Ispirato

Here is a SoulCollage card I made yesterday to give as a present to my friend, Robyn. Robyn attended the SoulCollage class last weekend run by Karen Mann. Then just this Saturday night past, Robyn celebrated her birthday here at my house. We had a karaoke machine and put it to good use. What fun!

Robyn’s alter ego is “Queen of Cocktails”, and she made us some beauties at the party. Yum-yum. That’s probably why we thought we sounded so good singing karaoke.

In her own artwork of late, Robyn has been using bird images, nest images and house images. So I used these in her card. There are five different pictures collaged together here.

In making this card for Robyn, I felt really free to just trust my intuition. I didn’t have to THINK about personal meaning to be assigned to the images. Karen told us this is the best way to work - don’t think and analyze and plan too much when making cards. Let the intuitive mind take over.

I recently read a fantastic book called “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” by Leonard Shlain. He is a neurosurgeon with an interest in art and history. Shlain’s suggestion is that, as cultures have embraced literacy, they exercise more of their left brain hemisphere and all its yang attributes predominate: masculine, intellectual, analytical, sequential, etc. As different cultural groups have become more literate, they have also become misogynistic, particularly when the making of art is discouraged. Art and images are very “right brain”. Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam all rejected art, which had been an important aspect of earlier cultures that worshiped the Goddess. “Thou shalt make no graven images” really was taken to an extreme.

In the Middle Ages in Europe this attitude relaxed. Statues and paintings of The Madonna were exalted in churches. Women were allowed to become nuns and create their own spiritual communities.

In the last 100 years, women have become increasingly more valued by society. Shlain points out that this corresponds to a rising prevalence of art, symbols and images in our cultures world wide. Photography, motion pictures, television, and now, the computer and internet, are helping to balance the left and right hemispheres of our brains. Even the fact that we use both our left and right hands to type on a keyboard, is an improvement over the fact that most people had used their right hands to write - the right hand being “powered” by the left brain hemisphere.

There was so much to this book. I learned heaps about history - especially the early history of major religions. As an artist, it gave me new insights into the power of visual symbolism.

Karen said people are often tempted to put words onto their SoulCollage cards, but she recommended we avoid doing this. Having read this amazing book by Leonard Shlain, I have a greater appreciation of why imagery without text, can help us access our subconscious/unconscious minds and speak to (and from) our very souls.

When I first read Seena B. Frost’s book “Soul Collage - An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups” I was very excited by the concept. I started saving images from magazines … but never got around to making any SoulCollage cards. I needed someone to light a fire under me.

I discovered Karen Mann was a SoulCollage facilitator, living not so far away from me and trained by Seena herself. So I talked four friends into joining me in a workshop and we hired Karen to come run our introduction session this past Sunday.

Karen was a fantastic teacher! She explained the process of SoulCollage and got us started making our own cards right away. One of my cards is shown here - I call it the “Reading” card. It is about my passion for non-fiction books and learning, the ideas and inspiration I get from books, and the fact that I would love to spend more time reading.

Karen taught us to use our cards for readings. You can pose a question, then draw a random card from your deck and speak from the images on the card saying, “I am the one who …” and then “What I can tell you about this issue is …”. When you draw parallels between your question and the statements that emerge as you look at your card, interesting answers are revealed.

My friends in the class were just as enamored as I with the process, and I know most of them have spent time gathering images and making cards in the days since our workshop.

The very first card I made was about looking after my body and being mindful of what I feed it. But the more I examined the card and the different images I’d collaged onto it, the more I learned about my own feelings regarding my illness.

I have withheld this information from my blog readers for several months now, but I’m just going to blurt it out now and be over and done with it: In April I was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer.

My original cancer was diagnosed in late 2002 and I had a lumpectomy, chemo and radiation, then hoped that the whole cancer-thing would never again rear its ugly head. I’d learned and matured through the experience of having breast cancer. Now the learning and maturing seems to have kicked into full-gear again. I had surgery on my right lung in April. I am having the same procedure now on my left lung next week. Physically - it has slowed me down. Emotionally - I am holding up very well. I have wonderful friends and family. I just had the best holiday ever. There is so much to be grateful for, not least of which is the fact that the medical treatment is making me better.

