A New Year & A Drawing Lab

While New Year's Resolutions are beginning to lag or maybe even fizzling out mine is taking its joyous shape.

It's not secret that I've struggled a great deal since moving to Chicago fifteen months ago. It was sometime last February when I realized to my horror that I couldn't write anymore. Poetry: gone. Fiction: gone. Letters: gone. Personal journal: gone. I'd always thought of the fabled writer's block as having the desire to write but for some reason not being able to do so. This time writer's block was feeling the weight of stories in my heart and mind yet not being able to let them bleed out. Voices, echoes, moments from stories true and imagined crowded in. Once that would have meant writing them out and becoming empowered by them but  this time I was crippled by them and felt unable to even face them.
I did several thing to try to drown out the stories or forget them, but at last in November I forced myself to write. That's the thing of it, there were so many stories floating through me that I'd pushed deeper and deeper until when at last I sat down to write I even said aloud, "I don't have a story to tell." I wrote anyway, just to prove to myself that I could. A strange thing happened then, I began to feel myself waking up. Suddenly the things I had brought into my life to help me ignore the nagging of the stories I couldn't release were obvious for the shackles they had always been.  I left Chicago to visit family for the holidays in a way I didn't expect: excited. Excited to visit family, but also excited to return to Chicago in a new year and another chance to write.

This photo from the Amazon listing

 While there are more quiet resolutions for myself about writing, I  was given another new year's resolution as a Christmas gift. When my parents gave me Carla Sonheim's Drawing Lab for Mixed-Media Artists I doubt they meant it to be a goal for my new year, but 52 drawing exercises is just perfect to have one for each week of the year! As the cover might suggest, this is not a book for realistic renderings instead Sonheim says that her goal is to make drawing fun again. The book has seven units and the first is about finding inspiration from animals. Within each unit there are several "drawing labs" with instructions for a drawing exercise and tips for taking the drawing further.
In the first week of 2014 I eagerly started the first lab "Cats on a Bed." The exercise involves using your bed (or in my case a pillow) to make loose drawings of cats from memory and imagination. This was a lot of fun! It was even more fun because when I'd run out of poses that I could imagine a cat in I would turn to my husband and say,"What else do cats do?" and that darling man would describe or ever act out another cat pose. The "taking it further" for this lab was to select one or two favorite poses and render them in another media. Because I'm giving myself a week for each lab, and because I liked several poses I ended up doing several of the poses in watercolors. I included one page of my sketches and my watercolor cats below.
So far the hardest thing about this New Year's resolution has been to not do all the exercises in 52 days!

One page of cats on a pillow

Colored cat

Red kitty eating

Blue kitty turns her back to you

Green kitty just wants to be petted

Orange kitty is scared

Purple kitty stretches

Mysterious purple kitty

The Fox Confessor

With school and work I haven't taken much time for being creative lately, but this week I miraculously finished my coursework before today! What with a dear friend's birthday this week and Neko Case's "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" on repeat I decided to finally work on another template from the amazing Facebook group Ornation Creation (created and run by Ben Kwok).

Fox "tangle" based on Ben Kwok's template

Unlike my first attempt at one of the templates I consulted several ZenTangle patterns to give some structure to my animal.  (ZenTangle Patterns is a neat place to expand your doodling horizions! My fox certainly doesn't fit ZenTangle guidelines, but there is something soothing in giving structure and direction to ones doodles) For this fox I used three different ballpoint pens. My pen hoarding habit paid off with two different shades of orange, and a brown ballpoint pen. I was also pretty pumped to use my shiny new gold gel pen! The colors survived the scan well but they haven't printed well. The printing is a bummer since I want to send a print as a card to the aforementioned fox-loving friend, but then again a less vibrant fox isn't so bad.

Last month I made desktop calendar with hummingbird sketches I'd done, but I hadn't come up with anything for this month yet. I had photoshop open for another project and came up with a fox desktop calendar for October that I'm pretty excited about. Finished, it's 1280X800 (perfect for a 13" laptop). If you'd like to use it for your own, you can download a full-sized version here. Use it on your desktop, you blog background, etc but please give me credit and don't sell or otherwise use it for profit.

This is a smaller version of the desktop. Download the original here.

