On a Roll . . .

Really on a roll now with making and swapping ATCS. Many thanks to my beautiful friend Deb who helped me get started with this fun hoppy! (It would only be a hobby if it didn't make me bunny hop all around the house at night looking for scraps of whatever to incorporate into cards.) I'm drawing, coloring, cutting, pasting, just like in kindergarten! Now my cards live in England, Alabama, and Oklahoma. More swaps on the way. For joy for joy!

Trip to Lucky Mojo

My art partner, Deb, and I made a journey up the highway to Forestville, California, where a strangely wonderful little shop is tucked away along the trail to the Russian River. Selling potions, candles, incense, amulets, it fed our imaginations, and I learned about the history of the evil eye and why it is associated with the color blue. As a blue-eyed divil meself, I reflect on how so many traditions have a deeply cultural bias and why we must constantly question our assumptions.

My First Overseas Swap

Congrats to Coop who will go down in history as my very first overseas swap, trading his humorous "Shake Well Before Using" card for one of my World's Worst Oppressors cards, the one in the "Dead Dictators" series of Pol Pot, the Cambodian genicidal maniac who destroyed so many innocent lives. May we never forget what tyrants may do. I have added an incredibly insightful poem from John Clare to help us remember.

SpinnngJannie

Working on "The Dark Side" Swap

This is one that comes naturally to me, yet I want to do something unique, as it should be when you are making Artist Trading Cards. So, I'm thinking about what is "the dark side"? It can be a positive, as in the wealth of the imagination hidden behind the conscious mind, the dreamlife behind sleep. It can be, and has usually been considered, a negative: "darkness" linked to fear, the unseen, the underbelly of human behavior. We don't apply consistent meanings to our word symbols.

Worlds' Worst Oppressors

I've been working on a 4x4 series, four cards each of four different world tyrants/oppressors/dictators/demonical murderers of masses of people, starting with Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and Pinochet. Since art and religion are useful to me in as much as they teach me how to live, how to be a better human being, I turn to both for lessons, instructions. I never really wanted to study history's atrocities but can't seem to escape it; I love to read what happened, and inevitably, it takes me to some place that leaves my stomach roiling, nightmares imploding, my daydreams intruded upon. Is it part of mental illness that drives me to this, a morbid compulsion which I have sensed from childhood when the story about the world and the world itself as I experienced it never fully jived. We lived with our parents' false tales, as they lived with the cleaned-up stories of their ancestral pasts. I want to get down to it, underneath it, not to make of mine an unhappy life--not at all, because I seek joy, love, happiness--but to be the examined life I believe I am meant to be. If God is a verb, as I believe is the case, then Evil, Satan, whatever the dark side is called, is also actively engaged in the world. There ARE scary monsters, there are full unfettered truths. I have a job to do, not simply create beauty but to unmask the ugliness, too.

And she's off . . .

I finally have enough ATCs to go online, so I joined ATCs for All (www.atcsforall.com) and joined three swaps yesterday: text in ATCs, the "dark side," and one on the theme of anatomy. Ooooh, this is going to be fun. I only do my ATCs after retiring after the workday, while sitting in bed, with my supplies, my bed desk, and usually a cat or two, and husband at my side, while watching t.v. These projects seem to redeem my "down" time, ordinarily given to watching the news, or a favorite show.

Spine of a Fish Welcomes Visitors

Dear Fellow Artists
Leave me your blessings and suggestions,
Your ideas and your smiles,
Your hints and precious moments,
Create, be kind, love life, do right.