Dispatch From LA

Authentic, Rich & Interesting

My sister and I have both been enjoying back and forth email discussions about our favorite new (to us) visual journalers from Dawn Sokol's fabulous compilation book.  If you are brand new to visual journaling and not sure where to begin, this book will open a wide river of possibilities for you.  I would love to have had it when I began my first visual journal.  8 years and 9 visual journals later, 1000 Artist's Journal Pages is still my favorite kind of art book to look at.  No instructions to tangle up my easily knotted and rebellious brain. 

Like some of my very own banana-eating monkeys, I do not like to follow directions.   I'm the kid in the class who sticks my fingers in her ears if the teacher makes a helpful suggestion during Art.   Or listens politely then does it her own way.  Just leave me all aloney on my owny and let me take my own meandering path (complete with blocked roads and false starts) to get there.  And if everyone could please not talk while I'm doing it all the better.  Please.

And so I present you with my favorite new artists.  People I will investigate further online.

All of these pages strike me as authentic, rich, and interesting.

I'm struck by the quirky detail. 

With words that pull me into the page and leave me with more questions than answers.

Smart, spare pages that remind me of dreams.

Clever talent.

Oh, there are plenty of old favorites in the book too.  Pages I could see a thousand times over and not grow tired of looking.  A diverse collection for a diverse audience.  Each one a brain scan of a different human being.

Skinny Sticks Of Things

Paired Things

Who, who had only seen wings,
could extrapolate the
skinny sticks of things
birds use for land,
the backward way they bend,
the silly way they stand?
And who, only studying
birdtracks in the sand,
could think those little forks
had decamped on the wind?
So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?

Home from school.  Just in time to sit out on the new patio out back and blink at the plants.  It is pleasant that they don't talk.  That no one is talking when I get home.  Shhhhhhhh.  

I just want to write in my book and dig my grubby mitts in the dirt.  No time for the visual journal or art making.  That would require cleaning up the workshop.  Things are pared down to the essentials:  read, write, dig, stare, sleep, repeat.

Crassula ovata below, Calandrinia grandiflora above.  Both strong silent types.  Sometimes I talk too much at school.  I appreciate being able to come home and not hear the sound of my own voice.  Blah blah blah.

A new poet to dream with:  Kay Ryan.  Our new poet laureate.  And...a Californian.  She wrote Paired Things above, which I like.  Very very very much.

My brain is limited lately to slow movement and slower thought.   Doing both with a view of the trees is new and different.

Quicksand!

 

My sister Dottie will spend a good part of her year- long sabbatical at a hermitage in the woods.  She and a carload of her possessions arrived last week.

A whole year of mostly solitude in a simple cabin in the woods.  In the middle of nowhere U.S.A.

With her own Walden's Pond.

And leafy tree boughs for company.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

-Henry David Thoreau

 

A year of contemplation under a curtain of green.

Lately I am also contemplative.  But my thoughts are not leading me down sunlit forest paths.  My mind is cluttered.  There is ringing in my ears.

If only I had not forgotten my stout pole.

Maybe I'll find it in Fridaville.  Nikki Hardin writes a blog you'll want to curl up with in bed at night.  One of the best written blogs I've stumbled across in a while.   Go check her out.  If you like to read as much as I do you'll be there for awhile. 

Get A Load Of This Throne

My neighbor Susan who lives across the street in a luscious purple house, has an outdoor terrace studio where she labors away on these glowing bistro tables. I strolled over on Saturday to check out her latest series of stories. Yes, I said stories.

The table above, with legs and lower stand yet to be painted, is one of her LA GIRLS. "The LA Girls cannot resist the charms of Bali."

Each of these jewels is more fabulous than the next. The red number above: "The LA Girls return from India with many souvenirs."

Let's move in for a closer look, shall we?
 

Lately Susan's tabletop stories have grown more elaborate and intricate. Each metal canvas she renders is pulsating with life & color. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that these tables and chairs are her first foray into the world of art-making. Yep. You heard me right. Her. First. Foray. Into. Artland.

Whenever I visit I'm stunned. I mean, wouldn't you be?

The pink beauty above: "The LA Girls try and remember exactly what fertilizer they used in the rose garden."
 

Next up: "The LA Girls enjoy their budget vacation in Mexico."

Get a load of this throne.

And finally the outdoor rooftop azotea where the magic happens.

Get your arse over to Susan's Etsy storefront for more lovely patio stories. Then go see what Domino magazine had to say about her.  You can thank me later.  

To Stand By A River And Go

A new graffiti poster spotted down the street!  When I saw it I thought of how perfectly it went with yesterday's wildfire mosaic, but today's a new day.  I present to you one of the most popular videos on U-tube.  A message of pure joy...from Matt, who writes:

14 months in the making, 42 countries, and a cast of thousands. Thanks to everyone who danced with me.

