India ink for tattoos
My thoughts wandered through memories of how much this friend meant to me, and my artist life, regret for not being closer as the decades have passed, and happiness that the gift I would send her would be ready to mail when I got home. She was going off cross-country and wouldn’t need them for a time, and “besides,” she said after watching me struggle with acrylics, “you’re trying to work with skim milk when what your paintings need is cream.” At the end of our first semester together my friend brought me her oil paints.
The synchronicity stuck me–art school friends. Watching my youngest saying good-bye to a friend, it occurred me how much the friend resembled the friend of mine I had just made a book for. My oldest joined us and all was to be a celebration weekend with Mother’s Day being that Sunday. I left the pieces drying that weekend as I made the family trip with my husband to NYC to bring my youngest home from her first semester at Pratt. Of course there was that little internal voice niggling that I shouldn’t ever stop working if it felt so good, and that these gifts were long overdue–good friends deserve better. Good work, well-done–soon to be sent to someone who would love it. That love of working returned, and as I laid the finished books under weights for Amazon shares pressing–I felt that lovely internal smile. Butterflies began to rise from a flag-book form–their cousins attached themselves to an accordion fold. This reminder energized my splashing, folding and forming. As I began building several books, I recalled I’d months ago promised an artist gift to several friends. When the latest push to work emerged, the papers were closest at hand. In truth it’s kid art with a little sophistication.
Splash paint inks onto both sides of bristol, then use the shapes the merging inks make to form floral and insect shapes.
India ink for tattoos windows#
Earlier this year I had shifted my classroom windows to a garden filled with butterflies and other winged beings. It finally erupts into an overpowering urge to create–something, anything. As things go in my artist life, when I’ve plunged far enough into ennui to be stagnantly frozen–something itches its way to just under the surface of my awareness Ferrari shares.