Author Archives: Alison

The Gods Themselves

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“The Gods, the infinite ones, give everything to the ones they love, all joys, all sorrows, EVERYTHING to us, their beloved ones.” Goethe

This quote from Goethe, along with the William Blake painting  “God creating the universe” was the inspiration for this journal page. It remained in this unfinished state (above) for many weeks. My original intention was to have many streams of bright colours coming down from God’s hand representing all the many life experiences, good and bad. Since the quote was “the Gods” plural, I decided to put some Greek and Roman gods in on the act, which was all going well until they all started bickering amongst themselves , as you can see below: (warning, swearing is involved) You’ll probably need to click on it to make it big enough to read anyway.

At this stage I realised that a bunch of really bright colours across the bottom was going to unbalance the whole colour composition so I just didn’t finish it for ages. Finally I had the idea to take some of the colours from the William Blake painting, and also from the purplish clouds, and use those colours for the coloured streams, and this is how it turned out:

I rather like the way it turned out now and I’m glad I finished it. For the border I think I just googled “Greek borders” and printed one out several times.

I’m not sure whether I find this quote comforting or not. I know the first time I heard it I was struck by it. I suppose in a way I celebrate the rich tapestry of life, I appreciate the many different experiences we are given, I understand that difficult experiences help us to grow, and naturally, at the same time I  wish for only good things to come my way!

My Brilliant Career

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I bought a children’s board book a while ago with the intention of altering it and turning it into a journal. It opens out like a concertina. I gessoed both sides of it, mostly covering over the  pictures and text underneath. I decided to make it into a kind of retrospective of my (school) teaching career, as I stopped teaching in school a year ago now, so it seemed a good time to think back over those years.

so far I’ve completed one side of the book in which I’ve written some memories of my university days and of my first few years of teaching in Sydney. I used old photographs and some pictures from “Where the wild things are” (a popular children’s book at the time) and some decorations from a set of scrapbook papers called “school days”.

This was a very therapeutic process for me, to relive old memories both good and bad, and to reflect on my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher!

It was great to look through old photos also, although a bit disappointing to find I didn’t really have many photos of myself at work.

I used some chipboard letters to make the title of the book, the first time I have ever used them and I really like the effect. I tend not to use anything vaguely 3 dimensional inside my journal because I imagine it won’t close properly. But the cover is a different matter!

I have painted some backgrounds on the other side of this journal ready for some photos and writing about the later years of my career up here on the North coast as a music and drama specialist teacher and will get around to finishing it sometime this year! Right now I’m all caught up with the 21 secrets online art journaling course!

Two backgrounds

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Here are two backgrounds waiting for me to do something with them. This first one is a bit textured: I used some kind of plastic mat to stamp some gesso, painted over it with orange acrylic and rubbed it back so you could see the gesso underneath. I had also painted a few gesso words, I think “no thought” and “play”. When the orange was dry I painted burnt umber over all and rubbed it back too. The page sat like that for a few weeks waiting for some attention and everytime I looked at it it seemed to say “Fire”. Then one week in my art journaling class with Zom we were asked to create some black gesso areas on one of our backgrounds so I chose this one and painted black across the centre creating the flames. This is quite a strong background now, I don’t quite know how to approach adding something to it. It would be likely that the background would overpower anything I might stick on top of it! Will keep you posted.

Here is another background awaiting a “foreground”. It was created in a similar way to the previous one only in this one I collaged down some pieces first…some music, a black and white photocopy of a photo of me in younger days, a page from the dictionary with definitions of love.Then I stamped some gesso using bought stamps and bubble wrap, and when that was dry painted 2 different shades of blue. Obviously I don’t know many different techniques yet for creating backgrounds! This was actually really fun to do because I was showing my friend Ruth (who has recently acquired the art journaling bug!) a couple of background techniques and we were working together at my dining room table, and having a lovely relaxed creating time. Anyway, I do like this blue background and I trust that one day it will become clear to me what I must put over it!

