back to my roots

Last weekend I went back to my creative roots and worked on mixed media journal covers. I finally finished binding them up last night and put them up at amanobooks.com today.

xxxvi
mixed media
6×8 inch handbound blank journal
sold

When I first started on my creative path, I began with making journals. It was something I always did for myself and journaling was always something I have done. It was a natural extension of me. Then I started creating collages on the covers, and that felt right. If you click here you can see my earliest mixed media collage journals I made, starting in 2002. Creating so many mixed media panels reawakened the desire in me to paint and it also allowed for me to grow creatively and gain the confidence in myself that I could paint. In 2006 I started to paint and begain to show and sell my paintings that year. (I can’t believe it’s only been 4 years!)

gather
mixed media
6×8 inch handbound blank journal
sold

I have made *a lot* of mixed media panels for journals since 2002. When I started working on them last weekend, it all came back to me. Kind of like putting on a really worn in, old, favorite pair of slippers. For me, creating these panels is a different brain process than when I paint, even though I use mixed media techniques in my larger paintings. When I create my collages, I feel like a sifter. My drawers that are filled with papers, photographs, transers are all open and spilling out onto the floor. Bins filled with torn pieces of paper that I thought looked too interesting to throw away surround me. All I do is pick up pieces of this and that and somehow it all sort of falls into place.

The four books that I made last week found me translating some of the symbols and imagery that I have been exploring in my paintings. Creating these panels really helped to work things out in my head, clarify the direction that I’m going in. My panels have always served that purpose for me as well- working out ideas, exploring imagery before I go bigger with canvas. An exploratory playground for larger pieces.

At one point, while I was sewing the sticks above to the canvas panel, I looked at my hands- my fingers were covered in paint and glue as I pulled the threaded needle up and down through the holes I had drilled through the covers. How many times in the past had I looked down at my hands like this? So many…but it had been a long time since my eyes had rested upon my hands in this way. And it felt right. I jsut love to combine paint with different textures, thread, papers, sticks even.

This is me.