Bodacious

Bodacious. The year I turned twenty someone used that word to describe me. I had no idea what it meant. I looked it up. I certainly didn't see myself that way.

Fast forward to 2013. Colorado Springs. The Summit, the international calligraphy convention. It is book signing night and I am sitting adjacent to Lisa Engelbrecht. In addition to signing her books she is offering to write calligraphic tattoos on the arms of fellow calligraphers as a tribute to Georgia Deaver who had started the tradition of 'inking' her friends years before. Everyone was on an emotional high that night. There was great laughter and camaraderie as is so often the case at our conventions. It took me a while but I finally warmed to the idea of some ink on my arm. But what to have her write? I though on it for a bit and suddenly the word appeared: bodacious.

Lisa loved it and she did a phenomenal job of lettering such a long word on such a short arm.
The next morning I was careful to keep my arm dry in the shower because I wanted to preserve my ink to show to my class. There was much fun to be had explaining what it meant.  I was safely in the midst of my tribe and laughed along with everyone.

The next morning I wasn't careful in the shower. I was heading home, it was time for the ink to disappear. But for some reason the ink didn't budge. Off I went to the airport with a very splashy, very real looking tattoo. I'm used to being practically invisible out in public, happily flying about under the radar if you will. Not that day! Ticket agents, security guards, the pourers of coffee, fellow travellers....everybody noticed me. The wait for the plane was endless - in fact after many hours the flight was cancelled altogether. I found myself looking for alternative ways to get to Denver for a newly ticketed flight to Toronto the next day. The United agent didn't know how I was going to get there and truly didn't care. There were about a dozen of us from the conference who found ourselves in the same situation. So I channelled all that bodaciousness I had been feeling because of my tattoo and called a limo company and talked the dispatcher into finding a van that could drive us to Denver. I asked my sweet husband to find a budget hotel where we could sleep. I even asked to ride shotgun on the trip into Denver!

The next morning the ink stayed in place despite vigourous scrubbing in the shower. Again I got lots of attention at the airport. Again my flight was late and by the time I was finally heading for home the only thing that was feeling bodacious was the skin under that ink.

The tattoo lasted a full week. My favourite part of this whole story happened in a little fruit market in a small town north of the city. The store employs a handful of young teenage boys who stock shelves, clean the floor and carry out groceries. I rarely even notice them. But this day one of them was trailing me as I shopped, finding ways to stay near my cart while he straightened signs, reformed piles of lemons, picked up random leaves around the lettuce...Just before I headed for the check out he spoke to me. He wanted to know about my tattoo, where I'd had it done, who had designed it. He thought it was the coolest tattoo he had ever seen and he was saving to have one done when he was old enough. I gave him my business card and told him to contact me if he ever wanted to have Lisa design one for him. I've never heard from him and now if I do, well, sadly I won't be able to follow through.

I want to thank Lisa for helping me claim my bodaciousness after all these years. Even after the tattoo faded I was left with a little more pluck. I've added it to the list of internal descriptors that I use to pump myself up when I'm feeling low. It helped me add "she who swims with penguins" to my list of accomplishments. But that story is one for another day.

Lest We Forget

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. 

As a child this sentence held such resonance and magic. It was laden with meaning even if I didn't really understand what it meant. No matter who said it I heard it in a with overtones of Churchill. It was biblical, epic, understood deep in the bones.

My mother was an only child but her father came from a family of thirteen. I called them all uncle and aunt, no need to say great. They were all veterans of the war having either fought or worked gruelling shifts, with war-rationed bellies, in factories that supplied the men at the front.  Having survived the Depression in a family that had nothing, they gave everything to the war effort. When Remembrance Day came around each November 11th it had real meaning for them. We had the day off from school and I remember watching them march to the cenotaph, remember men who were tough and robust with tears in their eyes.

Their service took its toll. What we now call PTSD was obviously a factor in their lives, I can see that now, looking back. I was shielded from most of it, but by and large they treated the symptoms with alcohol. The shame is that today we offer few other choices to our vets. It is a national shame here in Canada and elsewhere. The young man in uniform in the picture was my Uncle George. He was in the division of Canadian soldiers that liberated Holland and then some of the camps. He stayed on in Europe after the war was over, serving for an extra few years with restoration forces. He never married. He fought his demons the only way he knew how. He died when I was in high school, still a comparatively young man, a victim of PTSD.

