Beltane is for the Faeries!

A simple afternoon of creativity this Beltane Day, and all for the Faeries!  Oh and maybe for the little kids and the kids at heart that walk by too!

Happy Beltane everyone!

Almost Spring

The lady across the street was throwing bread crusts out for the birds and the gulls and crows wheeled in circles, swooping in, flying high, landing on her roof, then mine all the time calling their distinct calls.  The adult gulls are getting their clean white feathered heads that they get going into breeding season, leaving the feathers of winter behind.  Signs of the passing of winter and the coming of spring.

It’s funny that the lady across the street should choose this day of all days to feed the birds, for I have never seen her do so before. (Well unless you count the fact that her cat’s food, which is kept on her porch gets raided by the starlings from time to time.)  In some traditions and cultures this day is a day to celebrate, and one such way to celebrate this day is to leave an offering of food or milk for animals.  We did this by filling up our bird feeders again for the first time in a long time and to use the idea of milk, once I pick some more up from the store, our kitties will get a special treat.  One of my cats will be especially happy about this, she would worship cows if she knew they were the source of her most favorite treat.

Leaving offerings for the creatures of nature is just one way to celebrate today. Today is Imbolc, the half way point between winter and spring and another thing we will be doing today is burning our old paper snowflakes to usher winter out.  And in the coming days we’ll be walking in our neighborhood and parks and continue looking for signs of spring, which are already beginning to unfold.

Another ancient concept for this day has to do with a burning flame, often connected to the goddess Brigid or later St. Brigid and in the catholic Candlemas, the virgin Mary.  Since I tend to look at things in relation to nature more, for me this is a time where the sun grows even stronger and the light it brings ushers in new life and the creative forces of nature.  I celebrated this yesterday by letting my own inner creative flame inspire a bit of painting.

I call this piece ‘Almost Spring’.  Where the sky is a kaleidescope of blues, the hills are a patchwork of new greens, yet the oak tree, one of the last trees in our area to leaf out, still seems to slumber, waiting patiently for it’s time to unfold new leaves and join in the symphony of new growth and birds singing their spring songs.  A girl in her spring colored dress hugs the quiet oak, urging it to wake and at the same time drawing strength from it to wait patiently for the Equinox and all that it will bring.

Happy Almost Spring, dear readers.

Mischievous Wind

My inner artist wanted to come out and play today…

The Eclectic Artist

I’ve been messing about with different art mediums and seeing what sort of art comes from it.  I have been reminded again of how eclectic I am.  The piece pictured below is one I worked on today.  It is absolutely unlike anything I have done before.  Though I have dabbled here and there in the art world I often come back to working in pen and ink that has a distinctive style to it no matter how much I mess with it.  But I can only do so much pen and ink.  It is very hard on my hands.  So I occasionally make myself take a break and try something different.  

This time around I started messing with altered art, paper art, and collage.  Collage has the potential for me to do larger pieces while still utilizing smaller pieces of my pen and ink work.  Though there is none in this piece, I hope to try integrating the two in the future.

Another tendency for my art (and creative writing) is for it to take on a life of it’s own.  If I fight it, trying to make something look a certain preconceived (by me) way the flow stops and I can’t continue.  When I give in to the stubborn spirit of the art piece and go with the flow things usually work out – but I never know what I’m going to end up with when I start out.  

For this piece, I had a stretched canvas that I had at some point in the past given a streaky gray acrylic wash

to.  I had gotten interrupted shortly after painting it and never got back to it.  So it was sitting there, waiting.  Last night, just before drifting off to sleep I had the idea of using buttons and scrap paper to do flowers on canvas.  That was all I had in my head when I started out today. And this is what I ended up with.

I used colored backgrounds of magazine pages to create the flower stalks, bird shapes, and clouds.

The leaves I created from cutting out text from the same magazine, searching for words that turned out to have a positive theme.

The clouds were three different colors from magazine pages that I layered and used some colored pencil on the white layer to tone it down a bit.  I found whole individual words to apply to the clouds as well.

I also took some stamp pad ink in a frosty blue on my finger and brushed it across the surface of the canvas and around the edges of the cloud.

The teal blue highlights were prompted by one bright button that insisted on being included, no matter how hard I tried to stay with the grey scale theme.  And I ended up carrying that over into the birds, which I cut out, free style, from a teal colored page in the magazine.

This is the first time I have ever posted any of my art.  It has taken me a while to get brave enough to do so.  Now that I have though, I plan on getting some decent pictures of other things I have done and get them up here as well, that way, when I call myself  ’The Eclectic Artist’, you’ll understand why.