Journal Transition

This past summer, my work-associate and pal, Greg, gave me a bag full of old black & white pictures he dug out of his garage. Even after I split them with Miss Veronica, I had a large cigar-box full. Two of those photos quickly became my favorites - one of the Arc de Triomphe, and one of a woman in a party dress with a huge happy smile, dancing. I've had those up on my inspiration wall since I sorted them out of the bigger pile, wondering what I wanted to do with them.

Lately, I've been reading several publications about altered books, along with some very special blogs about journaling, and I decided to make a run to some thrift stores to see if I could find an interesting or fun book that I could alter for use as my next journal, since I'm about 3 pages shy of finishing my current volume. Saturday, I dropped Kevin off for a tournament basketball game and decided to go to the Good Will store just a few blocks away.

SCORE!!! (Yes, Kevin did: 17 points, 2 assists, 7 rebounds -- but I meant ME!!! I found the perfect book - $2.99, plumb full of sassy verbage, witty titles, and vintage and/or retro photos galore!!) I spent the entire day Saturday doing ... not really alterations, but ADDITIONS, to this book to prepare it for the onslaught of my pen and scrawling thoughts. I also READ the book and laughed aloud, sometimes guffawed! so I decided Miss V needed her own copy - this book is a hoot! I ordered her a used one from Amazon.

Now, "Miss V Altered Mixed Media Artist", you get a sampling of some of what I've done with this book. I'm going to start with the page where I mounted the pictures that started it all (my mood, my overall idea for a journal). My inspiration!! This photo, this woman! She looks like she's having so much fun, she appears relaxed, kind of mischievous ... I LOVED this picture the second I saw it, it made me smile, I recognized -- what? Her? Her mood? Her interior self at the moment this picture was snapped! And she seems like the twin of the woman already pictured on the page, as if the woman in my black and white photo is the living, breathing, 3-dimensional embodiment of the woman on the page - I mean, look at their dresses! So of course I had to put them together, these two women. I somehow had the idea that the woman already in the book is whispering in the ear of the woman in the photograph Greg gave me, and they're conspiring, laughing, sharing secrets. (Yes, this was the first picture I put in the book ... she got first choice of which page to live on.) Now -- The Arc de Triomphe photo ... a moment of silence! It's perfection! I don't know who took it (neither does Greg) ... but I've been there, I've stood in probably that same spot at the same time of the evening and seen it just like that, even the boulevards were nearly empty, and the night like a sheen all around, a silk-lined draped cloak causing all the lights to turn misty, to soften. Paris reached all of my undersides, the hidden places it takes something extraordinary to get turned over, and Paris never asked, she just flipped me, tossed me, rolled me, exposed me again and again. Amazingly, I didn't resist. Then again, is it possible to resist Paris? Look at this photo and answer that question for yourself. It's from the 50s or early 60s and still reaches the visceral parts of me.

See next blog entry for more pages.