Place

Let me sit within a quiet place at the close of day and melt again into the picture on the wall. Softness in folds of purple velvet delicacy in taste. Pomegranate, pineapple and grape. Painted rose ribbon under glass. Blue clay vase on corner table.  Iridescent scents color flowers in a room of slender space. I sit with solitude and observe the art of my life.

WordLayers

Fourteen years ago I was in the middle of a life changing decision; a conundrum of unmovable edge. I had to step back to step forward which moved me into an unknown place: an art store where I had never been, as me. I stepped inside and moved to the sketchbooks. After opening and closing and sensing, I found a large black one with wire binding. The paper was heavy and empty--like my heart. How to fill these pages? I followed several creative aisles over to the only medium that made sense. The colored markers. Hundreds of pens and hundreds of colors. I began to touch, to test and to turn a kiosk filled with innumerable possibilities.
After an embarrassing amount of time, I had a handful and paid  and headed for the kitchen table at home. This decision, what was it? What was I looking for? I wrote. And, the writing was not difficult, nor did it last long, nor did it fill the page. I returned the following day and wrote more in a different color and the next day I wrote on the same page in a new color. Within this time of writing in layers, several days and pages and weeks passed. Then, one day, I was done. Just done. The next Monday to follow this day, I resigned from my job. I knew where I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do. I did find a job, and I did move a long distance -- to a city near the city where I wanted to be. The colors continued to fill pages of writing text on text. All these pages eventually became my art and I had some printed into posters and framed the ones that fit especially well into where I was.  Within two years of settling, my then current job ended against my will. Unemployment stepped across the threshold. Never did the writing stop and a new layer turned the pages into poetry. Poems played on lines and into colors. From the moment of recognition, no matter how life happened, creativity stood as solace and guide. The span of no job phenomenally was the bridge to exactly where I wanted to be three years before, exactly. Many years ago I stepped into an art store in a city far away and dreamed my life whole. And now, that perfect job dreamt has turned cranky, noisy and un-fun. I recognize the taste of it and know "here I go, again." I look forward to "this," as if hanging onto every word. 

Wonderworks

Tao One, as translated by John Bright-Fey, refers to word without word as "Wonderworks" and this caused me to think of WordLayers and how it began and why. It came out of a dream to change my life from uncomfortable to joyous. I wrote words of the dream. I actualized Tao One by changing word to non-word and the result was exactly what I wanted as I watched it happen. I participated in the happening but it happened first -- this writing into non-word, this obtaining dream out of the colors of words. Imagine that. It happened and I lived it. I walked the path of the dreamer and lived exactly there, in back-word writing, until it was time to move on and I finally absorbed Wonderworks. Just absorbed it -- and all of me was me. I now write WordLayers as an art and take the prints to have them  beautifully matted and framed and each piece becomes its own within itself and all now hang on the walls of my home. And, in every room I walk through magic. This is what the Wordlayers.com site is all about and this just dawned on me today. I think there is really no time, we just live in this life and all is all at the same time. As Tao One reminds me, "one miracle talks to another in a language that you can feel but not understand."

Putting a title to it

Colors Leapt

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark." -- Agnes De Mille

This little piece of art scrabbled out of me during a period of recovery from a fall down the stairs. My brain and bones were broken. I had to make art and started scratching out color bars with my marking pens -- the colors came by themselves, waiting in line, patiently. I look at them now and wonder why these colors? I think the stripes fall in front of words before the words start talking about that which inspires. I found this particular piece when I turned my mind to other matters.

Art happens and then we put a title to it. This morning I am working on labels for the art show that begins June 1st and without my direction this print is in the pile of  "must take." It wears the appropriate title, Colors Leapt.

Garage Art in Winter

We finally had a snowfall! The roses are dormant and the Downy Woodpeckers are meeting at the feeder. The paintings I finished on the side of the garage have not slid off but remain bright behind clouds of falling snow. This is the winter view of the poem I wrote a year ago when freezing temperatures were rare and not a snowflake fell. I have lightly edited the poem on the website at http://wordlayers.com/GarageArt.htm  and here is how it begins:

Slightly lightly we began to notice and
to speak of wildflowers growing
by the garage in the back garden
and placed lawn chairs there just right
for evening conversation.
   
In the waning warmth of September days
we painted those wildflowers
on the white stucco garage wall--
the celandine poppy and prairie aster
the primrose and purple coneflower.

