Author Archives: Alison

2012 in photos…Part one, January to April

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Happy new year everyone. I thought I would just summarise my year in photos. I narrowed it down to 3 or 4 for each month.

This is sunrise on Jan 1st 2012 up at Australia’s most easterly point (Cape Byron)

 

January 1st again, lunch with Eirinn and Rowena on their last day in Byron Bay before they headed back to Holland. It’s now been a whole year since I saw them! Wah!

 

 

My birthday party, we played pictionary in 2 teams and had a wonderful time.

 

 

 

Towards the end of January we visited New Zealand. Here we are on the boat to the South Island, where we spent a couple of days walking the Queen Charlotte track, as well as visiting Golden Bay and Kaikoura.

FEBRUARY:
The Queen Charlotte track is a glorious 5 day walk along the QC Sound. We only did 2 days of it, staying in a bed and breakfast overnight.

 

 

 

Wharariki beach is a remote beach at the very top of the west coast of the South Island, and it’s absolutely stunning.

 

 

 

In Kaikoura on the east coast we met up with my friend Belinda and had a  long walk around the headland and some  close encounters with a seal colony! This is not to be recommended.

 

 

Valentine’s day saw us back on the North Island in Wellington.

 

 

 

MARCH:
My vocal group The Songbirds performed at International Women’s day and we were very well received. As usual…those girls can really sing! Plus they’re all shining spirits and I think that comes through when they sing.

 

My lovely daughter Katy came over to visit from London (with her cousin Hannah) for only 3 weeks. Here we are having a coffee break on the Byron lighthouse walk.

 

 

The two sisters and our two daughters…a happy lunch at the Conscious Cafe in Byron. They were admiring my art journal.

 

 

 

Another Songbirds performance at the Sphinx Rock cafe, WAY out in the country, on a wet Sunday afternoon. We had lots of family and friends there supporting us.

 

APRIL

We drove to Sydney for a couple of weeks because we had a non Simultaneous house exchange happening with a couple from Cornwall. We visited my friend Domenic at Dangar Island on the way down.

We headed straight up to the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, for some quality time with my old friend, movie buff extraordinaire, Noel. We had a strenuous bush walk with coffee and cakes at the end!

Also stayed a couple of nights with my brother Chris and his family.

While staying a few nights at my sister Noela’s place we had a family reunion with some of my siblings.

 

 

 

Here we are being tourists in Sydney, my home town! We are on the ferry to Manly, just going past the Opera House as you can see. At Manly one has to buy fish and chips to eat down at the beach front promenade while fighting off the seagulls.

The dark places

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I finally put something on this background that has been sitting here for months. I blogged about how I made the background here. For a long time I thought maybe I would do something about fire, since it looks a bit like flames. My sister commented that she thought it looked like a page about fear, but I didn’t feel to write a page about all my fears. I thought I’d rather write about what helps me to navigate my fears. Not just my fears, but the dark places of anxiety and depression as well. So I found some kind looking eyes and stuck them into the blackness. The goddess with the gold dust is showing me that there is treasure to be found by going through the darkness, and the eyes are showing me that I am not alone, they are there to help. I’m not sure who “they” are, something like spirit guides, or guardian angels, or aspects of my higher self. And maybe they’re all the same. In any case they are serene, unafraid, and they give me the gifts of compassion (for others going through dark places), courage and resilience.

I have been working in my journal a lot in the last few weeks, wanting to get all the pages finished for our exhibition (and they are finished, yahoo!) so I have a backlog of pages I would like to blog about. So I intend to try to blog a bit more frequently for a while to get through them all.

We’ve booked out tickets for Europe next year, nearly 4 months, wow! I’m still looking into what kind of journal I might keep while I’m traveling, there’s so many different options!

Growing Older

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A few weeks ago I had a week when a few different people commented that I looked unhappy lately. This perplexed me because actually I don’t think I’ve ever been happier really! So I figured out it’s because the corners of my mouth are succumbing to gravity, so if you catch sight of me not smiling I probably do look unhappy, or even grumpy! This is of course a rather disturbing new development in my aging process, but not one I can do much about, unless I have a facelift which I won’t.I have noticed that not everyone gets this dropping mouth thing, I guess its hereditary because it happened to my mother. I wish it wasn’t happening. Sometimes I feel a bit depressed when I unexpectedly catch sight of myself in the mirror or not smiling in photos. On the other hand, some people my age are much more wrinkled than I am, so I suppose we all have different aging processes. I’m trying not to think about it, I mean I’m healthy and happy, and glad to be alive and able to go through the aging process! I think it was Maurice Chevalier who said “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative”.

