Collage, 5 1/2″ x 7″
5×7, completed yesterday
Conté, 8×11
I don’t think this drawing is finished. It might have been more finished when I had drawn only the dog and an outline of a door. But if so, I can draw some like it again. I’m going to spend some time with it first.
This is the dog Denise Levertov wrote about that helped me so much a few years ago: grief, wanting to be acknowledged and not shut out in the cold. So I suppose this drawing comes earlier than that one, in which the dog was more at home. But grief doesn’t just move forward in time. Last week my mind’s eye, or maybe my heart’s eye, spotted a forlorn dog nosing and scratching at the door, so here he (?) is.
(c) 2021 Amy Zucker Morgenstern
We don’t necessarily have an Advent calendar each year, but my wife spotted a really cute one and ordered it. Unfortunately, it was coming from Japan or someplace, and arrived December 15. Laughing, she showed it to us and suggested it was a bit late for a countdown to Christmas. However, someone on the ever-useful interwebs had pointed out that if one bought an Advent calendar in the post-Christmas sales and opened the first window on 12/27, the last window would open on Inauguration Eve.
So we have been faithfully opening our Totoro-a-day calendar and displaying them as they emerge. I love the dust critters. The pumpkin happened to be around; no deeper significance is intended of an orange resident that is way past its time to GO.
One window left.
We have been talking about creating a room like this almost since we bought this house, in 2011. We live in a row house and the garage runs all the way from the front to the back. Joy dreamed it up, imagining turning the back section of that unnecessarily deep garage into a small space for laundry and art. During our sabbatical time in 2016, we said we’d get right on the project when we got back. But these kinds of things take a lot of work, and other priorities intruded. This year, Joy found a contractor, drew the plans, stood in a lot of lines at City Hall to get the permits, and shepherded the whole process, and now we have a dedicated space that we have modestly dubbed “the art room,” as “studio” seems a bit highfalutin.
I don’t have a “before” picture, but here is how things looked very early on:
Out of sight to the left, between the black file cabinet and the ladder leaning against the back wall, is the wall to our office. That is now the doorway into the art room. Let me escort you:
An art room needs a sink, and this is our laundry room too. We held onto these cabinets for six years after getting new ones for the kitchen, with the ultimate plan of using them here. I’m really glad we did. They would have just gone into the landfill, and now they are storage for lots of the stuff that got booted from the garage, like our three fondue sets (please don’t judge–we didn’t pay for any of them) and grocery overflow. The glass door goes to the back yard, and it and the long transom window above it allow in lots of light. There’s even a built-in ironing board across from the washer and dryer, another original fixture from the kitchen that has been waiting for its moment.
Thank you for coming on my tour! The office, freed of the treadmill, is now home to a trundle bed that opens up to king size, so that for the first time, we have a place for people to stay besides the living room. Now if we could only have guests come visit . . . ! Let’s hope 2021 brings them, and it begins in six hours.
Until I sorted all the art supplies last week, I had forgotten that I made a whole lot of painted papers ten years ago. Different textures and colors, using watercolors on tracing paper: a trove of treasure for someone on a collage kick.
untitled abstract, 6″ x 6″
The room is pretty much finished, the art supplies are sorted though still awaiting their shelves, and I sat down to make something from those boxes of “collage materials,” a.k.a. “interesting bits of paper that we don’t want to throw away, so let’s call them art supplies.” It’s not a lie, but it’s just this side of hoarding. Unless, of course, you actually make collages out of them.
I’m grateful to my colleague Barbara for posting her beautiful collages and connecting me to a collage artists’ group online, and to my friend Jess, who also posts her collages frequently. They all inspire me.
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