For anyone just tuning in, Ive been participating in something that Leah Pilkin Kolidas of Massachusetts has been doing for seven years. It’s called Art Every Day Month, and it’s a challenge to produce art in some form every day for the month of November. I jumped in head first, determined to find a way to accomplish this. It’s challenging but rewarding to become more mindful about art, which really means becoming more mindful about the world every day and our place in it. It’s challenging to look at a pile of junk and find the treasure, like this metal sunflower.
It’s not possible, of course, to produce a really good piece of art every day, but it is possible to produce something good, and something that can be built on in the future. After all, great works start with ideas and sketches and preliminary drawings, etc. And then many, many disciplines can be viewed as art. Cooking can be artful, decorating, taking a walk and observing details of the environs and writing an essay or a haikiu.
In my case, I managed a couple of posts with colleges and went to Colorado to visit my daughter. So armed with nothing but my camera and my imagination, I am creating art for a week out of photos. We took a drive to Aspen today, and I’m looking at details and patterns.
Leaving Paonia, there was a beautiful sky. The patterns of the clouds are amazing – the way they divide themselves into little puffs. I could watch the sky here all day.
Where we were heading, to Aspen, the trees have already lost their leaves, but Paonia, at about 6,000 feet, still has some beautiful color. The reflection in the water forms a pattern.
We stopped in Redstone for the kids to play in the park. One of them is at the end of this bridge. I love to look at shadows and the patterns they form. In this case, it’s easy to tell what direction the sun is coming from. The light and dark are like mirror images.
Now we’re higher, and I’m looking at the pattern of the trees and branches as they rise above the Raggeds (the mountain range). The trees have changed – no leaves. The sky has changed also.
Now we’re in Aspen, with a blue sky. The pattern I like here is the roof – it’s made of snowboards. That’s creative for sure. And I’m going to be able to use those in collage. In most of my collages, I use my own images as the background, and my own images as the collage material. You can see those here. I also use vintage fruit and crate labels as collage materials, which you’ll see in the first image of the Archangel Michael. In one of my AEDM posts I branched out into using old sheet music.
Here’s some creative furniture made of skis, which is certainly appropriate to Aspen.
I looked up at a ski slope into the sun, and saw this tangle of leaves and branches.
These beautiful leaves are wonderful details that inspire me. Tomorrow it’ll be a challenge to think of a photo essay subject, but I’ll manage.
Finally, a single leaf was caught up in another bush.
