Summer Siren

Summer Siren by ~runningwave~

I have finished my first work of mixed media art on canvas. Woot! I finally did it. She's turned out quite lovely. I am so new to all of this painting-figures-on-canvas thing, but I am loving it.  The mermaid was inspired by a lesson taught by my art guru, Effy Wild in her year-long online Moonshine 2014 course.  This was a pretty intense lesson. Here are some photographs showing the creation of this piece.

Step 1, paint the mermaid in acrylic colors

I drew the figure on a 12 by 9 inch canvas board, outlining first in pencil. I intended her to look like she was floating peacefully in her aquatic home, carried by the currents. Once I had painted the general shape of the mermaid and added in her facial features I let the whole canvas dry. Effy's lesson called for three-dimensional hair. She chose cheesecloth to approximate the look of seaweed-like hair. I love the effect she achieved so it was off to the grocery for me.

Step 2, glue cheesecloth hair onto the canvas

Here's what the canvas looked like after I glued layers of cheesecloth onto it using artist's matte medium.  This turned out beautifully. I wanted her tresses to look like they were floating in a radial spray from her head in the waves.

Detail of the face and hair in step 2.

Step 3, Detail of the face, mostly complete.

To paint color in her hair I mixed PearlEx metallic powders with my acrylic Titanium White paint. The Sea Green colored powder worked best for the palette. My experiments with the PearlEx resulted in some very pleasing colors and I intend to keep playing with them. I had purchased them years ago to use as embossing colors for rubber stamping, but their effect when mixed with acrylic paints is stunning.
You will notice the detail of eye lashes in Sakura Gelly Roll metallic blue Glaze. Her lips and necklace were painted with Jacquard Copper Lumiere acrylic. The necklace got some finishing contours added in a dimensional ink brand called irRESISTible Pico Embellisher by Tsukineko.

Detail. Completed mermaid tail under the hair.

There are more coppery details on her fishtail and also in the shadow on the left side of the canvas to counterbalance the visual "weight" of the tail and out-of-control hair.

Summer Siren, completed September 6, 2014.

I think there are three very important lessons that I learned from this exercise. One: I'm perfectly capable of creating fine art on canvas. Two: I can, in fact, paint faces. Three: This was a LOT of FUN and I want to paint more canvases with mixed media.

Training for the Big Leagues

"Blend" experiment from Tammy Garcia's "Watercolor Playground" Class

I've had some wonderful opportunities lately to learn art techniques from different teachers. I recently decided that I wanted to focus on art journaling. I am becoming fairly comfortable with acrylic paining, but my watercolor technique is fairly amateurish. Watercolor -- for those of you who have not played with it since art class in a K-12 environment -- is a very difficult medium. Just how much water to use or not use is always tricky. And you cannot truly control watercolor, so you have to practice to understand its limitations and benefits. This I know from my brief Intro to Art 101 in college where I got to experiment with new art media every two weeks. I really want to get to know watercolor at a whole new level, so I chose to enroll in Tammy Garcia's online course called Watercolor Playground.  

My first project was Blend, or an experiment in blending pigments painted adjacent to each other in a whole page of lines. I am posting the most successful of my Blend painting so far. This one was done with my very first set of professional grade watercolors which I purchased for taking this class. It was amazing to me how vivid these paints are, after years of using a cheap set that can be bought at any craft store for under $10.  You really get what you pay for when purchasing paints.  While I can see that I still need more practice with blending, I'm definitely improving.  I plan to cut up the practice pages for collages or backgrounds for other artwork.

I also had the good fortune to take a live class taught by Kass Hall, who is an amazing art journal guru hailing from Down Under. What a treat to take two workshops in a day from an artist who lives on the other side of the Globe at my favorite local paper-obsession store, The Queen's Ink. Truly a privilege. What I loved most about taking Kass' workshops is that she did not dictate what the final product should be. She gave us some very good layering techniques to build an effective art journal spread and taught us her secrets of making legible lettering.

Desert Rose, left page, made in Kass Hall's "Lyrically Speaking" class

Kass asked the class to find lyrics to a song or lines from a poem that really inspired us for the first workshop of the day. I chose Sting's "Desert Rose," because it's a favorite of mine and also because Sting's words evoke so many images for me. I brought some collage papers with me that I knew I would want to use, and found elements among those Kass passed out -- clip art from websites and swatches from her own art journal pages scanned at high res. I am pretty pleased with how these turned out.

Desert Rose, right page, made in Kass Hall's "Lyrically Speaking" class

I also took an afternoon workshop with Kass, where she included her technique for drawing faces. I am still working on that spread and will post photos when I feel it's in a more finished state. I am so pleased with my results. I had been avoiding painting in an art journal in favor of separate pages, concerned that I'd mess up a page. I am beginning to feel more confident about what I'm doing after a whole year of concentrated mixed media practice. And if I come up with really ugly pages, I'll just paint over them. I'm okay with that.

So now I have an art journal that will travel with me throughout the next phase of my artistic journey. I hope that it becomes a more frequent practice. I am making plans to incorporate my journaling into my daily life, so stay tuned for more.

