Thanks for reading Putting Your Body on the Line
Before I begin today’s post, I want to say thank you to everyone who read and forwarded my last post - Putting Your Body – and Life – on the Line. Over 300 people have clicked on the link to the video in just a few days – I don’t know if they’ve watched the entire 10 minutes, but they’ve at least looked. And maybe a few donations will have trickled in to the Fannie Lou Hamer Statue Fund. I know it’s a tough time to ask for money, especially when we’ve all just donated to Haitian relief. I sent a donation to Doctors without Borders, an organization that is already established in Haiti and certainly critically needed right now. But I think we can all squeeze out just a little bit more, especially with the stark reminder Haiti has given us of just how lucky we are. Tomorrow morning Ali and Allie, the two seventh-graders who made the video (they are now in tenth grade) will be showing it at the Martin Luther King Community Breakfast and later at the youth luncheon. I’m really proud of them. Especially in this photo, which was on the last post:
Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans with Ali and Allie
They are centered in this photo taken in Mississippi at the Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans Conference.
Pants on the Ground
One more item before today’s post. Did everyone watch Pants on the Ground? The American Idol audition of 62-year-old “General” Larry Platt who wrote this little ditty because he was tired of seeing kids with their pants hanging around their knees? It turns out he’s a civil rights veteran who marched with Martin Luther King and others! I love this guy. We’re all going to be singing Pants on the Ground, and there are some terrific remixes out there already.
Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water
We finally made it to today’s post! Still working with the Creative Every Day theme of Body, I extended the theme a bit to bodies of water. Leah said we could interpret it broadly! I’m fascinated with water – the patterns in water, colors, and I’ve been wanting to do a collage using water. One thing led to another, and I came up with this.
I painted the background on canvas using acrylic paints. The rectangles and squares are from photos taken in Mazatlan, Pismo Beach, Cambria (both in California) and a fountain at Disneyland. Most of the paper is glossy but some, such as the long strip on the bottom, is Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper (I do all my printing myself). I got all that arranged to my satisfaction – after several days of looking, walking away, changing something, etc. But I needed a focus and grabbed that Japanese Print book we were discarding. I have a feeling that a whole series of collages is going to come out of this book. So I found the perfect images in color and shape, and they lent such grace to the collage. So we have Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water.
I am particularly fond of this because it reminds me of some of the quilts my mother has made. Hers from cloth, mine from water (figuratively). It’s very poignant to think of my 86-year-old mom and her quilts as she still goes out to the studio and moves around blocks of cloth, but her memory isn’t there anymore and she can’t sew or quilt. None of us are sure, but I don’t think she realizes that she doesn’t actually quilt as she’s moving around cloth and planning what to do next. So in the best scenario, she’s still getting pleasure from it. For the rest of us, it’s quite poignant.
