Painting with Vegetables

 Well, he won't eat most of them.

 But they sure are fun to paint with!

 Delicious!

 Look, Mom! Blue hands!

 I suppose Oscar does eat carrots. At least with ketchup.

 And he actually kinda loves corn.

 And now he loves painting with corn!

WHALES!

Fifteen minutes into our boat ride we saw...

 WHALES!

 Two of them!

Humpbacks.

 They were young whales, or so our guide told us.

So they were curious.

Which could explain why they hung out with our boat for 40-50 minutes,

popping their noses up,

 swimming back and forth under and around the boat,

and sometimes even waving their noses at us when we waved at them (it's true! the guide told us to try it, and it worked! Curious whales sometimes play with people like that, he said).

It was one of the most magical moments of my life.

My son loved it too.

 We also saw two Southern Right Whales involved in, ahem, courting.

They were a bit less interested in our boat though.

We even saw sea lions.

 It was a day I'm certain I'll never forget.

P.S. This was all while still in Western Australia, for those who didn't read my last couple of posts.

More crafty fun: Batik

So, like I've been saying, my sister is crafty -- like me.

 

So I had to take her to the nearby KL Craft Complex to try Batik while she was visiting KL.

We also took my son, Oscar, who loves art projects lately.

Painting with Mommy and Auntie Kelli was a big treat (he made 4 batiks!).

I made a tree of life with a labyrinth in it.

 

The craft complex had a new offering too -- they sewed our batiks into pillows for just a few dollars more.

 I added the ribbon and button onto mine. 

Happiness is making crafty projects with my sister and son.

(Unless maybe those projects involve bike trickshaws...)

School Visits in Malaysia

 I've officially made two school visits while in Malaysia.

 Both were at my son's school; once with 3-to-4-year-olds and once with 5-to-six-year-olds.

 SO MUCH FUN!

 I love, love, love working with kids 

(In a parallel universe somewhere I'm probably an art teacher).

I've held back on doing school visits back home because I'm an unpublished illustrator. But now that I think about this, why does that have to stop me? Artists do school visits. I've been a professional artist for a long time.

 So this has got me thinking and dreaming. I hope I get the chance to make paper with many more classes in the future.

 These pictures are of the board about my visit that the older kids put up for Family Day (didn't want to put the actual close-up pictures without permissions; I figured the board is far enough away for blog picture purposes). Below is the beautiful thank you card they made me.

Kite Maker or Collage Artist?

Last week my family took a short trip north to an area of Malaysia called Kelantan.

Many artists around one of the main cities of Kelantan, Kota Bharu, are especially known for practicing several traditional Malaysian handicrafts. The painting above and detail of it below, done by a Malaysian artist named Yusoff Abdullah, hung in the airport at Kota Bharu. The painting depicts many of the local handicraft traditions*.

One of my favorites of these traditions is known as Wau, or kite making.

Kite makers use large wooden frames that they bend out of thin sticks:

And the patterns on most traditional kites are intricately cut out of colorful papers and layered over one another.

Here's an artist at work cutting a pattern using an exacto blade on a folded sheet of foil.

I watched him use a blade sharpener. It made me pause because most paper artists I know back home throw out their blades rather than sharpening them. (I personally most often use a scissors, FYI).

Here's a close detail to give you an idea of the layers of paper. Every color below is a different colored paper, glued on top of one another.

Inspiring!

* The signature here is from the painting at the top of this post. I mentioned that the artist's name was Yusoff Abdullah, a Malaysian artist who I could find little information on, which is why the uncertainty and the lack of links. Please accept my sincere apologies if I've given credit wrong! Also, please correct me, if someone out there knows better, I'd prefer to properly give credit and links if they exist.

The Crafty Lady vs. Ms. Snobby

One of my many Crafty Cousins (I’m talking real cousins here, I come from a very crafty family) recently put a blog post up wondering if she could call herself an artist. She likes making stuff (mighty fun stuff, I might add) and yet she was wondering if what she made was original enough to call Art. She asked how other people who make stuff come to call themselves artists or their work art. I like how vulnerable and real her post was. She got me to thinking in one of those raw, sincere ways that you’d share with your best friend, but might hesitate to share with your rough and tumble inner critic.

I was thinking, specifically, about this famous art critic person I heard speak in Chicago when I lived there, let’s refer to her as Ms. Snobby. Ms. Snobby claimed there only a few dozen true artists in the world at any given time in history and right now they were all living and working in New York City – because that is the “salon” of the current times.

I remember the amused, playful thoughts I had during this woman’s lecture. My first thought was, dude, this woman is full of herself! And not only has she discredited her own city and most of her country’s artists, she’s discredited entire other cultures and countries and traditions. What a freaking’ joke! Who died and made her the matriarch (although she sounded patronizing, not matronizing) of ALL ART OF OUR TIMES.

