I have been doing Noom for 8 weeks and decided to take up a 30 day challenge from my coach. I am going to art journal.
Day one
I started off with a home made journal. Previously I covered the pages in white acrylic and added patterned papers from my stash.
Flipping through a magazine an advert for a herbal supplement that offers to balance your life, jumped out at me. The picture had a very slim girl doing a tree pose.
I have been drawing semi blind contour portraits of my self recently and I thought I might use these as a motif for the challenge.
I carefully cut out the girl and replaced her head with my portrait- it feels like she is wearing a mask of me. A slim girl hiding behind a Tess mask….I talk to Jon about the concept he says it’s not Tess wearing a slim girl mask – she could be wanting to appear as if she is me – a mark of fandom or honour – something in me for her to aspire to. I like this , I had been thinking it might be something fake, I am not a slim girl , I never had those model like proportions.
I stenciled a white mandala on to my page and added the girl in the mask. Then the title ‘finding balance’ . I can never hold the tree pose for long so I searched for lots more arms, this could represent lots of figures behind the girl dancing, trying to balance or the Hindi goddess Durga, though my figure doesn’t have any weapons ……. well not any that you can see.
I flipped through another magazine looking for more inspiration and found a picture of cherry blossom. This time in lock down has been punctuated by walks around a near deserted Edinburgh New Town and the water of Leith. The fruit trees have been heavy with blossom. This anchors the page in time for me. I decided not to cut out the flowers but to draw my own and place them in a circle around the girl. Echoing the mandala , circles of life. Etc. Last year at this time I was in Sheffield attending the funeral of my cousin, this year it was my aunt.
The page needed anchoring so I added some more text at th bottom, create, expand, grow. Normally I like a page when it’s finished. There is something unsettling me about this one. In my gut I really don’t like that mask.
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