Day 52: Ha ha, I created a round cardboard, um, well... paper weight?  Ever since I stopped throwing away all the various boxes I acquire through purchasing cereal, crackers, pizza and such, my collection of them has been building up and bursting out of bags in my laundry room.  I wanted to create something that would use up quite a few of these.  I thought about those plates and bowls made out of strips of magazine paper, and tried something similar with strips of cardboard.  It took much longer than I thought (suprising how often that happens) and so all I ended up with was what I had intended to be the base of something larger, like a vase or bowl.  It will happen, I'm sure, and its gonna be awesome when it does.

Day 53:  I created the central part of this piece of art a few years ago.  I used pieces of cardboard to create a person, put pieces of a broken mirror coming out of its chest, and used scraps of lace to add texture to the background.  The plant growing out of the person signifies that growth and beauty can come from experiences where we feel hurt or broken hearted.  I hadn't known when I created my egg carton flowers, where they would find a home, but wandering around my house trying to decide what do create today, I made the connection between this earlier work and my flowers.  The plant in the painting was clearing lacking its blooms.  I also added leaves to the flowers, by smashing the round aluminum cups that tealights come in (which I had been holding onto for four years!)  Then I added pieces of some art that I did also about four years ago.  Maybe I went too far.  I took a multimedia art class a few years ago, and the teacher always said, "less is more," and she would come up to your art in progress and start pulling things off it.  However, in another art class I took, the teacher encouraged us to follow our urges through and not let the art critic in our heads tell us what is right or wrong, and that our art then becomes more personal and revealing.  I tend to take the second approach, and let there be more of a raw expression, rather than something well thought out.  One thing I find that happens in this approach is that my art makes me feel uncomfortable sometimes.  I often ask myself, "where the heck did I get that from?"  Like my question, "what are wings?"  I don't know where that came from.  I do know that the outcomes of my creative expression often cause me to feel as if I'm weird or different.  I'm okay with that, but often people relate to the things I make more often than I expect. 

Day 54: I created a frame for the picture of Diane that her husband Marco printed out for her memorial.  On the back side were the words to one of her songs, "Wild Honey."  The first time I heard this song several years ago, the lyrics blew me away, and they still do (now they also make me cry).  I repainted a frame from a thrift store and added decorations that I cut from an aluminum can (thanks to my hot glue gun).  One of the things I have loved about doing this yearly project is that doing it every day causes it to merge with what ever is going on in my life on a day to day basis.  It has been a good outlet for all the love and joy and sadness caused by losing my dear friend.  Life goes on no matter what happens, and each day is a step forward, and each project is a reflection of the adventure of life and love.

Someday your chariot of air
Will vanish
From this world of wine and bone
And then what remains of you
Is pure and genuine
As wild honey

To penetrate pure light
Penetrate pure light
You gotta suffer some

And then what remains of you
Is pure and genuine
As wild honey