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.

I join the throng

I was massively anti-art until a short while ago, and have now swung the other way. I've started keeping an art journal and am enjoying it so much it's becoming an obsession! I've been inspired by so many blogs and seen how great it can be to share experiences, that I've finally decided to overcome my technical handicaps (this is all new to me) and keep a blog on my journey into art. I'm hoping that other beginning artists might get something useful from reading about my experiments, successes, failures and I'm also hoping that any artists that browse here might have useful advice for me.

Why Messyboxbliss? Because when I get into the swing of doing my art I am fantastically messy and form a sort of huge chaotic nest of torn paper, bits of dried Golden gel medium, broken crayons, print outs, ruined palettes etc around wherever I happen to be sitting. Sometimes I look up and think of getting a cup of tea or something, see how difficult it would be to climb out and over all that and decide just to keep going...

Box because my living space is all higgledy piggledy and about the most direct opposite of a nice ordered IKEA type space that you could imagine. Most of my art supplies are kept in old cigar boxes of different shapes and sizes rather than in sensible drawers... because I love cigar boxes. And actually although I've always aspired to being tidy and organised and tell myself thousands of reasons why it would be so much better, more comfortable etc etc in reality I feel far more at home with in my chaotic nest.

Bliss because I want to discover more and more what that means for me. So far it mainly means art, and I hope that following one will expand into new other areas so that I get more happiness in my life. I would never have believed in that as a possibility until I saw the power of art at first hand. A colleague at work used to paint pictures of her old home, which no longer existed for various political reasons, from memory. From there she was inspired to go back to her homeland and not only recreate her home in real life from sourced original materials, but also regenenerate the entire community in that area, which is very poor indeed. Thanks to having witnessed what she created I never doubt the power of art and creativity now.