blue

finding all sorts of beautiful blues on flickr. see them up close at my flickr favs page

poetry & collage

i hardly ever mention that i'm a poet on this blog, and i'm not sure why. i think poetry and collage are not that far apart from one another. for me, poetry and collage both take images from the world around us. i'm always observing the stuff around me, i think i am a collector not only in ephemera, but in words and sounds and snippets of conversation. i often create alone in my attic room, but i am always pulling inspiration from the world outside.


for me collage is blending imagery and patterns into gesso and crayon and paint. and poems work with word and rhythm and sound and images. sometimes i incorporate words into my collages and i always have images in my poems.

so i wrote this poem yesterday & i like it because it reminds me of my collages.
it's untitled so far.

My name is a book of lives
I press leaves inside
Scraps of the city – one crumbled bus ticket, a newspaper washed from rain,
a torn photograph of two little girls

Look inside a red suitcase: You’ll find letters to no one

My name is the map of the world
A body of continents and stars

On the airplane
Look at the map: flights intersect
Travel miles & seas & hours & clouds

A window bird trills by my bed
Power lines crisscross streets
Like threads in the sky

A book of lives is a month of Saturdays
A seahorse from Peru
Perfume at my neck
All the threads in my body connect
The heart beats

Found & lost, inbetween, unexpected
These are all my names
Contradictory, jade-green, city grids
The last bite of an ice cream cone
These are all my names

A book of lives
Lives in my right hand
I clutch a pen in the other

A bird in a cage
Left handed
A piece of me is in everyone else
We are breathing in everyone else’s breath

All the rivers flower into the sea

computer broke but now it's fixed!

my computer went kaplooey a few days ago so it was sad, i missed the internet. it reminds me of what did we do before the internet?? who knows? :P
well, besides my computer being a butt, i've been going to school, working on art at night and its chinese new year tomorrow! that snuck up on me...you can't sweep the floor on the new year (sweeps your good luck away) and you can't wash your hair either (i'm not sure why) and the fun part is getting lai see (red envelopes w/ money) from relatives and going out to eat with them.


atcs made for a swap

so many art journals, so little time!

lately, i have been working on several different journals - a little moleskine cahier for the sketchbook project, my current personal art journal, a japanese accordion moleskine that is part of a round robin i am organizing, i will post scans and photos of these projects later.

i made a few spreads for a traveling journal: journal 3311 - a journal started by aprile of notpaper blog which highlights many different collage artists - she even did a feature of me a few months ago.

i was the first one to receive the journal so obviously it was mostly blank pages inside. i did 3 spreads i am pretty happy with:

i've been having a lot of fun with doing tissue paper backgrounds. i love the texture the tissue paper makes with its wrinkles and if you lightly apply some paint, you can still see the layer of text underneath.

i also used some crayons around the edges of the pages, i've been using these silky crayons which you can smudge around and are water soluble. i also like mine because several of the crayons are metallic so it gives the page a subtle shimmery touch.

i'm not sure if this spread is finished yet...

make your photos into polaroids!

because photos just look cuter as a polaroid, there is a free software to download called poladroid, where you click and drag your photos into the 'polaroid camera' and out will come your photo in polaroid form! it's easy peasy and the 'camera' will even make that classic sound you hear when the polaroid shoots out of the camera. it's free and easy to use, find it here.