The story of (a) creation.

The weather outside is frightful, the fire inside is delightful, let it snow, let is snow, let it snow...okay, so I can't carry a tune in a bucket, but it doesn't matter because I'm feeling too good to care. I woke up today feeling very much like the Karen that I am, ya know, the self you hold in your heart of hearts, the self that you like the best as opposed to my bitch self that enjoys a pigfoot and a bottle a beer and would prefer to cuss ya than say hello (yes, I do have those days and if you say you don't, then you're missing out ;)). 

Its been a tremendous week of blessings and conversations and creating.  I woke up with additional ideas for the quilt in progress whose working title is A Black Mother's Prayer.  The title will change if the new ideas for the piece fly.  This work means a great deal to me as I'm creating it from an emotional space that is typically intimate and personal and yet needs to open in order to convey my intent to connect with others if it will be exhibited.  So there is this questioning I have with myself around balancing the cryptic (personal) and the blatant (connection with others) when looking at what is happening with it.  I like to keep my artist statements succint and let the quilt carry the message which is as an African American woman I must walk in faith, literally and figuratively, to move through life.

To elaborate a little bit more on the space I'm in with this quilt can be described from a print by Brian Andreas called Bittersweet and the story on it reads "She said she usually cried at least once each day not because she was sad, but because the world was so beautiful and life was so short".  Another quote from Wynton Marsalis also comes to mind, "there is no price to pay for life except to live it. and if somebody wants to make you pay a price for how you live, fuck 'em. and with the blue-edged blade of love, him cut sharp both ways. sweet and bitter. and when it cuts you to the bone. and you can still make love as if the bite of that razor is what opened your heart for the the first time and set your blood on fire and your soul free...then you gon' find jazz in the bittersweet blues of life".

Twice this morning that the word bittersweet has popped up while I sat looking at this quilt contemplating the new ideas.  I pay attention to things like this when I'm working because I want to increase my self-awareness around the process. 

When I sat down to write this post, it was not this post that I was going to write. I was going to share my drawings from the exercises from Color and Compostion.  I'll make another entry later on.