There’s far too many lucky stars to count

–The Tender Idols, “Six Minute Feeling”

When I finally settled on pricing my art at the rate of five dollars per square inch, I decided I needed some form of one-square-inch art so just about anybody could afford at least something of mine.  I came up with the idea of doing wee magnets of Word Art with very short pieces on them.  I did the first batch of them at the Upper West Side Folk Art Market and dutifully transcribed all the original words into my iPhone so I could hang on to them:

Wishing Stars

Wish #1

This star is a wish for freedom to be whoever you really are. It is a wish that you may live without a sense of not being the way you should. It is a wish for you to love freely what or who you love and never feel the need to apologize for it

Wish #2

This star is a wish that the cracked places will find healing. It is a wish that your heart will expand in a way to your utter surprise. It is a wish for beauty, grace and for life in all its perplexing ways.

Wish #3

This star is a wish that you will always carry peace within your heart. This is a wish for serenity that knows beyond any knowing to breathe and let things be what they are. This is a wish for the wisdom to recall that all storms will pass and the rain exhausts itself into sunlight.

Wish #4

This star is a wish that the bright light of your inspiration will shine brightly for the world to see. It is a wish that your light will be seen as clearly as possible without filters to obscure the true colors and the true brilliance of it.

Wish #5

This star is a wish for you to know laughter, for you to take all things lightly. It is a wish no matter how critical the situation can become, it does not ever become serious. It is, in a way, a wish that you may see things from the outside and laugh now.

Wish #6

This star is a wish for a rich life full of all the marvels and wonders that this world has to offer to every one of us. It is a wish for you to lack for nothing in life that you have true need of and to embrace gratitude.

Wish #7

This star is a wish that your life may be filled with surprises of the happy kind. It is a wish that you will be gifted with presents you didn’t even know that you wanted until you received them. It is a wish for happy random perfection. It is a wish that apparent chaos may resolve itself into fractal beauty and perfection.

Moon

Sentinel of the night sky, perpetual in change and strangely constant for even as change will come over the face the same face is turned to us each night and only the shadow will shift. We are similar.

Actually, I did the moon first.  I’ve only done it once and I’m not even sure if I’ll do it again or just leave it on my fridge as a reminder of how this all started.

At my first art show, I swapped a wishing star with Chris Hubbard for a lucky star from his booth.  Somebody else bought another.  Then I came to the question of how to replenish my stock.  I decided to allow myself to repeat myself a bit and re-do some previous wishes.  Then I discovered how much easier said than done that was.

The first few stars had been tossed off rapidly–sketch in the stars and come up with words.  Then trying to repeat what I’d done left me wondering how in the heck did I do that in the first place.  It didn’t help that I’d been quietly raising my standards so that stars I would have used before started to appear too shabby for public consumption.  Finally, I hit a wall and could barely even make myself make them anymore.

Eventually, I nudged myself past my reluctance and starting refining my methods so the results both looked better and were easier to do.  (Templates are a beautiful thing, y’all.)  I tweaked my process a bit more as I sat in my booth at the Art-B-Que and while I didn’t sell much in the way of magnets, I did wonders in producing the things.

I think of all the materials and objects I use to create my word art, the only ones specifically purchased for artmaking purposes was the pack of Pilot G-2 Mini gel pens that I picked up at an office supply store.  The rest of my art supplies are things that were handed down to me or that I already happened to have.  My father had a desk drawerful of rulers and French curves that he gladly passed on to me, having no more need for them in the age of Macintosh.  I tucked one of them in the storage clipboard I’ve been using to carry my art supplies and one fine night went to see a fun little cover band known as The Intruders play at a downtown sports bar.

My the time I’d elbowed my way to a seat at the bar and gotten settled, I was too frazzled to be patient enough to do nice, neat squared off lines to define the boundaries of the words.  So I did some hasty and skewed ones, added a couple of shapes to work around with the French curves and somewhere among waiting an eternity to be served, ordering an overpriced hamburger, eating it and cleaning up after myself, I composed this.

Exile

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with me?What state of utter madness provokes a girl to make art in a sports bar?

This is the story of my entire life.Living at a slight distance from the rest of the world.

There’s a planet called normal.I’ve never really ever lived there.

But I do not inscribe my oddness on my skin or carve it into my flesh.