So while I don’t want to turn my beloved Ispirato blog into a journal about living with cancer, I can no longer hide the truth about my health because it is starting to creep into my artwork. As a lover of the transformative nature of art - its healing effects, the personal growth that come about through it, I intend to gift myself with more time to be creative.

SoulCollage has come along at the perfect time for me.

I’m so sorry to have neglected my blog for so many weeks. I have just returned from a big vacation! I really planned to write a few blog entries while I was away … but every day was so busy and every evening I collapsed into bed!

In late June my son Chris, husband George and I left Australia for Indiana where my parents live. We have a family reunion there on 4th of July weekend each year. This one was our BEST REUNION EVER - my parents, my brother, my four sisters and nearly all my nieces and nephews came this year, along with my four cousins and their families and my Dad’s two sisters. We were at Brown County State Park in Southern Indiana, where our clan hired four cabins and held our reunion. There were special meals, a talent show, crafts, bingo and a family trivia match. It was awesome.

I also got to catch-up with friends. It was a special time.

Here’s a little picture of me as a hula girl in the mid-1960’s. The photo was taken in our yard in Indiana - not Hawaii, sadly. But I finally got my chance to go to Hawaii after we left Indiana a few weeks ago. Wow - what took me so long? I loved it.

We spent our first week on the island of Kauai. It was such a beautiful, laid-back place. We did some kayaking, hiking and we drove a little ATV rhino through a farm where many movies have been filmed, including Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We swam in water holes fed by beautiful waterfalls. We ate mangos from trees growing wild along the roads. We hated to leave Kauai …

Our next week was spent on the island of Oahu. We stayed in a hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. This place has a big city feel about it! Our favorite day trips were to Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center. At the Polynesian Cultural Center we learned more about Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, New Zealand and Tonga. My teenage son took a shine to the Tahitian dancers. He wants our next trip to be to Tahiti for some strange reason.
We couldn’t get a direct flight back to Melbourne on the day we wanted … something to do with the Pope being in Sydney at that time. So the travel agent suggested a quick stopover in Fiji. We had two days at a resort in Denarau. Finally we spent some time relaxing instead of constantly being on the go in Indiana and Hawaii. The Fijians were so friendly and the resort was heavenly. I lounged at the pool and sipped tropical cocktails. That’s something I would definitely like to do more of in the future.

I took a couple of craft projects on the trip with me but didn’t touch them, nor did I manage to write in my journal. I guess that just goes to show how busy I was enjoying the holiday!

I was interviewed recently for the Aussie Scrapbooking site. Gabbie asked me to send a photo of my studio - it didn’t matter if it was messy, she said. Yikes! Because my sister Vonnie was visiting at the time, I had to clear the craft stuff out of the guest bedroom and stack it temporarily in the studio. So here is the room at its worst.

Trouble is, even when the room is at its best, there is far too much stuff in there. It ain’t conducive to working creatively. In fact, I probably spend more time looking for stuff and trying to sort and tidy than I actually spend creating art.

I’ve learned a new term for an overabundance of art and craft stuff. It is ‘SABLE’ - ‘Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy’.

Now I want you to check out the sign on the window above my desk. This is my new artist’s creed.

It is good to have this posted at my workspace. It really does make me pause and think about how I am approaching a project.

My friends are complaining that my blog DESPERATELY needs updating. Okay, I’m sorry! I’ve been distracted.

At left is a picture of me with my big sister Vonnie who came over from Marshfield, Wisconsin to Melbourne to visit me. You first met Vonnie and her quilting buddy, Gwen, in this post nearly a year ago, about my trip to the US.

