Setting Suns – Cut Paper Art
8 x 10 inch paper cutting.
Music: The Moon – Pleasure
Looking back 3 years
Three years ago today I left Brooklyn and came back to Kansas.. I always celebrate it because it was perhaps one out of two of the most significant events of my life. My life in Brooklyn was the best, most grueling schooling I couldn’t get a student loan for. And coming back “home” opened my eyes to the world with a whole new appreciation.
This was the very first photo I took when I got here. There were asian lady beetles everywhere (there’s one on the window sill) and I decided to embrace them… however you can embrace asian lady beetles (my way was to photograph them).
Brooklyn seems like a whole other lifetime ago, and in a way it was. I left mostly everything behind.. my computer even died about six hours before I left for the airport. And it phased me momentarily, but in the end it didn’t really matter. All the things that mattered I brought with me.
Kansas Frontier
I’m reading a book called “Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier” — it’s a collection of stories gathered by the author’s great-grandmother from 800 women that left their lives in the East and in Europe to settle on this newly available land… An excerpt: “Pioneer life was not all hardship and danger. The outstanding fact is that the environment was such as to bring out and develop the dominant qualities of individual character. Kansas women of that day learned at an early age to depend upon themselves – to do whatever work there was to be done, and to face danger when it must be faced, as calmly as they were able. And there was the compensation of contact with the great new West – a new world – theirs to develop from wild prairie to comfortable homes.”
Poppy papercutting in progress
My neighbor across the street has a front yard full of what I think are oriental poppies. I loved how they looked before they bloomed and they got me thinking about this paper cutting. I’ve been mulling it over for a couple weeks and I finally decided how to approach it. I’ll be adding color to this one and the previous one over tonight and tomorrow. Finished paper cuttings coming soon…
All about progress these days
Some more things in progress… I’m doing lots of drawing this morning before I move into coloring my previous piece. Actually sitting down to draw a design out is the hardest part of the whole process. It’s easiest to put off.. it requires the most thought.. you don’t really know what’s going to come out… it might look terrible (I have a few drawings meant for paper cuttings that will never see the light of day).. Once I get the pencil on the paper, it’s more difficult to stop working because I’m always eager to see how it will turn out.
More progress
This is another that I’m not totally sure where I’m going with it. I had a basic idea in my head, sat down and started into it. I’ve got all the major cutting work done.. now for deciding on color and a couple other finishing details.
Music: Sera Cahoone – Colorado Girl (Townes Van Zandt cover)
Paper cutting in progress
Everything in progress
I guess I could safely say that I’m entering the thick of art fair preparations and I’m adopting my seasonal schedule of “up at 4am to mat prints..”. I usually get up early, but my early morning activities generally only entail sitting around with a cup of coffee for a couple hours. I’m hoping to actually be prepared this year without stressing. Last year, I traveled with lots of extra supplies to Colorado so that I could keep working while I was there and it really took up lots of extra space in my vehicle (even had to ship some stuff..). I’m trying to travel lighter this year..
Things I didn’t accomplish: I didn’t get my animation finished for the Free State Film Fest – that’ll have to wait. Couldn’t match my ideas/ visuals/ available time in my head. And I bugged out trying to update my website – I have an outdated version of WordPress and I need to back up my blog, update software, etc.. This is something I’ll have to pay somebody to do. I’d likely accidently delete the whole thing if I tried to do it myself. Any takers? .. Gonna wait on it for a bit anyway.
Back to the cutting, matting, printing, framing, day-dreaming, coffee-drinking grind.