MY Artist Journal

Well, if you peek on over at Iris' page you will see what she is doing with some of her pages as an art guinea pig in her copy of Your Art Journal, and here are my art guinea pig pages. Maybe my other a-g-p's will choose to show us some of their pages this weekend? We can hope.

Here are the first pages as I open my journal. I just loved playing with all of those arms and legs cut-outs on the back pages ... I really wanted them to move but I can't find my stash of brads ANYwhere! I ended up cutting apart some paperclips (I can't find my wire stash box either!!) and curling the ends both in back and in front: so the appendages on the right-hand character do move. Yay.

And here is a page with fishes - an element that I used on another page, but liked so much that I made several more... they all fit into that purple pocket! You can't tell at this level of photography, but the scales on the pink and brown fishes are all individually glued in place. Great texture! Those two silver birds over on the top left are my fave metal duct tape (Hello hardware store) over cardstock - but they just wash out in the light. I'd have to rig much more subtle lighting to get them to look metallic, not white. And in keeping with my obsessive urges to use every scrap of paper on my desk (Earth Day, 1970, came at a particularly formative point in my life) these next two pages are filled with the artful (I hope) placement of some very tiny and pretty oddly shaped pieces of ... snipetts. One of them happened to be folded in half and so I just glued it down like that - then I realised that it was a little book! So I wrote in it and then started folding more and more papers and squeezed all of my thoughts behind these little doors. Among other things I was extolling the virtues of my children, which are legion, let me tell you. (As are the things that they need to learn.) But motherhood continues to be a deeply spiritual process for me and I am aghast most days at my childrens' ability to walk me right up the steps to the God/dess Of My Understanding. Where I remember to breathe. Where I weep.God Bless The Children.

Last night our adoption group celebrated The Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. These children, aged 5-12, about a dozen of them, ranged and caroused like puppies: running themselves ragged, glad to see each other again, eager to be called in for our potluck supper, thrilled to go outside again, tumbling back inside and settling like lambs to hear me read our traditional story about The Lady in the Moon, the littlest girl sitting in the lap of the eldest girl.

It's small wonder that I weep as I do.

So, off with us. Go make art that shows how much the children matter. And then start prepping yourself to vote in November like YOUR vote was going to make or break some child's life.

Because I guarantee it will.