Giving journals as gifts can be a tricky matter. Will they be used and loved, or will they collect dust on a shelf? By now, I’m fairly particular about the journals I use. They must be Paperblanks. Why bother doing all that art in a book that’s going to fall apart or that has heavy, distracting lines in it? So when I do give journals as gifts, I try to find really good ones, and think a lot about the user’s personality.

This is the cover of a journal I gave to my husband’s grandmother, Blanche Darnell, around Thanksgiving 2001. At the time she was living in Heather House, a cozy dwelling she designed herself in Mendocino, California. She also designed the gardens, and that’s where the house got its name. Blanche is not the sort of grandmother that gardens by putting a pot of pansies out on her porch. No, she goes big. And when she’s finished with her own yard, so that there’s no grass left because the entire yard is landscaped with beautiful plants, she starts in on her neighbors’ yards. Which they love, because she does really good work. When she designed the gardens for Heather House, she invited all the grandchildren out for a summer “vacation”, which amounted to building miles of rock walls, and planting about 250 heather plants. Some vacation. That’s one way to keep the grandkids out of trouble!

Well, I got the idea that since she knows so much about plants, she might want to keep track of all that info, and pass it on to the rest of us. I did the cover illustration of one of her heather beds with colored pencils. I try to personalize gift journals so that the user will feel special and worthy of writing or drawing his or her story. If you don’t feel your story’s important, you won’t write it down. Plus, sometimes the first page is the scariest. But if there’s already a nifty picture or quote there, it takes some of the pressure off. Still, I knew Blanche liked to draw, but I wasn’t sure she would actually use the journal.

But she did! It wasn’t the happiest time when we had to fly back out to California for her memorial service in January 2005, but looking at her art certainly was a healing moment. I found this journal again after 4 years. It was tucked in a shelf between about 20 other volumes dating all the way back to 1946. She, too, had been keeping journals since she was in high school (just like me!) and I never knew it. There was the “Gardens of Blanche” journal – full of sketches, notes, plant tags, and photos of her gardens.

Sometimes the gift of a journal is just the right thing. Here’s one of the spreads from that journal:

*I’ll include some of her other journals in later posts.

I imagine most of you reading this blog have heard of the musical trend called mashups. If not, that’s when you (or someone with a deskful of audio equipment) takes 2 songs and mixes them up until they become a third song. Very popular with the nerds these days. Think Beach Boys + Beastie Boys. Or Tchaikovsky’s Peter and the Wolf + techno music. Anyway, I didn’t exactly come up with a 3rd rhino, but it is a journal spread made of 2 artists’ rhinoceri. This is my visual version of a mashup.

The rhino saga began when my friend Dmitri told me some of my animal paintings reminded him of Albrecht Dürer. Being the silly American that I am, I knew the name, but was not familiar with his work. so I decided to do some sniffing around, which led me on an interesting adventure. I looked through lots of books, and found that he lived from 1471-1528. What really interested me about his work were his animal and plant watercolors. He did many other portraits and religious paintings, but it fascinates me that an artist would make a realistic painting of weeds and grasses called The Large Turf in 1503. Or a stag beetle. Or a rhinoceros? Wait – how did he even know what a rhinoceros was? Well, he never saw one, but heard about one in Lisbon. This is a printout of his famous Rhinoceros engraving of 1515. I was so fascinated by it that I pasted it in my journal and then had to answer the challenge with my own rhinoceros. I did mine in pencil and acrylic. And since Dürer had his own symbol for signing his artwork, I used mine as well. 2004 is a long time after 1515, but we are connected by the rhinoceros. See, art history isn’t boring at all! Studying a little about Dürer makes me feel like my art is part of a larger conversation and gives it a context.