So Vonnie wanted to visit in late May and I told her she could come so long as she didn’t distract me from the job of finishing up issue 6 of Astarte’s Mega-Zine with its publication date of June 1st. She had no problem with that, in fact, she needed time here to finish a big quilt she had started for my queen size bed. So while I worked at the computer, Vonnie sat nearby working at my sewing machine. In fact, she made dinner for my family every night, too! The arrangement worked wonderfully and we both completed our big tasks at around the same time.

This quilt is amazing. Vonnie has a great eye for color and her stitching is great! (When I’ve attempted smaller patchwork projects I’m not so good at getting the seams to line up correctly.) I have so much respect for quilt makers. Each big quilt takes hours and hours to complete. Yowzah!

So, okay, we didn’t just stay at home stitching and laying out the mega-zine full time. Vonnie also came along to my Goddess Mythology class, my meditation class, and she helped me when I taught a felt jewelry class at the Embroiderers Guild of Victoria one Saturday afternoon. Plus she got to meet a few of my friends while here. That was special.

So here you can see my beautiful bed. The framed picture behind is an embroidery I did years ago of an angel flying toward the moon. Vonnie designed the cushions and pillowcases to match the colors of the picture and the plum feature wall. Very clever, and quite possibly the best gift George and I have ever received.

Finally I have taken the time to turn my conjoined twin mermaids, cut out of my copy of the collaborative book mentioned in this previous post into a paper doll. I have just added the arms holding onto mirrors.

The conjoined mermaids are now my 36th art doll in the 100 Art-Dolls-Challenge that Arrigo and I are undertaking at the MyArtSelf.com blog.

A few years ago I saw a cloth doll from a softies maker that was conjoined twin girls. I loved it. Adored it. It is one of those handmade items that your mind keeps going back to. I wish I’d bought it, in hindsite, but it was pretty expensive. I’ve wanted to do something similar ever since.

Symbolically, conjoined twins remind us of the polarities that operate in our own personalities. The mirrors held by these mermaids symbolize the adage “Know Thyself”. This doll reminds me to look closely at who I am - not just the aspects I like, but the shadow parts, too.

Well, my last post attracted a few comments, eh?! Here is a big thank you for your empathy!

I bear the moderator of that group no ill feelings, by the way. She has made her apology for the manner in which I was given the boot … and I think she did me a favor by making me sit up and pay attention.
No more collaborative projects for me, but I ain’t giving up papercrafts! At Paperific I bought some Stampin’ Up! stamps and have had a ball making cards. Example at left.

And there is a free project sheet with card making project ideas - you can download it for free from Go-Make-Art’s homepage.

This is a sorrowful tale of rejection and humiliation. Of sadness and shame. But if you read to the end you will find there’s a happy ending.

I was kicked out of a collaborative book group on the grounds that my two submissions had attracted “considerable negative feedback” from other members.

Ouch.

CHAPTER ONE

At left you can see my first submission to “The Crown Book”. There was no theme for this book, we just had to work on a specific shape. I took that to mean we could create a page in any style. So this is what I did with my page.

In a collaborative book swap you make multiple identical pages, then send them to the host, who re-assembles the pages into books that get re-distributed to all the participants.

I liked my page. And as there was no theme, I took the opportunity to say “be daring and different”. At the time I had just wound-up my art stamp business after years of making art samples using my stamps. At last I was free to create art anyway I liked - not just using the stamp images my company sold. I could sing with my own voice and get back to that child-like non-conformity. I felt really free and happy about this and I really like this simple happy girl (who, okay, happens to be me, but that wasn’t important) and the quote because it was so relevant to me at the time.

When the others in the collaborative book swap received their books in the mail, apparently they did not share in my enthusiasm for this page. I guess they later discussed it amongst themselves. But no one told me how they felt. I wish they had.

