Bangs.

My mother took care of my bangs when I was a little girl. Every so many weeks I would sit down with a sheet wrapped around me, and my mother would snip away. She is quite the perfectionist, so if she thought the bangs were crooked, she would rectify that with another couple of snips, and for good measure a couple more. I don't know if it was fashionable at the time, but I went through my early life with really short bangs.

Stand still and you move backwards.

Oh dear. I know I am in a bad relationship........with my cell phone. We started out amicably enough and it seemed like such a wonderful thing to have him around all the time but over the years, I have become a little unsure. Of course, he comes to my rescue when I have a flat tire, and calls AAA or when I am running late for an appointment. But he demands a lot of attention, by playing that annoying little tune, that I always mean to change and never do. Just when I am totally engrossed in something he will pipe up and then I have to find him. He is usually in his favorite place, at the bottom of my bag. There are days when I suddenly realize that it has been awfully quiet for a long time and then find him in the car, sulking, his little belly flashing an angry red light.

Perhaps it's not so much my cell phone that I am no longer enamored with but his family. Sit down to dinner with company in a nice restaurant and a member of his family is often placed in a prominent position, as if it were another piece of vital cutlery. They then jingle, and even though not answered, there is still that little gap in the conversation as eyes glance down to see who is on the line. "What was that you were saying?". 

Worse still is when the cell phone becomes an accessory, held in the hand at all times, just in case a vital call comes in which they invariably do. "Oh, I am in line at the store, what are you doing?". 

So here I am. I no longer like him or his extended family since they have taken over like little alien beings, infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives. It's unavoidable, we will be sucked into their big black hole whether we like it or not and all end up talking in Tweets.

The photo was taken here in the Southwest, before going digital and still used my Minolta and would develop my own photos in the darkroom. Check the picture for bullet holes.

Rice paper and powder.

Several years ago I found a little box at the drugstore, which quite amazingly was empty and yet for sale. It was a pretty box and I have a 'thing' for little boxes, so by the time I walked out the door, the pretty box was mine. It was an ideal container for the nibs for my ink pens, but in reality its purpose was just to be pretty.

I have always wanted to draw the picture on the box and now I have.

If I ever thought I had found a treasure, then I was wrong. I have since discovered that the box is an ordinary commercial item and still being sold. When opening the box it should have contained little sheets of rice paper with rice powder to blot a shiny nose. Still, I am perfectly happy with my box, empty or not, because every time I look at it, it feeds my imagination.

These are more the real colors. The scanner made some changes of it's own. 

Paper: Strathmore Bristol smooth 260gsm

Paint: Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache, Micron 01

Brush: No. 6 Loew-Cornell

Technique: Gouache, crosshatch shading

Level of enjoyment while making: high

EDM Challenge 185.

When we bought a house in France we didn’t realize that the purchase price included 15 cats. There seemed to be cats everywhere: snoozing in the shade, under one of the many rose bushes, sitting on the wall blinking in the sun or making a dash for it as we approached.

I had never thought about cats as anything else than pets and had no idea that half-wild or feral cats existed.

It also took a few days for us to understand that this was an enormously incestuous little clowder. Down the road lived a stringy tom who was the granddaddy of them all and who would make his rounds to his harem several times a day. Our own (neutered) cat only watched from a safe distance or came indoors with a disgusted air that said, “I want no part in this”. It was all a little too uncivilized for his taste, I believe.

After the second litter had arrived, I decided that it was time return all the cats and whenever there was an opportunity I would put on ‘the gloves’ hoping that I would be successful at catching cat and putting it in a box to take it three villages down to it’s owners. Every so many days I would make the journey with a box containing a snarling, scratching cat on the seat beside me and show up at their door.

It was a cold, wet and windy April night when I looked out of the window and saw a cat crawling out of the neighbor’s basement and making a wild dash to our side of the road.

When I later went to look in the laundry room that we used as a potting shed, there were three kittens in a corner on a sack, their eyes still closed. This was the litter that stayed, although their Mother Mimi was later delivered to her rightful owners, who managed a sour smile, because I don’t think they really wanted me to return their cats and were wondering when this would stop. Mimi was the last.