I've travelled to the battlefields and cemeteries in Europe. I've taken my children to the museum in Ypres and tried to help them understand the risks of letting human behaviours get out of control, dissolve towards violence as a solution. None of it is easy to explain. How could that war, the second, have been avoided? How could we not have gone? And yet I so wish we hadn't needed to. All around us we see wars brewing, battles on the verge of breaking out. The causes are noble. Oh that we could find other solutions, some alternative to trying to counteract violence with violence.

Many years ago in a calligraphy class Reggie Ezell gave us an assignment called "Best Voices". He challenged us to think about the people in our lives who had been examples and role models, who had influenced our thinking or challenged us to be more. Today I remember my uncles and aunts who form part of the chorus of best voices in my life. But I also today think about all those who have been advocates for peace and pray that humanity can someday find its way forward without weapons.

Since the attack on Parliament Hill I have written out a simple poem, a simple prayer each day. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day this year this poem, written by Rabindranath Tagore, will again be my prayer:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

Born Under A Lucky Star

I intended to write about something completely different this week but the universe had other plans. Actually I could have called this blog "I Intended To..." but that seemed so defeatist. And I'm not that, not most of the time, but this morning I came close.

This story starts weeks and weeks ago. It starts with the slow decline of order in my office. I'm really blessed to have the luxury of space, actually spaces. I have a big studio in the basement plus storage for all the books I sell, an office on the main floor and a fibre arts room in one of the bedrooms upstairs. When my kids were small my husband would give them a big hug as he left on business trips and make them solemnly swear to not let me take over any more of the house while he was gone. Tidiness in my studio is all relative to what I am working on, the office has to meet the stranger standard and the sewing room doesn't get seen much but it tends to not be a problem. You may wonder what the stranger standard is. For me this means that if someone drops in or we have a workman in the house they should feel that I am really busy in the office, not slovenly. And I like that room tidy. I like to be able to sit down to work and not feel that piles of things are shouting at me to be put away. I like to be able to sit down at the antique, slant top writing desk and not wonder when the avalanche is going to blow me away. Alas, every week for the last few months I have been saying "Today I intend to get this room back under control." But I didn't. And today, well today the universe decided it was time.

On Friday night I took on the featured tangle on Square One which was Chainging or Punzel. (See www.tanglepatterns.com if you want to learn how to draw it and while you are there make a contribution to keep the site up and running. You get a great PDF of the tangles for donating and none of us would be where we are with tangling without this wonderful resource.) Truthfully these aren't my favourite tangles but I did a bit of warmup and some sketching with them and decided to jump in at the deep end. I sketched out a string with Fengle and then filled that in with Chainging. That having gone remarkably well I decided to further press my luck by filling it in with black and using highlights as the main decorative element. I was really happy with the way the tile turned out. (My resolution for this year is to actually admit that when it happens, and it is rare!)

The community in Square One was really generous in their comments and several people contacted me directly or in the comments for more information about how I created the star. I'd promised to do a sketch to post and this morning, my other writing having gone well, I thought I could steal a few minutes to do just that. I set the card on my slant top desk and started to look for a piece of tracing paper. The desk has a couple of lift up compartments on top which are a pain to access if you have a lot of other stuff balanced on the slanted top but over the years I've become pretty adept at accessing them. Of course the tracing paper wasn't where it belonged and I looked in the drawer underneath the  part of the slant top that folds up when the desk isn't in use. Again I've become pretty good at balancing whatever is on the desk while I do that manoeuver. Tracing paper wasn't there either. So I moved the stuff off the top onto the storage drawers on the left. Finally found a piece of paper that would do for drawing out the steps and then realized  the card was no longer on top of my desk! It was gone.

I looked for an hour, slowly going through portfolios standing beside the desk, throug all the drawers and nooks and crannies. As a last resort I called in my husband to look, the man who often can't find the milk carton in the fridge. But he is a love and he was really helpful. He got a flashlight and we looked under the storage drawers, even moved them out from the wall. He went back through the desk. After a half hour of this I conceded defeat. Went and poured myself a coffee and took a time out.

Then I decided it was time to do what I should have done weeks ago. I set up a card table and started to sort out the various piles of stuff I had moved looking for the tile. Since there is no use doing half a job on this sort of thing I decided to go deeper and sort and reorganize my desk contents. So I picked up the board that covers one of the compartments and reached over to set it against the wall. My hand made contact with paper on the bottom of the cover. The tile had stuck itself to the bottom of the board with a wadge of kneaded eraser!