Self portraits

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“The real work of this life is to allow ourselves to be who we already are, and to have what we already have.  The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits,until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.” Geneen Roth

“The Heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe” Joanna Macy

A series of self portraits, perhaps inspired by those two quotes. I believe that in some unfathomable way, we each contain the whole universe. We are stardust, we are light particles. The other portraits acknowledge some of my animal totems, and also my animal nature, my musical nature, and one of my most significant archetypes, Aphrodite.

I’m thinking of making a larger version of this page, perhaps on canvas…a scarey step for me! I’d like to add a couple more, maybe one with a map! I also already have some interest from friends in a portrait of them done in this way, representing some of their many “faces” or aspects. So I might be taking commissions!!

Beloved

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Here is my latest page, just finished a few days ago. It’s really a celebration of my relationship with my husband . There are some romantic pictures from old 1950’s magazines in the background, which are peeping through in places. I wanted to use the picture I had of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” (a painting much loved by romantics like myself!) and I ended up printing out some extra strips from the painting to make a border. I love sunflowers, they remind me of optimism and joy, and also of our fabulous trip last year through France, where we saw many beautiful fields of them. The photo of us was taken at our Christmas party last December. My skin is not actually that brown colour, something odd happened when I photographed this page. Because my journal is A4 size I can only scan one side of each double page at a time so I’ve been photographing the pages instead of scanning them for this blog. I think its mostly working out Ok, what do you think?

This page looks really happy, positive and sunny to me, and I guess that’s because I am in a happy phase of my life, and my beloved has a lot to do with that!

What gives me wings

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Like many beginning art journalers I have come across the work of Teesha Moore, greatly admired it and thought that one day I would try to do something a little bit similar. I have watched her videos on youtube which are really excellent for new art journalers, well for anyone really. If you haven’t seen them HERE is a link to one.

So in what way is this similar to her work in those videos? Well there is a plain brightly coloured background, a border made of colourful strips, some kind of central collaged image made up of different images and some curly lettering. Oh and I used a pan pastel to do some shading around the edges. My initial intention was to make a central image which was more like hers, a bit zany, with weird parts of people and animals, maybe huge eyes and stripey legs etc, but I somehow couldn’t do it. I was really stalled on this page once I had made the borders. Eventually I realised that I didn’t want to copy Teesha THAT closely, I need it to be meaningful to me. Then I came across this large butterfly pic which I loved, and this pic of me being ecstatic in the temple at the Mana retreat centre in New Zealand just seemed to go so easily with the wings. Writing down some of the things that “give me wings” was really fun too.

School days

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I belong to a creative writing group which meets fortnightly. For the last session of last year we randomly chose the name of someone else from the group and wrote a piece for them.

Denis got my name and wrote a lovely little piece about me in which he imagined what I must have been like at age 10. I was touched, and it also got me thinking about what I was like at that age. So I created these pages based around my memories of when I was nine and ten years old. I had some not very good black and white photos (we’re talking mid sixties here) which I photoshopped so they looked sepia because I love that sepia vintage look. I’m telling you this so you don’t think I’m older than I am!!! Anyway I had recently bought my first book of scrapbooking papers which had a School days theme, so I used bits of these papers and took my colour scheme from them. First I painted the whole page a creamy colour, than did some stenciling over it with a brownish red. It looked too bright so I gessoed over it with a cream tinted gesso to tone it all down. This was better, so then I collaged down some photos. I had a go at creating a pocket from my year 5 school photo and I folded Denis’ piece of writing and popped it into the pocket. I had quite a few memories I wanted to write, so I didn’t bother with doing fancy writing, just did my normal hand printing.

I have an unformed plan in my mind now to make a whole journal of memories of my life, perhaps starting even with my parents life before I was born. Two of my sisters have been writing some memoirs, but I suspect I don’t write as well as they do, I’m probably more visual. So perhaps a Visual memoir might be a good thing for me to attempt. It could become quite a big project I suppose. Maybe I’ll use an old book for the purpose, will keep you posted!

