The Answers to Everything

Now I know a lot of you have been asking me for advice lately.........wait, I can't even say that with a straight face. NO ONE has been asking me for advice. And that's just fine with me. I mean, what do I know? I question everything, I see both sides of an argument, I hate making decisions, I live in existential ambiguity, and I can't even decide whether or not  to be an agnostic or a free thinker because that's not indecisive enough for me.
 Nevertheless, I am going to give myself advice and if you care to eavesdrop that's just fine:

How To Stay Young and Happy Forever!
Nope, too grandiose. Plus a big fat lie. Let me tone it down.

How Not To Turn Into a Cranky Bitter Old Person.
That might be a bit harsh.......

How To Make The Best of Things and Muddle Through.
Much better, and decidedly British, hence the wee bit of fatalism.

So I made a list. I do love lists. I came up with ten suggestions for that happy thing we're all looking for, even though we're all going to die, and not one promises weight loss or eternal salvation. Not my area. Anyway, it's my personal writing assignment. For ten days I will address another item on the list and give it my complete attention.
But that's tomorrow. Today, here are some prayer flags I am making out of linen and cotton, staining and stitching. I know you are supposed to hang prayer flags outside and let the elements do their wabi sabi thing on them until they are tattered and torn and returned into nothingness like good little Buddhists. But my ego doesn't want the West Texas wind and West Texas birds having their way with them. Not to mention plagues of moths, June bugs, cicadas, ants and spiders. My good will will remain indoors.......

Don't worry, my list won't be as boring as it sounds. I'll have pictures!

Wandering

Onward with the random projects. It's nice I can always surprise myself because I never know what I'm going to feel like doing that day. Last week I was in a bookish mood, so I created another 'art' book. As I created each collage-ish page on 8"x8" mat board I had no idea what my theme would be but I noticed I was mainly sticking to earthy and slightly antiqued colours, probably because I'd purchased a spray bottle of walnut ink and wanted to see what it would do. Hint: it makes things look old. Instant antiquing. After assembling the pages in a rather different way with stained linen strips (looking so antiqued they began to resemble bandages left over from the Civil War) and some old chopsticks from the back of our silverware drawer, I picked a suitably vague title, Wandering, which could either indicate a sense of travel or just the state of my thoughts. Decide for yourselves:

Long Ago and Far Away

This Mother's Day weekend my sister and I have been perusing some interesting artifacts that our mother has piled up in a trunk. Treasures from the past. Andrea has signed up on Ancestry.com and has been tracking down our family tree. Unfortunately our Dad's family tree does not go too far back because when he was growing up Russia was in turmoil (something about a Bolshevik Revolution.....). She can only go as far back as his grandfather. Here are his parents though, in the only photo ever taken of them, Boris and Eugenia Komkov, before they died during the revolution and left him an orphan.

So Andrea has been concentrating on our mother's side, and I have to say our English ancestors were not exactly an exciting lot, and they never really moved far from around Nottingham and Derbyshire.
Here is my mom, Joyce, and her sisters, Gladys and Nell, around 1943.

Who knew that our mother would be the one to break hundreds of years of sameness and go galavanting off with our Dad, and later us, to various parts of Africa and then the U.S.? Not that she had much choice in the matter. Jobs were scarce after WWII so many in England went abroad to work.
We traveled a lot by ship as I mentioned in a previous post about my early wanderings, so I was thrilled and amused when Andrea unearthed the following children's menu from ship voyages we took in 1953 and 1954 when I was three and four years old. Check out what they were serving children back then. It certainly wasn't chicken nuggets with mac and cheese.

 I am trying to picture myself in a little pastel smocked dress and mary jane shoes saying; "I say there, good sir, might I have a wee bit more of the pressed ox tongue? And this strawberry melonge is simply devastating!"
Happy Mother's Day all.

Sketchy Habits

When I was an art major the process of keeping a sketchbook, a mandatory habit of the 'true' artist, was a bit of a chore. Maybe I thought I was supposed to be another Toulouse-Lautrec, hanging in bars and drawing the demi-monde of Lubbock. Guess I wasn't that decadent yet. I did something similar. I sketched my dance friends, sometimes in the dim light of the old Tower of Pizza on Main Street, sometimes in late night coffee slurps at Sambo's (10 cents for all you can drink all night!) after rehearsals, sometimes in each others' apartments on lazy Saturdays with nothing to do.
The drawings look crude and awkward to me now, smudged and overly serious, with pretty bad technique. They also bring back memories of college angst and a tendency to be overly dramatic. If anything I am now the complete reverse and could be guilty of being underly dramatic. "Oh look, my socks are on fire...." (true story).
For many years I dropped the sketchbook habit because my drawings and doodles just irritated me, displeased me, caused me to feel I was making NO progress as an artist whatsoever. So cut to the present. Now I doodle, draw, sketch, stamp, paste, scribble, and dabble almost every day. In at least five sketchbooks. Sometimes I come back and add more, paste more, blob paint down, gesso over, or even run the page under my sewing machine. I have freed myself from thinking my sketches have to look like mini works of art ready for framing, or that they have to be dutiful still lifes (lives?) of fruit, or empty wine glasses. Now they are just my practice pages, my venting, my art journaling, my need to 'do something creative' yet not knowing what I want to do. I engage in the process without judging (well, a bit of judginess, but I'm allowed to rip out a page here and there).
So here are some latest daily recordings, these from my Moleskine sketchbook, just because it looks cool to carry one around.