Answer: Invitation to Creativity

This piece offered by Big Daddy, my bud and Veronica's husband, a man with Big Artistic Guns who also happens to know a 'hint hint' when he sees one.

Illustration Friday - "SOAR"

Terrible photos, & missing some outlining details I'd rather have on it, but I'm out of energy and time. Word this week was/is: SOAR. Hopefully, soon, I'll work up the chutzpah to actually send what I'm doing to the Illustration Friday blog.

From the 'Hood - Texture

I spotted this and pretended I was approaching it on the back of a camel. Two humps, please. I've actually ridden a two-humped camel, name of Ralph (I mean it, at the Phoenix Zoo). Camel-riding is a very SWAYING experience, not something I recommend for anyone even slightly intoxicated or uncertain of her stomach. Or anyone put off by camel farts, cuz Ralph let one go with every other step! (I wonder if that's normal camel behavior, or if Ralph was uncertain of his stomach!) Visions of Morocco dance through my ever-far-horizon-travelling heart. Cool play of light and patterns here. I'm always a sucker for a roll of rusty wire, too. Even though this happens to be plastic cable wire. Patterns through spilled mortar. Could be an aerial shot of a strange water formation through a marsh. Just more utility or cable company street graffiti, but it looks quite exotic, doesn't it? What do you think it might say? This feels very Asian to me, balanced, symmetrical, even soothing: as if it could be on the doors of a temple, or an emblem for a new kind of tea. Closeup of sewer drainage cover. I like the subtle weathered colors. So dried, so fragile, this small branch. Not a great photo, but still -- doesn't it make you want to step on those leaves just to hear the crunch? [Too late - I already did!] Closeup of a knot on a mature Saguaro cactus. Aren't feathers just one of the most photogenic objects on the planet? Despite photographers who are forever getting too close & forgetting to take the MuthaCam off 'sienna effect'? An interesting split on a tree trunk. Growth blister? Same tree and crag, different angle. Looks like a canyon rock formation. Eesh, this poor telephone pole. All these nails?! From years of 'Yard Sale' and 'Missing Dog' signs? I'm addicted to these pods. They remind me of pomegranates (another addiction). I put these in my sweatshirt pocket and took them home to sketch. I have 3,781 sketches of these pods, but I never get tired of doing them. A word with particular poignancy in the desert. Closeup of broken oleander trunks. "Pilar", the tree in our front yard, is nearly nude now. Time to get out the rakes. Yard corner vignette: gate, wall, plant. Bottom of the palm trunk in our front yard. Old hardware latch on our backyard gate to the irrigation ditch. Double BB's work gloves, pair #4,799,825. This photo reduces me to tenderized mush, for some reason.

Invitation for Creations!

This shot, using the 'negative effect' on the MuthaCam, reminded me of the stunning transparencies I've seen on various on-line stores, i.e. Stampington. It's evocative, a little ghostly & surreal, also (to my mind) quite romantic & historical-seeming.

SO:

I would LOVE to see what any of you might do with it (in whole or in part) -- on a card, a piece, a journal page? (Patty? Mary Ann? Veronica? HINT! HINT!) Whatever you want, really -- just scan it when you're thru and email it to me, and let me know if you mind me posting it or not. Just be sure to tell me who you are so I can give credit.

From the 'Hood - Wrought Iron

I've driven by this turn-in for years. I've always wanted to turn in, but never have. I've always coveted a section of the wrought iron, too. On my last From the 'Hood walk, I decided to make this my destination. Recently, the property changed owners. I love the red doors & trim. As I was shooting my pictures, the new owner pulled in the driveway and slowed beside me to ask, "Can I help you?" [Polite version of 'Just what exactly is this sweatshirted and stocking-capped female with a Mutha of a Digicam doing treading on my sod?] I told him I was shooting his wrought iron. He gaped at me. "Do you like it?" 'Oh, yes, I love it. I always have,' I replied. He wrinkled his nose. "I hate it." In the last 2 weeks, I've noted the white iron, along with the surrounding leaves & blooms, has received a wildly enthusiastic but not-too-well-aimed gold spray paint treatment! New Owner's attempt to adorn the hated wrought iron? "Negative" effect setting on MuthaCam.

Card from Dad

This was my Dad's Christmas/Holiday card this year. Gorgeous. His photos always knock me on my keister. He wrote: "The photo is of an old building facade in Jerome, Arizona, mining ghost town turned art colony. The artisan working there now is what's open. In the background, snow-covered San Francisco Peaks, nearest thing to a White Christmas for Phoenicians."