Jacob & the Angel

    Yesterday morning I woke with a headache. It seems that the cat and the dust are conspiring against me, to what end I don't yet know. Benjamin and I get up relatively early on Sunday mornings so that we can have breakfast and prepare for church without having to rush. Normally this involves sitting in the living room reading together for thirty minutes to an hour, but because of my headache Benjamin wisely decreed that we should go outside to read. As I have often bemoaned, we don't have any outside area here (no balcony, porch, or patio) but we do live two strong-armed throws from a French Bakery. The bakery shares outdoor seating around a fountain with the other shops and restaurants that we live behind and has croissants that both Benjamin and I love. It was a lovely morning and so all the tables were already occupied when we arrived, but there was still a bench by the fountain. While Benjamin enjoyed his croissant and an essay by Rowan Williams I savored pain au chocolate and read from William Temple's Readings from St. John's Gospel. I've only recently started this work and have been surprised at how enjoyable and enriching I find it.

       The passage for the morning was John 1:43-51 Philip is the disciple who Jesus goes to, up to this point everyone has been coming to him. As soon as Christ comes to him, Philip goes to get Nathanael. Here things get really interesting because in Temple's translation it Jesus says to Nathanael, "Behold an Israelite in whom there is no Jacob." Then there's that bit where Jesus tells Nathanael what he was doing before Philip came to him and Nathanael is amazed, but Christ tells him that he hasn't seen anything yet. I've never really been sure what to make of that transition. It always seemed like Jesus was saying, "I'm even more awesome than you think and I'm gonna prove it." Which of course is a true statement, but did jive well with my understanding of Jesus. So did you catch the difference in Temple's translation and the ESV? The ESV says, "in whom there is no deceit." Other translations say, "in whom there is no guile." But when Temple replaces those words with "Jacob," a patriarch known for his guile and deceit, he gives the key to what Jesus is saying and who Nathanael is.
      When Philip comes to Nathanael, Nathanael has been sitting under the fig tree wrestling with God. Not physically like Jacob and the angel, but wrestling with whether or not Jesus could be the Christ. When Philip tells Nathanael who the Messiah is, Nathanael doesn't ponder  the suggestion or ask who Jesus of Nazareth is. No, he says, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth." Nathanael has been thinking this over weighing the options and keeps stumbling over Nazareth. When Jesus surprises him with His knowledge, Nathanael announces him the Son of God  (a Messianic name). Then Jesus says, "Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe?" But this is the great thing, it isn't that Jesus said he saw Nathanael under the fig tree, but that Jesus saw Nathanael contesting with God and announced upon his arrival that though he wrestles like Jacob, he has not the deceit of Jacob. It was this that helped Nathanael past Nazareth and to belief. 
       But the images don't stop there! "Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man,” Jesus says. This is finishing the story of Jacob the patriarch. Jacob slept and saw the ladder ascending into heaven and the angels ascending and descending. The angels or messengers of God were doing his will, bringing his messages, bridging the gap between heaven and earth. But Nathanael will see Jesus on the cross, bridging the gap between heaven and earth communicating the will and messages of God and the pleas of His people.
Now I'm sure that this isn't surprising to many folks, but his got into me and encouraged me. I've said for years that the Old and New Testaments are not different books, that Jesus is in the Old Testament as well as the New, but not until reading this did I realize that I'd forgotten the place of the Old Testament in the New Testament. The Patriarch and prophets don't make sense without Jesus, but I'd never realized that they were the key to understanding Jesus's parables!
That was a lot of revelation over pain au chocolate and before you think I'm very spiritual, you should know that I spent a decent amount of time at the fountain thinking about the figure's awkward pose and that it looks more like a spring than a fountain. 

       The sunshine and outdoors helped, my headache was gone within the first five minutes. After church my bike survived it's first ride without a tube popping and Benjamin and I enjoyed a great lunch with friends. Around five that afternoon we decided to go out again, but by that time it was in the nineties and a bike ride didn't sound pleasant. I confessed to Benjamin that this morning the fountain had struck me as something I should try to sketch and so we went back. I made my sketch of the fountain and just before we left I went up to see what in the world it was supposed to represent. Imagine my surprise when I read "Jacob and the Angel" stamped on the post!