When I received my compiled crown book, I liked some of the pages from the other artists. I thought other pages were poorly executed or lacked solid design principles. Most of the pages had an image of a woman or girl cut from a vintage photo or a painting and glued to the background. Some had wings and crowns collaged on. Mainly there was an overuse of embellishments that detracted from the focal image. So I was disappointed in about a third of the pages. But I didn’t tell anyone. As the book had a spiral wire binding, I just removed the pages I didn’t like and threw them away. I felt a little guilty about doing that. And I decided that maybe this collaborative group I’d been invited to join, wasn’t actually my scene. Should I quit?

CHAPTER TWO

The group moderator sent out an email announcing a new collaborative book project, “The Mermaid’s Tale”. I love mermaids. I decided to give the group one more shot. We were sent eight die-cut pages in the shape of a mermaid/fish tail to use as pages. We needed to decorate them all the same, as before with the crown book. This time we had a sea theme, of course and were given a blue and green color scheme.

I wanted to use the tail shape creatively and came up with the idea of fitting a mermaid head into each side of the fin, then a shared torso and mermaid tail to create mermaids who were conjoined twins. I made the tail and the mermaids’ hair with textured impasto and painted them with Lumiere paints and I drew the faces and features with pen highlighted with chalks. It was quite a production to make eight pages, but I was pleased with the result. Then I added some text at the side which was supposed to look like the text you see in a box on a comic book page, but my pen was too thick and I wasn’t as thrilled about that as I’d been with the mermaids.

I shipped off my pages on schedule. After a delay, because others held up the process, I got my compiled book in the mail.
My page was on top. Yes, I loved the mermaids and still disliked that pen I used for the text. Then I looked at the other pages. Hmmm. There were elements I liked about some of them, but I’m sorry to say there wasn’t a single page in the whole book that I thought really worked as a piece of decorative art . Overall, this was more disappointing than the crown book. I am sure the women who participated in this swap have talent, but it wasn’t really showing on these pages. I wondered if the tail shape of the page had something to do with it.
And then it dawned on me: Each artist used a cut-out photo or painted image of a woman or mermaid. The members of this group weren’t really stretching themselves to create art in a unique, personal style. They were all cutting up other artists’ photos or art and pasting them into new compositions. It was as if they were all trying to use the same style. Was that a rule in this group, that I had somehow missed? You had to use collage?
AN ASIDE:

Now I love Lynn Whipple’s Ninnies and Claudine Helmuth’s Poppets. Teesha Moore and Lynne Perella - magic. These artists have each developed their own unique artistic styles, instantly recognisable. Yes, they all work in collage, using photos. I love their work. I respect what they do because they are the trend-setters. And their works tell stories. And every element on a page is selected and placed with care to compliment the whole effect.

And I don’t mean to put anyone off the more common, currently popular style of collage where you combine pictures of girls with butterfly wings and party hats. I’ve done it myself and it is fun. But if you want to stretch yourself, and if you want to “assert imaginative vision” push beyond. Don’t settle for being a “creature of the commonplace” or a “slave of the ordinary”.
CHAPTER THREE

I came home from my week in Ballarat to find two emails from the group moderator - first, a personal one to me: My work in the crown book and the mermaids tale book had attracted negative feedback and there was no other way to handle it but to remove me from the group.

Then there was the email she sent to the entire group: She was “applying a clean broom”, getting rid of those of us who were “below par”. The other members who worked within the rules had a right to play in a “safe environment”. So to ensure the valued members didn’t quit the group, she was removing those of us who were the worst, and giving warnings to the others who were merely mediocre.

Of course I was in the category of “out you go”.

Oh the shame. Oh the embarrassment.

I had been planning to quietly leave the group because the work coming from most others was of a low standard. And it turned out that the group thought MY standard of work was so low; so very, very low, that they wanted to GET RID OF ME, with trumpets and fanfare.

Can you imagine how painful that was?

I looked at my work with a critical eye. I was prepared to believe that it was true. Yes, it quite possibly was crap. Regardless of what I felt about the other group members’ work, my own work fell short of the mark. Maybe they took my crown book page for scrapbooking (crapbooking). Maybe the mermaid page was absolutely horrible. Maybe I sucked as a papercraft artist, always had done, and for years no one had ever had the guts to tell me.

