Scratched one more off my Bucket List

I have always admired Georgia O'Keeffe's big paintings of flowers and hoped to see one in person some day. Well I did yesterday.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, her home from the 1940's until she died in 1986 is not too far off the route to our home in Texas so on our way south for the winter we zipped over to New Mexico and went straight to the Georgia O"Keeffe Museum.

Seeing her painting Jimson Weed up close takes your breath away but I was also impressed with her paintings of the landscape around her homes in New Mexico.

Instead of painting the view in front of her she painted the spirit and essence of the scene. She used her modernist vision to produce paintings in her own style. By doing so and being so successful as a female artist in a male dominated realm she opened the doors for more women artists to follow.

Healing Patterns

When creating I strive to go into a meditative like state, where nothing can disturb me and the work just flows from my brush. When that happens I can finish 3 or 4 paintings a day but it doesn't happen very often. What is more likely to happen is the exact opposite and I struggle with every brush stroke, over thinking and over stressing about my art work, taking days or weeks to get close to finishing a painting and then leaving it unsigned in the corner of my studio somewhere until I finally decide if it is actually done.

That didn't happen when I was learning Zentangle this summer. It was so easy to do the 2 or 3 stroke patterns. If I didn't do it exactly like the instructions all I had to do was cover the mistake over with a thicker line or a different pattern. It was repeated often by some of the CZT (Certified Zentangle Teachers) that there are no mistakes only happy accidents. I found that doing this type of drawing not only relaxed me but energized me as well. I felt motivated to try more things that I didn't think I would be very good at. I learned to clear my mind of everything that was bothering me while I focused on the drawing.

Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts are the founders of Zentangle and have a web site www.zentangle.com where they show their latest zentangle patterns, sell their Zentangle learning kits as well as advertise their up coming seminars. They mentioned in the last newsletter that a local college had sent a PhD to learn Zentangle and become a CZT. This college is setting up a clinical trial that will be focusing on the health benefits of the Zentangle drawing method. I have also read that it has been used by some doctors as a therapy for Autism patients.

Interesting!

There is a weekly Zentangle challenge posted by "I am the Diva - CZT" on her blog and this week she wanted us to do a tangle with the pattern called punzel. I attempted it in the long braid down the left of my drawing. I also added fifolia, the flowers, floating away. I will think of the fifolia's as all my stresses and worries.

Challenges

Life is full of challenges but the ones that " I am the Diva CZT " puts on her blog every monday are great fun. I have secretly been doing them for a few weeks now but never posted them. Today I think I will attempt to add the Sunflower Challenge to her list of entries.

Zentangles in the woods

Since the middle of August when I first heard of the word Zen Tangle I think there have been only one or two days when I have not taken pen to paper and let the world melt away while I doodled, drew and even painted my way through learning as many new patterns as I could.

This week I will be doing my drawing at a picnic table in the yard beside our cabin in the woods.  One ear will be listening for the bear that has been sniffing around camp and the other ear will be enjoying the chickadees, poplar leaves and motor boats that I can hear down the hill on the Saskatchewan River.  The rest of me will be lost on the page.

A couple weekends ago I was able to talk my friend Karen into showing me how she makes her Garden Spirit sculptures.  I have been intrigued by her sculptures since she posted her first pictures on Facebook and talked about the class she took at Red Roof Studio in Alberta.  I had heard that she was going back for another class and had brought back enough supplies to show a few people how to make them.   We enjoyed another beautiful fall day in the gazebo in her back yard while I learned how to build a sculpture out of wire, tinfoil and masking tape.  Then we cut up some old white t-shirts into strips and soaked them in the special GSM, looks like white glue that we added color to.  We wrapped the soaked material around the tinfoil form.  It looked like a mummy when we were done.  If you don't mind messes and having glue stuck all the way up to your elbows then you may enjoy this!  Once the mummy was wrapped we got to dress it.  Again material cut and dipped in the GSM and draped over the form.  Everything had to dry for a couple days and then it was painted to look like aged bronze and sealed so it can live out in the garden with out being bothered by the rain or snow.  I think my sculpture looks pretty good, for the first attempt.  Maybe I will make her a friend to share her rock with, wouldn't want her to be lonely in my garden.

Tangle Obsession

It's been 3 weeks of total immersion in zentangle and I have never enjoyed something so much.  It's easy, quick and you can be creative anywhere.  I was waiting for my daughter to meet me for lunch and took out my tangles, I can do it while waiting for a program or some photos to load on my computer and it's easy to sit with my feet up in front of the TV in the evening and do a little doodle.

I spent $12 on some nice card stock, $19 on a good enough paper cutter and bought a package of fine point Sharpies to practice with.  I already have a good set of Staedtler pigment liners but honestly the Sharpies work so well that I use them often.

Thanks to all the talented zentangle artists sharing their patterns and ideas I have found just about everything I needed to learn this art on line.  I did buy 3 zentangle books through Amazon though.  The first one is Zentangle Basics by Suzanne McNeill.  She is a certified zentangle teacher, who knew there was such a thing! This book is just like it said, Basic.  By the time the book got to me in the mail I had already learned the patterns in the book from all the information on line.  Calista, she is my niece, if you are reading this I think I will send this book to you to help you get started zentangling!  The next book was also by Suzanne McNeill and it is her fabric arts, quilting and embroidery book.  This whole journey started with me looking for an interesting quilt idea so I hope to put this book to good use.  The last book is Yoga for your Brain by Sandy Steen Bartholomew and by far the best of the three.  It has great patterns that I have never seen before, and exercises to teach you how to turn things you see everyday into more tangle patterns.  I love that!

