Friday 18 July 2008

Well, life took over for a little while... my little hum drum life momentarily went Shazam! with the arrival of a single gorgeous red rose complete with lovely vase and box of chocolates from a secret admirer! Oh my, wasn't I on tenterhooks for a while, since the note said I would be getting a letter "soon"... I waited... and waited... but so far my admirer is remaining hidden.

In the meantime I have discovered the perfect pen for me to write on my art journal painted pages :



It's by Rotring in case you can't see the name clearly - the only downside is it comes just in black - but it writes smoothly, clearly and no smudge that I could tell on acrylics - perfect!

I had to work quite a bit with my excitement over the secret admirer... so I created this little bookmark. It has Eckhart Tolle on it and Mingyur Rinpoche. Mingyur Rinpoche is an amazing young Tibetan lama who comes from a famous family of teachers. So I guess everyone would have been expecting him to develop smoothly into this calm, peaceful person himself. Instead, as a young boy up to about the age of 13 he was a nervous wreck, tortured by an anxiety disorder and panic attacks. Finally he went into a traditional 3 year retreat, and nearly had what he has re-named a "nervous break-through". Thankfully his efforts at using what he'd learnt in order not to crash totally were successful, and now he wants to pass his insights on to the world. This is all so inspiring for me, as I am a pretty nervous person too. I have found it nearly impossible to meditate until I came across the inspiration of these amazing teachers. My little sign saying "presence" seems to do the job quite well of at least reminding me when I've flown off even if I don't actually sink into full presence... I wanted to make something which reflected my environment as well as my inspiration, so the backgrounds are mainly from Cafe leaflets (you can guess which one, right? I think they're big enough not to get free advertising here!) and from a local bookshop. And the card I made it on? Handy cardboard supplied with certain forms that are used at work. Sometimes once they've been completed and handed to me the cardboard is still inside so.... I use them for art!!

This time it's all blurry because the gel medium I used was a bit too thick... still I quite like it.

Here's the shrine box so far. It's sloooooow I know. That's because I have this perfectionist side and I get downcast when reality doesn't match up, and I go and sulk for a while... for instance, I did all the pearls, background paint, even the tiny seed syllable done by hand... but then when I tried to glue all that into the box I didn't do it carefully enough and as you can see it didn't come out straight. I didn't have the heart to do it all again, and anyway I thought that living with slightly imperfect art is actually good for me. Gives ME permission to be "slightly imperfect" (very imperfect) ;-)



I'm also working on an art prompt from Milliande's site. We each supplied a photo of a corner of our house, were paired up with someone else and did artwork inspired by the other person's photo. Mine will be like a sort of mini-book just consisting of two joined boards, I'll show them once they're ready and posted to my group.