Late one night, after months of fine-tuning, I hit the submit button on the Mamalode website and sent a soul-baring essay through the internet ether about how I left my first husband.
I started this essay in outline format when I attended the Write Doe Bay workshop this past April. Sharing a cabin and communal space with all of these brave, creative souls really did a number on me. Hearing their stories, listening to the lyrics of their songs and absorbing the truth in their poetry cracked me wide open emotionally. Reeling from that experience in the days and weeks that followed, I had a flood of material that came to the surface and needed to get out of my head and onto a blank page.
You can find my essay entitled I Left My Husband Like a Country-Western Song today on Mamalode by clicking here. Be sure to click on the song at the bottom of the essay, too.
And while writing about my ex-husband might seem odd to some, I realized through the process that I wasn't writing about him. I was writing about me. If I hadn't gone through that experience, I would never have the life I have now.
I was nourishing my soul when I left and I'm nourishing it now as I share my story and move on.
We finished our mother-son art journaling project and, if I'm being honest, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and relief. It took us a little over two months to reach the letter Z and we changed our focus and direction a few times with our word choices. Overall, I'm pleased with the time we spent at the kitchen table, talking, sharing ideas, working on our separate pages.
You can see more of our project here, here, here & here or under the hashtag #gr8ymomartjournal2014 on instagram.
Left (Grady) :: Whimsy
Right (Me) :: Whimsy worksheet
Earlier this summer, I took Grady with me to a professional illustration workshop given by one of my favorite artists, Lisa Congdon, at the Makeshift Society. We got to meet her and gifted her with Grady's letterpressed poem, Home, and a fun screen printed envelope that I had previously made at the ohhappyday! craft night back in March. Lisa is a prolific, talented and dedicated artist. It was an honor to meet her and hear her genius.
The above black and white image was from an online line drawing workshop that Lisa Congdon taught through Creativebug back in March. If you don't have time for art classes, I highly recommend using Creativebug. Check out their website. We have horrible internet here in Valley Ford and I can't watch videos or anything that you have to stream, so I ended up watching this class while I was in Costa Rica back in March and took copious notes.
{Side Note :: If you love to peek into artists' studios and get inspired, check out the links here and here to view Lisa's amazing work space! Okay, I'll stop gushing, but she is my very, very favorite.)
I finally (and very belatedly) completed the drawing on found photos assignment. I just love how it turned out. I worked directly on the photocopied image and cut it out and glued it onto a yellow watercolored background in my journal. I like how I fancied up his shirt with a little hot pink scalloped ruffle. Definite whimsy going on.
Grady played around with some of the shapes she mentions in her class. The word whimsy was a hard one for him to understand. We read the definition over and over again.
whim·sy
noun\ˈhwim-zē, ˈwim-\
: a playful or amusing quality : a sense of humor or playfulness
: fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign
Grady's illustration showed the foreign concept of monkeys zip lining and the strangeness of a dude hang gliding upside down. Oh, how I love the musings of an 11 year old boy.
I decided to experiment with one of the strange and foreign tools that I had :: calligraphy pen & ink. I love the look of calligraphy, but always worry that I'll do it wrong, make a mess, tear the paper. Well, I did make a mess and splattered permanent ink all over myself. My lines are a bit drippy and uneven, but it was nice to give myself permission to try something new. I did learn that calligraphy ink is permanent. After the ink dried I painted over it with walnut ink and watercolors. No bleeding of the words and I quite liked the end result.
Top (Grady) :: Self-portrat
Bottom (Me) :: Self-portrait with thumbprint cheeks
We're often working on our journals first thing in the morning. On this day, our word reflected our quiet, tired disposition and guess what? Yep, we yawned a lot while drawing.
1yawn
verb\ˈyȯn, ˈyän\
: to open your mouth wide while taking in breath usually because you are tired or bored
of an opening, hole, etc. : to be deep, large, etc.
Left (Grady) :: Caran d'Ache water-soluble wax pastels
Right (Me) :: Micron pens + watercolors
Getting to the end of this project was a little bit of a letdown. Our word choices were less than inspiring and I think we both just wanted to be done with it.
1zap
interjection\ˈzap\
Definition of ZAP
1
—used to express a sound made by or as if by a gun
2
—used to indicate a sudden or instantaneous occurrence
2zap
verb
: to attack, destroy, or kill (someone or something) quickly
: to hit (someone or something) with electricity
: to shoot (someone or something) with an electric gun, laser, etc.