My brother adopted the two males and called them Mad Max and Dirty Harry, I kept the little gray female.

In the drawing Dirty Harry and my little gray kitten share a basket. She was with me for 19 years.

Challenge 185: Draw a cat. 
I decided to try the dreaded watercolors again, and ended up using them as I would gouache. Not quite the intention. The paper is 300 gsm, cold pressed Fabriano watercolor paper, which contains 25% cotton. For a brush I used a medium Niji waterbrush.

The watercolor paint is Pelican. For watercolor I prefer a box because tubes of paint can dry out seeing I do so few watercolors. Seeing that the paint isn't really very transparent I must have the box with opaque paint. All Dick Blick.

Listened to "Staying On" by Paul Scott, author of "The Jewel in The Crown".
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.Staying On won the Booker Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.

Lengua.

 

I had been to Mexico, which is only about 15 minutes away, but decided to eat in my favorite downtown Mexican restaurant anyway, where everything is authentic, including the decor. More authentic than the restaurants in the little town over the border that cater to our winter visitors.

For some time I had been thinking of having some tongue.  My grandmother would make marinaded tongue for sandwiches now and again. Lengua (tongue) is on the menu of most good Mexican restaurants and that's what I ordered.

As I waited I remembered that my grandmother would never allow me to peek in the pan while the tongue was boiling, because tongue can look rather unappetizing during preparation.

When my plate was put before me, I blinked a couple of times and  immediately knew that I was in for an adventure. Here was tongue in a very authentic state, with unidentifiable bits and bobs here and there, and some of the skin attached. It looked nothing like the succulent, thin slices of  marinaded meat of my grandmother's table.

I was as brave as I could be, and inwardly scolded myself for being such a big baby as I gingerly nibbled at my food. Perhaps next time, I should order  enchiladas like every self-respecting gringa. 

EDM Challenge 293

This is not recent work but I had recently scanned it. It is made on gesso layered with Indian Ink and scratched out so that you get a negative effect, which works very well for something made of glass.

EDM Challenge 304

Just a quick doodle to draw a bow and to use the watercolor pencils I have had in my drawer for as long as I can remember. "Everyday Matters" makes me want to do things I have not done before, and I think that this is what it is all about.

Paper Cut Collage. Moon in Pond.

So why make things easy when you can make them hard? This project started off quite innocently. Someone had given me Mexican chocolate and I saved the wrappers. Then one evening last week I make a fish. 

I quickly draw a fish on cardstock and painstakingly stick little pieces of wrapper paper on it.
Then I decide to make a pond. Of course, I first cut the waterlily pads because that's fun to do with some cardstock I had in my stack.
As I go along I make a rippled moon and decide to make my own background. 

I realize that for the lay-out I want, I need a background sheet of 30x35 cm, so I texturize 2 Yupo pages with ink and watercolors. I have little experience with Yupo and the experience I do have does not make me grab it often (I am not a watercolorist). However, this works really well and I use a sponge brush, a sponge roller and a little natural sponge (very spongy all this) to make something that looks like water.

In order to make it look like one sheet, I cut (I use an exacto) one side of one sheet in a wave pattern; paste my Yupo sheets to a cracker box for support, and paste down the various elements.

I also paste some of the snippets that I cut out to blend the two pages in the collage adding a little more dimension. Then I discover that I cannot seem to shoot a good picture of the finished project without trying out six different ways and still not succeeding.


What did I learn?
Do not use candy wrappers in a project that will take many hours to make. 
Candy wrapper paper does not look great on a photo.
Cracker boxes give excellent support in a pinch.
Yupo is nice after all. Here is my first attempt. It makes good backgrounds and offers me new possibilities now.
I really like paper cutting. Yupo cutting might be even better because you glide right through.


I listened to "A Murderous Procession" by Ariana Franklin, downloaded at Audible.com while working on this project.

National best-selling author Ariana Franklin resumes her Mistress of the Art of Death series with A Murderous Procession. In 1176, King Henry II's daughter is set to marry the king of Sicily. But when several wedding guests are murdered during the procession, Adelia must uncover who is behind the killings and who is the killer's real target. 