I threw the Crown Book and the Mermaid’s Tale book into the rubbish bin. But not before I first removed my own pages. They might’ve been crap, but they were my crap and I liked them anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR (this is the happy ending bit)

When I got over my grief, I came to some important conclusions, that are now typed out and posted above my desk:

• I make art the way I want to make art … even if it is lousy art.
  
• My art shall be tied to my soul; not my ego.
  
• As I start to create, I set this intention: I work in my own artistic style.

I am grateful for this humbling experience because it forced me to look hard at how and why I make art. I was pretty stupid, not to notice that the other members were all working in a similar style. If I’d paid closer attention, I might have fallen into the trap of making imitative collage art … which would have been entertaining, yet would have distracted me from doing what I really want to do as an artist.

So here is a promise: I will never join a collaborative book project or swap again.

Never ever.

Last week I escaped the real world and attended a residential art retreat, Fibres Ballarat. There were 170 of us living-in at Ballarat Grammar plus a number of locals who lived-out. Classes ranged from basketry, felt hat making, felt jewellery, tin jewellery, etching, machine embroidery, machine embellishing, garment making, banner making and my class of choice: book binding.

 My tutor was Sandy Webster of the US. She has taught in Australia several times and came highly recommended. I was not disappointed! Fantastic, generous with information and attention - this is a great teacher and artist.

Our class project was a book with a cover that wrapped around it like a box . Tucked into the book pages are several smaller projects - mini-books, paper toys and interactive mechanisms. Very cool. That’s my book spine getting stitched at left.

We also took on personal projects and you can read about my ‘Inanna’ project at my other blog, myartself.com as it was a book in combination with paper art dolls.

I have been attending Fibre Forums like this one for several years now and it is like being reunited with my sisters. I’ve forged many friendships and we have a good time both in and out of our classes. There are social activities like the cocktail party which raises funds to provide scholarships to these events. Here I am on the far left - one of the Cocktail Queens. We make ‘em and serve ‘em. Our natty fascinators are pretty bra cups. Would you have guessed? That’s Nonie, Robyn (the amazing Chief Beverage Designer) and one of my oldest, dearest friends, Jane - who lives in Sydney and often comments on this blog!

We could’ve done with more make-up and fewer double chins in this photo. But heck, we’re all smiling and isn’t that really what matters most?

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Many of my blog readers will know that I run Australia’s greatest papercraft expo, Melbourne Paperific in October every year. For 2008 I decided to add a March Paperific to the calendar. It seemed like a good idea when I announced the dates five months ago, but with a shorter lead-up time to plan this big event, it was really quite nerve-racking. It had more than its fair-share of organizational hiccups and there were days when I just wanted to turn back the clock and say, “FORGET THE MARCH EXPO! I CHANGED MY MIND!”

Well, thank goodness I didn’t do that.

We have had a FANTASTIC expo at the Caulfield Racecourse with lots of happy customers and exhibitors. Very, very happy.
I also have the BEST front entrance staff, enabling me to break away and spend quality time catching up with people at the show, and even taking in a little papercraft shopping myself.

There is a buzz of excitement at a craft show that you just don’t find when you are in a craft shop. I think gathering so many creative people in one place just automatically raises the spiritual vibration. And people are more likely to engage in conversation with strangers at craft shows than in a normal shop. Did I mention the retail therapy? There’s unbeatable retail therapy, too.

We need to support our local craft shops all year ’round. And even the little shops have to admit that craft shows like Paperific are actually good booster injections for the whole craft industry.
Back in October I wrote this blog post about our one (and only) Paperific at the Pavilion in Docklands which had a lot of ‘venue issues’. It was better attended and cost less to put on, so was more financially rewarding for me. But the venue issues caused a bit of angst, especially for older customers who didn’t like to be crowded.

No grumbles this weekend, though. Bigger, brighter aisles have meant people cope better on the crowded stands. Good soul stuff happening. Very, very happy at the expo.