Final Post of 2014

This blog was born in June 2014 with the sole intention of sharing my [he]art with people beyond my family, classmates, and close circle of friends. I had neither strategy nor goal for building an audience, and no clear cut plan for periodic posts. This thing just happened. Surprisingly, it's been a much easier, non-stressful, inspiring and sweetly challenging experience than I thought. Thanks, Linda Joy Burke, for staying in my ear about blogging.  

I especially like writing without laboring over what I will say. That is SO bleeping liberating - just show up, be authentic, really care, and allow the outflow.

That's how my pillow books and annual journals have evolved. I meet the blank page like a foreign country I've never visited before. And to that mystical, new terrain, I bring whatever I can glue/tape/affix/press to the page - strings of pearl, trains of thought, bits and pieces of this and that, ideas in flight, energy in motion - and then watch the magic happen. What a life.

Thanks to everyone who follows and has tuned into this blog. Your energy, your love and encouragement feed my soul and fuel me to keep going. 

 I wish you and your family the happiest of new years. Mbele Ashe!

Colorism

I was messing around in MWord one day--of all places--with photo enhancing tools and stumbled on this effect, which worked for the flyer I was creating. Like love, images sometimes come from the most unexpected places.

The Brides: Part 2

She will not be wearing Vera Lang or Marchesa, but a burqa. I wonder what she's thinking under all that fabric. How safe it is to witness the truth and lies in people's smiles without ever revealing your own. How powerful, too! To move about the world cloaked, concealed, insulated, beyond the influences of money and media, seeing much, revealing little. She is a study in stoic disposition, a woman waiting to be wed.

The Brides: Part I

She waits, the bride to be. Who knows what she contemplates; who dares to guess. From this side of the window looking ahead to the life that awaits her, I could tell her many things about marriage, both helpful and frightening. I could read her a newspaper article titled "Death Do Us Part." But none of it will make sense. Not from where she's sitting. I reckon she sees only blue skies ahead; I dare not guess. What do I know anyway, except today, outside her window, it's Autumn and there's an article in the paper about marriage; and a woman waits in a beautiful laced veil for her life to change.

A Tree

I'm sad today. My dear friend's brother was tragically killed Saturday night by a tree. He was collecting firewood and a large tree fell on him. A tree.

I am reminded of how gossamer fragile life really is.  How delicate and confounding this sticky wicked proteinaceous spider web of existence can be. A tree.

And I don't know what's real or True or if we are simply "billion year old carbon," as Joni Mitchell declares, trying break through the tensile strength of one fragile day to the next, or exactly what the Supreme Being has in mind or if there is such a thing after all, with its warped sense of destiny. A tree.

In the midst of this bluest eye felt in a whole month of assorted blues, my son Imani sends me a hilarious clip from Saturday Night Live, with Jim Carey doing a spoof on Matthew McConaughey in that Lincoln commercial. I laughed so hard I cried and almost peed on myself--a welcomed intermission in today's opera. It amazes me how things can change from one delicate second to the next and back again. A tree.

I am reminded of how peppermint cool it is to draw on tissue. How fragile and susceptible it is to being wrinkled and creased. But yet it endures, strong as its roots, its source. A tree.

Pencil drawing of Patti Austin from the--uh oh--is it the Havana Candy album? I forget; the albums are all packed away.

Back to the Bards

I'm back to Nef's bards--my little book cards. They've been calling me with flashes of new ideas for  page pop us and serendipitous encounters with design ideas. I spent this past weekend at a poetry retreat in central PA, at the Kirkridge retreat center, led by Michael and Kathleen Glaser and Jean Richardson. And what an exquisite experience that was. To bathe for three days in my essential questions. To explore my rich and turbulent inner life through the voice and lens of poetry. That's what these Kirkridge poetry retreats are all about, as opposed to spending three or five days trying/learning to write poetry. There are other places for those objectives; they're called writing classes and writers groups. But a retreat into oneself with an invitation to explore relationships, our world, nature, and essential questions is something sweeter. 

I digress. This weekend I made a new accordion fold bard that was a metaphor for a map to my centering place. (I also learned about an amazing mystic named Howard Thurman who advises: "How good it is to center down!") So now I'm centering in on a way to take this simple design--with its pop ups, cut outs, inserts--and do

something different/fresh/surprising. I'm starting to feel this artist's life is a constant movement and circling around possibilities, much like R. M. Rilke's following poem:

I live my life in growing orbits

which move out over the things of the world.

