Haiku Art – from February 2011 Faultlines of the Heart
February has rolled around once more. This year our Haiku prompt word is ‘moon.’ When I get back to the Valley I’ll work on the challenge, writing my haiku based on the prompt and completing a piece of artwork to represent it. In the meantime I’m jotting down some ideas – a stream of consciousness series of associations for the word ‘moon’.
Last year the February prompt word was ‘love.’ With so many new people on board this year I decided to encore the February 2011 haiku and art work. The piece was and is one of my favorites. My goal for the artwork was to illustrate feelings resulting from the loss of love and the subsequent attempts to hide emotions from others.
Here you have a heart that has been fractured into many pieces along the faultlines that were there all along. And floating over the pieces of the heart are a tangle of ribbons attempting to hide the tears underneath.
letting go of love
hot salty tears flow freely
bruised battered heart cracks.
All the red “shards” combine to form one complete heart. The pieces have been attached to the background with a lot of heavy quilting. I used heavy cotton plus metallic. The ribbons are hand tacked. Under the ribbons are tear-shaped beads peeking out. I purposefully left the thread tails and frayed edges alone as they are part of the over all feeling that I wanted to generate.
The Fight Against Breast Cancer Should Never Be Politicized
Dear Blog Followers:
This is an art blog and as such I strive to avoid topics that are controversial or that could be construed as political. However I take the recent decision by the Komen Foundation to defund mammograms offered by Planned Parenthood very seriously. My younger sister died much too early from Breast Cancer and it is appalling to see so many more women put at risk by this decision.
Please do whatever your own conscience tells you to insofar as decrying or applauding this decision but please do give the situation some thought as well as the overall impact on women and their health. My hopes are that you will let the Komen foundation know that you think it is an outrage – if indeed that is your conclusion.
Please take a quick look at this graphic (click on link) for some perspective. Thank you very much.
tumblr_lyqkrckXlJ1r65lwbo1_500.jpg (JPEG Image, 490 × 513 pixels).
B is for Bowling
Every time I go bowling I say the same thing – “This is so much fun! Why don’t we do this more often?” …. And then years go by….
I’m in Minneapolis this week to celebrate youngest granddaughter’s 11th birthday. She loves to bowl (she’s enthusiastic about EVERYTHING!) and requested a trip to Memory Lanes.
Some things were the same as I remembered – the clutzy shoes, the god-awful food from the snack bar (actually the nachos weren’t too bad) and the FUN!
Some things were very different. Like, as we were setting up my daughter in law asking me if I wanted gutter bumpers. I said “Huh?” She explained these little bumper thingies pop up to prevent your ball from going into the gutter. Are you KIDDING? You bet I want them 🙂
Watching the girls enjoy themselves was the most fun; getting a strike and scoring a hundred in a game was a lot of fun too.
Next time I will try to get a ball that my fingers don’t stick to when I try to release it. AND I will know where the foul line is. I didn’t realize until the 8th inning that I was mistaking a floorboard line about a yard and a half behind the REAL foul line for the foul line. And none of those bums told me !!
Challenge for January: Exhilaration – Haiku and Art
The Haiku Art prompt word for January was Exhilaration.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “Exhilaration” as “The state of being stimulated, refreshed, or elated.”
Sometimes all it takes to experience these feelings is to step outside on a sunny day.
The Haiku
scent of new mown grass
sunbeam caresses my cheek
living…feeling…aaaaah…
For the art work that I was preparing to go with this haiku – I didn’t want to be too structured. I wanted to indicate an almost childlike feeling of exhilaration with my composition and color choices.
At the same time, as a developing art quilter, I wanted to incorporate a couple of new techniques and see “what if”?
First off I used a “blah” pastel print in lieu of plain muslin as my base. I didn’t mind that it partly “showed through” – just felt it added some interest.
I felt that color was of first importance in this piece – so before doing anything else I painted my background using acrylic paint. In order to add some texture to the piece I used some Golden Light Molding Paste to parts of the grassy area.
I quilted the piece extensively with heavy thread.
Making Crystal Dangle Earrings
Another great video tutorial from Joggles
Just click on the link below and leave a comment here if you enjoy it and would like to see more of these short videos. Thanks! Guila
A is for Art (what makes it art?)
I have an old dear friend who blogs regularly and did a series last year that was prompted by the alphabet. I thought then that it would be fun to try. (Thank you Marallyn! ) And it just so happens that “A” is perfect for something that I’ve been wanting to talk about here.
Last semester my husband showed a video to his Biological Anthropology class that portrayed a chimp painting. The chimp seemed to be enjoying the process and he made some colorful pictures. They weren’t representative of anything in particular – just colorful blobs of paint.
