Grim

This is my traveling art journal that is going around a yahoo group called Paper Traders. Its called GRIM. I wanted it to be darkly tragic and romantic. It took on a life of its own. As the Dark Side often does. :-) Those are laminate samples on the cover.

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This is the instruction page, inside the front cover. I found a disease census card in a pack of ephemera that I made into a pocket. Inside the pocket is a little booklet of very brief instructions. Also a tag with a hint of a story line: " 'Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite' they said as they smiled and turned out the light. Bed bugs, she thought. Do they know something that I don't know? Wait!
The inside lining has a collection of insect specimens with pins . Inside the pocket is a black paper that once held sewing pins.

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The title page. Are definitions cliches? Probably. But I loved this one: ghastly, grim, grisly, gruesome, macabre...

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I looked for a grim fairy tale on the internet. I wanted something dark and gruesome. I found one that was just right. It was an Andersen fairy tale called The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. Click to read it. The heroines name is Inge.

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The beginning of the story. I used a great quirky font called Rouble.

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This is where Inge takes over. LOL! It becomes a story about her macabre fascination with bugs. Now, I added the needle paper and bed bug snippet into the instructions pocket. Inge is pulling this book together nicely.

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Inge's mother saying goodnight. As she leaves the bedroom, she looks over her shoulder and Inge imagines bed bugs crawling all over her.
(whacked, I know.)

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The artists sign-in page. The old parchment page and strip with a signature is from an old German book I found at a library sale. All the books you could fit in a bag for $10. The hand is a greeting card. I made pages inside for the contributing artists signatures. I can't wait to see where Inge leads them :-)

Madness

This is an entry into a round robin art journal. Its about a quote by Robin Williams. "You only get a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." I want to send it to Robin Williams but I don't have his address.

I used vintage clown images and superimposed R.W.s face on them. That's a photograph of him in the lower right hand corner wearing a checkered stretchy shirt like a cocoon. I guess he's trying to fit in. Anyway, I cloned the checkered floor that he's standing on and extended it at the bottom of the pages to integrate the image.
The spinner really works. It points to win, lose, sane, insane, I'm okay, you're okay. I normally try and stay away from the pointy hat cliche but I needed a pointer so it couldn't be avoided.
The overworked scritchedy drawing everywhere makes it look like it was done by a crazed obsessional artist. Not me of course. ;)

Here's more photos of the individual pages:

Feathers

I'm determined to push through my reluctance about this blog. There's something very scary about seeing my words out there. Images are okay to expose. They are open to interpretation. but words...they are much too revealing.
I remember a story one of my nuns told in grammar school.
There was once an old woman who was a town gossip. She recounted all of the comings and goings of the village. One day she said something she wished that she hadn't. Don't remember the details. Something bad.
Anyway she tried to take it back. She told her confession to the town priest on a Saturday night. He told her that she could never take back words. It was like a washerwoman who shook her down pillows out the window to clean. The pillows broke the seam from the shaking. The feathers flew on the winds everywhere. She could never retrieve every feather. It was impossible.
Words are like that. You can never chase them down. Like feathers.
They pin the idea securely in place. Can never recant them.
Art is open to projection. Its more about you than me. Less revealing than words.
Excuse my spelling.