So I made a page about all this and here it is. It is a fairly simple page really. I used some stencils and stamps and the red flowers are from some old wrapping paper.

I’ve nearly completed my first art journal..I started it in September last year, so its taken me 15 months. I have been working in a couple of other journals as well, but this is my large A4 one and I’m feeling quite proud of it. We have an art journal “exhibition” on next Thursday when some of the brave souls from our art journaling class (including me) will be putting them on display. It’s a bit scarey! I’ll take some photos and let you know how it all goes. I’ll be smiling in the photos.

Recent pages in my A5 journal

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I seem to be using my A5 size journal as my more experimental one these days, where I try out things at my art journal class with Zom. This is the page I did last week….our prompt was simply to write about our favourite number! Not something I’d thought about much, but it only took me a few seconds to realise it was 8, I’ve always liked it, probably because its in   my birth date, 18th. It also makes me think of a crimson colour, not sure why. Anyway, no doubt  this is all fascinating to you but I really want to tell you about this page because I’m proud of it.

The process: used Zom’s idea of cutting out a stencil of the number and gessoing around it. Then painted the page with red and wiped much of it off. The paint takes to the ungessoed parts of the page very differently, so the eights really stand out. Painted a watery purple over the whole page and wiped it back. Then I used the negative part of the stencil I had cut to make some white eights. I had also painted some red and purple on a spare sheet of paper, then used a stencil and dylusions spray inks on this. I scanned the result and reduced it in size, printed it out and cut the large decorated eight from it.  Then I cut borders from the original piece of stencilled paper. Somehow it became necessary for me to be on the page “presenting” my friend,  the large eight. I would never have thought of devoting a whole page to a number, but I’m pleased with what I did here and the harmony of the colours and patterns.

Here is another recent page in my small journal. The inspiration for this page was the black and white photo of the Indian woman who seemed to be looking so meaningfully at me. This is a page about the sort of older wise woman or crone that I would like to be. For the heading I printed the words out on the laser printer and made a transfer onto clear sticky tape.The angel is from some old wrapping paper.

I seem to use a lot of angels in my art journal! I started this page in class, we had to use a credit card to apply paint in some way. I swooped some gold paint on this blue background and they reminded me of angel wings. Also it just happened that I had put this poem by Hafiz up on the fridge that week, to remind me that I probably still could have many gifts and talents that I haven’t even discovered or used yet…I love that idea! I cut the gold border to echo the triangular shapes in the backgound. The angel has one wing which comes out from the page 3 dimensionally, but you can’t really see that from this photo. Here is the entire Hafiz poem:

There are so many gifts
Still unopened from your birthday,
There are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to you by God.
The Beloved does not mind repeating,
“Everything I have is also yours.”
Please forgive Hafiz and the Friend
If we break into a sweet laughter
When your heart complains of being thirsty
When ages ago
Every cell in your soul
Capsized forever
Into this infinite golden sea.
Indeed,
A lover’s pain is like holding one’s breath
Too long
In the middle of a vital performance,
In the middle of one of Creation’s favorite
Songs.
Indeed, a lover’s pain is this sleeping,
This sleeping,
When God just rolled over and gave you
Such a big good-morning kiss!
There are so many gifts, my dear,
Still unopened from your birthday.
O, there are so many hand-crafted presents
That have been sent to your life
From God.

~ Hafiz ~

Travel journal

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I’ve become interested in travel journaling in the last few weeks and have been looking at LOTS of travel journals, scrapbooks, smashbooks etc on the net. Next year we will be traveling back to Europe (both my offspring are over there) and of course I want to be journaling while I am there. I’m not sure what sort of journal I will be doing, but I thought I would have a go at making a travel journal retrospectively of our trip to Europe last year. So far I’ve only done the first part of it, which was about the 10 days we spent in Holland before we headed off to Switzerland and France. I used a plain 2 ring binder (A4 size). Here is the cover which I covered with a scrapbook paper and an antique map of Europe.

Here is the inside cover, on which I put one of my favourite photos taken in the Avignon palace, and surrounded it with a border of a scrapbook paper that I thought looked a bit medieval. The opening page with the airplane I made on photoshop.

First inside page shows some photos taken in Utrecht (where my son is living) I made a “filmstrip” of a few photos on photoshop.

 

I printed out quite a lot of photos so I had to find ways to fit them in. The small yellow page in the middle has a photo on each side.

On this next page I scanned a map of Utrecht that we had collected, made it lighter to create the background, then stuck strips of the original map around the edge as a border. I got my husband to write something in Dutch for me also.

