Mothers' Day

My mother passed away in November 2001.

She was an amazing woman and a wonderful mother. Mother's Day is often the hardest time of year for me. It is the time that grief and the sadness of losing her visit me more strongly than other times of the year like her birthday or other holidays.

I started working on a a piece of art (Memory Box or Shrine) a few years after she died. It has taken me quite a while as I have been looking for and waiting to find just the right elements and photos and ideas that would express how I remember her.

I have finally finished the piece. So, this is for you Ruth Elkins Philkill.

Circle Journal - Play

February was the month that the members of our Circle Journal had agreed to create pages on the theme of PLAY. Interestingly enough, it was during that month that one of us had painful surgery on her knee, one of us was dealing with a seriously ill parent and one of us was dealing with an unemployed husband and some serious financial difficulty.

We tossed around the idea of canning the theme play but decided if we had more time that it would probably be good for us if we had to contemplate and create around the theme of PLAY. We extended our completion date and decided to persevere with the topic of PLAY. After I committed myself to the project, it was a welcome relief to contemplate and create around the theme and it gave me moments of relief and respite and a chance to PLAY amidst the pressing and painful issues of life surrounding us as friends and Circle Journal collaborators.

I thought I would share these pages with you all and hope you can find a moment of play or joy or laughter in viewing pages created by three women looking for a bit of PLAY.

Jan's Page

Cindy's Page
Cyndi's Page
This is the three of us. Jan's pedaling, Cindy's in the front
riding backwards and that's me (Cyndi) hanging off
the back of the bike with the butterfly wings

Whimsical Clocks

Since my husband used to own a cigar shop, I have MANY cigar boxes at my disposal. Recently I have started making some whimsical assemblage clocks with my collection of vintage paper, interesting ephemera and items I have collected on my various training trips around the world.

I used cigar box tops and some cigar bands for the heart clocks.

These clocks are for sale in my Etsy Shop.

Circle Journals - Grace

Cindy B.'s Page

Jan's Page

Under the words on the white vellum is a photos of Jan as a little girl.

My page (Cyndi)

I have recently reconnected with two friends of mine who live in Michigan, Jan and Cindy. I used to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a short period of time from 1995 to 1997. After moving away I lost contact with these two amazing women. Thanks to Facebook and websites, we connected again a few months ago.

Both of these women are wonderfully creative and I suggested that we resume our relationship through making Circle Journals. For those of you who do not know what Circle Journals are I will try and explain. Any number of people decide to participate in a Circle Journal. Usually a theme or a variety of themes are chosen and the participants make art pages on those themes. A fixed size of journal paper is decided upon at the beginning. Each person makes a page for the other participants as well as themselves. Our Circle Journal group decided upon a 9 x 12 inch format using watercolor paper as our base. We decided to choose a different theme for each month and to work on the Journals for at least six months. We have a month to work on the page and then send each other a page by the end of each month.

We are hoping that sometime this summer we will be able to somehow meet together and design covers for our journals and then get them bound. It will be a time of reunion and remembrance and appreciate for the time, talent and friendship we have experienced during the time we have worked on our Circle Journals.

Our first theme was GRACE. The pages that we created are shown above. They do not do the pages complete justice as both Jan and Cindy's pages are interactive and opening the doors and panels on their pages are part of the experience. On the back of Cindy's page she wrote this poem in beautiful calligraphy:

sunnrise, sunset ceaseless;
seasons transform.

lunar revolutions,
tides ebb and flow.

often disregarded
yet unfailing;

grace in their wake.

Our next theme is PLAY. I am anxiously awaiting the pages from Jan and Cindy and will share them with you here on my blog when they arrive.

I would encourage anyone to get some friends together and try a Circle Journal. It is great fun, artistically challenging, makes getting mail WAY more fun, not to mention the great art journal you will have when all is said and done.

Give it a try! I would love to hear from any of you who have participated in a Circle Journal. Leave a comment here with a link to any journals in which you have participated. I would love to see your journals.

Women at the Well - A Spiritual Spa Day

I had the privilege of participating in a Spiritual Spa Day recently. The theme was "Expanding your View of God." At the beginning of the day the facilitator read the poem about the blind men and the elephant. The poem shows how each man's understanding of what an elephant is was based on his own limited experience of the elephant parts right in front of them that were touched and felt.

After reading the poem, the facilitator encouraged each of us to look through some photos and pick one that we were drawn to. She then asked us to write about the photos or what the photos evoked in us in the voice of God, to write as if God were describing the events or feelings or thoughts depicted in the photo.

I chose a photo with lots of water. This is what I wrote:

I am the essence of life. Without me there would be no living thing. I permeate all life. I flow, I move and am rarely dormant or at rest/ I connect all things and am the common denominator in all living things. I am within and without. I surround and support. My form may change but my essence remains the same. I have the power to overwhelm and destroy but the power of my love is greater than my ability to destroy. I invite you to lie down and rest within me. Drink and receive refreshment from me. In the stillness know that I will never leave you nor forsake you. I am everywhere. There is no missing my presence. I am beautiful and I am vast yet a drop of me can be enough to sustain you. Look in to me and see your reflection. Jump in to me and I will support you envelop you and refresh you. I am bottomless.

After writing we were encouraged to draw or paint something that would personalize the words that we wrote. The watercolor at the top of the page is what I painted.

Illustration Friday - Legendary

Here is LEGENDARY Steve Martin playing the legendary literary character Cyrano in one of my favorite of his roles in the movie "Roxanne." This Artist Trading Card is from a swap I participated in where we had to illustrate 3 cards with our favorite movies.

Intricate - Illustration Friday

This is my first submission to the blog Illustration Friday. I found out about this blog just recently and felt that this painting fit well for the theme, which is Intricate.

This is part of the mural painting I created for my grand-niece Paige Caroline. Nature always shows us beauty in its intricate details. It was a challenge to paint this much detail life-sized. There are little animals and insects hidden throughout the mural. My niece is now two years old and loves to hunt for and find all the hidden elements in the mural. I am hoping the mural instills in her a love of nature and an eye for seeing not just what is apparent but to look beneath the surface of things to see the hidden beauty in all of life.

Starting Over

So, it has been over two years since I wrote my first post on this blog and never came back to write again. The good thing is I did go to that Artist Trading Card meeting and it really got me into trading with folks through the internet as well as live swaps. So here are a few of my favorite cards that I have made and traded over the past few years.

What is most important is what I learned through the process. So here goes:

1. I can draw. I stopped for so long I was not secure in my abilities but now I am! :-)
2. I can use a variety of medium fairly well.
3. I love a challenge.
4. I get bored using just one medium all the time.
5. I am thrilled to own other people's art work and am challenged by their art and how they see life and the world.
6. Artist Trading Cards is a great way to experiment and try new mediums. Heck the canvas is only 2 inches by 3.50 inches. Make a mistake? Just toss it and start over.
7. The deadlines for sending in the Artist Trading Cards helped me to be disciplined and to actually finish projects.
8. The feedback from other artists is very encouraging and I don't feel like I am creating in a vacuum any more.
9. Working on artist Trading cards built my skill levels and my confidence and offered me a chance to play again and discover new things about myself on many different levels.
10. The community of artists trading in the Artist Trading Card community are, for the most part, kind, generous and encouraging fellow artists and travelers in this life we have been given.

So, before I obsess too much and decide to erase this whole blog, I will finish up and post this.