Left or Right?

My cupboards and closets are usually tidy, my table-tops not so much. I have no concern about driving with my fuel light blinking. I remember faces for years and years, surprising people that I can place whenever I first met them. I don't remember names. My sense of time, it has been proven time and time again, is non-existent. Yet, I am a planner and a list-maker. Visual and verbal are equally present in me. I use my hands a lot when I speak. I am very patient, especially with people, but very spontaneous in many things. Some of my best travel destinations were decided in 30 minutes and the ticket bought the same day.

All in all, I am right brain dominant.

Please don't ask me to do the same thing over and over again, so that I might become proficient in it, because boredom will most certainly set in, and with boredom comes distraction, and once distracted, you have lost me.

My mother, who is neat and structured, tried for many years to teach me how to sew my own clothes. I would have the most wonderful time sketching what I wanted my dress to look like, go out, chose the fabric, but when I started sewing I used that same wild enthusiasm, which would not work out quite as well. It always resulted in me having to undo seams and buttonholes, and eventually  in frustration. My mother would give me her 'little look' and end up making the dress, finishing it in fine, little stitches. How could it be that her daughter couldn't do this?

Left brain versus right brain, but we didn't know that then.

The picture of the Mexican tiled stairs was made in Tucson. Such a neat and structured pattern.

 

A Glowing New Year.

I added some glow to the New Year by using Chinese joss paper in which to cut some portals, like the ones you see in Yemen. Let's see what this year will bring.

Miss Potato Nose.

This past year, like Alice, I went down the rabbit hole. No Queen of Hearts in my story, but a Miss Potato Nose. She also yelled, "Off with their heads", at the top of her lungs, while she swung her machete around and changed the life of all of those about her.
I have read and reread the book by Martha Stout: The Sociopath Next Door. I had read it prior to having my head cut off and still could do nothing when it happened because we want to believe that those whom we like cannot be so heartless. 
Only now am I getting round to it, and I have acquired a nice new potato-peeler.

Paper Cut.

I have a problem - well perhaps more than one, but I have such a broad interest in everything around me that I always find myself doing something new. It's probably what I need, or I would specialize. 
Since I bought some printed paper this whimsical cut-out just wouldn't go away till I made her.

Gandhiji

More stamps than envelope, it seems. Gandhiji's tranquil face looking back at me multiple times, like looking through a kaleidoscope.
Last time I went to the post office they were out of 98 cent stamps and I bought 1 dollar ones, which are far prettier. I think I will continue doing that. They might even have different ones, which will make my envelopes more interesting too. Of course, I could just stick on 100 penny stamps.

Paper mosaic.

When a day is just plodding along, or worse than that even, when very little seems to go the way I would like it to go, then I am totally taken aback when I suddenly come across something that will just flood my head with ideas and flush out any disappointing feelings I may have.
It can be something simple. Like this morning when I saw a picture of a caterpillar, and the colors were so wild, that I immediately wanted to make a vividly colored caterpillar of my own. Recently I saw a program about fractals and there I went again, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Head spinning with inspiration.

Words, that are strung beautifully, do it to me too. 

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
 – Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
  

If I can't mosaic anything of scale, then why not mosaic something small and light. That is what you see in the picture. I am making paper mosaic tiles and placing them on a little wooden box. It looks like nothing this close, but when finished I will post the end result and it will look entirely different. You will see.

The Big Hat.

Your life experiences build you layer upon layer into whom you eventually become. It is also the life experiences of those whom you encounter along the way, that influence you in becoming who you are. As a woman, I have a strong admiration for women who disown certain conventions and seek out the experiences that make them multi-faceted and very interesting. I can name a few from the past, Baroness von Blixen, Mary Kingsley, Margaret Mead, Delia Akeley and Isabella Bird a.o. If you think that there are no modern day women who adventure out, then names like Jane Goodall and Alicia Colson come to mind, but granted I can find very few and most are scientists. However on the bright side, there is Sophie, who writes a blog journal about her hotel in the West African town of Djenne, Mali, where she has settled. Sophie, in turn introduces Edith Watts, of Papua New Guinea, in her October 18th, 2010 blog entry. Fascinating women. But they are not the only ones. Many women these days travel the world (outside the tourist circuit), live in little known pockets of the world and do interesting things. One day, future generations will hear of them, only, right now, it is not easy to find them even on the internet. 
Let's hope that they are keeping journals. 

