Free printable quote: Serve God, Love Me and Mend

It's been some time since I've posted.
My camera has been acting up and needs to go to the camera doctor.  So I haven't taken any photos I'm really proud of for a while, and got out of the habit of posting regularly.

However, I've been doing a personal graphic design project, and thought I would share the first fruits with you. 
I've been taking quotes I like, the ones that are deep enough to want to think about for some time, and setting them in type.  This allows me to meditate on the quote while deciding what aesthetic decisions most suite it, and hones my graphic design skills at the same time.

I love this quote.  It's from Much Ado About Nothing.  Benedict and Beatrice are being witty at each other and negotiating their way into a stable courtship.  Beatrice is in distress because her cousin and best friend is having a truly horrible time.  And then Benedict says this to her.  How can you not love a man who can comfort you in six words or less? Bliss.

The resolution is large enough to be easily printable as a 5 x 7 or 8 x 10. Enjoy

PS. When I was six I wanted to either marry Tony Curtis or Benedict from Much Ado.  True story.

Quote for November: A Woodland in Full Color

I've been pushing myself to become a better graphic designer.
So, I've set myself an assignment:
to merge a quote and a graphic or graphics, so that both the text and and the picture become an illustration of the meaning of the quote.

We'll see how it goes.  I'm pretty happy with Novembers', even though it can be a bit hard to read.

In other news, I'm now on Pinterest.  I've resisted getting on pinterest in the past because I knew it would soak up time.  However, it's been a great source for tutorials, graphic design inspiration, exposure to new artists, and even a wonderful way to figure out what friends would like for Christmas by snooping through their boards.  So, I'm enjoying my head off on it.  If you want to follow me, I'll have a button on the blog sometime this week.

Happy almost Turkey Day!

Marie Aull, I Love You...

...because you created beauty, and then gave it away.

My friends, today I'm rather blissed-out on beauty and sunshine.  Remember that feeling after your mom let you spent an entire afternoon at the pool? Where you're tired, slightly sunburnt, and have enjoyed yourself to the point of exhaustion.  Well, that's me right now, and I owe it all to Marie Aull.

This afternoon, my aunt and I took a leisurely stroll around Aullwood Gardens.  We talked family history, green (or black) thumbs, and admired thousand upon thousands of specimens of ornamental plants. Of course, I had my camera with me. I took about 200 luscious photographs, but have picked only the top 20 or so to share with you.

Aullwood gardens was the personal passion of Marie Aull, wife, then widow, of a well-to-do local businessman.  Mrs. Aull designed the gardens so that each of the spaces and plant specimens harmonize with the natural beauty of the locale.  The borders of the garden naturally fade into native Ohio woodland.  The spaces flow one to the other.  Most of the plants are native to Ohio, and none are invasive.
It is a ridiculously peaceful spot of heaven.  It's as if time flows more gently there.
Every time I'm there, I just keep thinking of the word "sylvan." I bet Marie did too, everytime she looked out onto her garden from her house, perched on a central, small hill.

Back in the 70's, Marie decided to share her personal patch of ground with everyone else.  She donated the farm and grounds to the National Audubon Society.  The garden is now part of the county-wide parks service.  Even though she had donated her land, Marie still lived in her house, perched at the top of the hill, until her death last year.  She was 105.
What a wonderful legacy to leave behind you.

I took ever so many pictures of flowers, but my eye kept being drawn back to the algae in the ornamental creek (an artificially diverted off-shoot of the Stillwater River).  It's not usually like this, but something about this warm spring has caused every rock in the creek to grow a refulgent, vibrant green "beard" of algae.  It was both beautiful, and rather disgusting looking.

back to the pretty flowers.

Collecting Inspiration

"The artist is by necessity a collector; 

he accumulates things with the same ardor and curiosity [with which] a boy stuffs his pockets. He borrows from the sea and from the scrap heap; he takes snapshots, makes mental notes, and records impressions on tablecloths and newspapers—why one particular thing and not another, he may not know at the time, but he is omnivorous. He has a taste for children’s wall scrawling as appreciative as that for prehistoric cave painting."

                                                                                                 -Paul Rand, American Graphic Designer

I can't tell you how much that quote comforts me.  I look about at my welter of possessions with a sort of ruefulness.  And so many of them are art-related, which means I find it almost impossible to get rid of them.  
They are either inspiration, tools, raw material, a project in flux, by-products of a past project, or simply interesting (and therefore indispensable to the art-making process.)  It is such a comfort to know that I am not alone in this need to accumulate interesting stuff. There are thousands of people like me who do the same thing, pulling together the intuitive raw material which will become their art.