As a little appeasement to the universe I decided I better make a proper job of setting out the steps for making this very Celtic looking star. I even decided to take the time to do a little video about how I have begun to highlight, which has always been a problem for me and also how I shade which I know is a problem for some of you. There are lots of ways to do both of these things but these are the ways I find easiest.
I hadn't decided on a name for it until all this happened but it was obvious. It had to be called Born Under A Lucky Star.

And my office? As soon as I get this posted I intend to....

Step One:
With a pencil draw Fengle with rounded ends. Draw as lightly as you can as the string needs to disappear after the star is drawn.

Step Two:
Draw the first step of Chainging slightly differently than the original tangle. Round the end and continue into the second stroke. Use the string to keep your strokes rounded and full. I find it easier to do tiles like this if I think of them like parenting. What you do to one section you must also equally to all the others. So I do Step One in all the sections making sure to turn the tile as I go so that the flow of the strokes stays the same.

Step Three
Continue to draw the tangle. Take notice of the fact that the "ribbons" are flowing under and over each other and that the points where they go under should be similar to the point where they emerge. Also note that you stop your stroke when you come to the string.

Step Four
The basic star is completed. Now you have to decide how to decorate and shade. The video below the diagram shows how I approached my highlighting. I really struggled with highlights and only recently realized that if I start with a 005 Pigma and then use a 01 or even a 03 for the filling in and finishing I get a better result. The video also demonstrates shading with a soft pencil and a stump or tortillon.

I Keep Falling In and Out of Love With You

Last week I was in a restaurant and Alicia Keys Fallin' was one of the selections on the musak playing in the background. It wormed itself back into my head (I remember it being an earworm before!) and I've caught myself humming it many times over the past few days. I think Alicia understands relationships and got it right. "I keep fallin' in and out of love with you..."

This blog isn't about love or marriage. I've been married for almost 32 years, and while I know that the words are true I know better than to write about my marriage! Suffice it to say that like any lasting marriage there have been ups and downs, twists and turns, challenges and victories. A good marriage does not necessarily mean that everything is perfect, every hour of the day, forever and ever. Mignon McLaughlin said, "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."  Truer words were never spoken and I think that they apply to our relationship with art as well.

I fell in love with fibre arts, specifically embroidery and quilting as a child. My paternal grandmother lived with us and she was always sewing, quilting, crocheting, tatting....she did it all. I took to the tools she used as soon as I was old enough to hold them. Fabric and threads are just in my blood. In my late teens I became an artistic bigamist. I fell in love with calligraphy. Both of those interests sustained me, challenged me, fulfilled me, frustrated me, created a vocation and defined me for decades.

Yes, there have been brief affairs with other crafts and hobbies but none of the others have had staying power. The dalliances have ended when It became apparent that the hobby was all flash and no dance. They were mere crushes, they didn't have enough depth for the long haul. Now this is not to say that my interests in fibre arts and calligraphy haven't evolved over time. Any marriage has to evolve as the partners grow and change. I've added scads of other interesting skills and materials to each, but by and large, if you want to hold my interest you have to feed back to the first loves. Bookbinding does that. Beading does that. Zentangle does that.

I've been an avid tangler for four years now. I was introduced to it by C.C. Sadler at a calligraphy conference. I know it had been around for a while before she showed me the work she was doing but it had never seemed relevant to me. And then it did. Tangling has helped me relax, focus, keep my hands in motion when arthritis threatens to ruin a day, strengthened my understanding of design, allowed me to work with symbol and pattern, taken me back to being an avid photographer and introduced me to a whole new group of friends. The work I have done with Zentangle has fed back into my fibre arts work by reinspiring my design choices and has helped to change the way I approach calligraphic tools and materials.

But the truth is that last winter I began to think that I was beginning to fall out of love with tangling and most everything else I was doing and that I needed a change, a big change. Everything felt a little flat, a bit too routine. I was just going through the motions.  I've seen other people post messages about being in a rut or just not feeling they could work anymore and they've wondered what to do about it. And I have to say that I think you have to be proactive as much as you can if you find that your art (or your marriage for that matter) has fallen a little flat. So what did I do? As they say, this wasn't my 'first trip to this rodeo'. I've been in that place before and I now have faith that if I hang in there long enough I'll find my way again especially if I actively search it out. And so I did a bunch of things like taking classes, buying new art materials, changing my colour choices, reading, walking, travelling, tidying. They all worked to some degree. Gelli printing was a big help especially when I bought new colours. But still I felt like I was faking it most of the time.