It was Sophie who mentioned "wearing the big hat" when writing about Edith Watts and when I was going through my black and white photographs from a while back, I found this one of my mother.

Foreign movies.

You say tomato, I say tomahto. When I say ball, you hear bowl. Seriously. 

A friend was going to bring my dog to the office, and I asked her to also bring the bowl. She called to say that there was no bowl in the kitchen. Puzzled, I told there was one by the fridge and heard her say, "Oh, you want her ball". I have told this story to others and Americans hear bowl for ball and I, when they say it, hear ball for bowl and bowl for ball. As if life is not confusing enough.

I was having dinner with a very likable man and we were making the usual small talk, which I am not good at even at the best of times. I asked him what kind of movies he liked and distinctly heard him say, "porn movies". I know my eyes must have glazed over when I looked up from my plate. He held my gaze and said again, "forn movies", (which I know are, to some people, almost the same as porn movies). "Ah", I said somewhat relieved, "forrin movies". 

Oh well, you say tomato, I say, tomahto. What does it matter? No reason to call the whole thing off.

I used pen and ink (Hydrus, Phthalo Green and Venetian Brown) for the peacock feather and washed in a watercolor for the yellow.
Lately some readers have asked if the photos and drawings are my own. Everything used in my blog is my own and all photos, writing, drawings and made objects etc are done by me with the exception of a few and I always mention if they are by someone else in the text.

Twitter & Tumblr & More.

I think my head is about to explode. I just don't understand where people find the time to do it all, and I don't even mean ALL. I mean, what they do behind their computers. I get numerous personal emails that need responses. I get business emails that need to be taken care of. I Blog, and if you are reading this you already know that. Then this Summer a friend invited me to see her photos on Facebook. Turns out you need to register to be able to see them, and once registered, there were many happy reunions with people from the past. People who had worked for me, friends who I had lost touch with and friends I see monthly, weekly or daily too. Soon I had a bunch of friends. Then there was the Tweeting, but I drew the line there, because I am hopeless at small talk and that seemed like small talk to me. But I like to at least know what is out there, so checked into Tumblr, which is a blogging system that I know I don't need. I like Flickr. I spend some time there now and then because I like seeing other peoples photos, but I have never uploaded any of my own. 

Now I come across Pinterest. Which is interesting, but I just don't see how one can manage it all.......and yes, many bloggers whose blogs I read, have Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and some others.

Between the phone, the mobile phone, text messaging, emailing and T, F, F, T and the others, reading blogs and actually living life and reading a book now and then, I think I have no option but to let my head explode. Perhaps I am taking this Slow and Simple idea too seriously, and should leap back into the Speed and Stress lane again, where everyone's head has already exploded.

What's the rush?

 

Lately, I seem to have been looking down a little more, and that's how I found the feathers that I stuck in my little art book. The ragged looking one will make a great stamp.

The day before Thanksgiving I was on the grocery store parking lot, in the middle of mayhem. A well-dressed man in a nice car was so concerned that I would take the parking spot he had his eye on that he stopped his car right in front of mine. I mimed something that was supposed to say: now what are you doing? His reaction was not well-dressed at all, but I had no time for him because two cars down, a car had backed into another.

What's wrong with having Thanksgiving on some boring Sunday in February? Travel will be cheap and the airports not crowded. There will be months of time for dinner preparations and getting the house in perfect shape for company. There will be no family feud about going to the one for dinner and not to the other. Shopping will be a pleasure in the almost empty stores.

Why not turn everything inside-out and upside-down and walk to the beat of your own drum?

Black Friday Shopping.

