Saturday, January 28, 2012

All the Rest of the Profiles!

This morning in a spurt of ambition I scanned all six of the remaining profiles.  So this will be a big posting.  I don't think I ever explained how the profiles came about nor how they were written.  When Lark asked me to add some material to the bind-up re-editioning I realized this was my chance to showcase some people whose journals I have long admired for their honesty and uniqueness.  These are people who use their journals as an integral part of their lives, and they give me so many ideas for my own journals and art.  I couldn't think of a better way to use the extra pages I was given.

I invited each person to write a short piece describing how they use journals and what their journals do for them.  So each of the profiles was written by the profiled person, not by me.  I wanted to show even more of their work than there was room for, so other pieces by these people are in the gallery section of the book as well as throughout the book.  Many of them already had work in Decorated Page and/or Decorated Journal.  Their generosity has made this book better than the sum of its parts, in my opinion.

Ann Turkle, whose page is shown above, should be familiar to to readers of Dec. Pg. and/or Dec. Jrnl.  In addition to being a journalkeeper of many years, Ann is a writer and contributed the sections on writing prompts to the other books.
Linda Chaves lives in Portugal but travels so extensively that it's hard to find her there.  I met her when she was in Asheville a year or so ago.

Loy is a good friend of mine with whom I spend a lot of time.  I can honestly say I have never seen her without her journal close at hand.  She seems to use it to keep a running commentary of her life.  The bottom journal shown here is an old ledger books that Loy found, so it's very large, not the usual small journal that follows its owners everywhere.  Loy's drawings come out of her imagination.
  Melly's journals relate to her artwork as well as her daily life.  She is experimental and playful with  materials.  She and Pat, shown below, are good friends who live in New York City and are part of a journal study group (which also includes Shirley and Benedicte, whose work you saw in previous postings) that meets very often for the purpose of having adventures and sketching around town.  They let me go with them when I'm in town.  I love watching these women in action!  Pat now uses her iPad (iPat) for sketching a lot of the time-- a new dimension in journaling and sketching.  The page below shows some of her pre-i Pad journal pages, which have the same funny quality as her new iPad pages.
 

The final profile is Sandy Webster's.  Sandy travels extensively to teach and to research.  Her journals are her research reports and repositories.  They are also the seedbeds of her artwork.  She always makes her own journals, often casing them, as in the Australia journal shown here, so that she has all her materials in the same place as the journal.  Sandy's book on using clay pigments is coming out soon.  To research her book, she traveled to Australia, France, and Italy, collecting pigments as she went, and carrying them home in her travel journal cases in specially-designed little containers that held the paints she had made from the pigments.

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