One of the students raised a question: Was the work that the chimp produced “Art”? Why do you think it might be? If you don’t think so, why not?
This remains a hotly debated topic in today’s Anthropological, Philosophical and Art circles.
My Sweet Little Gardener
I finally took a photo of this quilt – completed. It’s one of my earliest art quilts – 2007 – and it is from a pattern by Wendy Butler Berns. I started this quilt in Wendy’s workshop at the Glendale Quilt Show. She was teaching a technique for turning your favorite photos into art quilts. It was an excellent workshop.
This particular design reminds me, of course, of my granddaughters. The little girl in the picture could be either one of them.
I enjoyed making this – especially selecting the fabrics – and later doing the quilting. It’s a somewhat tedious process but well worth the effort. If you get a chance to take Wendy’s class I recommend it highly.
- My Sweet Little Gardener
Thanks for visiting ! I’d love to hear your comments.
I’m Going to “Occupy” the Yard – end of an era
I went out on the back patio earlier this evening and it really dawned on me. After more than 30 years of having cats in our lives suddenly there are none.
Now, thanks anyway, but no condolences are needed. We haven’t had any real pet cats since the late 90’s. THAT’s when condolences would have been welcomed. We had 3 that lived for 18, 19 and 20 years. I’ll have to write some other time about how the oldest one (my cat) used to sit on the Japanese bridge over the fish pond in our old back yard and dream of catching Koi. But I digress….
Sometime in those same late nineties a tiny mostly black cat took up residence in the back yard. She wouldn’t let us come near her. She would hiss and bristle then take off like a shot. Not just skittish, she was feral. So of course we started putting out food after a couple of days and she was still there. Thought maybe she had a home somewhere else. Once that first bowl of feline fuss budget special mix was set out there was no turning back. She was feral but she wasn’t crazy.
We started talking about trying to catch her and take her to a vet – instead she surprised us with a litter. Of course we couldn’t get near any of them either.
I started to worry about being overrun with cats and someday we may want to sell the house and we’d have to disclose there’s a cat problem – by then there’d be multiple generations and oh – maybe a few hundred – so my imagination conjured up. So we planned to catch all 4 and do the vet thing. Couldn’t get the job done ourselves so we hired a guy who specialized in trapping.
He was quite efficient. We had them all to the vets for shots and surgery and back in the yard quickly. (The kittens were old enough by the time we hired this guy who appeared in the newspaper a few years later after he’d been arrested for murder – but that’s another story. Again I digress.) So now, after supplying these critters food and water and a lovely patio to take over they have all gone on their way one by one. They really did have cushy lives for ferals but also obviously knew how to take care of themselves to live as long as they did.
Am I wistful? A little, I’ll admit. BUT this weekend I’m going out there with a bucketful of cleaning stuff and occupying the yard. It’s going to be beautiful once more on the patio with no cat hair!!
Procrastination – Observations: Visual and Poetic
One of the keys to overcoming any bad habit is to have some understanding of why we do it in the first place. So why don’t we “just do it” a la a Nike commercial and put off some tasks for later? And I’m not just talking about doing the dishes. I’m talking about taking care of tasks that we enjoy as well – could be sewing or gardening or whatever.
For some it could be some underlying fear of failure or even, for some others – fear of success. Maybe we don’t think that we have the specific skill required or talent needed to complete the task and that we will face ridicule. Maybe we’re in conflict about the task at hand and aren’t even sure it’s something that we want to do. Maybe we’re overwhelmed by other demands in our lives and can’t give adequate attention to this newer demand. Maybe we don’t have a clear enough image of exactly what it is we want to accomplish. Maybe the task is boring compared to some other activity that could substitute. I’m far from qualified to give out any advice here but maybe there’s some food for thought in the above possibilities.
I considered these ideas and wrote the following Haiku:
Demands, wants, needs, musts
I want to……….I don’t want to
Relentless tick – tock
I decided that I would set specific goals for the art work that would accompany this haiku:
1. to complete the work in a set amount of time – time that I alternatively would have spent that evening playing a game online . I thought that it was not unreasonable to have the main designing and rough assembly done in 45 minutes. I would do the quilting and finishing the following day.
2. I have a plastic storage box full of previously fused cotton scraps – some of which are remnants from previous projects. My challenge was to use ONLY fabrics from that particular box. Believe me there were plenty to choose from.
The completed piece is approximately 12 inches by 12 inches.
It demonstrates how focus, definition and time limits overcame procrastination in one dedicated to that art.
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Guila's Art & Other Assorted Joys 