Looking back at our finished pages, I'm proud of the dedicated time spent working on this self-imposed assignment. It really helped us to get back to the basics and remember why we both like to draw. Hearing Grady's interpretation of words and what images they conjured up for him was a gift to this word-loving mama. His imagination and sense of humor delighted me throughout our morning sessions.
And while we both feel a little zapped from this project, I think we both will remember the snippets of time spent reading the dictionary, talking about what words mean and pondering who in the hell Roget is.
This project grounded us, once again, and while I don't know what we'll do next - I do know one thing for sure…
Our mother-son art journaling alphabet project is still moving along. For more background on how this started, feel free to check out my previous blog posts here, here and here.
Left (Grady) :: Plunge(R)
Right (Me) :: Plunge! into the water
We are having a lot of fun with words and our interpretations of them.
Left (Me) :: Quake! facts
Right (Grady) :: Quake! picturing his father & his four-pack stomach & crazy morning hair
Real life occurrences, like the Napa earthquake, have influenced our word choices and have sparked unexpected conversations and future design ideas.
Above (Me) :: REED
Below (Grady) :: REEDs + purple gallinule floating on the water
My husband's mother's maiden name was Reid and his father's middle name is Reed. I wanted to name our unborn son Reed, but the name Grady ultimately stuck.
Above (Me) :: Sublime
Below (Grady) :: SUBLIME = Rainbow sherbet sunrise on the water that morphed into an ice cream sunday
Our word selections for the day conjure up the yummiest images and often instigates dessert planning for the evening ahead.
Top (Grady) :: TRIUMPH! on the soccer field
Bottom (Me) :: Triumph is my name!
Real life is seeping into our creative-filled mornings. A soccer victory and G's first goal in years found its spot on the page when we chose Triumph as our word for the day last week. I experimented with a made-up girl named Triumph and played around with color, shape, graphite pencils & I drew and painted without a pre-determined finish line.
Left (Grady) :: Uprising as inspired by the Percy Jackson series
Right (Me) :: UPRISING golden sunrise
After reading this book about how different artists utilize their sketchbooks, we were inspired to give ours a little more time and attention. I was particularly moved by the colorful & graphic sketchbook pages of Madrid-based artist, Pep Carrió, and his musings on why he keeps a sketchbook. His parting words were My sketchbooks are my warehouses of memory. Oh, how I loved that concept.
We decided to paint several pages with different base colors and let them dry overnight. The result was a more layered and thoughtful approach, as we weren't trying to reach the finish line with our entry for the day in 15-20 minutes. Instead, we took our time. We just so happened to finalize our Uprising paintings on 9/11. Grady's Empire State Building was inspired by a Percy Jackson book he was reading, but it just so happened to help us discuss the horrific events of 9/11 and recall where we were on that fateful day. I felt like my painting and interpretation of the word was hopeful and put a positive ending to our talks about life and loss, good and evil, what we believe in and how we should treat people.
Top (Me) :: VIGOR
Below (Grady) :: Vigor inspired by the definition of the word
Picking our word for the day has morphed in concept. What started out as a perusal of our household thesaurus has turned into a back-and-forth conversation about what words make us quickly visualize an image or what the true definition of the word is. We try to pick a word that we can quickly identify with and/or conceptualize almost immediately and get to work on it straight away.
This project is marrying my love of words and letters, children's art and color in the most wonderful way.
I haven't been blogging lately and I have so much to share.
My etsy shop, small town goods, is in the works. I plan to have it fully stocked and ready to go live on or about October 1st, but I wanted to at least get it up and open so that I could figure out the kinks, if any.
sketch book doodling for etsy shop names. this one stuck and was available.
I've been busy researching raw materials for a small line of textiles that will initially include flour sack tea towels and sturdy, canvas library tote bags made in the U.S.A.
I'm also desperately seeking a graphic designer to help me put my line drawings into vector in Illustrator. Um, I don't even really know what vector is and I need HELP! I put the word out on my instagram account and I'm hoping someone in that community can help this girl out. Crossing my fingers. Do you know someone who will work for trade? Blackberry jam? If so, let me know.
Until then, I've added my first item to my shop. Check it out here.