Perhaps I can never achieve the last,

but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, that ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years,

and still, I don't know if I am a falcon,

or a storm, or a great song.

--------------------------------------------------------

I, on the other hand, live my life like a cockeyed owl

which looks out over the whispers of night in two directions;

within and outside the heart's secret places

Perhaps I can never achieve a singular, laser focus

but that will be my attempt, as well.

I am circling around a real unchanging Truth

and I have been circling for countless incarnations 

and still, I don't know if I am a ghost,

or a beam of God, or a cockeyed owl.

                                                            -- Nef

Dollar Store Paint Painting Part 4

So what have I discovered on this journey to the universe of painting? It's much easier than I thought although not at all simple. Then again, nothing about creating art is ever simple. The process can be complex, consuming, tedious, maddening--you can seriously and joyfully lose yourself in that act. I'd like to hang out there again, ride that wave until something truly unique jolting weird other worldly and wondrous emerges. 

Dollar Store Paint Painting Part 3

I was inspired to recreate this woman from a birthday card I received earlier this year. Wish I still had the card, to give credit to the artist who originated this woman--and to thank her/him for inspiring me to start painting. I love those bold splashes of yellow, red and turquoise she/he used and the dark outlines. Seems that I do so much better when recreating faces from an image or photo than from my imagination, although I've created some interesting original profile drawings. The painting from last week (part 2) was also an original profile. Maybe it's a matter of just practice, practice, practice.

The one side of my collage door is almost covered with paintings. I'm looking forward to seeing what the opposite side will reveal.

 

Dollar Store Paint Painting Part 2

So now I'm wondering what to do with these paintings. One of my sons absolutely abhors them. They are, to his way of seeing, so amateur and crude and--for God's sake--created with dollar store paints!!! Unfortunately for him, I'm not quite ready to graduate to REAL paint (oils, acrylics), and fortunately for me he doesn't live at home anymore so I can continue hanging the paintings wherever I please--most recently on our guest bedroom/office door. Feels like a collage.

Which reminds me of an assignment one of my mentors gave me a while ago, to draw/paint/collage something on one side of a door and then do the complete opposite on the other side, i.e., change the scale, color, themes, etc. This is going to be interesting. I think the following painting should go in one of the four corners.

 

My first attempt at dollar store paint painting

After years of avoiding a serious study of painting techniques, I got this unexpected urge to paint. The art supply stores are a distance from my home, so I rushed to the dollar store down the street before the urge disappeared, bought some poster paints and got busy. Talk about feeling vulnerable--I'm totally out of my league with painting, but my Muse came a-calling. I must be obedient. 

Doing Creator's Creative Will

I once heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say, "I just want to do God's will." That's what I'm feeling today--I just want to do the Creator's will using the creative talents I've been given. I want to create art that satisfies my soul, that is a contribution to the hearts/minds/souls of everybody, for posterity. I want to move beyond everything that has blocked and stopped me from expressing the wellspring of creativity within, beyond the inner critic and the perfectionist. "I just want to do God's will" and get all this art out of me and into the world.

My adapted prayer today--and everyday I abide here by the grace of Pachamama--is:

Deliver me to my passion.

Deliver me to my brilliance.

Deliver me to my intelligence.

Deliver me to my depth.

Deliver me to my nobility.

Deliver me to my beauty.

Deliver me to my power to heal.

Deliver me to You.

(Adapted from Illuminata by Marianne Williamson) 

This cover for the first full-color edition of Passager is a page from one of my pillow books. I was truly honored that the publishers wanted to use this page. Writing in the round is magically disorienting.

What to do About Little Books?

My little pocket books are @ 3" x 4" and they fit quite comfortably in pant and jacket pockets. When I first started making these visual ditties as alternatives to traditional holiday cards, I had no idea if people would like them or even buy them, but they did. They seem to work best with simple accordion folds, front/back text, and covers affixed to the ends of the fold.

My creative challenge with these books  is to stay inspired--to keep coming up with fresh ideas for covers, folios, folds, bindings, and text. How they may be used for other purposes. Come to think of it, since they are a cross between greeting cards and little books, I could call them Nef's Bards--but then I'd have to use poems for text to make that work and a few visuals, of course.

I think I just started a new project.