I also went shopping this Thanksgiving weekend. Photo-shopping, that is. I used the following pictures. The bee and the woman, I clipped from magazines, and I had already worked the picture of the woman posted here quite a bit (can't seem to find the original). The photo of the roses I took in Monterey several years ago and I scanned the leaf. I think I might have another hobby.

She used to be a beautiful baby.

I bent down to plug my laptop into a socket which was inconveniently tucked under a piece of furniture. Instead of repositioning myself, I just tried it anyway, and soon felt my one leg sliding slowly away from the other. It was all in slow motion, and I had time to realize that if I let this continue, I could easily split down the middle. Too late to bring the leg back so I dropped my rear end to the floor. Far less painful than being split in two.
I looked up to see Athena in her usual position in the bedroom, sleeping most of her day away. 

I wondered that if I was in a really disastrous situation, would she come and save me, so I gave a plaintiff cry for help and I added a little whine for good measure.

She opened her eyes and raised her head; her paws one draped over the other most elegantly. I whined again, and in the bubble over her head I saw her think: "What in heaven's name are you doing on the floor? So unlike you". I think she blinked once or twice before she decided that it was impossible to continue holding her head up, placed it on her paws, and went back to her mid-morning snooze.

If I ever end up half-dead in a ditch, I think I can only expect a sympathetic little sniff from her, before seeing her tail jauntily disappear in the distance. So much for that.

Here she is wearing her rosebud baby collar and her favorite worried expression, which is totally fake. She never worries at all!

Rare birds.

Recently at a concert, where a soprano from New York sang the stars from the heavens, I glanced around as I settled in to listen. Across the aisle sat a baby-boomer Harley guy, with tattoo's up his arms and in his neck; his  chains catching the light. His face tilted upwards, his eyes closed, listening to the music in quiet appreciation. Although he seemed oddly out of place, it was good to see that we don't have to fit into society's little boxes.

The same week, at Petsmart, I approached a store associate, who was standing by an older woman with a mangy looking little dog on a lead.  He had sad eyes and was missing a large part of one of his ears. The elderly woman turned and gave me a snarling smile, telling me that it was not yet my turn because her dog was being trained as an assistance dog. Her expectations were clearly high. I looked at the dog and he looked up at me with tired eyes, and I am sure he was saying, "Do I remotely look like a dog that would be able to do that?". I wanted to pluck some of the woman's tail feathers, but thought better of it.

Later at the dog park (my life seems to revolve a lot around dogs), a man sat down next to me on the bench, while his wife settled on the armrest. He was hesitant to talk, but when he did he mentioned Mark Twain's autobiography, which is on the best-sellers list. I said, quite innocently, "So you are a NPR listener?", because that day it had been mentioned on the radio. I added that I liked listening to BBC news on that station. "I don't like that stupid English accent", he snapped. His wife scoured the sky for any birds flying by to study. Now there is no denying that my accent sounds British to some, but it's not. I realized that he wasn't happy at being found out that he listened to what he might consider a "liberal" station. I felt like feeding him a worm.

My accent sometimes incites reactions that are beyond my understanding. Like the woman in a car, who was in the assumption that I had locked my dog in a car with closed windows. She screamed that she had already called the humane society, so I walked up to her to explain, but she just bellowed, "Go back to Canada, and stay there". "Why would I want to go to Canada?", I asked but of course, I knew what it was about. My accent. I should have tied a knot in her beak. Silly bird.

You meet some rare birds sometimes and I am not talking about the biker at the concert, who didn't fly with the flock.

The birds in the drawing are a Sunday morning practice. I wanted to see if I could do something like this.

Bohdi Leaf Skeleton.

I have never watched much TV. There is a reason for this, I think. I grew up without television, not because I wasn't allowed to watch it, but it simply wasn't available. TV was only introduced in South Africa in 1976 and I might just have developed an early immunity to the TV-virus.

Of course, there was always a TV in the house later wherever I lived, and I did enjoy watching certain programs. I am after all not from another planet.

Then, about 10 years ago, I lived and worked in Barcelona for a while, and there too I had television but I had difficulty getting into the Catalan language and if you like reading then it's so simple to put on some music and settle into a book and forget about television altogether.