From the 'Hood - Sneak Peek

I drifted along for a 90 minute walk today, shooting pictures until my MuthaCam told me 'no more memory' ... I can take 80 photos. I TOOK 80 photos. Lucky for you, I've deleted several that didn't turn out well, didn't turn out at all, or were too similar to other shots. But boy did I get some yummmmmmmmyyyy shots! Stay tuned for my regularly scheduled Wednesday night From the 'Hood program.

Using my Cat Canvas Drying Time Productively

My first visual page of 2008. It's not in any kind of journal; I have no idea how I'm going to bind these pages yet. I. LOVE. THIS. PAGE.

Back to the Cat

The canvas is papered. Eesh, blimey, GRRRRRRR, if that didn't take 4 hours. The blank area is where I'll be creating a fence line, which will wrap around the left side of the canvas. May, thank goodness, has finally set her sites on something higher than Wheel of Fortune. She's after The Tool Belt Diva's job. Ok, all right -- Tool Belt Diva with all of Vanna's flair! Time to build a fence. My grandparents were farm folk, I can do this with my hands tied behind my back, I know it - I've got prairie DNA. Except - uh, er, well - let's just call this Typical Construction - not enough material, requiring a trip to Home Depot (or Michael's) for more. Drying time. Lots of heavy books to prevent balsa-wood-curling. I want to roughen & toughen these slats up with sandpaper, then stain them with this walnut ink. Ready, set, STAIN! Half the fence, stained. Tomorrow it's off to Michaels for me, to pick up another sheet of balsa to finish this. Then I'm going to use some distress paint on it to make it peeled and weathered. Ladies & Gentlemen: we have an alley trash can. Mr. Cat tells me this is starting to feel like home. He curled right up in the corner without any help from me.

Dream Directive

As "New-Agey" as I can get, I want to say right now that I've never heard voices. Ever. Sometimes when I was praying my heart out about something, I really WANTED to hear voices, wanted reassurance that God and the Universe were out there, possibly even listening.

As you know if you read my blog, yesterday before I went to sleep, I wrote my Resolutions entry about letting go of the visual journal & just containing myself in, confining myself to, my written journal. That felt like exactly the right thing to do. But last night I had A Dream. The same dream over & over. & over. & over. & again. Then once more. And it was a continuation dream: it would start where the last segment ended and then go forward from that point.

I was 'summoned' to a courtroom, an old-fashioned room of gleaming wood, seats like church pews, and wherein everyone wore crimson robes, funky high starched collars, & powdered Marie Antoinette-like white wigs. These were all women, mind you, every single person in those chambers. A courtroom full of my peers, my friends, my loved ones, along with a sea of faces unknown to me. All the faces were friendly. All the faces were also dead serious. I stood before this ROOM full of people, known and not, in the middle of a circle of tables covered over with pages from my visual journal. I recognized many of the pages; I also saw that many of them were pages I've only imagined doing. How did those materialize?

And then, one by one, each woman came up to the other side of a table and picked up a journal page. She held it with such love, sometimes with tears, most times with sparkles in her eyes and a big grin, and she explained to me what she loved about the page, and what it meant to her, and why it was not going to be ordained that I would quit making visual journals. A dozen women approached me in this manner, and then the 'court' would adjourn. And then my dream would pick up again and the next dozen women would tell me the import of my pages.

Of course after the first 3, I was blubbering and contrite and promising to return to the pages. But the women waved their hands to quiet all of that. They wanted me to HEAR. They wanted me to see the individual potentials for value of a page, not to make my choice out of emotional surges. They wanted me to consider, really think about it.

The second to last part of the dream shocked me. There was TONI (me!) approaching TONI (me!) and picking up page after page with reminders of why they were made, the prompts, the personal history in each one. And I was so gentle with myself (which I never am in reality)! I asked myself [in a voice like a lullaby], 'Are you sure you can do without this?'

And then arrived The Voice. Julia Cameron calls that voice 'her marching orders'. I don't know what to call it. It was a woman's voice. It was very melodical, somehow filled with chords as if maybe 3 voices were merged together into one but still harmozing. It was a mesmerizing voice. And it said to me, with infinite kindness and absolute compelling certainty, "You're not done here yet. Continue, slow down indeed, but continue. You still have great things to discover from these pages."

I'm a little freaked out. I have that thick throat sensation, that tickly prickly nose/eye thing going on, of big tears just behind and ready to burst forth. I'm a serious believer in messages from dreams so what I'm feeling right now is most definitely Spoken To. It's an overwhelmed feeling I don't know what to do with yet.