happy new year

winter is the  season for tending our inner garden
Rilke

old things

By following the materials and the process
for what I don't really understand
the meaning becomes revealed.
In this way the work is poetic.
journal entry today

red inside

 

'She layers existing histories with new narratives suggested by current events
to create a psychological terrain of pathos, tenderness and unease.
The dualities of love and suffering, danger and protection, life and death and
the human need for understanding are universal themes'

about Berlinde de Bruckere

dream cloth

 

 

Freud was right when he said that making art is magical thinking
- as dreams are -
and that art is the last place where the omnipotence of thought holds sway.

Donald Kuspit

gratitude

It's a pattern of aliveness, one of allowing.
One of not knowing what will come next
yet at the same time, comfortable in the knowledge that it will be the same as it always has been.
A looseness
A going with it
A plunging in.
But also a feeling of tenderness and serenitiy.  A kind of joy.
I've been working steadily on my gratitude log cabin piece
195 more weeks until we are married 50 years.
Hoping that everything stays the same.
Our health, our minds, the world, our kids' well-being.

Journal text from December 11

act of hope

 

doing and making are acts of hope
and as that hope grows,
we stop feeling overwhelmed by the troubles of the world.

sister Corita Kent

fantastic side track

 

That which seems like a false step
is just the next step

Agnes Martin

what you put into the lives of others

"what you put into the lives of others
comes back into your own"

my mother said that her mother said this all the time

intimacy of place

The vintage man's kimono is a gift from melanie
I have hung it on my studio curtain rod for two years, now I will fold it up
I don't know how to use it just now.  I need to wait.
The LaVallee quilt is ready for binding.
I choose the rayon that turned greenish when I put it into the alkaline water Ned made me from wood ash.  It had originally been pink, dyed from staghorn sumac drupes.

moment in time

thinking about
story telling
religion
representation
spirituality
secular, intellectual modernities
asserting and attending to systems of belief
the condition in which it is possible for an image to bond
the conscious touching of a moment in time
the impossibility of pushing an additional layer of colour into a long-dried wall when a fresh start                                                                                                    may be the only way
the violence of erasure
the resurfacing of images
where do cut fragments go?
what are half-lives?
what might emerge from the debris littering the landscape?
because when you erase a drawing there are still traces
when you un-pick a stitching we still know it had been there
there is the memory of it

beth stuart