my new art journal

I bought this awesome 100% recycled-paper Ecojot journal at Dandelion Mud Pie yesterday.



I love the sturdy coils and thick, cardboard covers.



Last night I started prepping the pages - randomly pasting in scraps of coloured paper and ephemera. Later I wrote notes to myself on some of the pages.



This morning I finished the inside front cover spread. The collaged paper on the right side was actually the first page, describing the journal. I ripped it out and tore it and pasted it back into the journal on one of the sturdier note pages.



This is the second spread that I completed this morning. What I love about this journal is that it can stand on its side, which will allow me to display one page at a time. I'll have to remember that when I'm composing future pages.

unity

This is one of the earliest drawings I made in my first art journal. I was very interested in the I Ching at the time, and decided to "draw" my reading - the hexagram called "Unity." I started by scribbling blobs of colour on the page, and then drawing an outline of the image that was suggested by the shapes - in this case, a bird diving downwards.

The drawing is created with Crayola wax crayons and black china marker.

peace

I am so disappointed with my scanner. It just doesn't seem to be picking up pale yellows, greens or pinks. I almost didn't post this image, but I think you still get the idea, even without the proper saturation of colours.

The collage includes a scrap of paper which is a list of my kitchen dishes before my last move. I then coloured the image with Crayola wax crayons. I was inspired by a website I discovered this morning:

http://www.attractworldpeace.com/

crow

I have a special fondness for crows. During my university years in London, Ontario, I enjoyed seeing a family of crows return every year to the same stretch of trees that lined the long driveway leading up to Brescia College. I would walk past them on my way to class every day, and their large, bold black figures fascinated me.

Years later I was walking through an older neighbourhood in London when I suddenly felt something land on my head. I immediately stopped in shock, and moments later the crow that had alighted on me hopped down onto the sidewalk in front of me, then turned and cast me a curious eye. We stood together for an endless moment, staring intently at each other, before the bird casually flew away and I was left to continue my walk, bemused.

Shortly after this I began taking singing lessons, and eventually came across a song that I loved to sing. It was a German Lied from Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise (Winter's Journey), called Die Krahe (The Crow). Click here to listen to a recording (scroll down to track 15). The song tells the story of a man near his life's end, followed ominously by a carrion crow as he walks out of town.

I was terribly upset when the crows began dying in southwestern Ontario, victims of the West Nile virus. For several summers the skies were empty of their raucous cawing and sweeping black forms. Sometimes I wondered if they'd ever return to visit me again. I'm happy to say that I often hear crows now, as I sit working at my desk near my open apartment window.

This is another drawing made with Crayola washable markers, sprayed with water to make the ink bleed.

eider duck

This drawing was inspired by a dream about a waterfowl (an "eider duck") on a distant planet. The image is an abstracted duck as seen from above, sitting on a rock with its head tucked under its wing.

The original Crayola washable-marker drawing was embellished with coloured-pencil shading and cross-hatching.

bird man

This drawing was created when I was involved in Jungian psychoanalysis in the winter of 1997/98. I had a dream about waterfowl on a distant planet, and when I did some work with the dream upon awakening, I envisioned a blue liquid seeping through me/the bird.

The drawing is made with Crayola washable markers. If lines are drawn and then sprayed with water, the ink bleeds like watercolour across the page. I had a lot of fun using this technique during this period.

lizard

This collage was a variation on a lizard-like animal I had previously drawn in another series of collages. Magazine pages were collaged in large colour fields, and then cut to fit the image.

starfish

This was one of my early collages made from magazine pages. The entire image is two pages wide: this is the right side. I used Sharpie pens to make the black lines, but quickly tired of this technique, since the solvents in Sharpies give me a headache.

I have an obsession with stars - they're in a lot of my drawings and collages. Fish, too.

the owl was a baker's daughter

This is one of my early collages, from 2005. The image was inspired by the title of a book by Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman. Woodman, a former high school English teacher, was searching for a metaphor to describe the internal distress that is particular to women with eating disorders, and found it in the description of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In the play Ophelia cries, "They say the owl was a baker's daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table!" Later, Ophelia is held up, "mermaid-like," by her garments as she drowns herself - until the weight of the water pulls her down into the mud.

I combined the symbol of the owl with a mermaid's tail. The collage elements are photographs from magazines - primarily fashion magazines, which I like for their bright, crisp colours. I went over the collage afterwards with a thick Sharpie pen, to add detail.

fishies

The background of this collage began as a piece of construction paper that my niece "wrote" the alphabet and numerals on, using a plastic template. She was only three at the time.

I was obsessed with drawing fish during the period when I made the collage (summer 2005), so some fish ended up in this piece. When I scanned the image, some pink crayon marks that had been on the large fish didn't come through. I've realized that my scanner doesn't like pink crayon for some reason. (shrug)