Begin Again.....and Again

So, I finished this...

submitted it for a juried show over on the East Slope, a.k.a the Front Range of Colorado and.....it didn't get in.
It happens, and don't worry, this post is not about the injustice of it all. My husband got that earful the last couple of days...and my daughter, driving home from picking her up at college. I told her I just wanted to know if there really was any value in my art or was it more akin to the pool hall dogs on black velvet. She just looked at me and then I thought.... All art has value, even the pool shooting dogs so I'm over it.
And now I can share Begin Again and explain it. To do that, we have to go back to the Tudors and to Queen Elizabeth the First.
Not to go all Art History on you, but, the Tudor Period of England, roughly 1485-1603, without Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and network news the monarchy had to find a way to communicate with the masses and the way they did that was with symbolism. Every flower had a meaning and everyone knew them. Well, all the people in the know knew them, probably not the serfs out in the fields. But the royal court studied paintings. How a hand was held, what it rested on, what or whom was in the reflection in the mirror, all had meaning. Queen Elizabeth the First knew how to communicate to her subjects and commissioned many a portrait with such symbols as below in the Isaac Oliver's Rainbow Dress.

It looks like the Virgin Queen is about to siphon some gas out of a tank or something. She's not. The "rainbow" colors have faded over time. What has not faded is the bedazzled serpant on her sleeve proclaiming back to Eve...

and God's endorsement to the monarch and "the eyes" and "ears" covering the dress, to declare...." I see and hear everything and am watching you all and listening."

Studying the Tudors communication by symbolism made me want to try it. Thus....Begin Again, which I talked about how I made in my previous post here.

I didn't crochet the lace that became the curtain. That, was made by my great grandmother, who we called Grandmommy. We named our youngest after her and I have her piano.I did knit the sweater, made from yarn that daughter brought me from Ireland last summer, when she got to see County Limerick where our family came from.

The baby is my other daughter, a snap shot of her and me as a reference...

The bunny? 

 I call her my "Runaway Bunny" because of Margret Wise Brown's book, which if you haven't you should read...

The butterfly, in winter? My "Runaway bunny" grew up and modeled for me again...

and I've made a few butterflies in my day... more about Migration in Moab here. The dog?

 Max, my beloved newfie lab that was by my side raising our babies and I still miss everyday...

The winter view of our old homestead, I have looked out at for over twenty years, a change from my childhood when I moved nine times before I headed off to college. 

What does it all mean?

I don't know, nothing deep. Just this fall, my last baby went off to college and I absolutely loved being a mother to my two girls, so I did some art therapy in stitching to come to terms with my little birdies flying away to their adventures.

So Happy Mother's Day to me, to my mother, to my grandmothers and to my great grandmothers and to my daughters, who I hope will be mothers someday and well, Begin Again...

My Hands Are Always Occupied...

 So, I'm an artist, I'm a mother and a wife, I'm the head cook of a soup kitchen, thus the pictures  on Twitter and Instagram of food...

 and tallies of how many people I and others have fed on a given meal ( low is around 80 people, high is about 130) At the soup kitchen, my official title is head cook and food coordinator. Which means I manage the other cooks, find the food, transport much of the food and well stock and sort the food....

Above is twelve cases of orange peppers...all at once. So, two mornings a week, with others, plus a few more scattered hours in the week,  my hands and mind are busy cooking. Five to six afternoons a week, I am alone, stitching my art.... 

 

Everything I do does take a lot of time, starting with the planning and designing ...

where  most of my decisions are made. And then I stitch....

and stitch...

and stitch...

Sometimes I do come up with crazy ideas at the end, like adding a three inch border of  vintage buttons. So I get on Etsy, find vintage sellers who have purchased 50 gallon trash cans of buttons from a little old lady who has been collecting them for 40 years. They quickly ship them from the Midwest to Colorado and then I stitch them down, all  picked from the box of 900 for color and size, then purposefully placed and sew them on. 

I'll show the finished piece pretty soon, I'm waiting to see if it gets into a juried show this summer. But the crazy notion of stitching so many buttons reminds me of  stitching  @#$@$@ butterflies on to  Migration Through Moab, a large fabric collage of my oldest daughter that literally took me a year to make. 

this is just a close up...

and a closer up...

The buttons took my 2.5 days from about 6 in the morning until 9 at night. It was easy to keep track because my husband was out of town, I was by myself and as he left, I walked down our drive and shut the gate, for the reason the cows had been messing with the fences and if they were successful in getting out of where they should stay, the closed gate would at least keep them in the yard until he got back to deal with them....I don't do cows and in theses parts, people are leery to go through closed gates without invitation. So I was completely  alone, stitching buttons from sun up to sun down and then some.
I rotated between two different couches and on top of my bed, listening to books on tape, half paying attention to a whole lot of youtube, and mindless TV series and movies, because choosing color and shape and stitching through the buttons twice really doesn't ask a lot of ones brain. But, this is what you do when there is a deadline fast approaching for a juried show and you get a good idea late in the game. When all was finished, my shoulders, arms and tips of my fingers hurt for days. But I made the deadline with a half a day to spare.

Right before the button frenzy, Jon found this in the cow's pen...

It's a stone tool, a grinding stone for either pecking and scratching art into rock or for grinding pigment, dropped or forgotten by an ancient artist possibly 800 years ago and buried on the land at the base of Mesa Verde that now we call home.
One thing we have many of.... within the boundaries of the Canyon of the Ancients Monument , are archaeologists and a few are my good friends. Pretty cool when you find something interesting and can text an expert, who is excited to see it and  tell you all about such a tool. We found  the stone on our own land, so I get to keep it... artifacts, even pot shards on public lands should be left where you find them per the law, but I've taken pictures to share later.

I wonder how long it took to make an old stone so smooth it shines, rock against rock, rock against mineral pigments, grinding back and forth, other artist's hands occupied for a long time.