“Waves on Stage” (2011) now has new curtains! The piece has been gussied up just in time for my July 2013 exhibit at Runnymede Library, Mosaic Dream Waves.
Category: Artwork
This paper doll emerged from the scraps of a previous project. Many of the various elements just seemed to want to be together!
The metallic paper background is fun to photograph because it changes colour depending on the location of the light source. From shiny to mysterious in two images!
Today my in-laws celebrate fifty years of marriage. Congratulations Heather and Robin! This collage is for you!
My friends Dan and Tracy love books, gardens, music, fine food, and wine. This collage is for them!
The boar with the headdress symbolizes Dan’s connection to Kansas City, Missouri. In that city, a statue of a boar lives on 47th Street, and he brings luck to people who rub his brass nose and drop a coin in a box.
It was my good fortune to make soap sculptures and listen to the Chronicles of Narnia with Dan in the 1970’s when we attended the same elementary school in Liberty, Missouri. As teenagers, we played in the symphonic band, wrote for the high school newspaper, and took French together. Dan and I kept in touch by mail, and in 2008 I got to visit him and his partner Tracy in Oregon.
Happy Birthday, Dan! May you and Tracy share a joyful day!
Before I took Drawing 1 at the Toronto School of Art in 2012, I thought I was hopeless at drawing. Even though I had been making collage and textile art for six years, I didn’t feel entitled to call myself a “real” artist because I lacked basic drawing skills.
With very little formal training in art, I wanted to address the gaps in my knowledge that held me back from stretching into three dimensions. It was also time to overcome the limiting “I can’t draw!” belief.
On the first day of my TSA evening class, our instructor, Paul Turner, boldly asserted that anyone who could hold a pencil could learn how to draw. I thought to myself, “I hope I don’t prove him wrong!”
As an adult educator myself, I know how important it is convince students to move beyond negative assessments of their abilities. Comparing my skills from the first week to the final week of drawing instruction, I can happily report that the only thing I proved wrong was my self-doubt.
To thank Paul and encourage anyone who wants to learn a new skill, I offer this illustrated blog post as evidence that if I could learn to draw at the age of 43, then others most certainly can too!
In the first two weeks, our class focused on the humble yet crucial box in one-point and two-point perspective, in addition to the equally essential ellipse. Paul encouraged us to “get comfortable with non-parallels” such as a box resting at a different angle from the table it’s sitting upon. However, I was remarkably and deeply uncomfortable with non-parallels.
In fact, I was actively alarmed when Paul stacked six books on top of each other and suddenly shifted all of their spines into different angles. How could I possibly draw that pile? I was barely adept at boxes floating in space, and my ellipses looked like squashed peaches in the mud.
Imagine my discomfiture when a variety of boxes on tables greeted us in week three. I had a drawing board, paper, and a skewer in my hand to gage proportions but little clue how to use it. (There was a reason why I scored low on spatial-relation skills on standardized tests in junior high).
Paul had demonstrated the skewer technique, and he even drew me a picture of a thumb holding a skewer next to a box, but I still felt hopelessly out of my depth. To my horror, I was actually close to tears!
Though measuring proportions was difficult, our instructor exhorted us not to give up. A quick comparison of the drawings above and below bears testimony to the fact that this skill became much easier for me.
In week four, I loved the opportunity to “respond to the total form with one line” and build a “relationship of trust with (my) eye, hand, and mind” (Paul Turner). The total form was a male model who changed poses frequently, and the rapid shifts pushed us to draw from “head to toe, boom, one line!”
The looseness and freedom of this gesture exercise lifted my spirits after the previous week’s disappointment with myself. Many of my sketches seem to express this joy.
In week five, we considered “how objects behave in space.” I liked the challenge of truly looking at a lantern, a bottle of dish detergent, and a lampshade to determine proportion, shape, and line. I also greatly appreciated Paul’s advice to be in the moment while engaged in drawing: “Don’t focus on where you think you should be (skill-wise) or what your drawing should look like. Be here now!”
