carol j watson

Asked what I’d like for Mother’s Day, I responded, “Let’s make garden gnomes!”

So that’s what we did. Down we sat, clay and tools in hand, in a sunny yellow kitchen overlooking our beloved garden. Armed with imagination, a few handy hand-building techniques, and a sense of humor, we all managed to create a gnome worthy of a garden.

It was a great day of art, indeed.

My husband, Arden, and I had an opportunity to attend a recent retreat for board members and volunteers of a wonderful and local non-profit organization called Georgetown Art Works. Our goals were simple: Clarify our vision as an organization, write (or at the very least agree upon the basics of) a mission statement, work on our 2009 calendar, and designate specific responsibilities and opportunities for each of us in attendance. We had an incredible facilitator, a dedicated board president, plenty of food, great ideas, and most importantly, a creative outlet. We made incredible progress.

The creative outlet, which was strictly optional, was to design a chair made from various materials: pipe cleaners, wire, beads, and imagination. As we listened, ate, talked, prioritized, laughed, and became better acquainted with one another, we also created a chair representative of us and our task at hand of “chairing” some event or task.

By the end of the retreat, several completed chairs were passed around for oohs and ahhhs…Oh, how I wished I had brought my camera! Each chair was indeed unique, representative of its creator, and just spilling over with artistic genius! The funniest, and certainly most endearing, moment was when my husband and I placed our chairs side by side. If you know us, you’ll love this picture (I snapped this picture at home):

While mine was, well, what you might expect from me, Arden’s was delightfully sturdy, stable, well-made…also what you would expect from him. I love the contrast the two chairs created, but it wasn’t until we showed the chairs to our son, Carter, when he commented on their scale. The way he put it was something like this, ” Whoever can fit into one chair can also fit into the other, isn’t that cool?” Pretty astute for a 13 year old, I think. What he hit upon is that our chairs shared the same scale. And in that moment I realized that our chairs were a perfect snapshot of our life together, me and Arden. Some similarities, some differences…well, maybe a lot of differences to those who only look at the outside, but we live our lives in scale with one another.

Perhaps that accounts for the harmony we so often experience in our household, even in these tumultuous times.

At any rate, this art activity ran deep and wide for me…I learned a lot that day of the retreat, but even more about myself, my love, and our life together later on.

Art is like that. It mirrors your reality, makes things clearer, gives voice to your life and times.

Art is worth doing.

Now I have added some color to the shrines. I used ink on top of the gesso, for a nice layered and transparent look. I blended colors that I liked, and even had quite a bit of fun using brown. It rounds colors out nicely. Still not sure of their content, I use “assembly line” time for quiet contemplation. It is still too early for me to tell what each of these little cabinets will become.

So far, I’ve colored six shrines (not all are pictured above).

Next, collage. I decided not to use ink on the inside, because (1) I have a limited supply, and (2) I have an abundant supply of paper to use instead. Anyway, I love collage, and I think it makes the inside of each shrine a bit more special and secret and important. As I worked, I allowed only color to drive me. No hidden messages, no theme yet for any of the shrines. I am toying with the idea of leaving them be, and making them available for people who wish to further customize them to their own ideas, people, messages, or causes.

The purple one remains empty at this time. It is my favorite one so far, and I just haven’t worked up the creative juice for it yet.

The brown-yellow one surprised me, because when I was finished looking with it, and actually looked at it as a piece, not a project in process, there was something of a message. The words bite, real estate, and crime all appear in text that I thought I was randomly adhering with varnish. Subliminal, for sure! Definitely not intended, though.

My papers that I use come from a variety of sources

• hand painted rice paper (so nice and thin), with watercolor, ink, and oil pastel
• commercially available crafting or scrapbook papers
• spanish language newspapers
• old novel pages
• old encyclopedia pages
• tags
• receipts

I just save cool stuff and then tear it up to use in my mixed media and collage pieces. I also use the papers to customize bar soap boxes to hold my Etsy items that sell when I mail them out. Very customized packing!

Here’s where I am now:

Next for me is to figure out the path of the purple shrine…

I am beginning my work on personal shrines. I’ve been sketching out ideas for design, but haven’t given much though to content yet…a mere list in my sketchbook at best. I want these prefab balsa cabinets to really take on a life of their own through the various media I plan to use, but I also want them to evoke emotion, because, after all, they ARE shrines. I see shrines as a venue for honoring an idea, a memory, or special time in one’s life.

Previous shrines I’ve made have been from matchboxes (small and large), as well as from objects such as Laughing Cow containers or soap boxes. The soap boxes smell good.

Humor, passion, art, and strength will feature prominently in these personal shrines. I am tempted to create one or two to honor the memory of my father, who passed away in 2007 from brain cancer, or commemorate the life of my grandmother, still living a shadow life with Alzheimer’s. I’ve used my art a lot in the last two years to work through my grief, so I am not sure that I need to address them again with these particular shrines. But as always, we’ll see…

I plan to use ink, collage, and personal drawings heavily. I also have some tiny adornments that might work, as well as some copies of old photographs. I’ll post updated pictures as I have them. For now, here’s what I have so far, just a little gesso. Enjoy!