Now in December we stand
at the kitchen window just right
for mid-day sunshine and
in silence watch as winter's light 
plays across the colors painted
when the flowers faded in the fall.

art to me

I wrote this to underline the essence of words and art in my normal view of the world. I cannot read it without feeling the influence on my creativity of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art here in Kansas City.

Museums manifest portraits of phrases distinctive in content and style. Landscapes listen as locutions rain down from sky and grow up from lawns of golden wheat. Installations involve consonants sprinting to vault vowels while scattering crumbs of words and letters across the ground. Sculpture parks parade bronze allocutions of unique stature across green grass in living color. Wouldn't it be fun to work out in a gigantic iambic pentameter? How about rolling about on slides of S and C? The forever of O? Or, hike to the peak of capital A to catch a Technicolor rendering of a new commentary for old readers seated on multi-colored zafus and zabutons. How to reach level ground after the peak of A? Jump to join the contact sport of phonics or, if not up to snuff, sit with the Yellow Birds on their low risers of great expectation. Enjoy the alphabet's 26 paratrooper patrol positioning into paraphrase of limitless number in the sky at sunset. Stars. Quiet up front!. Hush. Poets are reading their poems in the middle of the street. Listen! Close your eyes. Words feel like art to me.

Tao of WordLayers

Today I hung the panel. The photo is cropped and the subject hard to capture with my smart phone. As I stand in front of it, it is quite luminous as the sun pushes shadows and light through the texture of muslin  and the colors of ink. Hundreds of words and layers of text blend outward in a tone that reminds me of stained glass.

Today it hangs on the right of two French doors and I'm trying to decide what next. . .to leave it as a hanging shade or to make a couple more and frame them into a 3-panel screen? I tripped across the perfect summary of what this process and project mean to me:

The image of finely spun filaments describes the quality of spiritual energy that pervades the bodymind of a resolute follower of the Tao. Chapter 31 commentary (Bright-Fey)

Unsafe places

What have I done here? Selected reds and yellows and copied one poem or essay or journal entry over and over in repetitive WordLayers style. But instead of paper I used a 12" x 12" square of burlap canvas. The result was flat and uninteresting. So I scanned that square and dumped it into Photoshop wherein I cut it into pieces and strips, pieces and strips over and under and sometimes around. Sometimes translucent and sometimes just dull and then bold. There are spaces where the naked canvas shows through and that seemed too raw for me but I left it because it is true to the fabric. It is here that I discovered the integrity of the medium--pen, ink, fabric. The only fuss is the confusion of place--where one piece meets another and you know by feel whether belonging occurs. Yet I went to places that felt unsafe anyway and stayed awhile.

Lines & Light

Now, I sit in a June garden and am again without words to tell you how lovely it is at 7:30am this Wednesday morning. Then I read chapter one of the Tao as translated by Bright-Fey and I recognize that my language and art are in a state of flux, perhaps becoming line and light. "The tao source of life that we often talk about is beyond the power of words and labels to define or enclose"

Within the Thunder (Pt. 2)

within the thunder. . .I've been working on a revision of the first poem written after that mind-numbing concussion where only color and image existed. Perhaps this is where I belong for the images I put down were from heart and not from mind. Seriously, the dyslexic that I am has always struggled with word. Making sense of words through spelling and grammar continues to be a struggle. Either I accept that I cannot write or I continue in battle. However, out of the mess of speaking through writing came the magic of WordLayers which is a personal victory out of war into art. I go in and out of consciousness not from concussion but from creativity.

See Website

Slow rising dough

Like slow
rising dough
the gift within
dyslexia
waited
patiently for
me to
discover more
to a group of
letters than
an
inharmonious
sounding-out
of words.
Listen up!
There is more
to word.
And so too
with art
when writing
speaks
with voice
within the art.

Oh said the Yellow Bird
Word is thought heard 
Writing is thought seen
ART is thought answered.

Art in Crisis Happens

whether recognized or not, practiced or not, intended or not. You see, there exists an energy--a ringing forth into the world of labor pushing the making of love to make art. Letters and words pile upon each other and become visually attractive, read as art and whisper out of me christening an authentic self. And I know her, knew her before my time. Passing the mirror I pause, see the smile? "Oh! Here you are!" I say, "So nice to see you again." Art takes me to a place of sharing "hello" with my oldest friend.

When Writing Becomes Art    
In my darkest moments,right smack in the middle of dark,comes a measure of full. The fullness of heart. "How does this feel?" Like April in Eureka Springs when spring water begins to trickle out of limestone hills.