We are the words

"We are the words; We are the music; We are the thing itself." -- Virginia Woolf

Writing words has always been in the consciousness of my own creativity. First visualized and then written and then written again but in a different direction and again in a different direction and so on and so on. A word design appears of these words too difficult to speak and too jumbled to be put together to read. Nevertheless they are my words put out of my head and mouth to be added to the universe of words of the soul.

"There is no doubt that in my mind that I have found out how to begin to say something in my own voice." -- Virginia Woolf

WordLayers Web

About 9 months ago, the nice folks who managed my website decided to change careers and opened a business making cupcakes and ditched their web business. True story. My FrontPage, web building software was too old to change (like I felt) but . . . I needed a website to keep my creativity organized, corralled, in a sense. I renewed my domain name, "WordLayers" and found a home to house it and software to start over again. Until this trip to Dairy Hollow, I didn't have the time nor the guts to get on with the task building a new website. I broke through the crust of "I can't . . . " and I did. You can now visit the early workings of second edition of WordLayers.com

Words Over Kansas

Words feel like art to me. Museums manifest portraits of phrases distinctive in content and style. Landscapes listen as locutions rain down from sky and grow up from fields of harvested wheat. Installations involve consonants sprinting to vault vowels while scattering crumbs of  words and letters across the ground. Sculpture Parks parade bronze parodies of unique stature across green lawns in living color. Wouldn't it be fun to roll in a gigantic iambic pentameter? How about working out on slides of S and C and the forever 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. How to reach level ground after the peak of A? Bungee 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 rise. 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.

8 Layers of Words

This is the final web copy of the 20 inch square I contributed to the ARTS collaborative project. Soon all 9 pieces will be placed next to each other for the first time. All artists work independently toward one goal: a finished work of art within one construct.

The first words

The first layer of words sets the design for the total of all layers. And, meaning matters. Even though the literal text turns more to design then to reading matter, the essence of the word remains. Words can be read, changed, exchanged, erased, written using various means on enumerable surfaces, but the first word stays, is imprinted into the whole of the art. Therefore, trust the language used to form the base of what is seen when the sound of writing is over. In this case, Country Club Bank has stated well it's basic principles which I replayed as the only text for this piece beginning with "Strength Trust Stability: Where roots run deep, relationships grow strong."

The Image of Bear

I have finished the visual art of Bear. Every word of poetry weaves through image in color and design to round off a thought. During this project, my heart has been in the heart of Bear. I fell in love with the Bear that began as an image on the computer, a bank logo, in fact. And, tomorrow, I slide on icy roads to the printer to pick him up. He will be released from computer and digital drive to the open world of canvas where he can walk out and about. My part of the whole, for, eight of us have collaborated on pieces of Bear and now each 20" by 20" square will be hung as one, to be set free — Bear will then be experienced in the eyes and minds of those who see him and he will stay with some, for a moment, and remembered by some, later. And, we will speak of him, immediately full of joy and exuberant conversation and then he will walk the path of unending creative thought.

Bear

My section is now, of course, covered by words of a poem I wrote focusing on the two front legs of Bear.

I am Bear. I lead in the direction of instinct, safety, nourishment. Eyes, ears, nose and a sense of ground urge responsibility. I move powerfully on steady paws. My legs trustworthy as the trunks of oaks. Not a random pattern, my movements come into the new year. I step on old stone to move forward as determination persuades a new place to hunt, to feed, to stand. In tranquil moments of dirt and clover seeping through perception of lessons learned, a sensual knowledge of delicious sweet berries and painful thorns of caution become the background of my experience. Dawn opens through cloud layers dripping words. A fine mist of letters fall onto a map into the direction I travel. New phrases shadow and filter journey and form the companions that step with me deeper into the hills. 

Walking Alphabet

I walk and the same letters that children play with on refrigerator doors, walk with me in no particular
order.

Rose Window Redux

I am a chair in the corner
by the window
kind of person.

Inside the panes
looking out I participate
in the play of characters--

neighbors and cars,
the mail person
depositing seasonal catalogs,

the UPS driver delivering
a used book from the
book store in Colorado.

Today, as thunderstorms
continue to roll
across Missouri's belly

I see the elegant David Austin
roses in glistening freshness
growing rounder and fatter

during the wet, cool May days of
2013, as each day publishes
a new page in a garden guide--

the roses hang over the pansies
in the window box that sits above
deep purple iris next to

the neon orange scarves
of poppy heads. Today hears
an inside day and

I will continue to write
in many colors as the
storms pass by and
the roses peek in.

