Soul Signs of the times

As many of you reading this know, I host a collaging group (a strictly female event) at my home once or twice a month. It is inspired by the trademarked process:
What is SoulCollage®?
SoulCollage® is a process through which you contact your intuition and create an incredible deck of cards which have deep personal meaning and which will help you with life's questions.

It might sound cheesy but I'm over 50 cards in and I've led groups of teens and adults in different settings making them. I can't get enough!
Feel free to visit www.soulcollage.com
We convened without corporate permission last night and pasted together some soul cards. I made the card pictured here right before reading my related fortune from a fortune cookie. I think something is trying to be communicated to me!
In related news, did you know that SoulCollage has a facebook page!?!?

Right side up Today

Now I'm able to show you the doodles again...right-side up. Today is so much more calm and collected and sunny when photoshop is correctly installed once again on my computer. Deep breath.

Upside-down Doodling Tuesday

What's wrong with these pictures? Yes, they are upside down. This past rainy Friday felt like this when I did those drawings-all topsy-turvey and soggy...watching umbrella heads dash around the loop...But these images are also upside down because I haven't installed Photoshop yet on my new hard drive and won't bother to fix it in another program. But let's talk about what's right with this picture: I managed to re-connect my scanner and bring you these unedited images! YES! Perhaps tomorrow I'll post them again right side up so you don't have to stand on your head.

Soooo yeah, now that my techno-tools are getting back in order, I hope to get Doodling Tuesdays back on schedule again, folks. I'd like to take a moment to thank all of those Doodling Tuesday fans out there. You're the reason I doodle. Snif snif.

Spooling fooling words?

My new hard drive has arrived, my pictures are loading...ah, sweet sweet blogging can resume.
I have been continuing to tear up my journal writing and make those winding paths seen in previous works.
The latest piece has been a "spool" of my writing. "A thread of thinking" or "Unraveling my writing."
I'm sure there are other phrases. In fact, it feels fairly cliche so I'm either original with this spool of words or have plagiarized someone else's work. Has it all been done before? Those who have seen it already have told me they've never seen it before.

It reminded me of a story I heard about Paul McCartney writing the song, Yesterday. Wikipedia confirms it:
According to biographers of McCartney and The Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family.^[1] Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid letting it slip into the recesses of his mind.^[2]
McCartney's initial concern was that he had subconsciously plagiarised someone else's work (known as cryptomnesia). As he put it, "For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no-one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it."^[2]
See the full story here.

I don't claim this spool of words will enjoy the success of a Beatles' Song, I just hope I haven't subconsciously stolen another piece! Whatever the case, I think I'll continue spooling and fooling around with it.

The Virtual/Real Tangle

The start of grad school has begun with a jumble of information...not unlike the tangled cords that sit behind my computer and are pictured below. I've noticed the same tangle happening in a paper sculpture that is still growing and has been featured in previous blog posts--also pictured below.
But just as I can't quite unravel the tangle of classes, career paths, and tangle of information in this age of social networking, I can't seem to get my simple digital images uploaded to the blog. You see, my computer at home is even confused. It crashed unexpectedly the other day and when I restart it, a blinking icon of a folder with a question mark appears. I've been told in an apocalyptical tone, "That's bad."
That blinking question mark in its innocent Mac friendly font taunts me. It, too, is not sure what to do!
"How will I blog for my people?," I wondered. So I brought my digital camera to my school computer lab but the computer doesn't seem to upload the pics either. Sigh. In the irony of my techno-fuzzy world, I've taken a picture of my camera with my camera on my iPhone. (Yes, I'm now one of those people as of a few weeks ago.) I then emailed the iPhone pictures to myself and posted them here on this blog.



I also took a picture of this very blog you're looking at. Woh, that is so conceptual!
Quiz: How many screens are you looking through before you get to see my paper sculpture? Is it real? Sick, huh? Makes you want to touch a human being or play with mud or something, doesn't it?

Painting and Music: A nice duo with Trio

This past Wednesday, I had the honor to do a "speed-painting" during the duration of a concert performed by Trio in Stereo. (Visit MySpace or Facebook to learn more about this Chicago band!) I was invited to do a painting of some sort so I decided to role out the paper right on the floor in front of the stage. With paint markers, oil sticks and the Magnum 44 permanent marker, I created an image of the 5 band members in roughly 45 minutes. There were many comments on the strong odor this marker produces. Permanent marker is not a sense typically associated at the bar but, well, this was a multi-sensory experience for sure!
Next time, I'm definitely bringing knee pads!

Doodling sculpture

I'd like to think the wandering line in our formation of these dominos this past weekend is connected to the wandering line growing out of my "doodle."

My "doodle" today is the start of a new 3-D piece. It is a continuation of a series I've been working on since I was in North Carolina this past spring.

Tuesday Doodles adhered to Book!

After teaching and preaching the wonders of a sketchbook to teens this summer, I found myself practicing what I preach these past few days. Sketchbooks for holding ideas and images together is great and it's even greater when you get to make the book from scratch...sewing, gluing and filling. The whole thing.
You may have guessed I have accumulated many Tuesday doodles over the past few months... and I've thought, what better place to keep them than in a personal book I bound by hand myself?!?! Why did this concept only occur to me now?