And then one day this summer I saw that there was a new Facebook group called Square One. The concept was interesting and I was staying open to possibilities so I joined up. The idea was to get back to the basics of Zentangle, to create on the original tiles with the official tangles as a focus. Black and white only, no colour. Such a simple thing and yet isn't it always the simple things that make us fall in love again! And what has happened has made me feel engaged with tangling and has reinvigorated my calligraphy and my fibre arts work. For me being in love with one aspect of my work always casts a better light on the rest of my work, makes me feel stronger and more capable. I can't wait for Friday morning to see what the focus tangle of the week is. I've challenged myself to approach the tangles with fresh eyes. And my work has changed, shifted, been recharged. Truthfully I am surprised at how bold some of it is. I've put a new album of my Square One work up on my Facebook page if you want to see what I've been tangling. So this blog is my way of thanking the two women who started this group and have kept us all on the simple path. They have created a supportive and caring group who encourage and inspire. Chris Titus and Jenny Perruzzi have changed the way I work and have put that spring back in my artistic step.

I offer this advice for those of you who are in a creative low spot. Keep showing up and trying new things. Stay open to the possibilities that present themselves but also actively seek them out. Some day, some day soon, you will be offered a chance to fall in love all over again with your art, to remember what  attracted you to it in the first place and to move forward in the relationship you've built with it.

I leave you with the wise words of Alicia Keys. I always like to share my earworms!

I keep on fallin'
In and out of love
With you
Sometimes I love ya
Sometimes u make me blue
Sometimes I feel good
At times I feel used
Lovin you darlin'
Makes me so confused

I keep on
Fallin'
In and out of love with you
I never loved someone
The way that I love you

Oh, oh , I never felt this way
How do you give me so much pleasure
And cause me so much pain
Just when I think
I've taken more than would a fool
I start fallin' back in love with you

I keep on
Fallin'
In and out of love with you
I never loved someone
The way that I love you

Tree Hugging in Autumn

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!" 

Joseph Campbell

Fifty years ago my parents bought a piece of property about 3 hours north of Toronto in an area called Muskoka. The closest town is Huntsville and we are not far from Algonquin Park where the Group of Seven painted the images so often used (abused?) on souvenirs. We spent our summers up north in a log inn they restored, two months of long-lighted days with nothing but time to think and explore. The cottage was a large part of what made me who I am today.

As blissful as the summers were, it was the fall that was the true delight. When the fates are kind we get a long string of perfect days the last week of September - a little crisp, high autumnal blue skies, no wind. The leaves are changing and there is no where you can look without seeing colour and light. The colour is good every year, you can count on it, we are known for it. But this year, this year is exceptional.
My husband took these amazing photos over the weekend. Each one is stunning. Glory in the colour and the magic. You'll find even more in an album on my Facebook page. If you want to know the science behind the magic, read the paragraph from a wonderful book about trees written by a British author, Roger Deakin.

The tree senses a particular moment when the balance between day and night has altered. It appears to measure the hours and minutes with some precision, and shorter days trigger the development of a suicidal hormone in each leaf. It creeps down the leaf stem to the joint with the woody twig, where it stimulates the growth of a sphincter of brittle, hard tissue that gradually closes on itself, cutting off the supply of sap. Thus deprived of water, the chlorophyll in the leaf disintegrates. Chlorophyll makes leaves look green by absorbing the blue-and-red light of the sun and masking other pigments. As it breaks down, the leaf reveals the colours of its other underlying chemical constituents. Then it dries still more, the stem joint snaps, and it goes floating off to the woodland floor to settle in pools of yellow, orange or soft chestnut-browns...The leaves of different species contain distinctive pigments: the yellow carotenoids of willow, poplar or hazel; the red anthocyanins of maple or dogwood (the same pigment you encounter on the rosy side of the apple where it faces the sun); or the earthy tannins of oak leaves. The evaporation of the sap concentrates the leaf pigments so that they show up more vividly. the questing roots of one species will take up more molecules of phosphorus, magnesium, sodium or iron than another. The sap of one will be more acidic or alkaline or contain ore tannin, than another. This is the natural chemistry that paints the woodland colours...The process leading to leaf-fall is not affected by Indian summers or unusually cold weather. Photo-periodism is strictly abut light and darkness, and the shortening of days.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin (ISBN 978-0-141-01001-4)

