How Do You Eat An Elephant

Last week I was working away at a handful of collages with my pulled string art and some the precious bits of paper I've saved up over the years. One of the pieces that fell together featured an elephant that I printed on washi years and years ago. He appeared in an envelope of bits that fell out of a book I was moving on a shelf. Turns out he was an elephant on a mission and he'd arrived early. His name might be Serendipity.

Having decided that we will move house when we find the right bungalow I have already started to deal with the jobs that I know will trip me up during the packing process. I am being ably assisted by my friend Anne Marie who has a good sense of humour, is a fellow artist so she understands all the various products and treasures and she has a much stronger back than I do! We have tackled my paper studio first. It is an enormous job to sort through 26 years of layers. A couple of days after I made the elephant collage Anne Marie could see I was getting a little discouraged and she told me a story about a manager she had when she worked a regular job. He was forever telling them "one bite at a time" in a slow monotone. I must admit I had forgotten that old adage and Anne Marie had to remind me. "You know. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

Of course I immediately knew what was going to happen with the elephant collage that had stumbled out of my scrap box. And I've started it off. It is still very much a work in progress.

And that wily elephant got me thinking. And there is lots of time to think when you are sorting everything from paper to corks! One bite at a time is the answer to so many things.

I thought of it when a friend asked how to get started in lettering. I've been at lettering for a very long time. And I learned it one bite at a time. The problem I have said many times is that people want to take an afternoon class and know how to letter. That is just one small bite and calligraphy is a very large elephant. Actually it is a large herd of elephants. But that is a good thing. You start with one style of lettering and you digest it slowly, lots of leftovers and such. And then you discover a new style and you take a bit of that. It is a whole buffet and there are so many options. It takes years. It fills your life with possibilities and you learn discipline through practice and you make wonderful new friends who become treasured old friends. It isn't just a fast food meal. It is slow food.

I thought about it when I was remembering the amazing meal my friend Chris Titus cooked for a small group of us on Labour Day weekend. She had planned and created and cooked for weeks. The meal was heavenly - so many perfect bites. We were so grateful for the experience but I know that Chris got a thrill from planning those bites and working through the process. I also know she wore herself out because managing an elephant is tiring, rewarding but tiring. What I know for sure is that if I ever had to eat elephant for real (and that is a truly disgusting thought) I'd call her. I know she could find a way to sous vide it. She has a pot for everything! It would taste amazing. It would be served on just the right plate with the perfect wine. There would be sauce.

And then I was thinking about my friend Nancy who is the quintessential organizer. She is an active volunteer who sees a need and finds a way to fill it. One of the organizations that benefits from her energy is the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign (https://stephenlewisfoundation.org/get-involved/grandmothers-campaign). Her local chapter in Brampton finds many creative ways to earn money to support AIDS work in Africa (yes, this is still a major problem) but one of my favourites is their soup luncheon where you take 5 books to trade for 5 new books and share a lunch of homemade soups. (It is coming up if you are local and interested!) They are literally serving up the 'elephant' one bite at a time, finding a practical way to support grandmothers in Africa who are raising the children who have lost their parents to AIDS.

So I will continue to try and be cheery as I head into the studio, taking my daily bite of the elephant. I know that when it is tamed the sewing room awaits. And then the office. By the time I get moved I am going to be really sick of elephant.

And my collage that is WIP will get gloriously tangled. I've already started roughing in some ideas in pencil. Zentangle is another thing that is one bite at a time although we say it is "one stroke at a time". You don't worry about how long it will take or where it will take you. You just take the cap off your pen and make the first stroke. I'll let you know when it is done. It may be a while.

Hexonu

I was planning to start this blog by writing about perfectionism and to end it by introducing a little tangle I've been playing with that I call Hexonu. I couldn't find just the right way to segue from one topic to the other. So I'm skipping the bit about perfectionism pretty much completely and jumping into the tangle. That is one thing I've learned about perfectionism by the way - you can just say, "This is so not worth stressing over" and move on.

What I will say about perfectionism is that I've been finding myself more interested in things that are slightly off balance, less than perfect, funky if you will. I'm attracted to the energy they have. And now, on to the tangle...

In an attempt to keep my house from sinking I was doing my annual purge of magazines. I came across an ad that was visually appealing and stopped to look at it. I was attracted to the tension between the rules of geometry and the rules of balance. The page came out to join my image files and I've been playing with the design ever since.

When I looked at the image I immediately saw hexagons with off centred "centres" and radiating lines from the centres to the vertices. Simple yet magical. The eye was pulled around the image and surprised at every turn.

In playing with the tangle I've been surprised at all the ways Hexonu can be used. It works simplified, it works shaded, it works filled...I can't wait to see how you make it work. And I know you will want to try it. It put a hex on me and I know it will put a hex on you too.

Spirals

It has been a long time since I took time to write a blog post. Life got busy and I kept pushing writing off a day here, another day there. And suddenly seasons have passed and I haven't posted. And truly in all that busy-ness there was so much to do and so little time to think, so little time to process. Luckily, life is a spiral path and I have been slowly moving back to a place where I felt I had something that was ready to share. It isn't much, but it is a start: sometimes you just have to jump back in and trust that more will follow. I've learned that along the way. The spiral aspect of life, especially the artistic life, is one of the things that keeps us growing as we circle the mountain in ever rising loops looking to reach the summit. We can't lose sight of that.

The spiral nature of the tangle Printemp makes it one of my favourites. I can literally sit and draw it for hours, using it to fill in spaces while I calm my mind. The name of the tangle is a little bit of a jest, using the French word for the season of spring to describe the spiral. (The actual French word for an actual spring is ressort I believe.)

When I began drawing this tangle I am going to introduce you to I wanted to use the same sort of jest when I named it. It is a wave and I call it Boucle (without an accent because that is too hard on an English keyboard) instead of vague de l'océan which would be the correct word. Vague just seemed wrong. Boucle is a twist in the yarn used to make a fabric and it looks like a pin curl. This tangle reminds me of that and also, back in the day, women referred to getting their hair permed as getting a wave.

I like the image of the wave. For me it represents happy times at the seaside, Caribbean warmth stolen in time away from the punishing winters devoid of light. It represents the crests and crashes in life, the ebb and flow rhythm we all experience. It represents the salty solutions. As Isak Dinesen said "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea." And I love that this wave is doubled in the tangle giving it the feeling of yin and yang.

So without further ado here is Boucle (boo-clay). My apologies if this already exists in the tangle universe - it has become nigh unto impossible to keep track of tangles. It fell out of my hand one afternoon while I was working at Ogonquit in a class led by Kate Lamontagne. It was a lovely gift from the universe and I am grateful.

 

When you bring the strokes out in Step Two and Step Three it is important to go back into the circle and branch the strokes out naturally. This gives a better flow to the strokes and it also slows you down and makes you more mindful of the shape you are drawing. The wave strokes can be drawn in the opposite direction if that feels more natural or you want to change up the look a little. I showed that in the last box. The second from last box shows a couple of the strokes doubled, again to give more visual interest.