Complementary Messes

So it turns out that of all the 21 Secrets  “Make a Mess Magic” spreads that I did, I love the purple and yellow combination the most. Here is my finished spread, which I called “The Goddess of Paradox”. As with all my blog posts, click on the image to see a larger version. I’ve been scrolling the net lately for paintings which are out of copyright and it just so happens that I adore old paintings anyway,  especially 19th century paintings with women or goddesses paradoxin them! This one spoke to me about how relaxed she feels about living with Paradox (she does look relaxed doesn’t she!!?) and about how she contains multitudes and many opposing  contradictory characteristics, and she’s fine with that. And so am I.

I include here my process: first I made a mess using purple and yellow paint. Not only some interesting shades of brown but also some olive greens emerged, who knew?purple-and-yellow-mess

Then I did some stencilling in a dark olive green and a very light yellowy white. I started to love the page at this point.   I searched my images of paintings and found this wonderful woman who had some pale purple tones on her body and i knew she was perfect. I sponged a darker area underneath where I was going to stick her, so she would stand out and also tone in better to the background.

purple-and-yellow-stencilledFinally I dialogued with her to find out what she wanted to tell me, just as I do in SoulCollage, and with most of my art journal spreads.

She said she is the Goddess of paradox and she got me thinking about how I have many opposite characteristic as part of me, so i wrote some of these in tiny letters amongst the Flower of Life stencilling across the bottom of the page. I guess we all contain multitudes, I suspect you do too! Thanks for visiting my blog, here’s a bit of Walt Whitman to finish: “Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

purple-and-yellow-collaged

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The Joy of the Sea

joy-of-the-seaA few minutes drive from where I live the Brunswick River joins the sea at Brunswick Heads, and throughout summer and autumn I like to swim everyday in the river, at high tide if possible. Sometimes in spring and early summer it’s cold getting in, so I have a little ritual that I do. As I dive in I ask for the “Joy of the Ocean” to be mine, and I imagine the joy that all the sea creatures, especially dolphins and fish must have as they glide and leap about in the sea, and that I am receiving all that joy into my body. Somehow this stops me feeling so cold. Slightly. I imagine that I am asking this of the Goddess of the Sea. Anyway, this spread turned out to be about that.

I’ve bought several 21 Secrets online art journaling courses now. As I think I’ve mentioned, some of the classes are inspiring and others not so much. I bought the Spring 2015 class largely because Roxanne Coble was one of the teachers. I made this page after I watched her videos. I know it’s not really very like her work, but well, my own thing started happening, so I just went with it. I decorated a separate page of watercolour paper with stencils and paint and gel pens, using the same colour scheme  as my spread, and cut this paper up to use as collage. Roxanne was working in an old altered book which had some black and white photos in it. As I was just working on a blank page in my Strathmore art journal and not an altered book,  I collaged down some old photos and other images before I started painting. I was loving my colour scheme, and even though i tried really hard to paint in some black areas , as Roxanne is fond of doing, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it in the end. That dark Prussian blue was the darkest i wanted to use. I sponged an area of Prussian blue on which to glue my focal image of the underwater ballet dancer, so that she would stand out against the background. Here is the collaged page before I started adding paint: thank you for visiting my blog.joy-of-the-sea-collage

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