Thursday, June 17, 2010

Journal pages

I love throwing paint around, mindlessly, and calling it a journal page.


These are all ready for the next time inspiration hits.


This one has extra magic. It came alive in a frenzied painting session with one of the grands.


I learned to make these "people" in the painting class I took a few weeks ago.

Is it obvious that I hate to waste paint and I had a lot of these colors on my pallet?



I wish I could remember where I saw a painting of people flying all over a page. If it was yours, please say so and thanks for the inspiration.

It has come late to my life that I can allow myself activity that has no specific purpose. The surprise is how many wonderful things have come from this. So many gifts...


Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Just who am I?






Today gave me pause to wonder. A friend once told me that I am simply the universe experiencing itself as Laura. When my mother was outraged by something I'd done, she would say, "Just who do you think you are?" When I was a teenager, I would chafe at this, when I was a young child I would worry because I didn't know. Who do you think you are?

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

iPhone

iPhone Photos

Don't get me wrong, I love my big girl Canon camera, but, like Misty Mawn, I think there is just something fun and magical about the photos you can get with that iPhone and just a few of the amazing apps available for it. Add to that the fact that I am somewhat obsessed with taking pictures from the car and you get these, taken on the fabled So Cal freeway system heading home to the ranch from an afternoon with our darling, darling grandson. All in all, a great day.












Hidden Poems

I have recently made a discovery, here in blog land, that has my head spinning. I have a wonderful friend who gifts me with damaged but still lovable old books that I alter for journals. I've discovered that old paper takes paint and ink like no new paper can so I use these for signatures but, maybe because I also write, I always feel bad about covering up the text. Many book artists are now selectively scribbling out patches of the text and discovering hidden poems. I wonder about the person who wrote the text, the printer who set the type, all of the people who have read the book over these many years. I wonder if any of them knew that my poem was right there, hiding in plain site.

Here is one of my pages with an example of a poem that I "discovered" hidden within.




Solutions

Interesting and incomprehensible,
they are here in very old apothecaries
but the sick men of tradition
will have none of them.
No longer are the olden rites
in the housewives memories.
The husbandmen fear them,
the gardeners hate them.
A mercy upon them all.

lm/2010

The book this page is from is an etherial and colorful volume on gardens and gardening written in early 1900. How can these words be so meaningful more than a century later in a very different context?

What if time and space are illusions and there is really only right here and right now?

Think about this until your head spins. Then lie down for a nap and a wonderful dream. That's where I'm headed.




Gleanings

You all know what gleanings are. The food left in the field after the big harvest. Here are random bits from my past weeks of painting and writing. All of the painting was done in the class under the spell of Robert Burridge. All of the writing was done under the spell of my very own self.



I task myself to perfecting living in the moment that I might enjoy this dumb and endless comedy.



The Lord said, “I go before you always” but sometimes I need someone to have my back. I can usually avoid the devil before me, it’s the one sneaking up behind that I worry over.




This piece of writing was soooo prompted by Mary Ann at Dispatch from LA. If you don't read that blog your life is not as rich as it could be.

I dream of going to Merida. It seems so lovely, so comfortingly shabby and relaxed. The locals drive their horse drawn vehicles through the narrow winding streets as one with private cars and rickety buses. They have ballroom dancing on a roughly constructed wooden platform right in the middle of the square, and most afternoons you can watch the men and women, their bodies viejo, their hearts reciente , lost in punctuated executions of waltz, samba, tango. The markets flourish beneath beautifully ragged awnings that shade all manner of exotic produce and tempting trinkets. The fragrance of paper wrapped bouquets mingled with the spicy scent of street food calls to me, demands my presence. The magical pyramids of the Mayans, all of the hypnotic Yucatan, are but a short taxi ride away. Merida means “I can’t understand you”, as the Mayans answered Cortez when he asked, “Where am I.”



Life, it seems, comes in slices and I am sure to feel fragmented, incomplete, lacking, until the last slice reveals all.



A quiet yet urgent voice, calls softly through the phone,
Please, can you talk me off the ledge?
From my own precarious perch
I throw my rope of words
which she catches and ties around her waist.
I test the knot around mine
and together, once again
we cheat the abyss.




No one wants me until I want myself.
I see a ball tossed into the air,
climbing into the sky,
struggling out of the clutching arms of earth,
then, just before the inevitable descent,
a sacred moment.
The ball hesitates,
unencumbered in a state of bliss,
free of time and space.
It is that moment that
contains the hope of
me longing for me.



Her eyes tell me she is in a universe far away,
a place in a constant state of creation.
She nods in false assent,
directed by the shrieking phantoms
who whisper instructions,
whose commands protect
the gates of her mind
allowing no visitors, no thoughts
that might corrupt the hellish paradise
they have made there for themselves.



The porcelain hen lies shattered to powder and bits on the kitchen floor. The very last of my resolve as broken as she as I step into the shower to hide my tears.




My heart has turned to stone yet beautiful flowers still burst into bloom in it’s barren nooks and crannies.

all work by lm/2010