We interrupt this travelogue…
I just had to say
That is all.
Tag Archives: art
Posted on 25 August '10 by Jenny Wilde, under art. 3 Comments.
I’m not scattered, I’m omnipresent!
Now that my adventures in jam have passed for the moment, and I’ve (more or less) secured lodging in Scotland for our trip, my thoughts turn toward other projects, other pastimes… like making incense!
Yes, never content to have 20,000 in-progress projects at any one time, I’m always itching to start more!
Actually, the incense is something that was unfinished from before, so really I was tying up loose ends. Not to mention that it earns me some money for our trip (yay!). I’m an avid amateur herbalist, and so I’ve been working on developing a line of incenses and other herbal products. (The jam could actually tie in with this, but we’ll see.) Currently, I have two varieties of incense: Descendence Incense and Transcendence Incense, and they’re carried at The Sacred Well in Oakland.
The Well had requested more Transcendence Incense from me way back in November, but, what with school and all, I just couldn’t get it done. Now I’ve completed the order and earned some dough. Yay again!
Everybody needs a little transcendence now and then...
Of course, I’m also working on knitting a funky shawl, just because I feel like it,
Big needles mean I'll be done soon, I hope.
trying to get some more dioramas finished to sell through Gray Lady,
Can you guess what this'll look like?
coercing a friend to give me some blackberries to make more preserves (with Drambuie this time, I think), crocheting my outfit for Off the Needles: A Knitting Pinup Calendar, and…oh yeah, there’s that elderberry wine in the closet I still have to rack and sweeten, and I also still need to get honey to start the crab-apple mead going (crab-apple juice frozen in the back of my fridge). Mmm, a couple of other unfinished needle-work projects in there, too, but we won’t mention them.
Oh! And a friend of mine commissioned me to design a tarot deck for an iPad app he’s working on.
And I just got invited to teach classes to “mid-kids” at the Northern California Women’s Herbal Symposium this September.
Honestly, I don’t know how I end up getting so busy! I don’t set out to do a million things at once, I just seem to keep finding myself in the midst of it all. I can’t resist a new challenge, a new project, new ideas, new stimulation, new opportunities.
In school, my teachers said I lacked focus… I guess I could admit to that, but I prefer to think I’m just well-rounded.
Now if only I can get Lonely Planet to hire me to write for their travel guides…
Posted on 11 July '10 by Jenny Wilde, under art, creativity, food, herbs, transcendence, travel. 1 Comment.
The Beauty of Limits
I’d love to say that I’m one of those creative types who just has ideas flowing forth all the time, that I could barely keep up with all my ideas for thing to make, to do, to write. I wish that were true. The truth is, despite the fact that I have (finally) a fine arts degree, I usually struggle to come up with a starting point or an idea. For me, when the field is wide open, I just can’t even imagine where to begin. Sometimes my kids will request of me, “Draw me something.” They don’t understand how hard that is, to just draw something, anything. “Well, what do you want a picture of?” “I don’t know.”
I don’t know either.
Sometimes it seems easier to me to begin within a set of parameters. Sometimes limits stimulate creative thinking. This is one of the reasons I’ve been a perpetual student for the last 20 years: because in school I’m forced to push myself and jump-start my thinking by having to generate something that conforms to a specific set of rules.
Now that I’m done with school (for now), I have to find ways to create my own parameters and my own rules. It’s really quite challenging in its own right. I’m not particularly good at rules.
Magnetic poetry provides one such set of parameters. I know, it can be used to make really stupid and pointlessly crude phrases (that is certainly one of its most popular uses), but it can also be used to force a certain kind of flexibility in imagery and word choice. I realized I like it because it’s a sort of verbal collage. In the same way that I cut out images and move them around until they look right, I enjoy taking words and moving them around until they feel right. There is some element of selection, of course, but the options aren’t originally my own. I have to use what I’ve got.
Hmm, that relates to the cooking thing, too. Using leftovers, and all that.
So, what does it mean to be an artist anyway?
Does it really mean “creative problem solver”? That doesn’t sound as glamorous somehow…
Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Too many choices, I can’t even begin to decide.
.
.
.
Some Poetry That May or May Not Be Good,
But Was Made with Magnetic Poetry
A thousand whispers
Planet balmy like evening wind
What gold-red moon sips my breath?
Strange universe falling
.
.
Tinge my pithy Kafkaesque zeal
With crass delights and sanguine veils
(that was a great philosophy-themed set)
.
.
still roses cry their elaborate symphony
as my bitter honey sleeps,
a languid beauty
shadowed tongues dream easy beneath
the forested light
and sing the mists away
Posted on 2 July '10 by Jenny Wilde, under art, beauty, creativity. No Comments.