7 Images

I have been quiet about hanging the show. Shy about seeing my pieces displayed publicly.  Views of evocative imagery; scenes of the private rooms of my heart; swirls of creative urge. Not one of those 7 prints is easy. They came hard. Each one a breakthrough. Working with layers of image and word is the panning for gold in my artistic trials. It feels like tedium--bending over a cloudy moving stream as I hold the strainer focused on the gold that is sure to rise. Somewhere from the wetness and clouds it comes through--Oh, that's it! That which is here in front of my eyes with only thin air separating. And this "it" is remarkable at first sight before critical mind comes to my side with long pointy finger and jabbing words. What I see of the 7 prints? There is beauty there. I could sit with each one as a friend and each one would move naturally and without emotion to my side with an arm around my shoulder and in a fantasy my picture becomes something, someone else and we talk for hours mostly not saying a word. Each print tells me why they are. They say there is no creator only an emergence of art through the creative one--the artist facilitates the coming of the art that was already there. Just here on this side of vision--the other side of the way we think things are. So 7 prints came through me and are now hanging on the walls of Waldo Pizza in Lee's Summit. Today I walk by the tables and see silhouettes of talking and laughing heads in front of the art hanging above each table. What's going on here I wonder  as I watch this dream and I see the prints that told me just a moment ago that they are not mine--they emerged through me, that is all and I think "Why art?" and I see my art with strangers eating pizza: sitting at the table with families and friends and business partners. And like a mother at the prom I see my darlings with others and I stand uncomfortably fine about with others. There is a chance that one or two may go home with their new admirers and preen and be hung in just the right spot that is not my spot at all . . .

A Poem Flew

Thank the muses that a poem flew into my heart

this morning. Whenever I am the target of these
arrows of fancy I write gratefully and fastly. I
witness the pen moving and the ink--
this time the color brown--
flowing onto the page as the sun
sometimes sparks off the wetness
and then--like when the coffee maker
makes its final spurt--it is done. My hand stops moving as words drip to an end and the mind ques quiet and I earnestly read what has transpired in this attack of physical words in familiar hand on the page that is now full. For a moment my body is calm, my mind at rest. 

[Note: this is not the poem that came to me in a flash--that poem, over there, was written in blue and this, as I've said before, is of brown ink with an occasional spark of sun.]

April 4

The clouds are lifting

Words over Kansas

I took the photo while traveling from Colorado to Missouri. It is the high plains of Kansas and is starkly spiritually beautiful. The rainstorm from the low hanging clouds forced us off the road and we spent the night in a small motel in Colby Kansas. The morning was cool and clouds followed us into Kansas City, Missouri where a heavy and quick downpour caused flash flooding throughout the city. We found our home dry and pets well taken care of. Life is beautiful and sometimes I notice. I scanned the photo and processed it in a graphics program while adding words and letters of unprocessed thought.

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)

Hemming

During the stitching, pressing and pinning of the hem the song "Don't fence me in" kept singing in my head. It seemed clear that art on fabric requires no restrictions, no boundaries. Perhaps word on word and layer on layer presents a dance of sorts which calls for lose running stitches put in by hand rather then machine--a quieting of the progress of the process. The long running stitches, the handwork, the dance and the fresh summer breeze folded within the turns of the hem. It is playful to approach something that is logically unknowable.  (The photo to the right is the backside of the panel ready for hemming.)

Wonderwork

Isn't it odd that I thought I was finished with the design?  One thing I know for sure is that I don't control the process of creativity. This is tricky because the application of one more piece is permanent and if it isn't true to the design. . .blah. The art of WordLayers is always perfect because it is without expectation or definition. But design is completely different. Design can be ruined with one false step and usually the elegant solution is a clean slate. So I thought I was done but I was not and I added two more rectangles to the muslin panel that will become a hanging of some sort. The text of the last block was Chapter One of Bright-Fey's Tao:

the tao source of life that we often talk about is beyond the power of words and labels to define or enclose / while it is true that we employ words and labels to outline our experience they are not absolute and cannot define the absolute / when it all began there were no words or labels / these things were created out of the union of perception and perception / whether a person who is awake in play sees the heart of life or its surface manifestations is hardly important because they are exactly the same point in space and time . . . . if you feel as though you really need a name / then call it wonderwork / and watch one miracle talk to another / in a language that you can feel but not understand / it is playful to approach something that is logically unknowable

I play with these words over and over and over. Truly a wonderful experience. So now, the design is finished. Right?

The Design

Since I began the process of de-cluttering my studio I have cleared the beautiful poplar worktable made for me by my husband, Chuck. Having such a table was in itself an inspiration. The sight of it brought enormous pleasure: seeing the empty and knowing the potential of full. I began working on a 16" x 72" panel with the intention of making either the first of two door shades for our French doors or an art piece to hang as an unfurled scroll. The 8' table was the perfect place to begin. Next came the piece of muslin bought as a remnant at the fabric store. Lovely muslin--a common, simple fabric that allows the sun to shine through translucently. The format of the art is WordLayers and the text is "The Whole Heart of Tao" as translated by John Bright-Fey. This is the first time for a WordLayers project to be based on words other then mine. I relished being a scrivener of these words which sing as a most lyrical Tao translation. The process of WordLayers meant that I was writing word on word and layer on layer. Yesterday I may have finished Step 1: the design.