Today I made mad, passionate art!

Do you ever just get into one of those moods? I got home from sort of a stressful morning and took out the paint and the journal and just let myself go. It is actually hard for me to wildly paint, cut and paste without a plan of some kind, but I'm working on being spontaneous and authentic. And here, my dears, are the fruits of my labor.

This one was a real stretch. I'm fighting the urge to call it "messy" because I do kind of like it. It will become something else after it gets some good journaling in the open spaces. Some of the layers are old, old, old Yahtzee score cards. My kids names are on them in that wonderful grade school cursive. It makes me happy to know they are under there.



This blue is, I guess, is as close to pastels as I get. See the pretty stamp? Made these with some very yummy old India wood blocks. Sunday, the husband and I went to the famous Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena and found an entire basket of these for sale. Of course I wanted them all, but settled on three and am having a great time experimenting.

This is my favorite. The design in the background is a transparency transfer of a large doodle I did unconsciously while I was on a long telephone call. The photo fragment is from an anniversary card we got describing marriage as an adventure.

Here is the facing page with the imprint of another of my new wood blocks. I layered lots of paint onto the block so that the print has texture.

To round out my day of creative release, I worked on a poem I roughed out last night when I couldn't sleep. I've learned to catch up on my podcasts or to get up and write, read or sketch instead of tossing and turning and am always excited the next morning when I see what I produced. I'm going to share this poem because it seems that several of you are struggling with a loss. My Dad passed 4 years ago and it is still a tender place for me.

I Was Raised on Adages

"If you believe it, you can achieve it"
has tortured my mind
as surely as the head busting
plummet from the garage roof,
as incredulously reported by my father,
temporarily scrambled the brains
of his younger brother
who believed that
the towel tied around his neck
looked enough like Superman's cape
to enable him to fly.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch"
was an often repeated mantra
of my father's
that I thought of while,
parked at a highway rest station,
I watched him scurry from his camper
to bring a lunch plate,
piled high with his favorite foods,
to a man he saw
eating from a dumpster.

"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is"
reverberated through
the halls of my memory
like a slammed door
as I woke, clutching at the trailing hem
of a vanishing dream
in which I sat with my father,
at the old kitchen table,
laughing and eating ham sandwiches
feeding scraps to my best
and now angelic dog,
Rudy.

"There's no use crying over spilled milk"
returns to me as
I finally experience
the cleansing relief
of unrestrained tears
set free by the memory
of keeping vigil
as the life spilled from my dying father
like a pure white puddle
spreading it's way to eternity.

"Out of sight, out of mind."
Never.

lm 10/2008