Consolidating my imagery into a single book is also timely because I have been trying to purge things in my home that I no longer use. The One-Year-Rule is the best and has served me well: If you haven't found a use for something in the past year, get rid of it and trust it will come back to you when you need it. The Artist/Hoarder instinct goes haywire when you do this. One particularly persistent pile of clutter I had to face was a bag of sticks. Wooden sticks, people! I don't need them! If I had a front yard, I'm afraid mine would be the one with the old toilet overgrown with weeds and the rusty lawnmower. But anyway, almost everything in my workspace is being glued into my book...

My South side Experience

In an unexpected turn of events, I found myself not in Michigan this weekend as planned, but instead on the South side of Chicago. My friend recently moved to the neighborhood of Bridgeport and I thought I'd take advantage of a free day to explore the neighborhood streets with her. There are a lot of quirks to this traditionally blue-collar area. It is highly saturated with Italians, Chinese, Lithuanians, and cops. Lots of cops. One quirk I found particularly fascinating was the abundance of knick knacks and dolls decorating storefront windows . Yes, dolls.

If you place dolls in your windows, I'd like to learn why. My friend explains: "I think they're kind of like the lawn ornaments of Bridgeport restaurants." They are everywhere.
In another unexpected turn, I found out my suburbanite sister was going to be not just in the city that day, but in Bridgeport as well. She did indeed grow up on the North side but then married a Sox fan. She is forgiven.
My friend and I walked over to her tailgaiting party outside U.S. Cellular Field-home of the White Sox. It was the annual Elvis Day at the ballpark and we watched a few Elvis impersonators parachute into the field. This is particularly strange since I was with my brother on the previous Sunday at Wrigley Field watching planes from the Air and Water Show fly over the field. The South side and the North side. So alike and so different. On the South side, they have way more dolls and way more Elvises. And then there were fireworks and well, things just get craaaazy!
And that my friends, is just what happens when you visit the South side.

Painting Thursdays?

I haven't supplied a doodling Tuesday this week but here's a painting on a Thursday. This is a painting I started yesterday in the kitchen. With the palette resting on the counter and sink area, I started a painting of the stove, whistling tea kettle and all.
Let this be a public service announcement: it's usually not a good idea to mix toxic oil colors in the place that you prepare food. Eek! There are whole organizations dedicated to these issues: like the ACMI (Art and Creative Materials Institute) http://www.acminet.org/

Guess who makes my contact lenses!?!

I wish I could have posted a sign on a lamp post in Chinatown last week. It would have read:

"Lost:
Hard Contact Lens
Slight bluish Tint
Last seen in my eye at the corner of 23rd St. and Wentworth Ave.
Age: 18 months"

I wear lenses that last up to 2 years. I sleep with them in and take them out only to clean every few weeks. They are awesome and give me nearly perfect vision.
Life just isn't the same without those little curved lenses in my eyes.

BUT!, It turns out there are inmates in Dixon, Illinois who are busy carving away at eyewear, including the rigid gas permeable lens sitting atop my misshapen (but now delightfully corrected) cornea.

"We're more than license plates!" should be the motto of Illinois Correctional Industries. Browse their website and take note of the amazing array of products they make such as

Women's Cotton Panties

orHotdog Buns
But anyway, back to my contacts...
I am utterly amazed by contact lens technology all the time. I was looking at the website for the company that makes my lenses Menicon Z(and now apparently contracts with the IDOC.) They offer a product that my eye doctor never mentioned to me before and sounds fascinating. It's a lens that you only wear at night and it re-shapes your eye so that "you see perfectly all the day long without any visual correction." It's like braces for your eyes where you wear a retainer at night! HA! I imagine it being problematic if your cornea slowly loses its shape as the day wears on and things gut fuzzier and fuzzier. But still!

It also turns out it's hard to photograph contact lenses, especially when they're in your eye. Here are a few more of my attempts:


I can see! It's a miracle!

More doodles around Chicago

Love the aloof park-goers!

Woman on Blanket in Millenium Park

On Monday, we took our sketchbooks outside to our front yard: Millenium Park. It was the lunch hour for many and they sat on blankets in the lawn listening to free live reggae music. Have I mentioned I love summer in Chicago? This woman sat chatting to a friend with her back to me, unaware of her excellent posing skills.

Jean and doodles about town...

While I was supposed to be posting my Tuesday doodle last week, I was pushing the wonders of "jaffa cakes" onto my neighbor at Grant Park's Movie in the Parks. Everytime I go to Harvestime grocery store on Lawrence Avenue, I pick up a sugary unidentifiable something from another country. Harvestime stocks an amazing array of imported food products. What I thought were caramely insides from the picture on the "jaffa cakes" package, ended up being some orange flavor instead. Surprise! What have you bought from Poland lately?



I'm sorry. I went to Movies in the Parks in Grant Park last Tuesday and did not do my Tuesday doodle. I was embracing the ever fleeting summer in Chicago. I love summer in Chicago. To make up for it, I'm going to post several doodles this week. Promise!

That's including this one from the Monroe Harbor today:

Doodling Tuesdays!

Enough said.