The next 2 pages are a bit more “art journal” and less “scrapbook” like because I used a stencil and some spray ink to create a border (supposedly resembling some Delft blue pottery). First I collaged down some black and white pics of some delft buildings and gessoed over them. When I posted the photo of us in a giant clog on facebook the next day there was a funny little conversation about it, so I took a screen shot of this and included it on an extra flap in the centre. This is also a pocket in which I have put a pamphlet from the cathedral. Delft is where my husband went to University many years ago, so it was wonderful for me to see it with him.

We spent a couple of days in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which everyone seems to just call DenBosch. There is an amazing huge cathedral here, very gothic, and we were lucky enough to hear a beautiful choir singing there on the Sunday morning. I also met  Gerrit’s sister and brother (pictured at left). The background of this page is a photo I took in the cathedral which I made pale on photoshop.

There was also a museum dedicated to Hieronymous Bosch who hailed from this town in the 15th century. The flap/pocket in the middle is made from a postcard from this museum.

Here are some more photos from Utrecht, which was our base when we were in Holland. I had a belated Mother’s day lunch there with my two darlings. The page on the right is 3 photos of Utrecht cut in the French scrapbooking style known as Azza, which I discovered on the net. It is supposed to be a kind of tulip shape. The edges of this page are painted with watercolours. I expect I’ll be taking watercolour paints with me next year, but I don’t know whether I’ll be easily able to print out photos while we’re traveling.

This is the last page that I have done, with a couple of photos in Amsterdam.

I made a stamp myself (carved it with ezy carve) of some old Dutch houses (like you see in Amsterdam) and printed it here with a golden coloured ink. I’m rather proud of it. The page on the left is just a scrapbook paper with a photo stuck on it. I had fun one day visiting a scrapbook crafty shop in Lismore to buy some travel themed papers for this journal. I guess this travel journal is kind of a cross between a scrapbook and an art journal. It’s been a lot of work so far, and I’m only about one seventh into our trip (which was over 8 weeks long), I’m still learning as I go along, trying out different ways to present the photos, and to write some memories. It has been nice to relive some of those memories while making this journal. I hope that I continue with it. My other art journal is calling to me though, because it is nearly finished, only a few pages left…..and now Zom is back and art journaling classes have resumed, yahoo!

Blessings to all of you out there in blogland.

Altered board book

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I’ve finished my journal about my teaching career! I made it from a children’s board book which opens out concertina wise, and I posted about the first half of it here. One side is all in tones of muted reddy brown and cream, and the other side in blues and purples.

Here is the whole blue side:

I did not have very many photos that I had taken at school, considering the large number of concerts and plays I had produced over the years.

I love the blues and purples in the background on this side….I did quite a lot of bubble wrap printing also. I embellished it with some more illustrations from “Where the Wild things are”, and with a few borders cut from some scrapbook papers.

I painted over all the photos with a very transparent wash of a bluey purple colour to tie them into the background more, and I liked the effect.

 

I don’t miss my teaching career hardly at all really. Sometimes I remember some sweet moments,some creative things I did, or some proud moments, when my concerts really came together and the children loved performing. I also remember a lot of stressful moments!

I taught many adorable children over the years, and occasionally I will run into some, now grown up, and its usually wonderful to see them. I know many children I taught went on to study music or drama and some have told me that I had inspired them to make these choices, so that feels good!

 

This is how the journal looks folded out from the other side (which is about my earlier teaching years and also my university days.)

 

 

 

The Holy Tree

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“Beloved gaze in thine own heart, the Holy Tree is growing there…”

This is from “The Two Trees”, one of my favourite poems by W.B.Yeats. The poet encourages us to look into our own hearts with love and see the beauty and holiness growing there, and not to look through the “Bitter glass” where we see ourselves as an ugly bleak landscape distorted by self hatred. I will include the whole poem at the end of this post. Loreena McKennit has recorded a beautiful version of this poem (she wrote the music) which I have arranged to sing in my women’s choir Mystica, (and they do a beautiful job of it!).

How I made this page: I had collected this picture of a tree goddess from somewhere ages ago, and stuck her on a turquoise background. The page then sat untouched for months until I saw a mandala tree similar to this that someone posted on facebook. I considered downloading some mandalas form the net but I really wanted them to feel like mine, so I drew 3 mandalas on yellow paper using some coloured markers. The 3 largest ones are the originals. Then I scanned them and made them several different smaller sizes, printed them, cut them out and stuck them on the tree. I love the way they looked when they were reduced in size. I wrote most of the words of the first verse but had to leave out a couple of lines that wouldn’t fit.

