Cay Denise

I was going to do one of my art lessons today...a surrealism journey.  But there were so many videos involved in the instruction, and the project was going to take way too long.  So, I opted for organizing my collection of collage materials and then chose some of them to create this collage--a bit surrealist to boot.

2020 The Making of Miss Violet Desjardins from Cay Denise on Vimeo .

I've been working on this as an online class project.  The image is from a reference photo of a woman wearing a dark dress with a lace bodice.  I've tried re-creating that here and added a cloche hat with lacy scarf/tie to give the piece a bit of a Gatsby look.  The background definitely has influences of Klimt and Macintosh. If you were to give the piece a name, what would you come up with?

Thanks to Rae Missigman for being the inspiration for my start of an art journaling practice! This is a video tour of the pages in Art Journal 1...a continuing journey. Art Journal 1 from Cay Denise on Vimeo .

Due to the pandemic and shelter-at-home order in her community, Ardith Goodwin and another artist decided to offer short (and free) art journal video sessions.  I've really enjoyed them, and found the one I reviewed tonight to be very good. That lesson (GAHHH) is to work with drawing/painting emotion allowing your work not to look good or pretty...and essentially giving yourself permission to play.  So, I did.   Having had neck pain lately, this is a representation of what that 'OW' feels like as a facial expression from the perspective of looking upward at the face.  There are so many possibilities of working in this way and exploring how facial features change based on the emotion that accompanies each one.      Find the 'Journal Through It' prompts from Ardith at:  https://www.ardithgoodwin.com/blog and visit her very creative gallery of work while there.  

I love this journal page created by Austin Kleon!  For an opening page to a journal, the message is wonderfully inviting, and writing in secret code is a fun concept.   Secret code reminds me of the book titled 'Code Girls' about the young, educated college women recruited by the U.S. military during World War II.  Their job was to do codebreaking in which they took the place of men who'd done it before them--so the men could be moved into other positions-- even those in the theater of war/operations.  The codes these women broke were difficult to near impossible to do and many involved 'keys' that affected how letters were to be decoded.  The work involved math, attention to detail, and an ability to see relationships between totally different things that may have been seen at different times or in different places. There was also a Star Trek: TNG episode where Picard meets an alien captain whose race can only communicate in allegory based on the race&