considering a green border

Don't do anything else. 

Just be an artist.

Live in a kind of regime.

Manage the time you are given.  

Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize for Literature 2018

how do we know when we are ourselves?

 Emily Dickenson hid herself away.  It was the only way she could create the condition she needed to write. (journal entry)

my grandmother's basket quilt

Simply to wake up to the very life we're living,

which is so excellent once one get's one's mind and one's desires out of its way

and lets it act of its own accord.     John Cage

love

celebrating the every day awesomeness of light and colour and velvet and roses and trees inside houses and you, my loves.  Celebrate the winter holidays, however you do.  xo

a dreamer in vivid colour

 But still it is not yet enough to have memories.

One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come agian.  For it is not yet the memories themselves.

Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves -  not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes from them.

Rainer Maria Rilke - blood remembering

brave shapes of colour, not sad

to go beyond what I know

to make without a firm plan

these little squares of colour lead me.  I place them next to each other, and then listen to hear how they like their neighbours

I notice how they each have a presence, whether bold or quiet, and how the diagonal pathsthey make either blend in with others to create a firm yet gentle ground, or stand out boldly and are perhaps too loud

I have to wait until more colours go up

sometimes there is too much darkness and greyness.  how did that happen?  I am still the boss

I want to make something brave, not sad.  I often have to un-pick and re-sew.

The bravery of these colours, and these neat square shapes hand-sewn one to the other.

These colours and their paths are the subject today.  The SUBJECTS.

The object I end up with deals with these subjects, and that's all it does.

And while I sew them, I listen to the book about animal rights and astrology.

(Journal entry today)
 

Be defeated, carry on

 Art work is hard.

Artwork is a working through of disappointments and a growing recognition of failure to the point of defeat.  But still we wake up, and there is inspiration, and we go on.

Be defeated.  Carry on.     Agnes Martin