Shiny Things

When it comes to crows, several schools of thought apply. Depending on the one that speaks to you, crows are:

• Intelligent
• Mysterious
• A nuisance
• Lovers of shiny objects
• Bullies of other birds
• Spiritual
• Interesting characters in storybooks and legends

Moonlit Flight

Quite possibly, crows embody all of these aspects, making them not unlike us multifaceted humans. For this reason, I chose a crow as the mascot of my SandStorming shop.

Called by a variety of names (raven, rook, jackdaw), they appear in the Bible, Celtic and Greek mythology, European and American literature, Eastern and Middle Eastern lore, and Native American tales. And for the last few years, a flock in a Seattle suburb has been gifting one little girl: 

The Girl Who Gets Gifts from Birds

To pick up some shiny things for yourself, join the SandStorming crow on Etsy. 

Art and Philosophy

I typically find the words of Eastern philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti, quite profound. As an exception, and if I've understood him as intended, he once observed that churning out works of art struck him as a way in which the human brain avoids observing. While many of the philosophical journeys Krishnamurti shared ring true for me, this does not. Perhaps, not being inclined to artistry, he was making an assumption about it. I suspect he did not actually sit down and draw and find out what artistic production is all about, but made the conjecture by observing others who had. If he had had the experience of producing works of art, he'd have found that, to produce an accurate image of a thing takes an exceptionally deep observational approach.

The challenge of art is not so much the steadiness of the hand, but the steadiness of the intuition. Moreover, taking the accurate image of something in the mind's eye and then conveying it in a surrealistic way takes a certain profound understanding that's difficult to describe. The ability to observe some intrinsic quality in a thing may very well inspire the drawing of its essence, so to speak: the quality of the thing that allows us to feel it with intensity. For example, the saturation of color and light, and how these play across the landscape are qualities in a sunset that seem to move everyone universally.

The latest addition to the SandStorming shop invokes Spring.

Often, I draw while looking at one of my own photographs. Sometimes I draw a composite of images, creating something new, but still based on something actual. Very occasionally, I will create something that is surreal. But when I draw, that is, reproduce something my eyes perceive or my brain has recorded based on something my eyes have seen, I'm not thinking, "What species of flower is that?" or, "What was the name of the place in the picture?" I'm looking for the fact of the thing: What is (or was) the color? How does (or did) the light or shade play on the subject?

The drawing pictured here is based on a photo I took at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC, mid-Spring, 2009. Taking the photo required the close observation of these tiny flowers popping up along the edges of a walkway. Drawing this subject took a different type of observation. I had to match the colors as they present themselves in both light and shade, for each facet of the image. I had to determine which lines were objects and which were shadows of those objects. I also determined what from the photo I might decide to leave out or alter slightly--the beauty of drawing rather than photographing, or photographing and PhotoShopping, depending on your perspective. The truth is, if there is any sort of success in the effort, my thinking brain shuts off completely when I am drawing, or for that matter, photographing. In its place, a deeper sort of intuitive operation takes over.

And maybe that is the significant draw of art for me.

To do Krishnamurti justice, though he engaged in speeches and journal-keeping rather than dabbling in sketches, he too waxed poetic on sunsets and other common subjects of art. I can only assume he tapped the same intuition that conjures these images born of my camera, my memory, and my cognition.

32 Flavors, When it Counts

Grocery shopping occasionally leaves me feeling mildly overwhelmed.

There are so many flavors of, well, everything. There must be ten different kinds of Triscuits, for example. And don't get me wrong. I'm quite fond of a Triscuit. But the one that comes to mind is the original shredded wheat variety: slightly salt-infused, a bit of oil baked in to temper the dryness and add just a hint of nutty flavor.

But the word, Triscuit, means so many things now: fire-roasted, garden herb, rosemary and olive oil, and others I don't recall at the moment. It reminds me of a line from a song, "All the crazy you get from too much choice."

Hey, I really do appreciate expansive freedom in cracker choices, it's just that sometimes two options actually suffice and, in this case, choosing between a Triscuit and a Wheat Thin has always been enough for me.

It's not that I don't like choice. I do; and very much so, when it really counts. Take art and music: when it comes to variety, I can't get enough of either of these. Show me a sculpture formed from an ingenious blend of materials or play me a tune that defies today's audio pigeonholes, and I'm ecstatic. In fact, you'll restore my faith in the future of art and music, and clear my mind of crackers, all in one fell swoop.

Not long ago, I produced a drawing of a building (is it a barn? a house?) set in snow-covered woods. For a lark, I decided to apply a variety of filters to see how many moods I could create with that one drawing.

Were these variations of a single drawing necessary?  No; but there was something soul-soothing in sampling these many moods, something connecting me with humanity. While Golden felt sun-drenched surreal, warming up the snowy scene, Midday reminded me of childhood and the scent of my grandmother's cherry pies beckoning on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It's the eerie end of October when I look at Haunted, and I'm just arriving gratefully home from a long day in Dusk.