Even when I'm away from home, I am still thinking about art. My husband and I visited New York City last weekend to catch the fabulous exhibition on the Italian Futurists at the Guggenheim.  I admired the brash and colorful Futurist paintings when I was taking art history classes, but I had never heard about women being involved in the Futurist movement. In fact the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 is decidedly anti-feminist. Apparently that did not deter Italian women artists from participating in the movement. Benedetta Cappa's work is featured in the Guggenheim's exhibit, and her massive mural scheme for a Post Office in Palermo, Sicily (1933-1934) was the capstone of the whole exhibit.  There's a New York Times article interviewing the show's curator who talks about the work of this amazing artist.

Studio of Andrew Wyeth, Chadd's Ford, PA, Brandywine River Museum

Then, in contrast, we switched from the bombastic Futurist expressions to the more pastoral scenes of days of yore and country life painted by the various artists of the Wyeth family in their studios near Chadd's Ford, PA. The Brandywine River Museum preserves the homes and studios of the Wyeths and offers guided tours. Given how spartan Andrew Wyeth's paintings often are, I was amazed by the chaos in which he enjoyed working. The museum has recreated the whole ambiance with copies. I'm including a photograph of his studio that I took since our tour guide allowed us to take photographs. Apparently he drew many sketches for major works, but then let them fall to the floor of his studio and did not consult them much while he was working. He had already drawn the subject, you see, so the drawings were only the means to his end product.

His father's, N.C. Wyeth's studio was filled with props befitting a practitioner of swashbuckling illustration art: canoes, costumes, marble busts, weaponry and arms, helmets, etc. There is a copy of his final, unfinished illustration of George Washington on his easel, much has he must have left it on the day he died in 1945. I loved N.C. Wyeth's study for a mural of his whole family that the Museum is featuring in the Wyeths' large parlor. It must have been a small space for such a large family, but given how many creative people lived and were raised there it could not have been too distracting.

It is always so interesting to see how other artists work. Studios are a product of the individual who works in them.

Tricks of the Trade

Aspen tree stencil applied in gesso
with green spray ink.

I've been having a lot of fun making & discussing art socially in the past week, in addition to making art on my own. I have some very talented friends who are a constant source of energy boosts and support and I want to use this opportunity to give a shout-out to thank them all for being there. I *really* mean it!

Ms. PocketSize, who blogs regularly these days on her incredible adventure with "arting" has been posting some examples of her work with stencils and gesso.  I wanted to learn this art, since I'm rather limited in my stencil repertoire. Fortunately, I know Ms. PocketSize IRL, so she generously agreed to include a gesso with stencils demo into our randomly-scheduled art-nites at her mother's gorgeous and well-equipped mixed media studio (Zingala has another studio just for her textile art. Wow! Two art studios.)

The gesso stencil technique is rather fiddly, but I got the hang of it fairly quickly. I started with several stencils from TheCraftersWorkshop.com and then went for gold and used my artistcellar TEXTure Rivermap stencil by Jill K. Berry. The results were uneven, but I'll share my best efforts.

I made several great impressions of each stencil eventually. Ms. PocketSize encouraged me to try turning the stencil over on a blank page after I've pushed the gesso through the "positive" side of the stencil. The results of the "negative" stencil of the gears was rather steampunky, especially when I sprayed ink over it using my Glimmer Mist in chalkboard by Tattered Angels.  Another successful attempt was the aspen tree stencil with a medium green ink spray overlay (see above).  The best of the bunch was definitely the Rivermap stencil.  Not only is Jill K. Berry's font so awesome-looking, but I used red and green spray inks blended together, meeting in the middle.

Gessoed Rivermap stamp by J.K. Berry with spray ink.

The result of flipping the gear stencil over
while it was covered with gesso. Chalkboard mist.

Art adventure number two, was an impromptu opportunity at work. Several friends in my day-job world are paper conservators. I love to watch them carefully sew books back together, reattach their covers, and glue down marbled end papers whenever I walk through the conservation lab. They are all artists. Really, you have to be to do what they do everyday. You not only put things together, but often you have to take them apart, remove layers of nasty tape and other ickiness.  It's a kind of magic to me.

The other day, Vicki Lee was demonstrating for the benefit of her summer interns, how simple folded calendar books are made.  The calendar books are based upon surviving examples of late medieval and renaissance books in the Vade Museum. Vicki learned how to make these at a workshop, so now she was sharing the techniques.

No greater thing is there in life but to learn something and then share it with others. Spread the love, I say.  I want to try and make a fold-out art book using a binding technique like this.

Folding Calendar binding,
based upon historical sample

"Take Me Along" binding showing where
the pages will be sewn together

"Take Me Along" binding page laid out open

Working alongside other artists and creative types is the surest way for me to continue to practice and grow as an artist.  My other collaboration of the week was formed from a need to reconnect with a friend and to beat the heat wave we've been experiencing.

My friend is herself a budding multi-media artist. She's taking classes in a variety of techniques and working out through practice how she can best express herself. In other words, she and I are on a parallel path.  We spent more time just catching up on each other's lives and gabbing than we did on making art itself, but the process of talking about the art you're making is almost as important as the art-making part.

We tried out a "artful shamanism" guided journey technique that I've learned from artist Effy Wild as one of the mixed media lessons in Life Book 2013.  If that sounds too out there, think of it purely as mediation like you might do in a Buddhist monastery or during a yoga class. Anyway, let's just say that the process, or journey, enabled each of us to find a powerful symbol to use in a creative way.

The symbol that I imagined is becoming a work of art. Since the resulting visual image is still in progress, you'll have to wait for the next edition of Pull of the Tides to learn more.

