Collage Cure

IMG_0844I hadn’t made collage art in many moons, but when I saw a stack of LIFE Nature Library encyclopedias and a star chart on my neighbor’s curb, I snatched them up for the quiet weekend ahead.  Sorting through images and delving into non-verbalized waters was just the kind of immersion I needed.

On Sunday morning, I found myself surrounded with books and magazines, flipping through pages, reading here and there, and searching for images; I was casual, comfortable with the mess, until I would see something and then out came the scissors.  The open-ended process would suddenly turn into a narrowed down chase. Cutting pictures out, sometimes requiring the X-Acto knife for precision, became my sole pursuit.

I continued to roam randomly through my materials; savagely tearing whole pages out of books and with four snips of the scissors out came graphic images of words too. My hands were busy, and my piles of pictures grew, but nothing was coming together, not in my mind, or on the page.    I threw my Man and Space encyclopedia down.  Useless! Outdated!  A half hour before, collage making felt so purposeful, so easy and relaxed, but with nothing showing for my efforts, doubts started arising. Was I creating meaning or just wasting my time?

Then it happened. The self-doubt gave me access to stronger feelings. With some force, I tore the star chart off its cardboard background; a layer that I had felt inexplicably bound to.  After having thrown off that constraint, my collage quickly came together:  A muscular old lady in a standing pose, carrying a candle on a backdrop of a seasonal star chart.  It clearly expressed my recent reflections on my own aging, and the necessity to keep working my body through all the seasons of my life, and at the same time, carry my own flame, my spark, to keep me moving.

Making art is always revealing.  And unpredicatable.  It is a reliable remedy, bringing to the surface what we are ready to see.

 

 

My Best Framer

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My best framer is my best friend, Anna Sher.  Since we were eighteen years old, I have relied on Anna’s discernment and emotional acuity to help define myself through the years.  Under her keen designer’s eye, I have become more refined, truer, and (not to mention) better dressed. Because my best friend, who lives just a few blocks away, is  an ornamental metal artist, I also enjoy the benefits of her skills at external framing.  She has created much of the infrastructure that gives contempory definition to our home: custom hand forged metal gates, custom steel table tops, picture frames, wall ornamentation and a spice rack for our outdoor kitchen. Over the years, Anna has always given me the physical fix on the internal and external design issues that felt incurable to me.

Once, while at a yard sale, I felt compelled to rescue the family photos of perfect strangers that were being sold in a cardboard box for ten dollars.  One particular bundle of photos of a Japanese family, perfectly preserved in their original heavy weight paper matting, pulled at my heart. On the back of each photo, written in pencil were the idenifiers: greatgrandmother, grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, aunt and uncle. They needed a home. It was Anna who returned the dignity of their lineage by building them a sancturary in a septych. This family now resides in my acupuncture office. By adopting this familly as my surrogate ancestors, I can honor the influence of Japanese style acupuncture in my work.

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Because I am more of an earth type, I have always been awed by Anna’s command over the elements, metal and fire.  How she transforms raw steel through heating, pounding and grinding into a form that offers function and aesthetic, is a marvel to me.

You can see Anna’s large commercial installations of her extravagantly wicked custom fabricated iron work at all the Matador restaurants.  Her many gorgeous and curvaceous botanically inspired gates and railings mark perimeters of residences and businesses throughout the Puget Sound area.  Right now, Anna is getting ready to show her smaller scale interior design work (custom picture frames, spice racks, etc.) and take custom orders on Dec. 8th. at the Rainier Beach Community Club Holiday Bazaar at the VFW on 6038 S Pilgrim St., Seattle from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

I will be sitting at the table beside my best friend selling homemade sake.    We’ll be there side by side, expressing our native, elemental natures…always best friends.

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The Creativity Cure

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On Thanksgiving day, I had the good fortune to go to the studio of friend and ceramic artist, Margaret Lawerence, and be the first to purchase a set of dishes from her new collection. Readers may know Margaret as Marge, my guide on raw food and colon cleansing, in my previous post from over a year ago: http://www.yinyangvision.blogspot.com/2011/10/just-ask-marge.html

Now it’s not raw food Marge is revealing to me, but instead her raw creativity, finely honed and brillantly contained in modern dishware. She will be showing her work at Seward Park Clay Studio’s annual holiday sale which starts tonight (November 30th) at 6:30 and continues until December 24th.

Color, clay, creativity has always been a favorite way to remedy my life, and I’m so inspired by how my friends find their own artistic antidotes for what ails them.

Music Cure

There’s nothing that cures rainy day blues except by having my neighborhood pal, Claudia, come over and play music while I make hot & sour miso soup.  She’s playing old Indian Bob’s 12 string guitar, a curmudgeonly Ventura, which rebels against staying tuned but she coaxes it into harmony with her beautiful voice .