As they say, variety is the spice of life. But in life, as with food, to best compliment the experience, you need to know three things: when, what, and how much. If I had my choice (and there's that word, again), I'd lift the music business curse that now audibly limits the spectrum of songs produced. I'd launch a cultural revival of visual art in all its many forms.

But let's hold the fire-roasted Triscuits, please.

Art for the Eclectic Heart

The word, jewelry, typically brings to mind something sleek and stylized. Precious stones in a refined setting, perhaps. Though I'm not quite sure why, I tend to favor something rough-hewn. Old world. Primitive. Mysterious, in an ancient sort of way.

Celtic art and culture embodies the sort of mystery I find appealing. According to LiveScience:

"The relationship between modern-day Celts and their ancient forbearers is a contentious issue that scholars have different opinions about. Languages change over time, and people move, and how much modern-day Celtic peoples, language and cultures are related to the ancient Celts is an open question."

When I came across a circular metal pendant simulating an inscribed stone, I was curious to learn the history of those markings. After a bit of Googling, I discovered the medieval Celtic alphabet, called the Beith-luis-nin, based on the names of some of its letters. Not to be confused with the misnomer, "Celtic runes," the Beith (for short) contains letters bearing the names of trees, in what is known to scholars as the "Ogham" system. These markings appear in relationship to a vertical line and represent the branches of a tree.

Of the 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, 20 are represented by Ogham symbols. With some contemplation, I matched the missing six to those letters that sound closest to them. Then I got busy creating some prototypes of words spelled along my own Circle of Life, die-cut from polymer clay and either buffed using a metallic finish or hammered to look like flecked-gray stone.

"Love" inscribed around the Celtic Circle of Life

With a 1.5-inch diameter, the resulting pendants appear much like ancient artifacts made from metal or rock. Even so, they feel just weighty enough to steady them at the end of a length of leather cord.

As for inscriptions, depending on the word applied, they can bear as many as ten letters, or seem rather cramped at just five or six. Some space must remain at the top for the cord and also to discern where the word begins and ends. With these few limitations, it's still possible to create many variations on the theme, including a personalized version. Even in the case of a fairly common name, hand-inscription ensures that each piece will vary from all the others.  I'll admit, I couldn't resist the idea of a simulated "ancient artifact" with my own name on it. How about you?

Fearless Creativity

Those Etsy artisans taught me something. But it didn't happen overnight. 

You see, I opened my SandStorming shop before I was quite ready. Whatever for, you ask? 

It goes like this: A few years ago, I created some bras for an auction to support a dear friend who had developed breast cancer. [She is doing wonderfully well as I write this, for which I am infinitely grateful.] The bras were lauded as being rather clever, and I was encouraged to make more for sale. So I slapped a few photos on Etsy and left it at that. I sold one or maybe two--I don't even remember now--which left me with the thought that people are just being nice when they say, "Oh you could sell that, it's amazing!"

But I think now that, to sell, there's the product accomplishment, and then there's the exposure accomplishment. Clearly I was not cooperating when it came to exposing myself. Er, in the promotional way, mind you. After all, I reluctantly but diligently posed for that catalog-style shop shot. 

No. The problem was, everyone except me was certain I had something to offer. It's not that I didn't think the bras were worthy of sale. I simply couldn't wrap my head around having a shop that sold things I made, because, well, that would be too much like me, and I'd spent half a lifetime being everyone else but me. And after all that time, I thought, it just ain't fittin'. Ain't fittin'.

And then I encountered Pippenwyck's. Now that's a shop. Unique, delightful, imaginative. And a story behind it all, told in a guileless, delightful manner that sent me straight for a text window where I could finally and bravely confess my own artistic story. 

Astralana

It felt like a revelation to create this first drawing after more than a decade of closing off that part of myself.

In fact, this woman with star-tresses began as a scribble at the margin of a poem from the early 90s. I gave her a name, Astralana; and I've started to think of her as the superhero type: one of those characters of the surreal sort, with a mysterious background. A little dark. A little light. A lot of hope.

A Second Chance at Sand Castles

Somehow, despite a professional writing career that spans nearly three decades, I've successfully avoided this blog-writing thing. Granted, that writing career has sometimes wandered a disappointing desert in terms of creativity. No one, after all, wants an eloquent systems administration manual. They just want to administer, no frills added. 

On becoming an Etsy shop owner, however, I had to relent. At that point, I couldn't deny that, if one is going to commit to purveying things in a virtual store, one had best make good use of the virtual communities. 

Not one to hop eagerly aboard the shameless self-promotion train, I'd had the Etsy shop for more than a year without doing much beyond setting up a couple of items with marginal adieu. But I spontaneously began dabbling with pastels and, six months into that activity, decided to come clean and commemorate on my Etsy "About" page the reasons for my hesitation regarding art. I was finally starting to feel I could share what I'd learned from an excellent book recommended by one of my dear artist friends. The book describes in depth what I'd been experiencing, and provides lots of avenues for healing the creative spirit. Good medicine, indeed. 

It's an odd but welcome happenstance then, that getting over the art hurdles has made way for this new writing adventure. I have no immediate idea what I might discover, but I'm game to see what happens this time around, when I mix water with sand.