Stay tuned to this channel.

Until then, get off your duff and do something, anything, creative!

Music of the Spheres, or abstraction with purpose

"Tiger Rag," a blind scribble sketch plus watercolor by ~runningwave~

Earth to runningwave. Come in, please.

I am on week 3 of an intensive online art class with Jane Davies.  The course is immersing me in abstractions. My goal is to learn how to work with a few art media and tools that are completely new for me, while practicing with other media I have not played with for many years.  It seems odd to say, but these abstract explorations are improving my ability to observe the world as an artist and to figure out improved ways to get what I see onto paper. My drawing style is already becoming looser, more free. I am having less trouble squelching the inner critic voice that wants to critique every mark and say, "oh, that doesn't really look like a tree. . ."  I attribute my progress mostly to the fact that my teacher, is a great motivator and fan of other artists.

I admire abstraction very much in other artists' work, but I never could quite get the hang of it. It have found it difficult to draw from life. I'm too easily distracted to sit and observe a thing for a long time. Not such an easy task when your head is too often in the clouds. That part will take a lot of work indeed, the quick sketch techniques that Jane Davies uses are improving my skills.

Approaching art from the abstract side, I find that my mind always seems to find ways to take a shape or line and bring it down to the ground, the real world. I'm practical that way. 

I have been discovering new insights into my creativity in the past few months. For one thing, I have noticed that my creativity is that it is very tied to music. When I hear music, it's impossible for me not to "see" pictures or colors, in my mind's eye. It's rather like a music video. Except that my brain has been doing this since long before MTV existed and music videos hit the mainstream. 

When I think back on it, music is tied to very important moments of my life. Music and my memory are also interconnected. I know that many people do talk about hearing a song and remembering their senior year in high school, or dancing with someone, or their mother singing to them at bedtime.

I realized in talking to my husband about music, that it's more than just music and memory. Most people do not experience music in such a visual way as I do. The vivid pictures I see when a song washes over me are so clear and so compelling. It is like a little movie, with scenes, lighting, stage sets, and dialogue. If the music is vintage jazz, the pictures are very different than if the music is rock or classical. The colors, lighting and mood of the "visuals" in my head change with the type of music.

Then I began thinking about the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, who famously wrote about his own experiences with synesthesia, which -- for Kandinsky-- was the fact that sound produced sensations of certain colors. I was fascinated with this subject in college as a budding art history scholar, but I had not yet sat down to think about why Kandinsky's writings on spirituality, art, and color vibrations were such powerful concepts for me in my youth.  I never thought to ask myself why I seemed to innately understand Kandinsky's concepts of the relationship between sound and color .

So, how did I come to the realization that music and my creativity are connected? Bear with me, here, because this may go out on a New Age limb for some of you. I will get back to the ground, I promise you.

Flashback to last summer. There's a Native American shaman who lives in the next town over. He and his family host weekly gatherings at his lovely garden in a quiet suburb. You'd never know about these happenings unless a friend gave you directions, but mine did. 

As with many Native American gatherings, the drumming begins the gathering, just to clear the air. The musicians then play hand-made flutes to call in the spirits. There's a moment of silence, a pause before the shaman begins to play glass crystal bowls of various sizes attuned to different notes. He says each of the bowls represents one of the chakras in Tibetan spirituality. The largest of these bowls is more than a foot in diameter and it sits on the floor. The smaller, higher pitched bowls are hand-held. The folklore is that the crystal bowls help to realign your mind, body, and spirit. A kind of mental, spiritual, physical balancing, like the way you would tune-up a car, according to the shaman.

When I heard the bowls played for the first time I had overpowering sensations of colors. Closing my eyes the colors got brighter, more vivid. The vibration of these crystals at different frequencies changes the colors that I see.  How else can I explain that except synesthesia?

Since that first time hearing the bowls, I've been back to the shaman's gathering several times. And, yep, it happens every time. Sometimes the colors are more clear than others, and I think that may have to do with how mentally focused I am that morning. I decided to do some research and to take a test to learn more about synesthesia. I want to determine if I really do have it.

Even if I don't, I find that my abstract art is better, that I am more effective at working with color and line, if I am listening to music while working. I made the following line sketch, selecting the theme "inspiration" from a list my teacher offered. I worked to a song called "Alive" by Omnia while I drew.

"Inspiration" emotimarks, India ink and watercolor pencil
by ~runningwave~

Another related discovery, is that I tend to create higher-quality abstract art if I take a long, hard look at the first set of doodles, and see what shapes are emerging. What objects can I see in the patterns?

Music of the Spheres, watercolor sketch with wax resist and collage by ~runningwave~

When my art teacher asked me to produce a work of art based upon circles, I knew that I wanted to think about celestial bodies, stars, moons, and comets, as I worked. The result reminds me of Baroque music by Handel, like the Wassermusik suites. Above is my favorite piece from the class so far. I actually gave the sketch to my friend the astrophysicist, who was visiting town for her conference at the National Science Foundation. I was touched when she said she'd give it a place of honor on her office wall.

So far, my forays into mixed media art are taking me some places that I did not expect. Today, I am planning some interesting water & ink paintings using several wet-in-wet techniques that my teacher taught us how to do in an instructional video. 

There is so much more to come. In fact, this is high time that I make a public service announcement.

Those of you who follow me regularly here at Pull of the Tides should be forewarned. 