The feelings I had then could be compared with the feelings I have now when I hear a wing-nut politico speak wing-nuttery. I felt kind of aghast but at the same time amused at the sheer ridiculousness.

Anyway, when I left the lecture, I realized most others did not take the lecture the same way I took it. I remember fellow art student friends looking rather bummed out. They were commiserating in frustration, expressing gloom and doom. Like it was impossible to be an artist. Nothing they could do mattered.

This is my apron.

My eye-brows knitted. I couldn’t believe what a different take-away I was getting from Ms. Snobby. I felt light-hearted almost. She had somehow in one hour’s time given me complete permission to write off super high-brow snobbery forever. Because, really? Who made her the judge? She could go ahead and have fun with her obviously and impossibly narrow view over in her stuffy academic office while I left her stuffy lecture to check out an interesting drawing show at the coffee house down the street, not giving a hoot whether she thought those drawings were REAL ART or not. She could be the expert dressed in black, while I continued to be the “non-artist” enjoying other “non-artist’s work” all the while with my apron soaked in color.

And I guess that moment was somehow a switching point for me. I knew then that I was an artist, and it didn’t matter what any Ms. Snobby thought. It’s not that rejection doesn’t suck. Believe me (if you don't already know it yourself), rejection sucks. But grand sweeping rejection of entire swaths of artists and their work is flat out ridiculous. And from that day on I knew that no matter what rejection came my way, it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m an artist.

Why?

The floor of my studio the day I wrote this post.

Because,

Artists make art.

It's as simple as that.

And there's no way I'd ever stop making art.

Critics can try to make some kind of exclusive club for what’s art or not art or what’s good art or bad art while the rest of us can go on “loving what the soft animal of our body loves”  (to quote Mary Oliver in an out of context sort of way).

“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” ~ Vincent Van Gogh.

Or, as I suggested to my cousin, if one really can’t handle the baggage that comes along with the word, "Artist," just don’t worry about the label and go on making stuff. Make what you feel like making. If you must give yourself a label, consider the label “CRAFTER,” or, my personal favorite, “CRAFTY LADY.” Because crafters craft. And that even includes doilies. Which is awesome.

Truth be told, even though I do consider myself an artist, I have a shirt that says “CRAFTY LADY,” and I’d rather wear it than one that said artist, any day of the week.

But either way, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m someone who makes stuff and attempts to bring a bit more color and heart into the world by doing so. No matter what any Ms. Snobby calls me.

Paper made from Elephant Dung

Did you know paper can be made from elephant dung?

 Indeed it can. 

I learned all about it earlier this month at the Pinnawala Elephant Dung Paper Products center in Sri Lanka.

 Elephants apparently have very inefficient digestive systems. 

 They eat tons of plant material (literally), but much of it goes straight through them. That is, after being chewed and pulverized in their stomachs (essentially beaten like one beats paper in a paper beater or blender). So paper-makers gather elephant dung, boil out the "impurities,"rinse the fibers, 

 beat the fibers (as I mentioned, the elephant got this process started in its stomach) using traditional paper-making beater machines, 

dye the fibers, 

 and strain them through moulds just like I do with my handmade paper.

 The paper-makers let the paper dry on the mould and then, depending on the desired texture, either leave the paper as is (rough) or ring it through a paper press.

 Then craftswomen and men make the paper into all sorts of handmade goodies: journals, stationary, picture frames, etc.

Who knew that *waste* could be so useful, interesting and lead to such crafty goodness?

So there's a *fresh* perspective on recycling for you.

(Note: did I really just write that and leave it for the world to see?)

Back to cleaner subjects next post.

Going on a Whale Watch

I have a couple of fun posts about our trip to Sri Lanka coming up. Thought I'd try something different for this one. Enjoy!

Kjersten (as Mommy) and her son Oscar (age 3) present:

A story we made about whale watching in Sri Lanka! 

Written mostly by Oscar after a song Mommy was making up on the boat.
Please note that some illustrations have been replaced with pictures for the purposes of this blog.
Also, for those who aren't in the know -- this is DEFINITELY not the sort of thing you want to submit to publishers. But, all the same, I do recommend trying this at home.

(kinda sometimes sung to the tune of this song, but not perfectly so by a long stretch):

We saw the Indian Ocean and it was more rough than it should be! 

[don't try too hard to fit that into the melody, I'm telling you it won't work no matter how hard you try, but I digress]

We saw the sea.

Until...

[here's where we kinda loose the song for awhile]

Footnote for those interested: Blue Whales are the big attraction off the coast of Sri Lanka. But we didn't see a Blue Whale (even though they are usually spotted nearly daily at this time of year). We saw a Bryde's whale. Maybe not as big as a Blue Whale, but pretty thrilling anyway. Maybe only slightly more thrilling than your kid telling you he wants to make a story about the experience later that afternoon.