Art Projects

Some of my grandmother’s favorite pieces of charm bracelet costume jewelry were these round metal discs with glass fronts that held photos of her great granddaughter’s beaming faces.

A couple years after she passed away, I found two of these discs tucked away in one of her curated boxes filled with cherished mementos. One of me as a child and one of my two daughters around the ages of 7 and 1, posed and poised, appearing happy together. I stashed them back in the box and forgot about them.

During a move to a new house, we sold our living room furniture to a young couple. A few days later, the man was at our front door and said, “My wife found this inside the couch and we thought someone might want it,” as he handed me one of the discs. The one with my two daughters.

I retrieved the keepsake box and placed the errant trinket back in its home. I smiled at the mystery of how it got out of its container, into the couch, and kindly returned by a stranger.

This was one of Grandmother’s winks as she peered at me over her glasses perched on the end of her nose and I mentally threw my arms around her neck and gave her a big hug.

Day 16/61

All the words here are part of my creative journey and practice. Some are the activities that became habits. Some annual events that nudge my creative life to the next level. Projects large and small. All part of what I do and who I am, in a word cloud, today’s ICAD prompt.

FYI: there’s a website, wordclouds dot com which will generate a cloud for you based on a website or text you paste or enter. It’s fun.

One thing my father taught me was how to properly hold a knife in the kitchen. He was a professional chef and he passed along a few of his “good” knives to me before he passed away in 2012. When I saw the prompt, “dice”, I thought about his hands and how he showed me how to hold mine when doing that very thing.

Micron pen sketch.

Bippity. Boppity. Boo.

Fairytale, 2021. 😊

Didn’t have time this morning to finish the card. But it conveys my sentiment, so I’ll leave it as is.

A library is the delivery room for the birthplace of ideas, a place where history comes to life.”

— Norman Cousins

A library as a cave, books as bats (or butterflies?), each a light, a glow. Books bring forth the light and the library is where that light congregates. This prompt had me swimming in symbolism and I did my best to convey it in watercolor.