I am gearing up for Art Everyday Month, which is a November challenge event hosted by Boston-based artist, Leah Piken Kolidas.  I plan to create art, cook, or take photographs everyday this November and to post the results on this blog as often as possible.

I can appreciate the fact that some of you may not like additional spam and bombardment of electronic posts in your life. I plan to post more art and less words, if that helps you decide whether or not to stay tuned.

Still, I hope that one or two of you will continue to follow along. I love the comments I've been getting from fellow art-explorers out there, and I'm glad that you are journeying with me.

If you'd rather not be bothered, that's cool by me. I'll hope to see you again on the flip-side at the beginning of December.

Peak of Energy

Art Journal Page by ~runningwave~

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” 

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Summer in the Chesapeake region is hot and hazy. Particularly this summer, since we had that incredible triple-digit heat wave at the end of June through the beginning of July.

Summer is also heady -- exciting, intoxicating, a peak of energy and activity.
Days are extra long, so the increased daylight seems to make everyone squeeze out every minute with being active, especially outdoors.

My world is moving on a giant burst of energy this summer, "just as things grow fast in the movies," like F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.  I'm in the center of a whirlwind of activity, largely self-propelled.

And I'm happy about it.

I've found that I am now creating the space in my life to be creative -- in diverse ways.

I'm giving myself permission to make time for my creativity without feeling guilty, as though I should be doing something else for the benefit of others.  I've observed in the past few weeks that when I'm at my creative peak, I'm also able to think more clearly. The creative energy I give off is useful to others. People learn from me, just as I'm learning from them. People complement my artwork that I have enjoyed spending time making.

Give and take -- not really a selfish act to express yourself. I wouldn't call the great artists I've known and learned about -- visual artists, musicians, actors -- selfish for practicing with their talent. I think they are doing what the love and hoping other people can enjoy it too.

I've begun to think of myself as an artist, who happens to have a day job doing something else. This is a recent change in perspective for me. I spent many years working hard to build a career until I found a job in which I make a professional wage that rather enjoy doing. Yet, I've also had to stop and consider where my heart is.

I am no longer struggling to make ends meet like I did in long years of graduate school. Nor am I doggedly competing to find a job that I enjoy that both pays the bills and suits my talents and temperament. I've found it, so I had to ask myself "Just why, why am I not satisfied?"


My heart answers, that I did put one thing aside when I decided to move forward in a career that brought me along the path I now tread. A - R - T


I attended an art school for two years, studying  commercial photography way back when. When I reached my graduation, I wasn't all that pleased about my job prospects. In the Midwestern town where I got my degree being a woman photographer in a commercial studio was not a glamorous job unless you made it to the top of the heap. Otherwise, you'd be making the coffee for other photographers and doing the hauling of lighting equipment, until your talent got noticed. If it got noticed at all.


So, I left my art behind in pursuit of more rigorous intellectual training, which I also loved. I always thought I was glad to have been to art school, but equally glad I was not a starving artist.

Well, I certainly have my basic needs met as I sit here today. I want more, and I'm taking this seriously at last.

Not giving up my day job any time soon, but when I have the free time, you'll find me taking art classes and working in new media. Practicing and stretching my very, flabby artistic muscles.

Not sure yet, where this path is taking me, but I am exhilarated.

I feel a sense of wonder and the thrilling taste of  adventure.

"Could you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?"

I decided that the only way I'm going to improve my drawing is the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.
Practice, practice, practice!

Since my previous post, I've been keeping my notebook with me and working on sketches every chance I get. Some people sit and play with their phone apps while waiting for a meeting; I have my little black Moleskine artist's journal and colored pens with me to pass the time.

I had to be in Baltimore four days straight last week, so I made sure I brought my journal. I assigned myself a theme for the first day: circles and curves. Traffic was light the first day, and I got to town early. I needed to wait about 40 minutes. So, I doodled everything I could think of on the theme of circles and curves.

On one of my lunch breaks, I drew my favorite landmark in Baltimore:  the Bromo Seltzer Tower. Fortunately there was shade from a nearby building so that I could stand being outside in 90-degree heat.  (I'm glad I did it that day, because the next day's thermometer topped over 100-degrees F.)


Result of my experiments:
1) It's good to have a journal and pens with me all the time. I'm more likely to use it to kill time between activities.
2) Theme of the Day or pausing to draw something around me that illustrates what the day is like are great strategies.

You may have heard on the news that we had some pretty dramatic weather in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore region last Friday. 105-degrees temps combined with a huge line of deadly thunderstorms and extremely high winds -- not a tornado, but a derecho. Afterwards there were trees uprooted, power lines down, and masses of people without power. It was pretty ugly, but somehow my home wasn't directly impacted. Whew! I feel very grateful and sympathize with everyone who didn't have power in the aftermath-- and those who still don't have the power back on.

Needless to say, with the steaming blast of temperature everyone was desperate to be indoors near an air conditioner. I was elated that my local mixed media arts store, The Queen's Ink, got their power back on in time for my long-awaited cigar box decoupage class on Sunday afternoon.

A Century Celebration box by ~runningwave~

Patti taught us the techniques for converting a used cigar box into a brand new keepsake box. She had preselected some wonderful papers  with artwork based upon fashion magazines from circa 1912 to 1922. This just happens to fall into my favorite time period in history, and I have spend years studying art and culture from 1900 to about 1940. I learned to love the Edwardian period during my college studies.

