I did this page on 23-25 September 2005. I don’t often copy the work of the masters, or even directly reference them, but this darling Dürer caught my eye. Something about her seemed very familiar. Almost like I had met her before. I was enticed by the gorgeous autumnal color palette. And the mysterious black background. Of course I added the bat wings. The other way I altered the work, besides using my own style of brushstrokes, and combining a bunch of other irrelevant imagery, was to turn her eyes curiously up towards the blue beetle emblazoned cryptically above her head.

I painted the orchid from life. I was named after the “Kristen Ann” part of this hybrid, although my name is spelled differently.

Particular Influences…

• Quote by William Blake: “The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel’d to heaven is no artist.”
• Jeune Femme Venetienne 1505 by Albrecht Dürer
• Orchid: Dendrobium Susan Takahashi ‘Dark’ xx Grace Okabe x Mini Pearl
• Blue Beetle: Pseudomagrus waterhousei

Media:

• acrylic paints
• colored pens
• alphabet stamps

On 6 October 2005, I went out to dinner with John Sant’Ambrogio at a little Chinese place in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I happened to be visiting from St. Louis to do a workshop with some local 4th graders. I was thinking about waterbirds when John picked me up. I hardly remember the food. What gripped me that evening was the fire in John’s eyes as he explained the idea for Emerald City Opera’s next performance: telling the story of Mozart’s adult life through arias from his seven mature operas. ECO (Steamboat’s local company) was looking for a writer to fill in some descriptive dialogue between the musical numbers.

This is a page from my journal 2 weeks later.

What made journaling an indespensible part of my artistic life? Teaching journaling to the next generation. After journaling off and on through high school and college, I came back to it seriously and consistently in January 2002. That’s when I got to teach writing on the Principia Upper School Teton Trip. I have now completed 6 volumes since the beginning of 2002. I love to look at them slowly taking over the bookshelf next to my bed. (#4 is still lost – “on vacation” I prefer to say…) I taught the writing again in 2004, and this year finally got to teach the art part. I was pretty thrilled about that idea, as you can see from this opening page.

I spent 3 weeks (21 August – 11 September 2005) teaching journaling and children’s literature at Arts For The Soul in Steamboat Springs, Colorado again this summer. It was quite an adventure! I made a few new friends and got to hang out with some old ones too. Hiked every Saturday with the younger staff and our energetic director, John Sant’Ambrogio (who might actually be something like 73, but thinks he is one of the younger staff. And that’s all that really matters anyway, right?) This time my husband Gabriel (who created this adorable website – thanks honey!) got to come out for Labor Day weekend, and my mom joined me for 3rd Session.

The evening concerts performed by the professional string quartet are always a special treat for me. I have to soak up as much music as I can, because most of my regular life is wrapped up in the visual arts… On Tuesday, 6 September 2005, (3rd Session) we ate at Outlaws, a classy restaurant that opens in the off-season especially for the AFTS group. The musicians performed a Late Beethoven program, which included the Cavatina movement from the String Quartet No. 13 in B flat major (“Lieb”), Op. 130. John explained that Beethoven was completely deaf when he wrote this piece, and yet it moved him so deeply that he couldn’t be in the room to even watch a performance because it would make him cry. He also explained that we would hear the cello (John Sant’Ambrogio), viola (Paul Reynolds), and 2nd violin (Jane Price) play one melody while the 1st violin (Dmitri Pogorelov) would lift up from that earthly sound and float a heavenly melody over the top of the composition. It was exquisite. As John explained the structure of the piece, I could see what that looked like. I didn’t have my journal with me that night, so I began to draw using the only materials I had available: a brown pen and a brown paper bag.
Above, you can see how I taped the sketch into my journal, and made notes about how I would like to develop the idea.

After the concert, I showed the sketch to my friend Dmitri, and explained how I would love to put it on a 4-foot canvas and really develop the surfaces with a good amount of painterliness. His reaction, as a musician, was very interesting:

“Big? Really? To me this piece is very small…” he said, holding his hands close to his heart and folding his shoulders inward.

That gave me an idea. Just then, I remembered that I was scheduled to present something about my process of making art at a panel called “Artists on Art” on Thursday. I decided to develop this idea in two different ways, so the students could see how in art, there isn’t only one right answer – there might be several.

