The State of the Studio

Sweet summer lingers on in Oregon. It's been an unusually busy time, with harvesting, canning and time in the studio keeping us occupied. Tomorrow I teach journal making to the high school kids near where I live. I'm taking stacks of my filled journals and I hope to instill in several of them a life long habit of writing, creating and loving the book form.

This is the back cover, spine and front cover of the journal I'll be putting together in class. The photo is a picture of my mother when she was 16 years old. Yesterday would have been her 87th Birthday and I just love this picture of her. It's printed on tracing paper, glued over an underpainting and then coated with 2 layers of tar gel. 

This is how I treated the insides of the journal covers. Wallpaper scraps glued randomly.

Recent pages. Lots of deep thinking. 

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was telling a class that now that my mother is gone that my journal is my mother; where I go with my good news and bad. And the people in the class looked at me like I was stating the obvious and said, "everybody knows that".

This afternoon I'm determined to get back to the cold wax paintings. I have a bunch of panels stacked up at the in-between stage.

Stephanie and I put in the mostly-final edits on the Plaster eBook this weekend so in days now I expect it will go through the final edit and on to the master disk guy. We check his work and then we get the disks made for all of you who have ordered them. It has taken awhile for this to come together but in seeing the final product I think you will appreciate all that's gone into it. Thank you all for your patience; you've been wonderful.

More studio stuff. Gotta get some of this packed away so I have room to make more stuff.

John made a very spicy soup out of these ingredients that had a creamy base of soy cream. It was just incredibly good and involved a trip to the neighboring farm stands for the corn because ours is not quite ripe yet. John is on a gluten free vegan diet now; good thing he's an awesome, creative cook.

Here is the recipe, it's in Spanish but I think you can figure it out. John made substitutions; olive oil for butter and soy cream for mayonnaise. He left out the meat too, obviously. Oh, and the chicken feet too - lol. That might disturb some people.

That's all the news I can think of today. Just breathing in summer, eating strawberries, giving thanks for life. I've said it before but I'll say it again, "Life: even when it's bad it's good". xo