These scrapbook paper illustrations are about as Edwardian as they come. I look at them and see characters from P.G. Wodehouse novels. " 'Shall I bring the motor car round, Sir?' inquired Jeeves."  The car ended up on top of the box; it just had to! Plus that gave me the excuse to make the button knob look like a tire (or is that, tyre?)

Side view: A Century Celebration box by ~runningwave~

Inside view

Chosen materials, for those of you reading who care about that sort of thing: The papers our instructor selected for the class were Graphic 45 "A Ladies Diary" theme. The edges of the paper are covered with Ranger Arts distress ink (Pine Needles or Tattered Rose, depending on the background colors of the printed paper.). The handle is a stack of buttons nested and then glued together with Glossy Accents. The trick it to actually anchor the button knob with a tiny button sewn with waxed linen thread to the inside lid of the box.

Box Coverage

In my quest to find something useful to do with my love of collage and mixed media art, I recently took a workshop with Jane Davies. The topic was "Collage In a Box" and I want to give credit both to Jane for a fantastic and well-organized class and to Patti who is the delightful proprietor of The Queen's Ink, who hosted the workshop.

The goal of the workshop is to make a box from scratch and decorate it with mixed media papers and other embellishments. I needed a striking design for the outside, but since the box is for my husband, I didn't want it to be floral or pastel. I selected the blue and turquoise greek key pattern as perfect for him. The design is on wonderful Lokta paper (rice paper, traditional type made in Nepal), which is very easy to bend and wrap, as well as, thick enough to withstand the necessary layer of adhesive used to cover the chipboard.

The box edges are covered with a very thin, hand-painted rice paper. It's a remnant from a stack of the jewel-toned papers by a local artist that I purchased at The Queen's Ink many years ago. The paper is so richly colored you cannot take your eyes off of it. The downside for box collage, is that it is very thin. The adhesive made the paper so wet that I had to be careful not to tear it. It was also tricky to manipulate this paper to cover the edges of the box. It had the tendency to want to fold, crease, and buckle no matter how careful I was. I decided, however, that I was okay with the result because the creases actually make the flecks of metallic paint sparkle.

When you open the box, you'll see one of my scrapbooking papers of vintage travel luggage tags. One of them fortuitously is from Hotel Carlos V in Spain. Marc and I stayed at a hotel of that name in Madrid 11 years ago on our first big trip to Europe together. I laid out my interior paper so that the Carlos V tag was an important visual element, impossible to miss as you open the box.


And with that jazzy pattern on the inside of the box top, I decided the bottom interior covering should be ultra simple. It needed to match the Lokta paper. I had also brought with me several colors of papers that mimicked faux leather; I chose the turquoise color to match the Lokta design on the exterior.

I'm so pleased with how my very first box of this type came out. I will be adding just a few collage elements to the box's top exterior to complete the design. I have some travel tickets that I've stockpiled from travel abroad with which I can experiment.

Power Mantras

I first learned about practices of meditation when I was at college. I read a great deal about Eastern religion in those days, exploring new forms of spirituality. I really enjoyed reading about Buddhism, but felt quite sure that I couldn't identify with it completely. Yet some of the practices intrigued me. I also learned about the disciplined yogi of India and of their dedication to turning inward for learning deep lessons about life's existence.

Any attempts to actually teach myself meditation usually failed. Even when I attended a group mediation, I found myself feeling foolish and unable to focus on the task of focusing my mind the way the group leader asked me to do. I am a visual thinker by nature, so the only successful forms of meditation for me back then, centered on visualization techniques versus "sitting and breathing" as I thought of it.

It took me a while to realize that I had already encountered visualization techniques at a very young age, when I was 6 or 7 years old. My Mom enrolled me in a children's yoga class at the local YMCA. I remember our yoga teacher instructing us to lie on our mats at the end of class and close our eyes. We had to imagine that we saw a brightly-colored ball, like a bouncing ball we might have played with. Our teacher asked us to think about this ball growing larger and larger until it was so large that we were inside of the ball. This was a way to help us to focus, relax, and refresh. (Not an easy feat with a class of rambunctious children!) In my child's brain, I didn't know I was meditating, but I was.

Visualization remains my most effective tool for mediation, but my thoughts about the practice have changed pretty radically in the recent past. I am beginning to see that the chants really do help me connect with the universe when I am alone or with others collectively when I chant in a group setting. The effect is very similar to what I experienced in years of choral singing. The vibrations and rhythm help bring control and order to my existence.

The word resonate is the one that sticks most with me when I think of mantra.

Grown-up me has finally begun to unlock the potential of mantras. I started taking yoga again about four years ago as a means of stress-relief. I have had some amazing teachers, but my favorite one uses mantra combined with yoga poses (asana) and/or hand gestures (mudra).

One of the first simple mantras I learned in her class is the one she says she taught her two sons, it is a series of four key sounds made in the Sanskrit language of ancient India: SA TA NA MA These four sounds, made with hand gestures translate to mean: "Infinity, life, death, and rebirth."