You can find the Loreena McKennit version on youtube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chU3ZZ67-VI

I’ll leave you with the original poem, and remember you all have a beautiful holy tree growing in your own hearts. Love and light to all.

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there;

From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear.

The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light;

The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night;

The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody,

And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee.

There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days,

Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways;

Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart,

Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile,

Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while;

For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives,

Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves.

For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold,

The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old.

There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought;

Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat,

Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas!

Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

Living on the Inside

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There is a song by Michael Franks that I have loved for many years called “Living on the Inside” and I was listening to it driving along the other day and thinking that it applies to me now as I am feeling very happy and content in my relationship. It occurred to me that it would be nice to make an art journal page based on it. This is the song:

Here is the page I made, a pic of my husband and I living on the inside of our happiness bubble. The golden “raindrops” have bits of our wedding ceremony inside them (very small). Sorry, I’m a hopeless romantic. They are golden because the goddess Aphrodite supposedly sends a golden rain or mist down over lovers. I painted the background to match some of the colours that were in the bubble and I put our photo into the bubble using photoshop. I only know how to do about 6 things on photoshop, but they have come in very handy for my art journal, as I LOVE including photos in my journal.

I decided just to write some, not all of the song lyrics, so I’ve written the first half of verse one and the second half of verse two.

 

I move onto canvas!

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A couple of weeks ago I took a leap out of my comfort zone and went along to the Mixed Media class (with Turiya Bruce) where they (gulp) make art on canvas. I took along my art journal because I thought some of the pages I have done in there might translate reasonably well onto canvas. Turiya encouraged me to try an image transfer onto canvas, which I botched up, and I’m still wondering whether to continue with that one or just collage over it. But anyway, just seeing the kinds of things that people were doing inspired me and so I made this canvas during the week, using this photo of my mother in the 1930’s sometime. I just collaged down some papers for the background, including the Hymn “Abide with Me” which she loved, and also a remnant of her handwriting of her name and address before she was married. I painted over them all with a cream tinted gesso, and a bit of burnt umber around the edges. I sprayed some brown through an old plastic lace tablecloth (thanks for that Fran!). I sprayed the lace paper doilies with the same brown spray and stuck them down around the edges. I love this photo of my mother as it shows her vivacity and dramatic inclinations!

I have started a couple of other canvases also based on pages from my journal. It doesn’t seem like I will forsake my journal in favour of canvases though, I’m still loving my journal and dreaming up new ideas for it. Besides, if I start making lots of canvases, what am I going to do with them all? There’s limited wall space, and I can’t imagine anyone would actually buy one.

Blessings to all out there in blogland and cyberspace!

A Song in my Heart

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I came into this world with a song of praise in my heart, and I can’t stop singing it, though I no longer know to whom I am singing.

This is the sentence that came to me in response  to the background of this page, and it felt like such a true statement for me that when I read it out to my creative writing group last week I began to cry. Who knows why, maybe a deep truth affects me like that.  It is true that my life has been largely devoted to music, to singing, to arranging songs for choirs and in recent years to writing songs for our weekly spiritual group Sanctuary. These are kind of like hymns or chants I suppose, originally inspired by the songs of Taize (a Christian spiritual community in France) but not so Christian; more reflecting the universal spiritual ideas and values that many of us here in Byron have….like being in the present moment, mindfulness, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude etc This page began with an undercollage of some sheet music and an old hymn, “How Great Thou Art”. Growing up in the church (almost literally) of course I know all the words to this and countless other hymns, many of which come back to me and sing themselves in my heart, especially when I’m walking on the beach. This background got me thinking about  how I still love singing those old hymns and also gospel songs , as well as all the songs and chants we sing each week at Sanctuary. Songs of praise have been a major thing in my life, and I still love them….although, as I said I’m no longer sure to whom I am singing.

How I made this page (for those interested): First I stuck down the music. Then I used some spray inks (Dylusions) with stencils: My Cathedral window stencil AND a paper doily. Sprayed through them both a few times, then stuck the doily (which was quite red by then from the spray ink) in 2 halves on either side. Then I google-image-searched (that’s a verb these days) for musical angels and printed some out. I didn’t know what to do next, the angels were overwhelmed by the background and the whole thing was not……cohesive somehow. The background  was a bit busy and needed a focal point so I was delighted when I had the idea to use the silhouette of the little girl. She seems to hold the whole page together and she fits in perfectly with the theme of the words.

This is now one of my favourite pages, probably because the words are so significant to me.  I will finish with this quote from Sam Keen, “My Life has been one long song, a hymn to an unknown God” (from “Hymns to an Unknown God, awakening the spirit in everyday life” a book I have had for many years and highly recommend). Blessings to all.