studio - behind the scenes
Winter Sun: Found Art
A Conversation with https://merkatart.substack.com/
Merkat: …I sit typing, milking the last drops of serotonin from my brain in order to stay afloat. Are you in the same boat? Let’s ward off scurvy together. A lime for your January thoughts.
Mia: I used to embrace my inner brown bear and crave winter hibernation. That bear is a cumbersome creature, no? But I have been working a long time now on what you offer in the second stanza of your poem, Dark Channels; climbing into that unsafe boat. Now, boatless, I am in the ocean trying to stay atop the waves of like and dislike, can do and can’t do. Sound Buddhist? It is.
I must add that the adamantine sun of winter still helps, as does giving that old bear a hug now and then (and yeah, the blog schedule gets gappy!) And while I might struggle to follow my own prescription, I believe more in-person contact is good medicine. Less Zoom, more coffee shop. Great Lakes people are winter people! Let’s get outside!
Art by Fan and Dusty, 2013
105 billion pounds…
…is how much plastic waste was generated in the US in 2021, according to a report in the Guardian. Where does it go? Not “away”, since on Finite Earth, there is no “away”. These particular bits of plastic waste were perversely diverted from the trash by my late aunt, who was loath to throw out anything that might be reused. Her pin-neat apartment concealed hundreds of ancient odds and ends. But bread bag clips? Hundreds of them? Equally perversely, when I came across them, I decided to keep them, mostly as a cautionary tale of eccentricity.
Years later, I have found a use for them…
… a new assemblage and new poem is in the works, equal parts statement, question, hope.
The Four Sisters
Haleakala Crater, Maui, 9740 Ft.
L-R Jackie, Vicky, Anne-Marie (Mia), Lyn
When we (on the left) were young, and visited the Rocky Mountains in the summer, The Three Sisters were always pointed out. Hey, that’s us! Then in 2004 we met Lyn, our oldest sister, a secret since childhood. Now we have another mountain, Haleakala, house of the sun, guardian of Lyn’s new home, to commemorate our sisterhood!
I too am commemorating, working on stories about my lifelong voyage, my rocky road, to this brilliant summit.
at the Colborne Art Gallery
My assemblage, Prairie 1 – Unsettled, is in good company at the CAG Juried Show until the end of October. The chosen works all inspire curiosity (how did they do that?) and creativity (how would I express this?) As the leaves drift down from the maple tree outside my window I marvel at how others have captured such exquisite moments in nature.
The Colborne Art Gallery itself is in the old county land registry, thus the bars on the windows. What was more valuable back then than title to land swindled away from First Nations! It is a land acknowledgment made manifest. That it is now an art gallery might go some way towards Reconciliaction. Let us be mindful when we cross that threshold.
Making a book…
… without writing a word. What I did on my summer vacation: Book Art with Holly Dean (Art + Play) offered in Port Hope by Loyalist College as part of their new summer arts program. We had a week of mixed media fun learning on the one hand to let go of measuring, overthinking, and preconceptions, and on the other hand to build skills in pamphlet stitch, Coptic stitch, and long stitch bindings. My favourite, however, is the jewel-like concertina book, a secret book that could fit in the palm of your hand. I have much written that could fill a book or ten and now an exciting new path to sharing my work one book at a time!
Nothing to see here, folks….
Yesterday’s Art Salon was a little Contemplative Photography field trip to the Cobourg Ecology garden and the salvage littered brownlands behind Legacy. Vicky forgot her camera bag and was reduced to using her old iPhone camera. I was using my old film camera. Vicky shares my disdain for trying to photograph something with only a small LCD screen for reference, the view either wiped out by the sun’s glare or dulled out by the deep shade, the resulting photo altered by the phone’s computer, serving up the image it thinks you want. I not-so-secretly love my old menu-less camera, which I can use without thinking, concentrating on the image I’m forming, but I do have to wait – finish the film – and wait – take it to Peterborough Photo for processing – before I see the results. Which is worse?