In another class, my teacher taught a mantra that has become my favorite. It's intended to be a chant to invoke the power of women, the feminine aspects within the universe. It's a hauntingly beautiful chant, but also very raw and energetic. I loved it so much that I found a dance-groove mix recording of it by musician Erin Kamler and her colleagues, performing as Mantra Girl.
The chant is:

ADI SHAKTI, ADI SHAKTI, ADI SHAKTI, NAMO NAMO,
SARAB SHAKTI, SARAB SHAKTI, SARAB SHAKTI, NAMO NAMO,
PRITHUM BHAGAWATI, PRITHUM BHAGAWATI, PRITHUM BHAGAWATI,
NAMO NAMO,
KUNDALINI, MATA SHAKTI, MATA SHAKTI, NAMO, NAMO.

One yoga website describes this ancient mantra as:

The First Shakti Mantra tunes into the frequency of the Divine Mother, and to primal protective, generating energy. Chanting it eliminates fears and fulfils desires. Adi Shakti means the "Primal Power," Sarab Shakti means "All Power", and Prithum Bhagawati means "which creates through God."ation while I was in college.

--quotation from "Kundalini Yoga" website, www.kundaliniyoga.org

Now, thanks to my same teacher, I am learning a new mantra. Along with it come a set of mudra (gestures), and some yoga poses that enhance certain of the words that form the mantra.

I am choosing to learn this mantra because I went through a month of anxiety and sleep-disorder that I had not experienced in many years. The affects of not being able to sleep were so disruptive to my health that I needed something new to get me back into the healthy rhythm of life.

Just as singing a favorite song can lift your heart, mantra can also help raise your spirits. It is intensely focused (unlike some songs) and if you chant the mantra long enough it begins to change you. It doesn't change you on the outside, but it does change you on the inside, where it counts most.

My new mantra combines the Sanskrit words representing the building blocks of all things: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Ether, and Light.

LAM, VWAM, RAM, YAM, HAM, OM

It may sound weird, and even childish to read the words on the page, but when you chant these words for a long time and make the hand gestures things change.

This post dedicated to Lara and all the brilliant yoga teachers out there

Found Objects and Good Karma

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

-Paul Strand, photographer

On my short drive to work a few days ago I received an unexpected phone call. I thought it was maybe my mother, because who would be calling me so early in the day.

To my surprise is was Patti of The Queen's Ink telling me that there was an opening in the Saturday morning class to be taught by Tim Holtz at her shop. I had been third on the wait list for the Saturday class, and fifteenth on the list for one of Tim's Sunday workshops, so at this late date I had thought there was no chance.

This unexpected opportunity led me to a whole day of creativity with collage elements and "found" objects.

Tim Holtz is a rock star of the craft world. He has made a brilliant career out of designing and teaching. I had not realized just how many crafters would be sharing this class when arrived -- about 70! And the morning went like a whirlwind. Tim showed us how to make five pieces of jewelry using provided findings, papers, artifact-charms, and tools. All this in four hours!

My first bonus was that Patti announced that there were a couple of people who had cancelled out of the afternoon workshop on book-making. I raised my hand immediately to indicate I wanted to sign up. So, I finally had the chance to learn how to create a book from scratch. Bind the pages in signatures, create a embossed foil cover, and put it all together to create a work of art that's more like a treasure chest than a plain ole book.

My second bonus was meeting some incredibly warm and friendly crafters. Some of whom are amazing artists. I met a few people who do art for a living and others who make art for the sheer joy of it.

Tim was totally approachable, helpful when you had a question, and very, very adept at teaching for a large crowd. The last is a rare talent to be sure. I have taken workshops from some pretty skilled artists, but Tim and his assistants organized and carefully presented step-by-step processes for putting together these intricate designs. They made it seem effortless, and yet the old event-planner training in me knows just how difficult that is to accomplish.

I am not a newcomer to assemblage and collage techniques like I was a novice at book-binding, but I had been scratching my head about how to jumpstart my stalled mixed media hobby. I spent a total of 8 1/2 hours in the classes. I feel like I've received a big dose of good karma. After a whole day of assemblage workshops, my creative batteries have been recharged.

A Web of Intellectual Connections

I just finished listening to a fascinating interview of science and technology historian James Burke by a podcaster named Dan Carlin (who broadcasts Hardcore History). I had not listened to Carlin's podcast before, but was wondering around online hoping to find a new history-related podcast that I could get excited about.

So far the realm of podcasts has not delivered much in the way of "meaty" history that a professional historian who also enjoys mainstream popular culture can get into. Up until now The Napoleon Podcast has been by far my favorite because of the hosts' passion for history and their exploration of its subject on a level anyone with a basic high-school level education could understand. It's entertaining and reflects the type of conversation shared by people who really love to discuss and argue about history for history's sake.

The other day while trolling I-Tunes, one episode of Carlin's Hardcore History caught my eye, "A Fly on James Burke's Wall" (see Show 18 in Carlin's archive) I downloaded it and was instantly transported to a dynamic intellectual exchange between one of my favorite historians, Burke, and an enthusiastic amateur historian, Carlin, with some really thought-provoking insights of his own.

I am one of a generation that grew up learning about history from the likes of James Burke, with his television show Connections, which first broadcast in the US in 1979. I was at an impressionable age, but eager to learn so long as I had fun in doing so. I can remember that I was watching Connections at a time when I actually found the subject of history in school to be quite boring. I was incredibly good at memorizing the names of rulers, places, and dates of events for multiple choice quizzes, but bored to tears with the way it was presented in class by my teachers. Plop me down in front of the Tube, however, and I would watch, and re-watch Connections and its sequels over and over.