When I got back to Arizona, I remember I was making the bed while Sally Raphael was on and thinking that I didn't want this kind if thing in my home, and cancelling the cable and switching to DVDs. I had to forfeit PBS and some other things I was fond of watching, but it was either the one, or the other.

I am now staying in a home where there is television, and the first two weeks it was practically impossible for me to unglue my eyes from the screen. I just loved watching NatGeo, PBS and some cooking shows. How could I have lived without this for so long?

Week two, I discovered that TV-life consists of reruns and reruns and then some more and I went to the local library for some books and now the sullen screen sits in a corner sulking and feeling very unloved.

When shooting the skeleton leaf in the picture I was reminded of my time in Barcelona. I had bought some there in a florist shop, but they are easy to make. Just use sturdy leaves such as magnolia or maple, dry them in phone book for a few days so that they are nice and flat, and then place them in water. Clean the water daily to avoid decay, and soon you will find that you can carefully remove the remainder of the fleshy green part as it rots away with an old toothbrush and dry the skeleton.

There is something about snail mail that I like.

This morning the mailman had a parcel for me. My sister-in-law loves sending things (and I love receiving them), and she had already told me that something was on its way. It took long enough, but then it had to come all the way from Thailand.
Even the wrapping was na rak (cute) in the way Hello Kitty is cute. Hard to believe that Hello Kitty has been around since 1975. I read in my book that the Thai have their own characters that appear on stamps, train tickets and obviously on Thai Mail packaging. Manga, the Japanese cartoons and characters, which are popular here too (although, I must say I don't know anyone who is interested in manga, but when I go to my favorite art supply store, there is a whole Manga department, so there must be quite a bit of manga drawing going on).

I am working on a drawing of a peacock feather that I found when staying with a friend who has about 25 peacocks wandering on her property. They were an endless source of entertainment for Athena, my dog, although I don't think the peacocks shared in the fun.

Another thing I am doing is using my old trusty Minolta again with expired film. I have seen just wonderful photos made with expired film. You never know what you are going to get, so it is senseless to work towards an end-result. You just shoot subjects that aren't important and see the magic or the black magic that appears, because some just come out totally black with nothing to see.

I know you can photoshop anything and everything, but this is a little different. I like a little different.

All one leaves behind.

This picture was taken in White Sands, New Mexico, when my life was still what I considered 'normal'. Three years later all has changed. Surprisingly, change, although it takes a little getting used to, can be exciting. I can't say that it is easy to have so much change in one's life, however I am seldom bored these days, and boredom is something that I can't abide.

When I was a little girl in South Africa, most Sunday's would be spent at a riverside, usually the Vaal, but sometimes the family would get adventurous and we would end up in a new location, like at a dam. I suppose water was an essential element for a family of Dutch people to enjoy themselves. My grandfather built boats that would chug along the river with everyone on board. His shed was never empty as there was always the beginning of a new boat in it.

Fishing was another hobby of his. Upon arrival at the river, he would take his rod and tackle, chair and hat, and settle at the river's edge in the shade. He would catch barbell, catfish, which it is said can even travel over land. We did not eat them and he would release them after calling some of us over to admire his catch. I thought they were ugly and they smelt of the river mud, but it was his pleasure, along with reading and perusing maps, because he was a traveller at heart. I think most of the geography I learned was based on him showin me all the places he would have visited if his life had been different. He had wanted to go to sea, but was very short sighted and needed glasses, so that never happened. He loved water, especially the sea, I think, because of where it could take him.

What is genetic or what is delivered by the imprint your family leaves behind on the sands of your life?

None of his progeny has any interest in fishing, but both my brothers are avid and good sailors. We are all three interested in the world and discovering it. Imprints, I think. Our myopia? Genetic for sure.

First Day of School.

I suppose if you are 6 going on 7, and you have already lived in Holland, USA, France and now Thailand, you learn to take everything in your stride. Fleur, in her school uniform is ready to start the new school year. She certainly isn't afraid of much, if she can wrap a python around her neck.