Alphabet Mandala

This week’s Art Journal Adventure prompt was to incorporate a mandala or something similar.  I am no good at mandalas.  I have tried them a few times but I just don’t have the patience or precision required.  I like to draw things that are wonky, asymmetrical, that involve dribble and spatter.  That’s my kind of thing.  The mathematical precision and repetition of mandala are just not me.  My workaround, therefore, was to think of something I could use that would create a repeated pattern for me.  My eyes landed on my small alphabet stamps and I had my flash of inspiration.  Stamping letters in concentric rings should have been simple enough but even that “cheat” defeated me because I did not line up the stamps with enough accuracy to create sharp rings.

I was going to keep the page black and white and let it sit like that for a while.  I worried that it was a bit too boring, however, so I spritzed the page with yellow spray ink and spattered on some orange and red watercolour.  It turns out that I much prefer the monochrome version.

Just Be Kind

This week’s Documented Life Project challenge was to combine the previous three weeks’ challenges: stamps, stencils and masks.  The quotation prompt was one from Henry James:  “Three things in human life are important.  The first is to be kind.  The second is to be kind.  And the third is to be kind.”  When watching the news at present, it is difficult to see much kindness in the world but I like to think that the sentiment of James’ words are true.  If we want to affect change then we can all start by individually striving to respond to others with tolerance, compassion and kindness.  Maybe small gestures have a ripple effect.

I wanted to illustrate that idea in my art journal, the notion that small changes in individual behaviour can be a seed that germinates and grows.  I, therefore, used stencils and a mask – an oval blob I surrounded with thick black paint – to create a little pod person, a seed to grow in the darkness.  I then used stamps to add the words “Just be kind”.  A simple message for a simple idea and a simple page.

Go Your Own Way

In order to catch up with the Documented Life Project challenges, I decided to combine two together.  The challenges involved using a hand carved stamp and using masks.  I used the gelli plate to construct a background in my journal page.  I cut some chunky, wiggly lines from cardboard and used those as masks on the gelli plate to print on to a page collaged with text pages.  By moving them around on the gelli plate with each change of colour, I achieved some nice layering.  That gave me some water.  Next I needed the fish.  I had some scraps of lino so I used those to carve two fish stamps.  Using block printing ink and a baren, I printed one fish – different from the rest – swimming in a different direction from the rest of the shoal.  I was thinking about the need for each person to find their own way in life, the importance of not just following the herd (or shoal) but making informed and active decisions instead, of celebrating non-conformity, of how life is richer because of diversity and difference.  Maybe I should have added a quotation to make the message explicit but I like to think the image, for all its simplicity, conveys the ideas well enough.

Shadow and Light

This week’s Life Book lesson was taken by Jessica Swift.  The idea was to explore visual contrasts and dualities through having “shadow and light” pages that mirrored each other.  The creative element was the instruction for us to carve our own stamps and to use these in our piece.  I had kept some decent sized chunks of lino from block printing and also had some circular discs of soft carve so I set about carving a few stamps.  This is something I have been meaning to do for a while now so it was great to have this lesson give me the impetus to crack on with it.  I carved a circular pattern into the disc and fashioned a shape that could be a leaf or feather out of one lino scrap.  I had two smaller lino scraps that I turned into a trio of curved shapes and a trio of triangles.

In the video tutorial, Swift had used the stamps to create a border for each of her pages – using contrasting inks – and had then written in the centre of each page.  I am not big into writing in my art, not even in my art journal, so I decided to try using a lino block of a whale I had carved last year as if it was a stamp.  I chose my colour palette based simply on the colours of block printing ink I had available that would provide good contrast.  I could have gone black and white with the ink but I decided to go with blue and white so shades of blue acrylic paint then became the palette for my background page.  I was short on time this week (I seem to write that phrase a lot) so I decided to actually work on one page split in half rather than on two pages, the smaller scale making it manageable.

Treating the whale block print like a stamp did not quite work.  Although I applied pressure to it, I placed it down on the paper rather than vice versa as I would when block printing and I did not, therefore, use my baren.  Clearly the pressure was uneven since the print quality is patchy – especially with the white version.  The smaller stamps I carved worked a lot better presumably because I could apply more even pressure to them.  I am not convinced this page turned out so well but carving my own stamps was fun and is something I shall try to do more of.

 

Home is Where the Heart is

This week’s Documented Life Project prompt was to incorporate a map of “your state or the world” and document something on that map.  Luckily, a few months ago, when doing my usual poking around in thrift stores, I had purchased a world atlas for 50 cents.  I, therefore, actually had the materials I needed.  Furthermore, I immediately had an idea of what I wanted to create, a little flash of an image skimming across my mind’s eye, which was a welcome contrast to the previous few weeks when I have been scratching my head for a bit.  I decided to use the map to document the fact I am “between belonging” right now as an immigrant, ensconced as I am as a resident of America but very much still feeling my Scottishness and connection to my homeland pulling on my heart strings.

I used a template to cut out two birds from two different maps: one of Pennsylvania, with the Philadelphia area being prominent around the bird’s head; and the other of Scotland, though actually it was of most of the British isles since that land mass was small enough in the atlas to fit.  I suppose that is appropriate since I have lived in three different locations in Scotland and have also lived in England for a while.  I chose the bird shape not just because I have become a tad obsessed with birds this past year but also because they represented migration.  I created the background using gelatos.  I have a love-hate relationship with gelatos: I love their creaminess and the rich vibrancy of the pigment but I cannot seem to get them to go onto the paper as smoothly as I have seen on tutorial videos.  Instead they still have a bit of a rough scribbly quality at places in the mark-making and I have to then deploy a faithful baby wipe in order to spread the colour across the page.  I used two shades of blue and a mid-green to represent the ocean between my places and the colours on the globe.  The green was used on a practical level to outline and thus highlight the shapes I was collaging onto the page.  I then added some strips of glittery green washi tape just because it supported the green outlining and because it was glittery.  I cut a love heart out of a map scrap which happened to contain the words “Atlantic Ocean” and then several smaller hearts out of US and UK postage stamps, again suggesting that idea of migration, travel, journey.  I also used two air mail stickers just because they chimed with the theme of the page and also it’s colour scheme.

Visually my page was communicating my sense of “not belonging”, of being between two locales.  I have yet to find my place here in America so I still feel rather discombobulated by how alien things are, by my difference and otherness, by all the little things I do not know, by how unfamiliar things are that I used to take for granted back home in Britain.  However, bizarrely and conversely, I do feel at home here.  I feel settled enough on a domestic, family level now – especially having bought a place to call home – that I do now feel at home here in Pennsylvania.  Ultimately that is because the cliche is a truism: home is where the heart is.  Ultimately I belong wherever my husband and kids are.  That, therefore, became the sentiment that I stamped across my page.

So my DLP art journal page this week is really about the push and pull of where I am at as an immigrant, as a wife and mother, as a Scot living as part of the diaspora in America; my page is about that tension between not belonging yet feeling at home.  Hopefully I have managed to convey that in the visual elements and the words on the page.