What fascinated me most was that Burke's approach appeals to my innate sense of synthesis. My brain is simply wired to draw together ideas quickly. Linear thinking is terribly uninteresting to me. Always was. Destined to be a post-modernist, my wild inclination was to draw two concepts together from different sides of the question and build a theory around them. That's how my fantasy life operated in my child's mind and, later, it's how my scholar's mind turned around sophisticated groups of facts to churn out pages and pages of grad school ramblings. Honed by a youth spent with exploring connections, I understood that history is not simply a string of happenings, but an array of decisions and inventions that might have just as easily gone the other way had circumstances been altered ever so slightly.

Popular scholars and scientists like James Burke, Carl Sagan, and Joseph Campbell showed me that ideas are power and the brain is a tool of exploration. As my education progressed I began to find the voices of scholars who opened up the field of women's history. I can remember being excited by my first readings of "serious" feminist art history in my first year of graduate school. Scholars like Whitney Chadwick and Linda Nochlin raised my awareness of just how much women had been overlooked in the previous views of world history -- not to mention all of the cultures considered "Other" or "Primitive" by First World scholars.

That brings me to the really nifty project that James Burke mentioned in passing during the conversation with Dan Carlin. He's using the Internet as a tool to expand his theories of inter-connectivity among people and moments in history on a website called the Knowledge Web. I encourage you to explore it for yourself. I highly recommend the "Mystery Tours" section which will introduce (or re-introduce) you to Burke's heady style of historic synthesis. My personal favorite tour so far is "Wallpaper to Germ Theory."

My husband and I have often batted around this crazy notion of writing a book together on a certain sub-set of myths about the history of England as filtered down to us from the Victorian era. It's rather crazy on the one hand because we are both really just armchair scholars of the period concerned, but he -- being a scientific/engineering mind with a devotion to folklore -- and I -- with my background in cultural history, archival research, and post-modernist academic training -- might just come up with a perspective on our topic that no one else has ever written. We have between the two of us background, experience, and skills related to intellectual history that combined is actually brilliant (if I do say so myself). The question is: could we produce research that anyone else would care about or want to read? Well, first we have to do the brainstorming and then the research. I'll get back to you on this topic.

I just want to conclude that human knowledge is at a peak. In my culture I am aware of just how fortunate I am to have information almost always at my fingertips. Making it far easier for me to make intellectual leaps than ever before. Its a long way from the paper card catalogues in my elementary school to the high-speed connections of the Internet on my laptop or hand-held device. Almost whenever I have a question, I can within a reasonable amount of time download all kinds of random facts, tidbits, reviews, ramblings, and conspiracy theories about it in a matter of minutes.

Oh, where, I wonder, will the connections lead?

How Do We Know? Or, Thoughts on Learning in the Digital Age

Learning is a reoccurring theme for me this past week. It has been made abundantly clear that learning is a huge component of my job. In fact, one of the reasons I haven't been updating Pull of the Tides is that I've been expending mental energy to absorb all I need to know about the job I started last summer. This past week I began to learn new software that will enable me to complete some very important assignments during the summer and beyond. I am also learning the larger lessons of how to work within the assigned parameters, whether or not I agree with the methods executives choose to use. And now I'm training two young people for their summer internships, and mentoring has always been a way for me to learn and to grow.

The fact is that I cannot imaging a life without learning. I thrive on it. If my work includes a component that allows me to learn new things and constantly, I'm as happy as a clam. I'm just doing my job to filter through the information, and hopefully the water I output from my shell is clearer than it was before.


I have also encountered the theme of learning in my women's group meeting last Friday. It was one of the dominant themes of an otherwise playful and fun gathering. I remarked on the fact that of the ten women present, nearly all mentioned that they were (or had been) a teacher of some kind or the other. It's remarkable because we came to the meeting from diverse backgrounds and disciplines and lifestyles and, yet, teaching and learning were such common threads that united us and our discussion.


Several women mentioned how the Internet has changed their ways of thinking or processing what they have learned. They talked about how communication and learning walk hand-in-hand and how the Internet brings communities of like-minded people out there together to solve problems or answer questions. The Internet can also be sensory overload -- too much information thrown at you in a small space of time. Like most tools, the Internet becomes a resource and inspiration, but it can also bring on a kind of madness. For me, Facebook has been a fascinating experiment that I have found to be a tool of connection to people in my distant and not so distant past. It's also a site that can play amusing games with the viral method of transmitting fads, mini-games, and trends. Sometimes I find it's traffic so overwhelming I cannot visit it or begin to respond to all of the "pokes" and insistent "requests" from friends. And all because a friend who lives 500-miles distant invited me to join.

In the Digital Age, we see to learn information about events and people in oddly incomplete ways. We may know the latest tragedy or scandal the instant after it happens, but try to find reliable sources for the background on a news story and you really have to use your research skills. It's not easy to find reporters who aren't all quoting the AP wire or a single source or two. This is not to denigrate the work that journalists do, but rather to comment on the fragmented and two-dimensional ways that "easy information" comes to us.

As an archivist who works with primary sources every day at work, I understand all too well how important it is to choose your information sources carefully. A personal letter might tell one side of the story for a family tragedy that results in a court case, while the official record may record very different perspectives and collate a variety of local opinions on the case. Which is true is a question that the scholar has to decide. What case will she make? Whose side will she be one? People write about themselves differently than others may write about them. And what is "Truth" anyway? My graduate education in the humanities has taught me that there is no one version of the Truth. It changes depending upon who you are, what information you have at hand, and the cultural lens with which you see the world.