And another poem from William Stafford, great Kansas poet, and all around good fellow.

Quo Vadis

Sometimes I choose a cloud and let it

cross the sky floating me away.

Or a bird unravels its song and carries me 

as it flies deeper and deeper into the woods.

Is there a way to be gone and still

belong?  Travel that takes you home?

Is that life?  to stand by a river and go.

Which brings me to my next rambling summer thought on this bright hot Los Angeles day. TREES.  Eucalyptus.  This particular species which most resemble the limbs of humans. These I found soaring up across the street from the graffiti poster.  Sometimes a drifting mind sees beautiful things when you aren't looking for them.

California Is Burning

Wildfires are roaring across northern and central California. In Big Sur several baby condor chicks that can't yet fly are feared dead. Big animals have been seen crossing the roads heading towards the ocean. Watching those majestic redwoods burning on the news is painful. So is imagining the suffering of the wild animals, the 17,000 or so firefighters valiantly trying to stop the inferno, and all of the people displaced from their homes. I made the mosaic from mostly AP photos of online news stories. Look at the photo in the middle of the rescued goat.  And the one on the bottom right of the man displaced from his home.  He's waiting by the side of the road with his most treasured possession in the front seat.  

California is burning.  Stop soon please, very very soon.

BOOM BOOM BOOM

Busy.  New walkway & driveway to stare at and water several times per day.  (Avert your eyes from the thicket of ungroomed plants.)

A brand spanking new school year began on Tuesday.  There are 21 more baby alligators just like this one to wrangle every morning.  Don't be fooled by their cutenes.  They are a sly and cunning lot.  AND they move around.  A LOT. .  This herd is particularly wriggly.  

Walking on the new concrete late at night barefooted helps to soothe my savage inner beast.  A 3-day weekend  is a fine package I'll be unwrapping one minute at a time.  

Someone turned 13 today.

That's all.  The thinking required to compose this post while thundering BOOMING rocket-fire rattles my windows and nerves is beyond my feeble abilities.  Neighbors are enthusiastically boom boom booming their way through the night.  Oy.  Must go lie down and pull covers over head.  Okay, who hid the ear plugs?  Where are my nerve pills?  Someone make me a martini!

BOOM.

Sunday Night 71 Degrees

I will leave it to your imagination to decide how two red dogs without owners in tow ended up on the porch of Moss Cottage this afternoon.

Then you may be interested in having a look at my sister's travel journal from Italy.

Kisses I Am Blowing You

Visual Journal #9     The last page is scribbled on.  One year coming to a close.

At school someone else finishes her journal entry with a blaze of hearts.  "Kisses I am blowing you," she explains.

Vintage photo frames meet mailart across a divide of woodgrain contact paper.  Sewing goes awry and has to be ripped out.  I like the patterns the broken stitches make.

A vinyl pocket is sewn on the back to hold a photo.

Day 2 of walkway construction comes to a close at Moss Cottage.  The crew leaves.  One member of the cat posse gazes in quiet reflection at the aftermath.

Another pokes around in the dirt trying to find where he buried the red duct tape.

I ponder the combinations to be made of 10 tiles with 3 different patterns across 4 grids of walkway.  After much grave thought I conclude that chaos is the only possible solution.

Stencil Manifesto

I received my TRUE VISION book today.  Rockport did not disappoint.  What good quality books they publish!  LK did a stunning job of writing and pulling everything together.   The book is impressive.  

For consideration in the book I submitted a stencil portfolio I constructed out of cardboard and duct tape.  It's covered with sprayed stencils.  Tucked inside were loose visual journal pages which I collaged, stenciled, and wrote on top of.  The pages were backed with wallpaper to make them more sturdy.   

These are the inside  covers.  

The size of the portfolio is 10 by 16.  A good size for holding a variety of different sizes of collage pieces or stencil work.  Cover them with writing and call them journal pages.  I do.

The pages I share here are not in TRUE VISION, but they have a similar pallette as I created most of them within a few days of each other.  Not wanting to ship my heavy cumbersome Visual Journal #8, I chose instead to make something on the spot for possible inclusion into the book.  When I found a stack of cardboard in the school trash earlier that week the idea for a portfolio was born.  With the shaky pony express service I figured losing these would be less painful than having my entire journal go missing.

 

Having just returned from San Miguel de Allende a few months before,  I enjoyed copying passages from my travel journal onto some of my newly created visual journal pages.  Drives to school yielded other material.  We visual journalers are nothing, if not evidence gatherers.

Here's the whole shebang all stacked up.

It seems as though I made my fair share of these portfolios.  Trouble is I can't quite recall what happened to them all.  Did they all hit the pony express trail?  Did my sister steal them?  The 45 year old brain has difficulty recalling what the 44 year old hands were doing last year.

I took photos of them though.  I have evidence.   

Okay.  Who stole my red duct tape?  That is definitely missing.