I Remember Mama

Yesterday I spent time crying now and then as I worked on this quilt about my Mom. However, it was good crying. I really like the way it is coming together. I have been busy scanning pictures to include and have been having a really good time going down memory lane. Pictures of my mom when she was little, a teen ager, a young adult, engaged to my dad, married, in different situations, traveling around, being herself, her art, and the graceful way she aged. I have one last picture I think I will include which is of my mother just two weeks before she died. She has bright red lipstick on, something she wore a lot, and it was Christmas and she was in a wheelchair at my house, in her fancy robe. There is something so sweet about her bright red lipstick and her paleness and smallness that just touches me tremendously.

So today it was over to Dad's again, took him to the lab for his routine testing, shopping and then back to his house where I went snooping through more pictures. I have most of the family pictures at my house but my mom traveled to England every other year for quite a while and made huge albums of her trips...includes photos, photos taken by her good friend and traveling companion, post cards, and of course all the ticket stubs, handouts, and booklets she could get. One doesn't have to go there to learn about it! I picked up a bag of several of these that were in the closet and it wasn't until I got home and started looking through them that I realized I had brought home the ones that covered the time she took my daughter with her. What fun to look back at my daughter at age 16 traveling with her grandmother and her grandmother's friend!

Looking at castles in her books is giving me ideas. I already have done one piece called "The Windows in the Castle Wall" which I am considering entering in to Tactile Architecture but it is pretty abstract. When I looked at the pieces that were in the show last year they are pretty down to earth...fantastic but not abstract. Oh well, I only have $5 to lose if they don't take it!

Ideas are generating all over the place. Getting ideas about more surface design and how to incorporate it in my work. I sometimes worry about doing something that someone else has but in my own way. Twyla Tharp has a great quote in her book, The Creative Habit in which she says about demons..."Someone has done it beofre? Honey, it's all been done before. Nothing's really original. Not Homer, or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself!" Something to remember when I start feeling either full of myself or worried that something might seem to have come from someone else's work. People, lots of people, have done arches, ladders, squares, circles, etc but if I do them I will do them in my own way, my own design, my own colors.

I love to keep all these pithy quotes in my art journel. That, in and of itself, is a pretty fun thing. I like to start painting pages (because who wants to write on a white paper) and then go back and play some more and add pictures and quotes and all sorts of stuff. And then when I feel like it I write. It also travels with me so ends up with bits and pieces from where ever I am. part journel, part art, part scrapebook!