I am daily thankful for the internet, and for the many many people who post pictures of the things they find beautiful, or the work they are creating.  
I I never tire of looking at other artists and designers websites.  They inspire me and challenge me, and teach me to think in ever-more non-linear ways.


As I wander from link to link, I bookmark pages I find useful, and download pictures that I want to use later for design sources or photographic inspiration.  I thought I'd share what I've been looking at recently:


Perhaps because of the gray weather and the tentative spring plants, I've been lusting after color. Bodacious, glorious color.
These photographers and blogs have been providing my fix:

clockwise from top left: 1. a picture of lichen via chanel no. fly  2. Eric Cahan, sky series via Butdoesitfloat 3. Sarah Ryhanen, being unusually vibrant, via the Little Flower School. 4. Eric Cahan, sky series.


I've been thinking about color and its application to photographic portraiture.  One way to start playing with color is to put colored films over your lights, but I'm not sure how interested I am in that.  There are other, more subtle ways.
One of them is to put the subject against a brightly colored backdrop. Having the backdrop be a field of color also can eject a huge amount of emotion and energy into an image. Also, If the subject is close to the backdrop, then the light bouncing off of the backdrop will bounce onto the subject, creating a color cast to the shadows on the person. 


I have dreams of photographing people against fields of vivid red and seeing the way it interracts with their personalities.  However, few people's skin tones can survive infusions of red.  It makes them look flushed, like they ran around the block a couple times before you snapped their picture.  Pink on the other hand, makes everyone look good.  Baby blue is also frequently nice.


Here are some pictues I've been looking at that have been giving me ideas.

I've done about 4 different types of searches, trying to find the source of these images, but to no avail.  I'll keep looking, and update if I find them.

Here's a few other things I'm loving:

• dreamy, interesting paintings by Phillip Haager, found via Butdoesitfloat.
• Delia Creates.  She's expecting a baby girl, and has done a series of beautiful, unfussy DIY tutorials getting ready for her little one.  My sewing machine broke halfway through sewing a strawberry baby hat based on her tutorial, and now I have to wait 2 whole weeks to see what it looks like! So frustrating for me.
• Aunt Peaches.
• She always makes me laugh.
• Jessica Hische's design work.  You've seen it most recently on February's exquisite Love stamp.

P.S. Sorry for the rambling quality of this post.  I blame it on my cold.  
Also, as you can see, I've been experimenting with making gridded digital collages, especially when citing another person's image.  What do you think?

Silent, Soft, and Slow...

This Longfellow poem always gives me a frisson.  I took these pictures almost exactly three years ago, and feel that they match perfectly.  I always think of them both, together, at this time of year.

Snowflakes

Out of the bosom of the Air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

how I wish it would snow.

dream a little dream

A few days ago, I stumbled across a picture of Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (of Finding Neverland fame)  and just loved the soft femininity of it.
I put the photograph in my photography inspiration folder, vowing to shoot a picture of a woman that looks as dreamy as that.  Then, when sorting through my photos, I found that I already had.

It's a funny old world isn't it?

I found the portrait on a blog run by one of the librarians of the Beinecke Rare Book Collection.  It's a lovely blog, full of interesting pictures and book related tidbits. I stumbled across it while doing a google search on wombats, of all things.

Story telling, and stories told.

My little brother Paul reading "Bearskin" (ill. Trina Schart Hyman) aloud.

My 7 year old Korean niece is creative, a trait she inherited from her mother.  Her drawings are full of detail, and are beginning to show active observation of the world around her. Most kids are busy drawing "symbols" of the world around them. (ex: the lolly-pop shaped things every child knows is a tree) My niece is beginning to observe reality, and incorporate details from it into her drawings. For example, she drew me as a princess surrounded by a cloud of diamonds, and she got my hair-do right. I don't have much contact with her, because they live, quite literally, on the other side of the world.  However, I do whatever I can to fan that spark of creativity.

I've sent her art supplies, but have been waiting until Christmas to send her some inspiration.  Various of my siblings pooled our money, and bought her the same books that inspired and enthralled us as children.  Some are still in print, but a fair amount of them are not, which makes finding good copies an "adventure."  We picked some books illustrated by Trina Schart Hymen, The Golden Book of Fairy Tales, and of course, some Dr. Suess.
Now here's the problem with our little scheme: my niece can't read english.

She can understand spoken english pretty well, though. So, I decided to record family members reading the books aloud to her.