Schwerin and Time

This blog post continues with thoughts and events that arose from our recent Baltic cruise. On our day ashore in Germany we chose to go to Schwerin rather than make the long trip in to Berlin and back. I so want to see Berlin and the museums there but five or six hours just wasn't going to be enough so we settled for Schwerin. Sometimes settling can be the right decision - our day in Schwerin was a delight. A delight and also, like most of our tours, a small torture. Everything moved so fast and all I wanted to do was slow down and really have time to look. We took copious photos and as I am going through and sorting them into a slide show I am able to take a little time and see things in a different way.

On this day need for time to think and absorb was most pressing when we were in Schwerin Cathedral. From the moment I approached the outer door I was falling in love with that church. It had to be a short love affair - we'd been given but a half hour to explore the church and the market square (which holds one of the most delightful, tongue-in-cheek, statues which tells the story of how the town was conquered for Christianity a small portion of which is pictured above). The church (12C)  holds a wealth of history within it. The floor is inlaid with countless tomb markers. Huge brass etchings hang along one wall telling the story of one family of nobles and the workmanship is exquisite! There are gargoyles and yes, a green man!, tucked into every column. Even the inlaid brickwork is full of pattern and colour and life. And best of all, with the sun streaming in the stained glass was rich and vibrant. I just wanted to sit and drink it all in, sit and think, sit and let the record of so much life and loss sink into my soul. And yet, I couldn't, time marched on and I had a bus to catch. At least I have the photos, have time now to study all the details. But the feeling of light and life, oh how I wish I could have drunk it in. I wrote the beginnings of this poem on the bus on the way back to the ship.

Strictly measured time.
Clicking rapidly through
nave to quire
portal to apse
transept? check
stations seen but not observed
fonts and tombs
birth to death
confessional gone but 
still the kneelers come
for weddings and weepings.

On the way out
one person, local,
ignoring the invasion,
reaches for a candle.
It catches,
and being caught flickers 
in the backdraft of the migrating tourists.

The stained glass dances graffiti on the clay
asking me to stay.
But I can not.

Rapid Transit

 Just before I get on a plane I have a little ritual. I make a final trip to the washroom and when I am washing my hands I look in the mirror and say goodbye to myself. The person that boards the plane is never the person that returns. All travel changes you if you are doing it right. This last trip was no exception.

Quite on the spur of the moment we headed off on a Baltic cruise at the end of August. People keep asking me how it was and I really don't know how to answer them - there are so many different aspects to the trip that it is hard to know where to start. Actually, I think I am in culture shock. There was no time to read and prepare before I left. Everything was a bit of a surprise. And each day we docked in a different country and we were exposed to a different history, a different culture, new colours, new smells, new art. It was all so fast. I had no time to absorb it all. I've come home with a jumble of images and colours racing around in my head and it will take time to assimilate them into the new me.

Let me give show you what I mean. In two days I saw so many things in St. Petersburg that I could spend the rest of my days letting the images I shot from there dictate my drawing and writing and thinking. The first day I spent eighteen hours in buses, museums, churches, palaces, squares and dining halls. The second day I spent another ten hours doing the same. It was sensory overload. The pre-Soviet royalty in St. Petersburg lived in a world of sensory overload. It explains so much. Here are just a few images to give you an idea of how overwhelmingly exquisite it was.

Conversely the book I chose to read while I was away was one I bought well over a year ago,  a book about slowing down. It is quite telling that I didn't get a chance to read it until last week. And what a great choice it was, the perfect foil for the rapid pace of all the land tours.  The book is called World Enough and Time and is written by Christian McEwan (ISBN 978-0-87233-146-4). What makes it different from all the other books about slowing down is that it is written by someone creative, a writer, for other people who are artists and writers. She examines the lives of creative people and draws out their insights on the need for slow, continuous introspection in the life of an artist. It is a treasure trove of inspirational quotes and thought. It was a delight to read slowly - I held myself to a chapter a day - and I will savour many of the ideas I encountered over the months and years to come just as I will savour the sensory overload of our Baltic trip, slowly, on the many cold days of the winter to come.