Friday, April 29, 2011

Bones & Pearls

This papercut is 8-1/2 x 11 and velvety black. I photographed it on a textured blue glass plate, shown below. This is informed by the whole concept of mudras, which have a basis in yoga and are another way of arranging the body to focus the mind. Everyone has a different way of putting things. I remember being in a yoga class and the instructor said that the spinal cord is like a string of pearls, that together with my infatuation with marine life and the ocean is the basis for this stream-of-conscious papercut. I'm calling it "stream" because it came out of a drawing scribble and evolve into the image on the left. A spinal column framed by hands entwined with pearls, ribbons of kelp and the odd fish. I feel the seahorse is a little too cartoony so am planning to do another one and continue with a series, called Mudras.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Yes, it is Monday. That means...

yesterday was Sunday, flea market day.
The flea market is a crap shoot.
You go, you find and you buy crap.
But sometimes, especially if you approach the whole endeavor with...dare I say, "right thought", you score.
And because everyone is looking, you are all in competition with one another and kind of looking together.
Okay, yesterday. I'd decided that I was going to buy an item each week that I would incorporate into my bookmaking enterprise.
Just a word of explanation here: I mean bookmaking in the sense of book arts...okay?
and if you aren't familiar with this term, check out donnaseagergallery.com (awesome!)
So this Sunday, I had purpose.
Dennis and I paid our $1.25 entry fee (That alone is a bargain. Where else can you go for only a buck twenty five?) and headed to the right, over the drive-in movie hillocks towards a car that was parked perpendicular to the rows. D's first comment was that this guy didn't know what he was doing. As we approached, he took a box from his car, set it on the table at the front of his vendor spot and immediately a layer of people were looking, scooping and buying then he was taking another box out of his car. He never had a chance to unpack. People were buying stuff right out of the box. And a lot of these people were other vendors and regulars. Definitely something was going on. I stayed to figure it out. D took off.

A word about the flea market. There's a lot of stuff -categories and individual items that turn up on a regular basis.

There are individual items that keep repeating week after week. I saw the same waffle iron for six months, didn't see it yesterday so maybe someone finally bought it. There are themes or trends or maybe someone made a request to the Universe and I just happened to tune in. dunno.

He had fabrics, books, dishes and there was something unique about everything. The pelt was a kangaroo skin; the books were old. This is what I bought from him:
(to be continued)