Below, you can see how I was originally imagining the composition.

Notice how the ethereal 1st violin shape is balanced on the curving 2nd violin shape. The biggest paper I had to work with was a spread in my journal, not a 4-foot canvas, but you get the idea. I used acrylics to make this painting, and there are about 4 translucent layers that make up the background.

Next, I puzzled about how to do a small, precious version of the same composition. I was immediately reminded of those little wooden devotional triptychs that often reveal an image of the virgin and child inside. Here’s an example. (No, I did not make this one…) But it had to fit in my journal, so I made my triptych out of paper, instead of wood. I am not sure how it will last over time, but we’ll see.

I began with the center image and then worked out to the side panels, which represent the clear, starry nights that make midnight in Colorado so magical. The front faces of the panels are decorated with angels in a bronze color scheme – sort of representing church doors.

Just as I was finishing the triptych, it was time to attend another concert the next night. That evening, we took the students down the hill to Wild Horse Gallery, where they got to listen to the quartet read through some music as artist and gallery owner Richard Galusha painted a portrait of Dmitri. I spent the evening trying to evoke the bit of time when Dmitri told me how he imagined the Cavatina. Pencil sketches accumulated around the outside of the triptych. (I added a bit of color later…) I was interested to watch myself trying to picture such a small event, an almost nothing of a moment, through several related gesture drawings instead of painting a complete representation.

Here’s the visual version of Beethoven’s Cavatina as inspired by Dmitri:

AFTS became a bridge like the Devil’s Causeway between painting, music and writing. I found myself exploring the unfamiliar landscape of music with nothing but my brushes and pencils. The whole thing was exhilirating.

I sometimes get asked how I handle situations where there’s something I need to write in my journal but I don’t want anyone else to read it. This spread is an example of one response to that question. I started by writing a 4 page email to a good friend of mine, which I never intended to send. Sometimes addressing my journal entries to someone specific helps me focus my thought. I didn’t want anyone else to read this letter, but I liked a lot of the phrasing and imagery that came out in the process. So I ripped up the letter, leaving long strips of my favorite phrases visible, mixed up all the pieces, and pasted them in my journal. Then I painted over and around the word collage. I used a bit of clear acrylic medium to thin the colors so that the words would still be visible through the red and orange paint. I made this page on 26 May 2005.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

-Rumi
(13th century)

I know. It has been too long. I have been journaling like crazy, but not sharing my pages on this site. It’s time to fix that. I did this page on 16 May 2005. Oops. I can’t believe it’s August already. Anyway, I wanted to talk about how I often journal without using words. Sometimes a feeling can be best articulated with an image. I find that if the rest of me is still – if I can simply be aware of what I am feeling, a clear, distinct image often forms in my thought that expresses precisely my internal landscape. This image just showed up in my head while I was in PA on a school visit trip talking about the children’s books I write & illustrate. I painted it in my cheap hotel room, where I stayed alone for 4 nights – in between visiting elementary schools during the daytime. The kids were wonderful, but I was ready to be home. This picture comes from a vast, hollow feeling that was living in my chest during that time. But there is also beauty there. I learned about 10 years ago that there is a way to make something beautiful out of just about any kind of hurt. And if you don’t find the beauty – if you don’t look through whatever is troubling you to find that pearl of discovery, then there really isn’t any point in putting yourself in a place where you can get hurt. It’s not sublime. It’s just terrible. But if I look straight at it, I can see through it.

Here are 2 more pages from the journals of Blanche Darnell. Both are from 1998. It’s a good example of her style. She loves markers. Sometimes she will cover an entire page with an illustration, and other times she will leave room for writing. I think she would write first, and fit drawings, or “penners” as she would call her marker pictures, into any available crevice. Very similar to her gardening style. Most of her art is about plants, as you might expect from such a prolific gardener.

Blanche’s writing is interesting as well. She records the price of milk, what time she got up in the morning, word games, what she was watching on tv, as well as spiritual inspirations & tips for growing plants. It’s a good example of balancing big and little thoughts to give a complete picture of someone’s life and times.

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.