An Artistic Legerdemain
Work continues on the Ann Head but progress is slow. This sore throat/fever/aches and pain – stuffy and I can’t rest syndrome is for the birds. My sedentary days make the dogs nutzo bazooms because I won’t take them for a walk until the sun goes down and the air is cooler. My little household fills quickly with internal squalor as my health declines. Rob [my muse] remained home last night as The Assemblagist ventured out into the public domain to seek inspiration and comfort amongst friends and family. While the opening act proved sufficient to reduce my ill-gotten cold symptoms, by the second hour my throat began to its quick descent into complete oblivion as my tonsils and adenoids became visions of past infections.
Today is fit only for mild artistic endeavors and lots of fruit smoothie consumption.
With hopes for improvement upon the ‘morrow, I leave you for now, dear friends. (Does morrow need a ‘?)
Apture plugin trial run gets an A+ so far.
Trial run of Apture, an amazing plugin for WordPress. Most extraordinary, I must say. Will comment more on this later…
Blustery — my word to illustrate
For the Art House Coop’s visual encyclopedia project, another of my words is blustery. What’s your first reaction to blustery? Probably same as mine. Betcha’ it is… Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. Right?
So do I give in and draw Pooh with a kite? Would viewers get it and if they did, would it be too cheesey? I will give in to my instincts and do a collage with a lovely sketch of Pooh which I will cut out from an illustration and then, to enhance the cheese-factor, I’ll make a tiny kite and use a bit of thread for the string and glue it to PoohBear’s little paw. Honestly, there isn’t anything else to do, now is there? I thought of blustering politicians giving odious speeches, but nah — who’d get it? Thought of a nice Mr. Wind with billowing curls of air-breath but then it would “windy” not “blustery” in the eye of the beholder.
Talked myself into it. Pooh it is. And poo on my detractors.
Right brain or left brain dominant?
Well, the test results are finally here. I’m neither. During some of my spare times, I took the high school student quiz on About.com to find out if I was left- or right-brain dominant. Turns out I’m Middle Brained. More to come on this but gotta’ go to Firefox because this new Safari install won’t let me add anything from the pop-up menu which doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me suffice it to say, such an occurrence caused me to lose my train of thought and then the train, which had already left the station, derailed.
You are open minded but not gullible about things or people. You may run into trouble making decisions sometimes, while your logical brain plays tug-of-war with your gut instinct. You enjoy the arts, but you could also do well in science and math. You appreciate the beauty of all things in life, and are well-rounded. Middle brain students would do well on The Apprentice, since they can have a strong mix of gut instinct and an appreciation for numbers. You would have a strong career in business, but you may not go that route; you may be more interested in studying the arts and sciences in college. You would be wise to read over the characteristics of left and right brain students and consider whether you fall into the traps of either type. For instance, extreme right brain dominant students can get too bogged down in thought, while extreme left brain students can be rigid in their views.
One of the oddest off-track items attacking my brain is my sister, Ann, who told me I was completely, totally, right brained. Then she said, “No, you’re not, you’re left brained… wait… you’re random-sequential.”
I’m bogged down by my rigid views of my gut instinct’s appreciation for numbers.
Aerie, one of my “words” in the Canvas Project
While researching aerie, one of my project words, and trying to find more than “nest of a bird on a cliff or mountain top”, I came across Coven of the Mother Mountain Aerie. Now I wonder if there’s any way to include such a group as my encyclopedia entry for aerie. Probably not, since the COMMA folk, while being quite interesting, may not provide the type of definition of my word necessary for the Project. At the exact time I performed the Mother Mountain Aerie research online, the story of Arthur, past King of all lovely tales of knighthood and Right Over Might, came on the History Channel. Excellent timing.
Anything concerning Arthurian legend brings back memories of my childhood reading preferences. Just as I graduated from Dr. Seuss and moved, by personal choice, into more meaty fiction, my teachers banded together to force upon me that awful of awful moment of scholarship – the introduction of Classical Literature. Mrs. Warner gagged me with Les Miserables. Followed it closely with a Charles Dickens, the title of which remains, for my own sanity, blocked from my memory. Eighth grade English. Classroom flashbacks crowd in and slam against the angst of pre-early teen years. The shock of receiving a grade lower than B+ sent me crying to Mrs. Warner, begging for a second chance at a grade above a D+. A book report, please please, I begged, extra credit…? She said, Fine then, you want extra credit? Read The Once and Future King by T.H. White… you have one week. I will quiz you about it myself, you will not write a report… no no… we’ll have an oral exam. Next Thursday after school.
You can understand why I do assemblage art if you try to follow my writing. Leaps and lags from point to counter-point. Bits of one memory flagged then tagged by another. Like my art. Pieces of me. Of the past. Ephemeral as junior high fashion.
The rest of the story of Arthur and my English class? I read the book, every bit of it. In one weekend. I was twelve. Then came Mary Stewart’s book about Merlin, then more books throughout high school, culminating in a discussion of Le Morte d’Arthur as a senior term paper. Between reading about King Arthur, Amelia Earhart, all the villains who were hung by Judge Parker, and Tolkein’s novels – it’s a wonder I graduated high school at all. Which sends me driving down another memorial highway beginning with my not attending graduation and ending with the University of Arkansas.
Hell, this is supposed to be about my art. The process of assemblage. I’m sure the proofreading of this blog post will be painful tomorrow. Today was much too filled with activity for me to be lucid right now.