I’ve never even gotten a haircut any more extreme than perhaps the wee pixie cut I used to wear.

No, all my oddness is on the inside.

Once in a while it slips out of me in ways that startle and might even also disturb.

I’m not quite sure. Perhaps I shouldn’t flatter myself so.

All I know is I walk through so much of life feeling like there’s a glass wall in the way between me and everybody else.

I can be seen, I can even be heard, but I cannot be as close as one needs to be to touch.

My hands are open to grasp, but this barrier makes the grip useless.

Everyone slides out of my grip.

When I am truly close enough to touch, I barely know what to do with myself.

I wrap like a vine and it tears me when I am pulled loose.

And it would be easy to say that this is why I keep my distance.

But it feels more like my distance keeps me.

I speak and I cannot be heard. I listen and cannot quite understand.

I cannot speak your language. When I try, it comes out uncertain and mispronounced and it mutilates me inside.

I feel too much and I can’t find the valve to shut it off. I’d be afraid that I might never be able to switch it back on if I ever did.

This is why I don’t talk much–not because I have nothing to say, but because nobody really listens and understands.

This is why I write compulsively–because the page is the one listener who never feels a need to interrupt, who takes every word in and passes no judgment.

The page will never ask me what to explain what I meant by that.

The page will never excuse itself to get another drink and never come back.

That is why I’m scribbling these words in a sports bar while the band plays rock ‘n’ roll.

Because I don’t have to shout to be heard here.

If you are crazy enough to be reading these words, or have them read to you, this is what a whispered scream looks like, the urge to simultaneously want to be noticed and want to be left alone.

Because I wish I could connect but I don’t know if anyone in this room could bear the burden of my insanity.

I do not have room in me to listen, as I should if I should have any hope of connecting.

So I will pour out what is left of my seething brain into what is left of this page and I will see if anybody even notices what I’ve done.

Didn’t I tell you?This is the story of my entire life. Living at a slight distance from the rest of the world.

There’s a planet called normal. I’ve never really lived there.

It looks pretty from a distance, doesn’t it?  Then you get up close and find it’s not pretty at all.  I’m not normally in the habit of using my artwork as catharsis that way–I have Catbooks and Shit Books for that sort of thing–but the time and the place and the circumstance combined so there wasn’t any other kind of work that would have come out of me.

Printout of this work (2 MB .jpg file) available here.  Please read the license details.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original has been sold.

This is the second of two recent “hey, look, I’ve got a picture frame, let’s fill it with art!” pieces.  (The previous entry, Fire Meets Water, was the other one.)  While it’s very, very, easy to get a standard size picture frame and do standard sized artwork to fit in advance, there’s something a little more fun about making art to fit into an existing frame, especially if the frame isn’t the usual photograph size.

I’ve had this beautiful stained glass frame for so long I’m honestly a bit uncertain where I got it from.  I’m pretty sure it was a birthday present from a friend.  It sat, much like the bridesmaid’s gift frame, unfilled because I had no three-inch-by-three-inch pictures to fit into it and was reluctant to crop any existing photographs to make them fit.  When I finally started doing word art, one of the first things I wanted to try was a star as the white space.  This was the result:

Star Light Star Bright

The rhyme is engraved on my heart, to the point that the words don’t even come up anymore.

A glance at the sky and a longing rises up, the craving of the moment cast into the ether in the hopes that it will somehow be heard.

The request is usually for love. That seems to be the way of it.

Once in a while, the request is granted promptly enough to encourage one to expect more.

More often, the wish requires a repetition so, perhaps, the forces in such charge can be sure that it was well and truly meant, and not an idle thing.

How many of the tales we are told begin as an idle and unmeant wish is made?

Even God likes to be sure before He answers our prayers.

How much distance is there really between a prayer and a wish?

Each new night sky presents one with the chance to ask a most singularly important question. What do I really want?

And the answer comes in our cravings, in our secret longings, in the things we aren’t supposed to speak aloud lest we jinx it.

Which came first, I wonder–astrology or the practice of wishing on the stars?

And is there as much of a distance between the two as to even notice?

The result is the same in any event–casting our fate on lights in the sky from distant places.

The urge to control our fate by harnessing the forces of the cosmos.

