Laughter: Rebecca's September Sketch

I can't draw...yet. I am good at imitating people, though (that's what we teach our students about writing, right?), so I just used the fabulous Noun Project website to find an image that related to the mini-stories I was working on (icons are easier to draw for me). Writing is definitely more in my comfort zone than sketching, but that's what I love about the sketchbook: drawing, in and of itself, is both a generating strategy and a revision strategy (searching for images actually made me re-write). 

I thought it might be neat to try a peek-a-boo style so the image would (hopefully) hook the reader into hearing the funny story.  I drafted it first online and then just used my Zebra marker to draw after pencil and a Copic Multi Liner (0.3) to transcribe the vignettes.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

Meaningful song into art...turned into a meaningful quilt for my eldest daughter. I have kept shirts, dresses, favorite worn shorts, patches and ladybug backpacks from my 2 daughter's growing up years. I've carted a bin for each of them from Oregon to Tunisia to Singapore. Last December, I hauled my oldest daughter's bin to BC where my folks live. While I was there, I put together this kaleidoscope quilt for my artist daughter. I pondered on it for ages before starting, trying to imagine how to put together all these memories and colors into an attractively arranged quilt, but then the kaleidoscope idea hit me. I filled in extra spaces with rich velvets and trimmed the edge with black velvet. There are little pockets of shirts and shorts in the quilt that my parents (Alix's grandparents) stuffed little love notes in before we gave it to her. My mom machine quilted the top with her amazing abilities. One corner reads, "You are my sunshine..." as that was a favorite song Jim and I sang to her as she fell to sleep when she was a baby. My mom and I sewed all her nicknames into the quilt. There are even some favorite sock pieces in it. I LOVED doing this project and can't wait to have time to work on Abby's...maybe next year after she leaves for college- boo hoo.

Reverse Ekphrasis: Music Into Art

I loved teaching ekphrasis in high school -- having students look at pieces of art and then write poetry about them (or sometimes studying published examples of the written art). Cool examples include poetry inspired by art such as William Carlos Williams' The Fall of Icarus;  after contemplating Brueghel's painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Williams'  eyes turned to the corner, away from the farmer, where most people look, to the legs splashing into the water. He writes:

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

But this sketchbook could do more. I imagined using music as the inspiration for us to create art. Where the painting inspired the writing before, now the writing inspires the painting, or in the case of my first sketch, oil pastels.

One of my favorite memories with Michael is of a small concert in Baltimore I attended just before moving to Singapore. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova's film Once (a musical movie) was one of my favorites, and the two were on stage in my own hometown. I wanted to freeze that moment in time, seeing them in person and hearing their heartfelt music -- soon enough, we found out the concert had been professionally recorded, and we raced to buy it on iTunes. I often find myself going back to one song they performed that night (and that Glen had performed years earlier with his band, The Frames.

"Star Star" centers me. There's a point in the song where he surprises you. It fills me with the wonder of a child and is my go-to song when I'm having a tough day as a grown-up.

Quite simply, it's my song.

But I was stuck with how I'd make it into art. I wrote the lyrics down. I made lists to generate images, like the verbs he used, the repeated images (sorry, I'm an RLA teacher)...and then I threw my pencil down, thinking, I don't want to do Starry Night like Van Gogh. I'm teaching my students how to avoid cliche, for goodness sake!

So I went into Barbara's art studio, played the song for a few of her students, and told her the story. She guided me to the oil pastels. We talked about paper and color; the rules of thirds and negative space; freedom to screw up.

Freedom to get my fingers dirty as I smudge everything. Freedom to not fill the whole thing in. Freedom to make movement visible and messy. Freedom to press hard on the oil pastel. Yes, I need to be told to let go, on occasion.

Which was the point of the song, oddly enough. Funny how art can bring us back to the images in the music that inspired us in the first place. Barbara "taught me how to shine, shine." Thank you, Barbara. And thank you, Glen.

Treasuring where I live

Anybody who knows me well will know that I'm a tea fiend.  I sip a different cuppa depending on my mood.  At home, when the mood is blissed contentment, when I'm loving life and I'm in the moment, that flavour is a full-bodied orange pekoe (I cart a year's worth of it back from Canada every summer, and visitors bring me my favourite blend rather than items from duty-free).  I've been known to drink three to four pots of it a day.  If my mom, sister, grandmother or either of my mothers-in-law is with me, double that.  So here is a huge cup of that blend, and on the cup,  places & people that make my heart happy. The top two bands are Canada-related treasures from where we live - mostly because we're  at t-minus 24 days until these feet hit Canadian soil & Rebecca's theme immediately flooded me with visions of long summer days at the lake.  If it weren't for that, the bottom two bands, of Singapore places and the names of the kids whose laughter I hear on a daily basis at Mimosa, would be at the top  :)

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