The following week, I learned to pay more attention to the spaces between objects. Our task was to “go after” the shapes created in the gaps between items such as a chair, a goblet, or a sled propped up together on a table. We used white charcoal on colored paper to depict the negative space, allowing the objects to take form from the absence of charcoal.
It was the objects’ turn to live in the gaps and let so-called empty space take center stage for a change. Why should positive, filled-up space get all the attention when so many fascinating patterns are waiting to be noticed in the liminal places, the edges of objects, and the sea of animated air between them? I loved the radical shift in visual and conceptual perspective that the lesson in negative space inspired.
During week seven’s still-life exercise with two objects, I became very aware of the lovely negative-space shape made by the inside of my grandmother’s silver teapot’s handle, something I might not have noticed prior to the class. As I gazed at the teapot and a green vase from TSA’s closet of diverse objects, Paul suggested, “Let the shape lead you to the line.”
On the eighth class, we had a new model, and Paul instructed us to “build a height and width for the form and then plant a shoulder.” I liked the use of the verb “to plant” in a drawing context because it implied bold, purposeful action, a deliberate sowing of a seed from a burlap bag, a strong line from which something new can grow.
Planting the first shoulder of the form is an act of bravery, a commitment that changes a blank scroll of paper into a potential drawing. The first line transforms an idea into artistic reality, the abstract to the concrete, and fear-paralysis (“Will the line be perfect?”) into definitive action.
Value was week nine’s topic, and I struggled to get my head around the terminology and grapple with the sphere resting in front of me on a draped table. At one point, I sighed, “Vanquished by a styrofoam ball!”
I was disappointed in my value drawing even though I managed to improve it somewhat. However, I did like this artistic and psychologically-applicable advice from Paul: “Deal with the dark side of the form first and then work your way into the light.”
In week ten (our last week), we had the opportunity to do sustained drawings of another model and integrate what we’d learned about proportion, shape, gesture, negative space, and line. I also learned some new phrases to describe the long line of the body from shoulder to hip: “the line of action, the bow of the torso, and the C-curve.” I enjoyed thinking in terms of active lines. These lines are alive, humming with tension like an archery bow and curved like fruit in a bowl.
Even though I had trouble visualizing the planes of the body and understanding what Paul meant when he said, “Let the interior shapes guide you the exterior,” by the end of the evening I had two sketches I particularly liked.
Reflecting on my experience as a novice student of drawing, I am very grateful for such a stimulating class that taught me to have faith in my learning potential. I especially appreciate the invitation to look at objects, space, form, and light in fresh ways. What a gift to an artist and a writer!
Thank you, Paul, for taking me on a journey from perceived hopelessness to confidence in a developing skill!
Categories
Flying Bookfish
I was lucky to attend Emily Tinkler’s free Altered Books workshop at S. Walter Stewart Library, where more than a dozen participants eagerly listened to Emily describe how to fold, cut, and poke pages with an awl to turn an old book with a sewn binding into a work of art.
I had been given an out-of-date computer book to use for the workshop, and I soon went to work folding the pages to create an accordion shape. I was inspired by the examples that Emily had brought to show us, especially the one in which wire and ribbon rioted through the pages of a former book.
After the session, I took my unfinished piece home, where it sat on a table mutely calling out for something to spring from the folds of paper. Meanwhile, I continued sewing clumps of paper together with saffron and fern green thread.
A trip to the sticker aisle in an art store supplied me with the missing element. Fish! When I saw the fish collection, they seemed to want to be flying out of a book.
I glued double-images of the fish stickers together, and then I cut twelve skewers into varying sizes before affixing the energetic yet dignified creatures to them. As as penultimate touch, I tied short lengths of the saffron and green thread around each skewer. Finally, I added stickers to the decorated inside covers of the book. And that’s the story of Flying Bookfish!
Life Within, Catherine Raine, 2012
I made this collage for a friend who has been fighting a life-threatening illness. When I asked her what colors, images, and themes she might like, she wrote, “I have been enjoying vivid colors lately, and anything that evokes the ocean. We spent two weeks in Hawaii before my surgery, and images of the water and life within helped carry me through . . . . Themes of time, stretched and compressed feel relevant.”