Some of the turns of phrase came out a little weird because of the demands of fitting the words to the space provided.  I’m also not entirely happy with the way the first line was too large and too loose, but the rest of the words came out too well for me to want to toss the whole thing, so I’m keeping it.

Stars seem to have become a recurring theme in my work without much effort on my part.  There’s a piece I finished recently called “Moon, Stars, Comets and Other Possibilities” that runs in similar directions and I’m planning to do a series based on the astronomical symbols for the planets, followed by another series on the astrological signs.  Perhaps some future art historian can analyze the reasons why after I’m safely dead.  Until then, I’ll just be making the damn art.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I’d have a lot of trouble.  But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that’s a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

–Stephen Sondheim

Despite the constant blather one hears about “thinking outside the box”, I find that creativity can be more effective when executed within boundaries.  Sometimes the limitations are a function of the medium, other times the limitations are self-imposed to catalyze the all important question “If I can’t do this, what can I do?”

Poetry is a good example of this.  Any poetic form, from a haiku to a limerick to a sonnet to a sestina, places limits on the words you can use, whether the syllables, the rhythm, the rhyme or even words or lines that must be repeated at specific points.  Those rules force you to narrow your choices, to pick the word or the line that will fit the form and carry your intended message at the same time.  And yet within those limits, the possibilities remain endless.

I go back and forth on whether the textual portion of my Word Art would be considered poetry or not.  I suppose with the rules of poetry having been slackened to include just about anything made out of words, I could call it poetry and no one would be in a position to contradict me.  But I still don’t feel quite comfortable with the notion, since the words aren’t worked out in advance and once they’re written, there’s no room for revision.  First draft poems, at best, then.

The particular rules for this poetic form, if you want to call it that, are still being worked out.  This piece was an experiment to determine how it would look visually if I used a boundary instead of the end of a sentence to change ink colors, as I’d done in other pieces up to that point.  I picked two distinct colors–blue and red–traced a slight curve to split the space and with some vague notions in my head about water and fire, I sat down and began to write:

Some days, I am water and what enters me is dissolved and becomes a part of my me, an addition to my overall sense of self.

And then there are the other days, the days I am fire, when that which enters is fuel to be fed upon, to be transformed in a source of energy, of heat and light.

Unlike the elements I emulate, I can shift in one direction or the other without the risk of cancelling [sic] myself out.

Fire added to water leads to steam.

Air is supposedly my element according to those who measure such things by the alignments of the stars. I am not sure of this.

Or maybe it’s true if steam is close enough to air to count.

I spend enough time with my head in the clouds, to hear some people say it.

Though, clouds are formed by way of sunlight, not fire.

Fire from a distance, rather than directly applied.

Where the zenith of the sky meets the depths of the oceans, then the clouds form between.

Where the fire of action meets the water of contemplation, the steam of ideas is formed.

And steam can be harnessed to drive engines, as we all know. (Or, rather, those of us those of us in modern civilization all know.)

But steam only drives when it is channelled at the moment it is formed.

Once it has escaped, the force of it is no longer enough to push solid objects in the way.

And so when the waters of our contemplation meet the fires of action, hesitation is only going to lead to a fog.

Action without contemplation only burns out, or rages over everything and destroys all in its path.

To contemplate without any action, well, one could argue that water wears away stone, but it takes longer than a single human lifetime in order to do so.

(And even if we are granted additional lives, each transition tends to interrupt the chain of thought.)

So keep your fire as it should be kept and keep your water as deep and pure as you are able to do.

I’d originally designed it to fit into one of two lonely picture frames that had been sitting without pictures in them for years.  (My next entry will probably be about the piece I did to fill the other frame.)  This one had been a bridesmaid’s gift from my sister-in-law and I realize with some embarrassment that she and my older brother have been married for well over a decade now.

Fire Meets Water -- original frame

Not long after finally putting something in that frame (before then, it still held the thank-you note from my sister-in-law with the message STEP AWAY FROM THE ANIMAL PRINTS!) I realized that it would be the perfect size for one of the school pictures of my youngest niece.  I made the substitution and moved the work over to one of the frames I’d gotten from a thrift shop run where I’d bought as many frames as I could with a roll of quarters.

Fire Meets Water -- current frame

The frame is imperfect but suits it well.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.