This is not a mandala. Maybe it’s a questala! Looking towards the horizon, destination unknown.
Destination Unknown
Category: ABSTRACTS
Abstract
Just an Abstract! Any suggestions for a title?
If you are interested in methods, you can find the photo from which this one arose, something rather surprising, by looking for it in Art Methods
Passing
This was made from a photo of reflections on a wall. They did indeed pass, as soon as the sun moved on! When I first saw them, I thought of a group of cloaked figures walking past.
“Passing”: passing through Now, passing beyond the past, passing over the past, “passing on” … , passing over, passing for . . . So much depends on prepositions!
Soundings
“To take soundings” means, amongst other things, to drop a line down into the depths, to find out what is down there, below the surface, measuring how deep down the line will go.
In these Covid times, where very little is “normal”, we have been forced, willy nilly, to take stock of our situations and face ourselves to a degree which many of us may have rarely had to do before. In this pandemic, with mega-uncertainty about most things, with outcomes depending on many factors beyond our control and constantly having to make choices whether to do this or that without sufficient information, we are called on to look very deeply into ourselves, to “take soundings” to find out what is really important to us and each in our own way, to find in these depths the resources to cope with it all. All this as horrors play out on the world stage.
And then there are the lesser problems! We are learning that there is more than one way to do many things: work, shop, meet, eat, travel, etc.
This is one of my “Concrete Abstracts” . If interested in the method, go to the page on Art Methods and zoom down to this pic
Next Text
Next text: what does that mean? Perhaps it could mean that the petals of a flower (ie Nature), superimposed over twisted lines of text, give a new and urgently needed view of “next”; perhaps it could mean that there is some text, of whatever kind, that is especially meaningful and deserves to be decorated with a flower? Or perhaps the background is not text at all! Whatever it suggests to you, that is what it “means”!
Mixed Metaphor
I have always been fond of Oriental carpets and have usually had one or more wherever I have lived, from childhood on. When I moved to an apartment where there was no space for my favorite rug, it remained rolled up in storage. Later when I went to unroll it, out flew hundreds of moths! They had had such a good meal that, though I considered it, there was no sense in trying to restore it. So, sadly, out it went. A rug which had flown across several continents, both before it became mine, and afterwards as I moved, made a final journey into the garbage!
This is made from a photo of a poor replica of such a carpet. The resulting twist reminds me both of a butterfly and of the flying carpets of myth and children’s stories, both of which could be a metaphor for flying away to some wonderful place or state.
It is interesting to consider why you love to have certain objects around you in whatever place you may live. Is it because your childhood home had them? Is there a symbolic reason? For instance, I have lived in many types of dwelling, from one room to a house, but in my home there always have to be oriental rugs, cushions, handmade pottery, lots of little wooden drawers and, because I am a bookish woman, many shelves.
Do you have certain musts in your furnishings or decorations?
Just bend, just stretch!
This one is to emphasize the importance of exercising!
If you’d like a smile, here’s the photo from which this picture was made.
Believe it or not, the inspiration was my lunch after coming home from an exercise class : a bowl of carrot soup on a pottery dish. A lot of twisting and turning and adding in Photoshop Elements . . . and Just Bend arrived. That’s how far my artwork gets from the original photos!
Covid Time : Three versions!
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Covid-Time 1 : Time Stretched!
Covid-Time 2 : Time Shrunk!
One of the odd things about this Covid time is that for me, and for many people it seems, time itself appears to either speed up or to crawl! It’s hard to believe it will soon be Summer when I have hardly become used to the idea that it is Spring … and what happened to Winter? Some days I can’t believe it when I see that it is only 3:00 PM when I thought it must be at least 6:00 PM; other times, the days speed by faster than ever and there isn’t time to do all the things I meant to. And it always seems to be the weekend again every few days! Strange.
So I thought I’d have a bit of fun and try to depict that visually.
At the top, is a picture which might represent a chunk of normal Time, with all its ups and downs, ins and outs, lights and darks. (Dont take it too literally: perhaps this was a day I spent looking at flowers, waiting at traffic lights, or making a spinach and tomato soup, then trying not to snooze while watching TV) : )
Then to follow there are Time Stretched and Time Shrunk.
The last two are made by manipulating the same original picture, which is itself an edited photo, just as our brains seem to do with time!
Just what happened
Old tapestories wear thin!
Tapestories. No that’s not a typo: Tapes, stories! This is made from a photo of a tapestry, which did indeed wear thin. It was also attacked by moths and it became so worn that, sadly, I had to throw it out.
Stories, Tapes, are a part of everyone’s life: family stories, family histories, (not to mention history and herstory), religious and cultural histories, myths and folk tales, even nursery rhymes. Then there’s the personal stories, the ones we tell ourselves and those we tell other people, not necessarily the same thing!
There are schools of thought which say that we are just our stories, our self is our story! All these stories, from those of our culture, to the personal ones we hold inside ourselves, play a large part in who we are.
The stories we tell ourselves can often be very limiting. “I’m just a person who can’t do this or that”; “this is the way it’s meant to be”; “it’s all so-and-so’s fault I am the way I am”; “I’ll never get over it”; or whatever! We run these tapes, stories, over and over again in our minds. Part of growing older is the joy of finally seeing that these tapes/ stories are wearing thin, and we can toss them!