Remember Color?

All that’s left to complete for my submission to The Sketchbook Project 2012 is to wrap up my journal into a safe package and send it off. Yes, I’ve finished the pages, scanned them, and over the next few days I will have the last handful of images color-corrected and posted to flickr. Yay!

It’s surprising to me that I’ve enjoyed working on the project so much that I don’t even mind that I am parting with the journal. I thought it would be hard for me to give up something I had carefully created, but instead I am excited and look forward to sharing it. (In fact, I just signed up for The Sketchbook Project Limited Edition!)

It is also a bit surprising–and kind of funny–that although I fully embraced the “monochromatic” theme, now that I am back to my personal journal, I am also back to color. I really love my water-soluble graphite pencils that I used though out my journal for The Sketchbook Project, and I have even created some personal journal pages with them. But I haven’t touched them for a few days now.

Instead, I’ve been using many of the paints and inks (and crayons and pencils) that I put aside for the brief time I was working on my monochromatic pages. So, I guess it’s a “color correction” in it’s own way.

Going back and forth between extremes–that achieves balance, right?

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

An Easy Journal to Make

Recently, I’ve seen a few artists online who have made Teesha Moore’s 16-page journal. That motivated me to post the instructions for Pam Carriker’s 12-page journal, although I haven’t posted a “how-to” here before.

I like Pam’s journal because it’s a bit simpler, involves no measuring, uses the single sheet efficiently, and can easily be adapted to any size sheet. And it really does take only about ten minutes to make! I have made this type of journal twice, both times using 14×17 sheets of Strathmore drawing paper. (One is the Everyday Journal I posted on flickr: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjw2quTm.) I like to work small, but I think I will try making one from a 22×30 sheet next time.

Some notes on the instructions: 1) Maybe you want to reverse steps 4 and 5 so that you don’t accidentally tear open the folds that are to be to the spine. 2) For heavier paper, wet the edges you will tear open; it makes it easier. 3) Want 24 pages? Just do the same steps with two sheets at once instead of one.

Have fun!

Speaking Without Words

I am almost finished with my submission for The 2012 Sketchbook Project! Hooray–just one more page to go!

I’ll admit that I was somewhat intimidated at the start of the project, mainly because you are asked to choose a theme for your sketchbook when you sign up online. A theme? None of my journals have ever had a theme! At least, no theme other than “me”: what I am working on, what I am thinking about, and what I am exploring at the time. (Is that too self-centered?)

But whether I am intimidated or not, I generally follow rules; so I signed up and selected a theme from the list that was given without too much fuss. In many places on the website there were encouragements to use the themes as guides and suggestions, not limitations. I still felt a little uneasy. I had decided on “monochromatic,” since I felt that was safe–I could use it to influence my method or media, if not my subjects.

After all, giving my sketchbook a theme–Hopes and Failures, The Worst Story Ever Told, or a similar one from the list of suggestions–would be to bare more than I am ready for. I take comfort in the fact that no one really knows what my doodles, collages, paintings, and journal pages are all about. Their response to anything I put out there remains just that–theirs.

I think back to one of my favorite bands when I was in college, The Cocteau Twins, and how you could never really understand the lyrics that their vocalist was singing. I heard her (Liz Fraser) explain it in an interview this way: that she had some painful experiences, that she wanted to talk about them and express her pain in some way, yet she was afraid to do that, so keeping her lyrics difficult to distinguish kept her protected. She was speaking, but no one could really understand what she was saying. Online, I found this quote from her: “It’s amazing though…I mean really the records are…a representation of our coping skills…”

Yes, it’s more than a little ironic to sing into a microphone and hope that no one understands you, just like it doesn’t make any sense to post art online on this big,vast internet and then refuse to tell anyone what it’s really about. But we all cope in our own way.

The Thing Itself

“Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself” is a Wallace Steven poem that has fascinated me since I was first introduced to it in college. At the time, it was the most obscure poem I had ever read, and I just couldn’t figure it out. It was a “welcome to college where you’ll find out that you’re not as smart as you think you are” moment. It was a moment of authenticity.

And authenticity is what I think of when I read that poem today; after all, we seem to live in a culture that is hungry for experiences that are direct, immediate, and most importantly, authentic. This has a good side: protesters across the world can take videos with cell phones and instantly upload them to the internet to show us what their totalitarian leaders are really up to. On the other hand, it means that “The Jersey Shore” and other reality shows like it are the most popular shows on television. I have no numbers to prove this,  but instinct tells me that today more people read blogs than newspapers.

There’s more–think of how few people write first novels anymore. They write memoirs instead. And think of how professional wrestling has lost the interest of many, while the UFC is growing. The first time I saw an UFC fight on TV, I told my husband (a blue belt in jiu-jitsu), “But it just looks like two guys in a street fight!” Exactly. Whereas professional wrestling is a performance, this stuff looks real.

Our culture today rejects anything that seems too manufactured, too polished, too precious. We want the real thing.

But what does this have to do with journals and art? I wonder that myself.

It was a little less than 15 years ago when I first saw example of art journals at a presentation given by Tracy and Teesha Moore. The idea that you’d make art that is just for you–just like you’d write a diary that you never intended anyone else to read–and then show it, was so new that it was a shock to me. But now art journals and sketchbooks are hardly new; in fact, they seem to be all over. There’s the 1000 Journals Project. The Sketchbook Project. There are books and books of examples and how-to’s; there are websites, too.

It used to be that artists’ sketchbooks were private places where they worked out the challenges of larger, finished pieces that were intended for a wider audience. The finished piece was “the real thing.” Today the opposite seems to be true–those raw, unfinished pages seem more real. More genuine.

And so even if the popularity of “the Jersey Shore” makes me worry, more sketchbooks–and more art–in the world doesn’t.

My Journal, My Hair

Last night, I tried to draw my hair.

About a week ago, there was a Yahoo! story explaining that someone had spotted a three-inch-long scar just behind the hairline of Princess Kate by carefully looking at a close-up photo. The writer wondered what that scar could be from.

Most of the comments on the story were to be expected (“Who cares?”, “Give her a break!”, and “So what if she’s not perfect!”). My own thought was: Three inches? That’s nothing–mine is almost 13! My second thought was that my hair would never, ever, give me away.

That’s because my thick, wild, wavy, course hair–which has been my bane for most of my existence–keeps my secret for me. My hair hides the scar from my brain surgery completely: no one that I meet can see my scar, and it would take more than a chance close-up with a camera to reveal it. I can feel it there, but only because I have memorized its location. My scar will never tell the secret of my surgery (and even if it yelled, the sound would be muffled by the many, many layers of hair I have).

So now I finally can say that have something better than what a princess does. And my relationship with my hair has changed from “hate” to “love-hate.” This is progress–trust me. The journal page above doesn’t begin to communicate just how incorrigible it is! That would take at least a few more angst-filled journals…