Category Archives: digital play

The gloaming

This photo came from the drafts file. The title was The gloaming of a lame duck November. 11/18/2020. Nearly one year ago. Doesn’t it feel longer like maybe a century? Isn’t it more than a little disappointing how tense and frightening the state of affairs remains?

In other cheery news, I made an etsy sale yesterday and cleared $2.50. The postage killed me.

Stuffed into a 4″x6″ envelope, this pile of metal bibs and bobs cost $6.83 to ship to the west coast. I charged $3.50.

One way is to think about this is that I am a fool. Another way: I just made $2.50 for stuff I picked up on the street AND I got rid of some studio clutter.

Now, I’m letting the app calculate the postage. And I’ll raise some prices.

I’ve been tired. Can’t blame it all on travel because I was tired in LA, too. It was great to be there, don’t get me wrong, to see the progress, relax together, to have a meal with one of our boys, to see another whole section of the city (Echo Park). It’s just: I was tired.

I glued up this collage the day after returning home. Global warming is on all our minds as Biden heads to Glasgow for the G20 and the details of the BBB bill get hammered out.

This digital mash up includes a snow-scene quilt and this week’s Paris Collage prompt. Not happy with it yet.

It’s a banner year for walnuts. Some mornings it’s like artillery out there. Passing cars add their percussion — pop, pop, pop — as they crush the nuts in the street.

Today I will: write postcards to voters and finish binding two old abstract landscapes.

Paper plus photo plus another photo (or two)

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And so it goes, obsessively, with this weekly visual prompt challenge from the Paris Collage Collective. I’m sorry if this gets to be too much, but given how many iterations I produce, there’s this need to document at least some of them here.

When I cut the male silhouette out of a magazine ad (above), by removing his knee, the lower shadow took on the appearance of a dress which, by association, transformed the dreadlocks into the knots and folds of a head scarf.

On an unrelated note, the other night when I couldn’t sleep I stepped outside and walked across the lawn to shoot the moon between the branches of our big black walnut tree.

Just as I reached out to open the front door, a man made his way along the street. Dressed head to toe in khaki, middle-aged, he creeped me the fuck out. I mean it was 2:30. Maybe I shouldn’t have read Stephen King’s The Outsider?

A little haunting

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After dinner while K watched a taped Patriots game, I made a slideshow. It’s in the middle of the post. A few stills follow.

But first the original collages of the running girl. In them, her urgent need to escape emerged from the iterations. The double/triple exposures that form the basis of the slideshow, seemingly of their own accord, continue that feeling. The way she comes in and out of view heightens the sense of imminent harm and also, perhaps, points to the way trauma damages one’s ability to stay in the body.

I couldn’t sleep last night. Eventually got up and read. I came across an article about Emmett Till which you can read here.

Short version: a journalist hired to write about Till’s murder for Life Magazine (this was after the two men were acquitted), couldn’t get releases from two OTHER murderers, so he just WROTE THEM OUT OF THE STORY.

The journalist could be tried (could have been? Sorry, it was 3:00 in the morning) for accessory to murder after the fact.

The current article makes plain that not only was it journalistic malpractice and very possibly illegal, the omission generated more terror in the Black community than had they known there’d been four perpetrators.

If two men were capable of THAT, what’s next?

*Paris Collage Collective prompt. I now see the girl running in negative space with leaf as hair. Do you?*

Maybe the sense of haunting had something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. K and I watched a Frontline episode — America After 9/11. Oh my god the lying politicians. The lazy press. It underscored a pithy tweet I read which said that we would have been better off as a country if we had literally done nothing.

The personal impact of the tragedy is rendered beautifully in this memoir piece: Hero by Liz Ackert.

Four of the hijackers spent their last night on earth in a discount hotel less than a mile down the road.

The place has long since been torn down.

P. S. Just went back and found a post about dreams the week before 9/11. And a Tarot card pulled (The Tower). Interesting to look back. A little haunting.

Clouds and collage

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K went into the office this morning and Finn and I accompanied him to the T. The cool gray 7:00 am hour was quiet. Pleasant. And, since I didn’t really sleep last night, it was good to get the walk in before I crump.

Came home, vacuumed studio and then cranked out a few collages. The clean up and organizing around here is gaining momentum. Garage and basement. Ooh boy! This rhododendron-hand collage has two sides. In part, this represents the long-standing quilter’s appreciation for the “other” side of compositions. It’s also a result of watching with curious interest as Jude creates two-sided quilts — each side with composed patchwork, the stitching going through.

I’m liking torn edges and learning to place dark colors under them to showcase them. When flipping a collage over, I find the serendipity of the other side of magazine pages fun — in this instance, the dishes in the lower left. Here, I made two variations of the rhodie/bubble digital collage and then split up a single Natl Geo page of an ancient sculpture. So the two sides are thematically related.

I’d already been working on the photo of bubbles provided by the Paris Collage Collective this week, using — what else? — house images. There are : some old photos of a house form stenciled in reverse on a page of the NYTimes, a collage from Acey’s 2019 prompts and, in one of them, a red version color xerox of a collage creates in SF of a Northampton house I lived in. Further down, are variations using three different house quilts.

We might get as much as one inch of rain an hour starting this afternoon. But it isn’t likely we’ll lose power. It took SIX TRUCKS working all day to repair the toppled street light and busted transformer around the corner that I mentioned recently. I cannot begin to imagine how long it’s gonna take Louisiana.

Communications seems to be up as an issue right now. My own and others’ blunders. Expectations dashed, then revised. Opinions yanked around. Sometimes I just want to crawl into a hole and suck my thumb.

Post-Henri Errands

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This open drapey robe would be suitable for a tall thin woman. Not me, in other words. I didn’t wear it on our bank errand yesterday because there are times when I feel that I ought to be semi-presentable.

We closed our Eastern account and moved the money to BOA, an institution seemingly committed to anti-service. Whaddya gonna do? I swear, though, if they make more of a stink about yesterday’s deposit, we’ll go in there and close THAT account and go back to Eastern. If your check blah blah. No charge if blah blah. DO YOU WANT OUR MONEY OR NOT?! Vengeance banking — it could be a thing.

We also went to the mall. I bought bath bombs and two disks of shampoo and conditioner (the reward mentioned two days ago). I was dumb struck when the cherubic curly-haired clerk asked me what I wanted from my conditioner. Ummm. My hair was a day-late for washing and haphazardly pulled on top of my head with a pair of clips. Do I look like I care?

K and I laughed in the car. You should have told her you do better with multiple choice. He’d seen me nodding with relief when she’d offered, “Add more volume?”