eh?

The picture on the right was from an outdoor festival.  I went out into the audience to bring this little girl up to dance and my sister caught what she calls our 'Oh, yeahhhhhhh' face on camera.  The picture on the right is an "Alfonse Mucha" image I fell in love with while working on some marketing fliers for a friend....I am now totally in love with Mucha BTW.

Materials: Gel Medium, Wings Stencil, Long, Broad piece of textured ribbon, glitter, sequins, pink painted tissue paper, water colors and the black and white picture print outs.

And these I just wanted to repost because I'd been falling in so much love with these pages since my original post I decided to take a better picture of the textures, up close♥  From the first Texture Pages