Susie's Muse

Found Poetry

I was playing around with found text when I was creating my artwork for the RR book.

I believe inspiration is like seeing into the looking glass.

A glimpse of life from within.

Light from the human soul.

Elements from the beauty of life itself.

Artistic Indulgences

I am hosting a Triptych ATC swap on The 'In This House' Group. This is my creation for the swap. The cards had to be attached in some way and the theme being 'home' however wish that is interpreted to each participant.

I sewed cotton binding tape that I coffee stained to the cards. The triptych folds up accordian style.

I am also participating in an RR on another group. We each created a book with pages that each have a pocket of some kind. Our mission is to art each others pages and create something for each pocket. There are a grand total of 16 players in the RR so it will be a while for our books to make their rounds which included a journey across to the pond to our UK players.

Here are my pages. My theme is Found Lives. I was inspired a bit by my obesseion with cab cards and the idea that we so often use images of people long since gone from this world. I wonder what their lives were like, who they were, what they did. I can never know so why not create histories for them?

My book is done in both fabric and paper.

Completed cover.

Inside front cover.

Front of my page.

Back of my page with pocket.

I used Behr's crackle on 140 pound water paper and it worked great. I did all of my pages in this manner. I just can't send anything out that has plain white pages. VBG.

My pocket artwork. An altered cabinet card that I called 'muse'. I had a lot of fun creating this one and used crackle on it as well. I masked off the image when I crackled the card.

Back of cabinet card.

Inside of back cover.I used alot of hand dyed scrim and cheesecloth in this book. I just love heavily layered artwork. It's hard for me to work entirely flat these days. It's all about texture and texture and texture!

Back cover outside.

Playing Catch Up

I need at least a dozen more hours in each day to accomplish all the things I really want to be doing. I just spent a brief respite in our pool and feel guilty for indulging in the brief pleasure from the heat we have been hit with this week. Is there a way to do artwork while soaking up the sun, sitting in the pool? Any suggestions?

So last weekend we headed up to the very tip of Minnesota, close to Canada and spent an all to brief 48 hours in the peace and quiet of the Northern woods. Grand Marias is an artist community and a very small town where all of the locals know each other but visitors flock from far and wide to see Lake Superior in all her glory. A month ago this area was hit with a massive wild fire that bordered Canada and the boundary Waters Canoe area. We took a drive up the Gunflint trail to see for ourselves what Mother Nature had done. Here are a few of the sites.

My girls sitting on the breakwater on Lake Superior. Meg on the left and Brittney on the right.

An area of the wildfire where Mother Nature exposed a hidden falls we did not know existed.