When the Marriage of Images & Words Produces a Baby

Living into the marriage of images and words is one of the great joys of my artistic life. There's so much freedom in knowing that I can write not only with words but with colors, photographs, drawings, and objects affixed to the page. There are days when a simple stroke of turquoise paint across a stark white page says it all; when crumbled dried leaves glued below a sentence complete the thought; when illustrations insist on being commas, semicolons, ellipses, and exclamation marks. I especially love those moments when my words and images begin to make exquisite love on the page and something weird, wild and wonderful is born, like a song.

Palenque Memories

I long for the jungle of Palenque and that rich, pungent aroma of Mayan pyramids. I long for my writing table there, encompassed by hungry flora, seduced by hummingbirds, lulled by images too sublime to recreate in words or graphite or oil. I long to return to that timeless place.

Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

 ---Rudyard Kipling

The Monochrome View

Poem by L. Nef'fahitit Partlow-Myrick

Photo "Butterfly" by Jennifer Bishop

Tell him it’s a lie.
The ashen hue for sun,
the gunmetal ground for soil,
the pewter pole for fruit-bearing tree,
the cinereous mural wall for fresh field
with its marbleized animalia—

all fallacies.

Show him how to see.
Beyond appearances,
azura days of clarity,
Kelly green gardens of hope,
vermillion walls of a happy home,
kaleidoscope ways of being impervious to
circumstances and unnatural playgrounds—

all possibilities.

Tell him and tell him again and again,
the truth about little black boys and Monarchs,
then pray he flies.

Where my Words & Images Come Together

I’ve found bookmaking to be the perfect medium for channeling my visual-­literary passions simultaneously.  I may start out with an idea for one kind of book, but the finished piece is always a surprise.  All I have to do is trust my creative process implicitly and not be attached to outcomes.   Forget about making perfect art.  It’s all about showing up on the page and keeping the exchange between artist and audience real, from the heart.  And if the work touches people even a little bit, then that’s cool, too.

I am eternally grateful to the woman who first taught me the technical aspects of the craft—master bookmaker Rebecca Childers—and the woman who taught me how to breathe a book alive— Kendra Kopelke, poet, professor, and Director of the University of Baltimore’s Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Program.  Her classes really opened my mind to the possibilities of what a book can be: an experience.  Ache

Making Books

I love books.   Always have.  I love how they smell and feel, their different textures and sizes, the way they weigh in my hands and lap, and the foreplay of their pages against my fingertips.  I love the personality of their Titles  and  colorful covers and even their solid-colored covers with no text—that’s so sexy. And how their inner parts get  laid,  overlaid,  blocked, flushed, and  s           t           r           e           w           n   across the territory of pages for readers’ consumption.  The more delicious the content, the better.                  

I love making books, too.  It’s a high form of meditation that centers me completely in the present, in that holy state of “no mind” where thoughts yield to pure creative impulses.  That’s where all the magic happens.  That’s where the art gets made.

Living Journals

Several years ago Spectra Gallery, under the artistic direction of artist/curator Karen Summerville, presented a solo show of my art books and journals: 33Bookz. It's time to expand that show and create some new works.  First, I have to find the right and perfect place with ample space for sitting and reading. That's a lesson learned from the last show--people want to spend time with some of these books. So, I get to find an exhibit space with all the comforts of a cozy reading room.

Being a Creative Contribution

Revelation #849

More than making a contribution for the greatest good, I want to BE a contribution. Being and doing are different for me, although my Being does affect what I do, that is, the actions I take. One good  thing I get to be is consistent with this blog, in sharing my art with the world beyond my home and desk and art table.  Being that kind of contribution along with being Love in all that I say/do/feel/think/create & intend are the two wisest choices I can make today. And so it is!

Keep the Conversation Going

Earlier last week, I initiated a power prayer circle by inviting some friends to explore this question with me for 30 days: What is the wisest choice I can make today to change and set my life on the path of greatest self expression for the greater good?  This blog is one answer to that question.

And then I took Landmark Education's Access to Power communications course this past weekend, and suddenly my life has gotten bigger. Truth be told, it was already big and has been waiting for me to simply live into it, consistently.

Now knowing I AM as fully self expressed as I say I am and as I choose to be, my guiding question for this month is this: What is the wisest choice I can make today on this path of greatest self expression for the greater good? It's amazing what a little editing can do.

Here's my answer for today--a single page from one of my 1-page books without words (make up your own story if you choose):