From The Journal

I finished a new journal last week - here are a few of my more successful pages.  

It's funny though, many of them are not my "best" drawing or the "best" use of technique, but pages that I made in unique circumstances or that were inspired by something particularly meaningful. 

Paper that I marbled my very own self in my kitchen

 On my trip to Brussels I took the SLOW train to Gent (I mean, really slow) and satisfied myself with recording all of the stops we made along the way from "Bruxelles-Midi" to "St. Pier - Gent".  Later that night I treated myself at a lovely neighborhood market with local sausages and cheese, fresh fruits and nuts. These were my first pages of the trip and though they are a little sparse, they got me started for the rest of the visit.

 Christmas Eve 2014.  I'd been drawing all break and just generally enjoying the beautiful Muscat weather.  After some last minute Christmas shopping we saw a tiny sliver of a moon hanging above some buildings.  The horizon was just starting to turn orange and I made Max wait in the car for a few minutes while I sketched an outline to watercolor later.  

   

Our sweet housekeeper's mother passed away last week and she left me a perfectly simple and expressive note. "I am so sad" it read.

Regardless of nationality or language, loss is something that translates.

The text behind the Sri Lankan woman is Sinhala, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka.       

More Visual Journaling of Turkey

Remnants From The Orient Express

 Above is the ramshackle neighborhood where I later wrote:

Do I regret walking the winding road from the Chora church, along the Thessodosius walls, past a hundreds of years old syanagoge, past the old women leaving chicken necks for local cats and to the Egripike gate alone because some 10 year old, after being dared by his friends, raced around the corner and slapped my backside before disappearing into his house?  No.  I wish I had paid more attention to his quickening footsteps or walked faster when the group of boys crashed their kite, weighed down by a water bottle of sand, at my feet instead of looking up to see where it had come from but these are all choices we make as explorers.  

Yeah, it happens.

Visual Journal: Istanbul

Before we left for Istanbul a few weeks ago I made a small journal with Arches water color paper.  I used coptic style binding to allow any page to lay flat for drawing or painting.  It was my first attempt at visual journaling a trip along the way and all and all it went pretty well.  I certainly did not fill up the whole thing in a week - it has been a work in progress since I got home which has actually added to the enjoyment for me.  I get to relive moments of my trip and use processes I couldn't manage with the small art kit I packed.

Istanbul Traveling Art Kit: 

5 Sepia toned  Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens
4 Black Micron Sakura pens in varying sizes
4 Watercolor paintbrushes: 2 round, 1 rigger, 1 flat
Handful of graphitint watercolor pencils
Needle and thread for sewing in extra pages, maps, receipts + sharpener and eraser in an Altoids box
Very small 12 color Lukas watercolor tin
2 tubes of gauche: copper & gold 

I found that when I drew from real life I didn't use pencils - I used my smallest ink pens and made lots of lines until I came upon the right one.  I also found that staying put in one place long enough to sketch something has imprinted those places much stronger in my memory.  I remember what the foaming yogurt drink tastes like or how cold it was outside the house with a tree growing through the front porch roof.  I usually sketched on site and painted in the evening while I listened to a fantastic book about Istanbul.  I know, heaven.

Here's what I will say about drawing:  for me it's a constant issue of confidence.  I have wanted to draw for years but never thought I was a "drawer".  I have several reference books and all the materials, but I didn't get serious about it until moving to Oman.  Every time I drew I became so embarrassed about my inability to make something look like I wanted it to or about what I now realized is just my personal style that I threw it away and didn't draw for weeks.  When I moved here I said "enough!"  and just started keeping a visual journal, the only rule being that I couldn't throw anything out and I had to draw something every week and then every day for a while.

I finally got comfortable drawing inside my house where no one could see and slowly started showing them to my husband.  But the idea of drawing in public where someone could look over my shoulder and see immediately what kind of an amateur I am gave me night sweats.   Enter vacation where no one knows you and will never see you again.  One of the many reasons I like to travel is that you become completely free from whatever idea of yourself you have or (and usually more trapping) the idea of you that the people around you have.  I didn't grow up making art and when I think about making art at home I feel a bit like a fraud.  So in Istanbul I threw the old non-drawing Brooke out the window and became Brooke who draws.  It was a really great experience and has increased my confidence for studio work at home.  I have been working from photographs of our trip now and I hope to have a completed book in a few weeks.      

Notes from our food tour

Map of Hagia Sophia

 

Sweetness

I was trying to remember when I started calling you sweetness. I honestly don't know.  

  

My most recent book came from a short exchange between me and my husband.  At some point in our marriage my husband began calling me sweetness.  I'm a serial nicknamer and thus I have allowed him a few of his choosing.  

I first designed a print taken from the sucrose molecule and then printed it along with text of our short email chain.  I also printed the molecule pattern on the outside flypages. 

Then I bound the two sheets into a single signature using a butterfly stitch.  I secured the tale with a small silver bead I found in the Muttrah souk here in Muscat and a small pull tag.  I housed the book in a slipcase that has a small paper collage and the full sucrose image lightly transferred onto the front using gel medium.  

I've been trying to devise projects that are more meaningful than the blank journals I've been working on for the past few years.  I've found it more successful to start with text - something personal or meaningful to me and work out from there instead of devising the structure and working backwards.  

I've been more productive in my studio the last few months that the last two years combined - 

pictures forthcoming. 

Here's to a year of fruitful making.  

Sperm Donor

Got your attention, huh?

The past few months I've been working on my artist book skills...and they haven't come easily.  I've wanted to make books about a lot of things lately: living in morocco, infertility, changing family dynamics, good books I've read, pictures I've taken, dogs and husbands I love, Moroccan rug prints, the list goes on and on.  But whenever I sit down to tell a story that is personal I'm completely bereft of ideas and enthusiasm.  I don't know if I'm afraid my technical skills won't live up to my emotional attachment to these ideas or what, but It took me 8 months to get halfway through a book about our trip to Portugal last year but then I hated it and dismantled it for parts.

So, Max and I have been pulling prompts from a grocery sack the last few weeks.  He has to write about them and I have to create a book around the prompt.  The first one we drew said "A Golf Caddy Learns a Dark Secret".  Since my reading and thinking habits trend non-fiction I immediately hit the google to research golf scandals and the like - thinking I'd take my inspiration from real life.  (Max wrote a delightful piece of fiction.  Our brains work very differently.)

I came across this crazy story about a caddy who claimed he was seduced by his golfer solely for the purpose of getting pregnant.  He later sued her saying he was an "unwitting sperm donor".  Close enough for me.  I know it's a super weird thing to make a book about, but for some reason it worked for me and I was able to try a few new techniques I'd been wanting to experiment with.

The design and construction are really simple - mostly I wanted to see if I could finish a task and stick to a theme.  Telling a story I had no personal attachment to was a really great exercise.  It let me step back and see what worked and what didn't and how to construct an idea using mostly images.  I think after a few more goes I'll be ready to tell my own stories.      

"Sperm Donor" 

 Accordion Fold  

Paper: Arches Cold Press, Ingres

Matte Medium Image Transfers 

  Text taken verbatim from newspaper clippings