An art journaling month

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My first attempt at a calendar page! I had seen some other art journalers that did a calendar page and was inspired to begin one on 1st January. I really enjoyed this process and I LOVE looking back at it now and remembering all the events,  but it was a big commitment at the time. I decided to use photos for some of the days, but not all. I was after a variety of different ideas and media. Apart from printing out little photos to fit each day’s unique shape (thank God for photoshop and a laser printer) I used acrylic paint, inktense pencils, prismacolour pencils and stamps.

I started carrying my camera around with me everywhere, keeping in mind that I might want to get a picture for this calendar. This changed my consciousness in a way…it’s hard to explain but my life seemed to take on a new significance because everything was potential fodder for this calendar page. Each event and each day somehow became more important, and I even seemed more important, which was quite a nice feeling. So I will definitely do it again sometime, not next month because we’ll be going away for 2 weeks (away from my computer and printer!!) but maybe in May.

One thing I noticed was that because the photos had to be fairly small,  they looked much better if they were close ups. January 1st was the last day of my son Eirinn’s 2 week Christmas visit before he went back to Holland. I probably won’t see him now until April NEXT year (sigh!) so I love that there is a photo of him (with his partner Rowena) at the beginning of this calendar.

I almost immediately regretted writing the John O’Donohue quote down the left hand side because the calendar actually looked much nicer without it. The writing around the edges makes it all too busy and detracts from the calendar in my opinion. We live and learn!

Faery Gifts

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I’m a SoulCollage facilitator (see www.soulcollage.com ) and have on occasions run a workshop in which I have used a guided meditation that I wrote based on the Sleeping Beauty story. In a nutshell, the participants visualise themselves as a baby and there are 12 faeries invited to their christening. Each faery comes forward with a special gift for them, for example, that they will be artistic, kind hearted, athletic etc and as they “hear” each gift they write it down (a bit tricky when you are in a light trance, but not impossible!). Just when the last faery is about to step forward the 13th faery (who was not invited) appears in a puff of smoke, and she is NOT HAPPY. So she gives the  baby an “obstacle” something that will hold them back from achieving their best purposes in life. When she disappears, cackling, the twelfth faery steps forward and says that although she cannot undo the 13th faery’s “obstacle” she can give the baby a gift which will help him/her to overcome it. The participants will afterwards go on to make some SoulCollage cards based on some of these gifts.

So this double page is based on that guided meditation. That is a photo of me as a baby, and I have written the gifts that I believe I was given at birth. The obstacle I was given is being too FEARFUL, and the ameliorating gift from the 12th faery is the gift of a “courageous heart”, because Love is always stronger than fear.

A cautionary note: Because I used pastels on this page (on the stage curtains at the top) I sprayed the page with fixative which caused some of the stamps and writing to run (at bottom of page) EVEN THOUGH they were waterproof pens. The writing at the bottom right ran so badly that I ended up printing the words out  (“For love is always stronger than fear”) and sticking them over the top. Turned out OK anyway!

A Travel Page

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The prompt was simply to write about a place we had been, and as we had returned relatively recently from our big European trip I wrote about one of the most special moments of our holiday, ie our visit to Beynac castle on the Dordogne river in France.

The borders are just ripped from some magazines, the background was raw umber paint smeared over the gesso and rubbed back. Some sky blue was painted over part of the page and then some of my holiday photos collaged on. I’m still experimenting with my writing style, trying out different things. I tried to do a sort of curly flourishy font here, with limited success. I feel a bit dissatisfied with my own writing, everything I write in my journal looks like I’ve written it (which of course I have) but somehow I want it to look different, more interesting, more artistic.

Anyway, back to Beynac. This was such a beautiful place especially the view from a grassy terrace where other castles could be seen all down the river on both sides. We both felt very happy and I could almost imagine that perhaps we had had a past life there together. Who knows?!