Life Within, Catherine Raine, 2012
Life Within, Catherine Raine, 2012
Life Within, Catherine Raine, 2012
Desolate Yet All Undaunted, Catherine Raine, 2012
The raven is curious about the eclipse but not overly concerned. He stands his ground without fear.
Desolate Yet All Undaunted, Catherine Raine, 2012
I’m sending this raven piece to an art magazine that is calling for submissions on the theme of Edgar Allen Poe. (The title comes from Poe’s 1845 poem, “The Raven”). Wish me and the raven luck!
This Russian doll is on a wild stagecoach ride to an unnamed destination!
Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Catherine Raine, 2012
Collage materials include colored paper, stickers, and a postcard.
Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Catherine Raine, 2012
Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Catherine Raine, 2012
Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Catherine Raine, 2012
Matryoshka Doll on a Stagecoach Ride, Catherine Raine, 2012
There she goes!
Petunia is a souvenir of my recent vacation to Nova Scotia, for I finished her embellishments while relaxing in a hotel. To make a cloth creature like Petunia, you’ll need a sock, a rubber band, a sash, some beads, miniature crochet flowers, and thread.
Petunia may seem rude when she sticks out her blue tongue, but she’s more playful than disrespectful.
Dancing Bird Woman, Catherine Raine, 2012
Dancing Bird Woman is here to remind me to dance, be fiery, and enjoy wearing flares!
Dancing Bird Woman, Catherine Raine, 2012
Dancing Bird Woman, Catherine Raine, 2012
To close the post, here is a bookmark that Dancing Bird Woman might like to pick up with her beak:
Coins and Flowers Bookmark, Catherine Raine, 2012
I’ve never tried yogic flying, but this is what I imagine it could be like with the assistance of a crazy quilt:
Yogic Flying on a Crazy Quilt, Catherine Raine, 2012
Michelle’s Doily Frogs, Catherine Raine 2012
I have a friend who likes frogs, so I thought she might enjoy a collage that featured her favorite amphibians gussied up with doilies. The frogs pulled off the look with dignity.
And to round out the post, here are some bookmarks I collaged recently!
My grandmother Mary Raine (1911-2008), a practical woman from a small Missouri town, would have classed the practice of guided visualization as “a little different.” Nevertheless, Grandma was present in the meditation room of an Ontario spa last spring when a mindfulness coach asked me to close my eyes and descend deep into the earth, deep within deep, down to the cave of the grandmothers.
Shine, Catherine Raine, 2012
Drawn by the firelight and the chance to see Grandma Raine again, I went into the cave. Grandma gave me a heavy object wrapped in a gray cloth. Resting inside the cloth was a stained glass ornament that once dangled from a curtain rod above her apartment’s east window. When it caught the bright Missouri sunlight, it released streams of green, lavender, red, and blue. I used to love looking at those ribbons of light, and when my niece Emma saw them as a baby, she loved them too.
I took the gift reverently and gave thanks for its rainbow message, the loving command to let myself shine. It called for translucence and generation, allowing light to both pass through me and radiate from within. It called from a cave as deep as the grandmother’s mythical one, but just as real and powerful.
The gift was a verb. Shine. Be the stained glass. Transform clear light into personal pigment. Manifest the light into words, art, kindnesses, movement, and love. Don’t be opaque. Be clearly colorful, openly bright, unabashedly shiny, embody the light.
The visionary gift and its invocation have arrived at the perfect time to fight grief shadows that shroud, inhibit, and dim. Grandmother Raine’s heirloom bathes mind, body, and soul in its light and invites the living to surrender to radiance. It bids us to shine, shine, shine, and shine.
Jagged Peaks, Catherine Raine, 2012
“Triangle Nest” Shadowbox, Catherine Raine 2012
“Triangle Nest” Shadowbox, Catherine Raine 2012 (Back of Box)
“Fire Sprite” Textile Creature, Catherine Raine, 2011
I gave away some more collaged bookmarks this week. Here they are! (Materials include stickers, handmade paper, regular paper, and paint pens).