Both Sandy Steen Bartholomew and Suzanne McNeiil have great blogs and Suzanne has a whole bunch of You Tube videos about zentangle.  You can see Sandy's blog at http://beezinthebelfry.blogspot.com. Her last blog was called Tangle Homework and she challenged her readers to take the zentangle original pattern Bales and see how many variations you could make.  I decided to take that challenge and this is what I came up with.

This is about 5.5 inches by 3.5 inches.  I have 8 variations of bales, but if I had started on a bigger piece of card stock I think I could have done many more.  Once your pen starts it's like there is no stopping it!

Try Zentangle and see if you like it as much as I do.

One thing leads to another

I was searching the internet for ideas for quilting. Its been 15 or more years since I started my first Log Cabin Quilt, it's still not done. The poor thing is folded away in a box somewhere and I keep promising to find it and get it done but that never seems to happen. It got packed up when I moved to Cold Lake, AB. I have moved three times since then. I wonder how many more boxes never got opened?!?

Anyway it's fall, hubby is going to be busy with harvest for the next month or so and I need something to fill the hours between making lunches and running out to the field. I thought a quilt would be interesting to try my hand at again, or that is what I was thinking as I searched the web for easy and interesting ideas. I came across a 10 minute block pattern by Suzanne McNeill and that lead me to her blog blog.suzannemcneill.com. She was talking about something called ZenTangle. Never heard of it. So I googled it. Wow, jackpot!

Zen Tangle is doodling with a purpose. The pictures that the Zen Tangle artists were making were amazing, so detailed and intricate. I was intrigued and needed to try this. All I needed was a pen and some paper, I have that! I use some pretty nice Staedtler pigment liners in my acrylic paintings from time to time, so dug those out and picked up my handy, dandy sketch diary and started to doodle... or zentangle.

I needed to learn some designs and found another wonderful web site tanglepatterns.com Hundreds of designs are broken down into 4 or more steps so you can see how each is really made. Some of the most detailed become the easiest when you know how to start. I bought a note book with graph paper and set out to learn as many as I could. I think the ideas will be endless because now I see tangles everywhere and I can't wait to start designing my own tangle patterns.

Busy Summer

Well we are back at the farm to start preparing for the harvest. Keep your fingers crossed, it has not been a very good year for farmers, what with the late spring then all the rain, hail, wind and flooded fields. I am still trying to get used to a business where you take $300,000 and bury it in a hole in the ground in the spring and then hope that you can dig it up in the fall and find more $$.

Anyway, that is another story for another day. We left the cabin on Monday and it was a sad farewell. As we drove away Bernie and I promised ourselves and each other that we would do what ever it took to get back there in the fall before we left for Texas and our winter. We didn't manage to do that last year and really regretted not being able to spend at least a weekend when we could enjoy the crisp weather, the trees changing color and No bugs!

We did not get started on the "big cabin" like we had hoped too, it just didn't seem like a good idea until we are more certain that we will have a crop to sell this fall. Instead we spent our summer working Bernie's sawmill and making a small mountain of wood siding for the interior walls and boards that will be used for trim around doors and windows inside the cabin when we do get building. The plan is to have a contractor build the cabin, putting on the metal roof, installing the windows, doors, basically take it what they call the lock up stage. Then Bernie and I will finish the inside. That will include covering all the inside walls, floors and ceiling with wood. Hopefully wood that we have cut on our sawmill from the trees that came down to make the road into our property.

Working a sawmill was certainly a new thing for me but I'm game for new things and actually really enjoyed the physical labor. A pair of work boots, some comfy pants, t-shirt, leather gloves and a hat was my wardrobe. Bernie had a pair of coveralls. You know the kind, full sleeve, step into the legs and pull the zipper up to your neck. Well when we get to the Brownsville flea market this winter I'm going to look for a pair of coveralls for myself. I won't look pretty but I will be much more comfortable. You see pants and a shirt is fine but I get covered in sawdust, again that is ok until you have to make a trip to the biffy (aka outhouse). It is impossible to keep that sawdust from falling off your cloths and sticking to your hot sweaty skin. Boys don't have to worry about this problem as they never have to actually pull anything down to use the facilities, not that they would ever use the facilities, the world is their urinal after all, but us girls are not so lucky.

First of all the biffy is a long way from the sawmill so planning is pertinent but very rarely done. That means a brisk walk, well waddle if I waited to long and then getting those pants down as fast as possible once I'm in there. I never though about dusting off the sawdust from my back, I did the front, arms and knees, but who thinks of dusting off their back? I did mention that this was physical work right and, well, I sweat, really sweat, not a lady like kind of sweat but the kind that soaks into your shirt and runs down your back to catch in the waist band

of your pants sweat. The kind that soaks the band in your hat and then runs into your eyes sweat. The kind that leaves your whole body wet and the kind that sawdust likes to stick to.

Working with Bernie milling the logs that will eventually become the walls of our cabin is a lot of fun, working with Bernie milling the logs that will eventually become the walls of our cabin while I have sawdust stuck to my butt and itching me like crazy is absolutely not fun!