This brings me to a final way that I've been learning in the past week. Reading is a huge pleasure for me and has been ever since I acquired the skill in early childhood. I read both fiction and non-fiction for fun. At the moment I am reading a book published several years ago by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich named for a phrase she had used in a graduate student research paper that she wrote in the 1970s: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. In the book she explores the odd ways in which her "radical" phrase has spread through poplar culture since a reporter quoted it in an article. Women and men have interpreted her phrase to mean quite a different set of values and concepts over the years and Ulrich catalogs many of these uses. To her mind some are quite positive and life-affirming, while other uses of the quote have been negative, destructive, and even copyright infringement.

Yet Ulrich does not stop there. She then selects three literary women who made history: one in the wake of the Renaissance in Europe, one in the years of Suffragette struggle in the United States, and one modernist author very dear to my own heart (and past research). I find it fascinating that Ulrich can find threads of meaning between such distant personalities. I find it thrilling that she explores both their struggle as feminists and their struggles to find their own voices. If you are looking for a radical departure in scholarship, you will not find it in this book. You will find -- if you dare to look -- a sense that history has a way of repeating itself, of moving forward slowly. Some battles have been won, but the very popularity of Ulrich's phrase suggests there are still a few to be fought.

I'm still reading this book and still considering Ulrich's arguments. I am swayed by her argument that historians don't control history. Individuals do have the opportunity to make history themselves. Historians can sway opinion, but often they are the servants of history and their own cultural world-views. You can learn all you want about the past, but the knowledge you gain make teach you as much about the present as it has about history.

Harlaxton College Remembered

It doesn't seem at all like 20 years have past since my freshman year of college. On this date in 1987 I was packing my two allotted suitcases and bursting with anticipation of spending my freshman year abroad in England.

I had grown up in a small town in Northern Kentucky near Cincinnati, Ohio and I never fit in with 98% of my high school classmates. My 11th grade guidance counselor looked at me as though I sprouted horns when I clearly stated my intention of studying in England for my first year in college. "You mean, you don't want to go to UK [Univ. of Kentucky]?" he asked incredulously. A large percentage of my college-bound classmates were headed there. I was furious with him, but then I was furious and impatient with people in general in those days. So I embarked upon my own mission to find a college program where a freshman could study abroad. My mother and the Cincinnati Public Library's resources helped me in my quest. From the library I found an address for the Council on International Education Exchange. They sent me a 3/4" catalogue of study abroad programs. I narrowed it down to three programs that permitted freshman to enter their program, but one of the three leaped out at me from the page and said something like this:

Study in a stately home built in the 1830s by industrialist Gregory Gregory. Take liberal arts classes taught by British and American faculty in state rooms and live on a manor with 6.5 acre walled garden and formal gardens. . .

When I applied to the University of Evansville for admission to Harlaxton College all those years ago, I had no idea how much it would change my life. For the first time I felt like the world was huge and mine for exploration. I found my profession, art history, there influenced by one of Harlaxton's eminent faculty members, medieval scholar Lady Wedgwood [Dr. Pamela Tudor-Craig]. Even though my parents are professional artists, I had no idea that you could think, talk and write about art as a job before attending Harlaxton and sitting-in on Lady Wedgwood's amazing lectures. I also took four courses in British history and literature, and a wonderful science course on Physical Geography of Great Britain. I absorbed quietly like a little sponge and adored every minute of starring up to a ceiling of gilt Victorian grandeur or stone masonry.

And I traveled. Every weekend I went somewhere, all around the island of Great Britain, including North Wales, Edinburgh, York, Lincoln, the Cotswolds, the Lake District, and of course, many trips to London. Each semester were had two four-day long weekends for travel and so I went to the Ile de France, to Venice, to Rome, and explored the seaside town of Ramsgate where my great grandmother Anne left behind those shores for the New World.

I met some wonderful people art Harlaxton and found myself immersed in diverse cultures. It was truly an international community with students from the UK, Europe, the Middle East all blended together. I went to pubs and imbibed good British cider and bitter. I ate Indian food for the first time. I became friends with students from Chicago, rural Indiana, and Germany. I'll never forget the evening that the Turkish students invited us to share strong coffee and Turkish delight with them. I won't for get the fall evening of the Guy Fawkes Night Bonfire and an evening ramble to explore Harlaxton's creepy gatehouse. My friend AC and I explored the punk clothing stores in Nottingham and played Warhammer role-playing games in the evenings. The American students put together a haunted house for Halloween and a one-mile line of British teens were lined up to go inside (back then, haunted houses were an oddity in England). We rented costumes and enjoyed a fabulous masquerade ball in the great hall each semester.

It would be impossible for me to encompass that entire year into one short essay and do it justice, but I can only hint at the richness I learned by seeing, touching, hearing about things that were far older than any European settlement in the United States. I had such a hunger for anything antique or ancient. The tangible contact with all that history changed me. It grounded my future and raised my awareness to things beyond the tiny, provincial community where I had lived most of my then 18 years.

Now sitting here twenty years later it is difficult for me to separate the strands of my life that were affected by this grand tour experiment of mine in my freshman year. I would be a different person now, if not for Harlaxton. I would venture to guess I am a more interesting and better education person for having been there, too.