I rediscovered my love of art when I was 38 years old. The spark was a class facilitated by Erica Ross called “Create Your Own Healing Deck” at Sheena’s Place in 2007. By the end of the course, I had created more than a dozen cards that contained encouraging words and images to address my struggles with emotional eating.
My collages were exhibited at Sheena’s Annual Art Show (2007 and 2008), and I continued to attend classes there, including Erica’s “Dance Our Way Home” and Ellen Jaffe’s “Writing Your Way.” The prose-poem that accompanies Ruined Barn in this exhibit emerged from a writing exercise in which Ellen asked us to imagine ourselves as a landscape. Barn Memory wrote itself in a white-water rush, a lament for past and current losses:
I am a ruined barn, empty but smelling of ancient hay. I sit in a lost valley, no longer a shelter nor part of a living farm. I used to be warmer, to glow orange from lanterns on February mornings, to retain animal heat. Now my shadows fill in their outlines, random headlight baths from the highway my only relief.
All my sounds are whispers and echoes now, where once I heard grunts, shouts, whinnies, cries of pain and hunger. It’s so quiet now. Ruin is quiet . . . . I miss being whole. I miss being real. I miss the animals I used to protect.
Barn Memory and the collage that illustrates it are the “grief-seeds” (Rumi) at the root of Maps of Loss: Rivers, Ruins, and Grief. Even though I made the encaustic painting Inner Map: Non-Political three years after I wrote the barn piece, there is a living connection between these two inner landscapes and the eight other works of art you see at Richview Library today.
Maps of Loss has helped me articulate grief and map it visually, divining underground rivers of emotion that I had not detected beneath the surface. This personal excavation has revealed unexpected artifacts, including a Trippy Pier to Nowhere, a Heron and Ladder, a woman alone in a purple bed, and rivers (Tidal River and Encaustic River Beast). These unearthed souvenirs of my psyche speak to mystery, solitude, and a sense of moorings washed away.
In July 2010, my childhood friend Jenny died of cancer at age 41. On the day she died, I went to the Picture Collection at the Toronto Reference Library to look for meadows and the flowers she loved. I felt connected to Jenny when I pored over a folder containing peaceful scenes from nature. And when I memorialized my friend in Jenny’s Purple Iris, I used her favorite flower to create an organic gown, a vision of peace in her body after the suffering ended.
In the fall of 2010, I distracted myself with a continuing education course in encaustic painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design. I learned how to melt wax to create tactile pieces that smelled of beeswax, and the three encaustic paintings in Maps of Loss come from my time at OCAD. Two of these pieces contain rivers, which reflects one of my earliest influences. Having grown up near the banks of the Missouri River, rivers mean home, time passing, movement, and change. They also represent uncensored feelings: unpredictable, fierce, embodying invisible currents and the wild mystery of eddies.
The remaining two pieces, Lenin;s Mosaic and When Ruins Swoon, flow back to the beginning, connecting me to Ruined Barn. The central photographs in both collages depict ruined houses in the former Soviet Union that have partially returned to nature after nuclear disaster.
These images of Cold War wreckage haunt me because my father’s health was also ruined by this war. When he was in the United States Navy in the late 1950’s, he witnessed atomic blasts in the Pacific Ocean as part of a testing program during the nuclear arms race. From his post on Midway Island, he and his naval comrades watched the blasts without any protective gear, and the cancers he later developed correspond to cancers caused by radiation exposure. He died in 1995 at the age of 58. (Jenny promised to give him a hug for me).
A ruined barn, house, or room can symbolize a body stricken by illness, once vital but now a husk. Ruins also represent loss, mortality, and history; they are relics of forgotten worlds. Like rivers, they testify to the inescapable passage of time. Like maps, they locate a particular loss in a specific time and place. They are both tangible and abstract, accessible and remote.
To add an element of hope to the ruins, I have enveloped them in mosaics that suggest new colour and growth. Thank you for taking part in my own artistic growth by viewing Maps of Loss. Your presence helps me answer Rumi’s question: “Where will you plant your grief-seeds?” (Illuminated Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks)
Apparently, I haven’t quite exhausted my bookmark energy. Three more of them were waiting to manifest themselves!
