Through the incredible generosity of Ricë Freeman-Zachery, I am now the owner of all these stamps. Wow. What a kickstart to my new venture in book arts.
My first carved alphabet stamps. I’m filling in the missing stamps from the vintage collection Ricë gave me.
Do you see why I’m totally in love with this woman now? She has become my new mentor. I’ve been learning from her blog and her YouTube videos. And she’s funky and cool and unabashedly human and funny as hell.
I was thinking about my problems with finding a new mentor and teacher, and while I certainly don’t believe that the universe caused harm to John and Suzanne in order to steer me in the right direction, sometimes it seems that when you’re frustrated and impatient that you’re blocked, maybe you just need to chill out and wait. That somebody or something to rev you up may be a minute away. Maybe if I had gone to Italy, I wouldn’t have headed in this direction. Who knows?
Maybe I am destined to go to Italy another time, with another teacher. God knows some interesting coincidences have come to my attention in that area. Such as a pamphlet given to me in an art quilt class at Art & Soul offering classes in journaling and collage and such, which happened to be about an Italy tourism business run by the same couple who have been sending me emails about Slow Food related trips. Well, I didn’t know that the teacher of the class I was taking was going to be teaching in Orvieto next year with these folks.
So today, since it’s good for me to always have some exciting art venture to look forward to, I registered for a week-long class with Daniel Essig at John C. Campbell Folk School to make wooden books. I justify it this way – I don’t have to stinking justify it, man. It’s the way it is. I am an artist, and this is energy coming in. Last fall, a professor counseled me that all my energy was going out, and I needed to find the way to let it in. Or something like that. It was not being replenished, and I was deflating. I really think that she was right.
Anyway, I’m just avoiding going out to the studio because I see the NDN out the window. Maybe I’ll slip out there under the cover of darkness.
slowly she turned 