I knew it would be a good gift to give, and one full of familial tradition.
For me, opening these books feels like coming home, the same way Southern Ohio hills are what looks like home, or the way bread rising smells like home, to me.

I was read to a lot as a child, and it was a wonderful, warm experience. My father read to us a great deal.  By the time I came along, many of my siblings had learned to imitate my father, and read aloud to the children younger than them.  My sister Mary was particularly enthusiastic about this.  There were probably hundreds of nights where she read to us while we worked on the dishes. We loved being read to, but hated doing dishes. We liked to stop mid-dish and just listen. I can still hear her saying "I won't keep reading unless you keep working."

I made sure that my father was one of the ones who I recorded.
He read "The Sleep Book" by Dr. Suess.
It's a book I can remember being read to me by his father.  Apparently my grandfather read to my father when he was a little boy, and so my father learned to bond with us by reading to us frequently.  We would perch on whichever of his limbs were most available.  Little kids got precedence over big kids, especially if it was a picture book.  The best spot, if he was lying on his stomach on the floor, was straddling his back, and peering over his shoulder at the book.

Stars, keep the watch. When night is dim
One more light the bowl shall brim,
Shining beyond the frosty weather,
Bright as sun and moon together.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the star, is on the way

I've liked posting these verses.  However, I've gotten impatient, because I have at least 3 post's worth of things to show you.  Some are things I'm working on, and some are just beautiful.

So, I'm posting both verse 3 and 4 tonight, and then tomorrow I get to finally give you a free printable of Christmas cards.

Wedding Certificates... or the importance of a piece of paper

I have a funny story to share with you.

My sister forgot to get married.
That is, they left the marriage license at home, and consequently didn't get anyone to sign it, and therefore were not legally married.
So, in the eyes of God, their souls were bound irrevocably together.  However, in the eyes of the state, they were still two starry eyed lovers who had gone to church and then thrown a big party.

They didn't realize this until about 11:15, when we were packing everything up to get out of the reception site in time.
Under more "normal" circumstances, they would've waited until the next morning and tracked the priest down after Sunday mass at his home parish, and sheepishly asked him to sign it with them.  However, they had chosen to have their wedding celebrated by a friend, a Dominican Father who is living in another state, and they didn't know when he was leaving on Sunday.
Luckily they knew he was staying at his (local) parent's house.  So at about 12:15, they knocked on the door.  Father Joe was thankfully still up, and they got married, for real, at his parents kitchen table.  The priest's mother got pictures.  I'm dying to see them.

In lieu of showing you my sister's "real" wedding photos, here's a few pictures of Jewish marriage certificates from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Collection.

enjoy!

A link to the Beinecke Rare Book Collection website.

Fields of Color

Beautiful, isn't it?
It's possibly the most successful example of a Tumbling Block quilt I've ever seen.  The colors are so perfectly chosen, and the design so bold. A halfway decent quilt is a thing of beauty and a usable object.
A great quilt is, well, Art.
I came upon this quilt through the book "Treasury of American Quilts" It's my favorite book of quilts. It's full of quilts that transcend mere craftsmanship.
Don't get me wrong, I love craftsmanship.  I'm utterly intrigued by the relationship between folk art and so called "real" art.  I've also found it easier to sew, paint, and collage useful objects with people rather than cloistering myself away and making "high art."  It's easier to get paid too.

Anyway, back to quilts
Some of my favorite quilts are color field quilts, mostly Amish.  These women, forbidden from wearing bright colors, cover their beds with them instead.
The quilts, interestingly enough, pre-date color field paintings by as much as 100 years.  The similarities in concept and color-play are startling.
It makes me wonder where artists really learn about color theory: whether it's the collegiate level science of Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman, or something learned much more fundamental, learned as we explore our natural world from a very young age.

This last quilt reminds me of the entire room of red Mark Rothkos at the National Gallery.  I love those paintings.  You'd think a room full of red paitings would be downright threatening.  However, they're warm, and somehow soothing. 

I couldn't find an image of them, so you'll just have to use your imagination. 

I also love these Gee's Bend quilts.  They were created by a family of women and their social circle starting in the 1930s.  The put in mind Piet Mondrian, Joan Miro, and Hans Hoffman.

I could go on for a while about the historical context of these quilts, they've been written about fairly extensively, so I'll just include links to informative sites at the bottom of this post, rather than badly paraphrasing someone else's work.

gallery selling Gee's Bend Quilts

 official Gee's Bend website

Mennonite Heritage Center