Month: April 2018

Winter has been long this year.  We’ve had it easy, no big blizzards or anything, but the arrival of Spring has been in slo-mo.  I keep thinking a vacation would be nice, but everyone else in the continental US seems to be having worse weather than here, so I’ve decided what I’m really looking for is a change of scene. There are a few tenets to the benefits of travel that get iterated often, precisely because they are so true.  One is that when you go to new places, you get to explore a new you.  Wherever you go, there you are, but who you are can depend a lot on your environs.

The second is that it summons new creativity, because you see new places and meet new people and explore new things.  It’s impossible to not be inspired by all that novelty.

But there’s another great benefit, if not to travel exactly, then to placing yourself in different scenes.  And that’s to your eyesight.  I’ve become uncomfortably aware lately how routine my focus fields have become.  Entirely too much of my sight-time is devoted to viewing about 18 inches in front of me, staring into a computer screen.  I suspect that’s true for a lot of people.  The added challenge of this is that the concentrated glow of the LED screen reinforces the 2-dimensional nature of what I’m looking at, and does a lot to negate any artistic enjoyment out of what I’m seeing.

Also true for many people, is routinely seeing to about 3 cars length in front of you, while moving quickly.  That’s a detrimental vision habit too, artistically speaking, as it forces you to take only a surface read of what you’re seeing.  Swapping keen observation for safety is fine while driving, but when the habit carries into the rest of your day, you lose a lot of detail potential.

Even a regular walking route can build vision habits that lose more that you gain.  In my many years of walking to the el or bus stop to get anywhere when I lived in the city, it was so easy to zone out on those walks, especially if I was tired, that I often based what I saw on the assumption of what I should see, rather than what was there.  Many times I would pass a shop front and suddenly realize a new business was there, only to wonder when the heck did that happen?  Where was I, in the dozens of times I passed by and didn’t see a change?

I’m bringing some sight-changes into my life.  Here’s a simple exercise I did, from the comfort of my favorite recliner!  The living room wall of my apartment is all glass, with a giant patio door.  I look out all of the time to this lovely treeline.  But my habit is to flatten it into a single view, rather than really look into the whole depth of that space.  So I decided to use the clear acetate left over from my hanging orb project. I trimmed it into about 3″ squares, and then took the time to explore different depth fields of this patio view I am so accustomed to.  I made simple sketches with Sharpies on each acetate square, then layered them to complete the scene.

I want to continue this method as a style of sketchbook, because the materials travel well and the sketching I do is not complicated – I am not looking to create a photo-realistic final image.  The main thing, is my eyes feel better when I consciously explore these depths of field.  It is a refreshing way to take a journey, without having to travel far.

Here are my daily visitors, who merited a layer of my sketch.

“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. ” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

This famous quote from Emerson has been a favorite since I first encountered it.  There is no mistake in seeing the wordplay between ‘eye’ and “I.”  With a few phrases, he launches us from the point of undifferentiated conscious awareness (the first circle, that which is capable of seeing, the I AM) into a tangible space dimension where the only limit is the perception of the next circle to be seen (the second circle, one horizon that leads to another and answers “Who am I?”) We all end up in this same orb, navigating our place in it, balancing the eye of perception with the identities of the world created in it.

This Interlude began with the simple question “What do I want to see more of in my world?”  After considering a long list of predictable divine auspices, global graces and social improvements,  I found one I knew I could achieve in a day.  I am wanting to see more hanging orbs in my environs.  (A glib segue, perhaps.  But in the nature of this universe, one circle leads to another.)  A friend made me two origami orbs that I have hanging from my ceiling, and I have wanted to expand that universe.  So I perused the internet for paper orb tutorials and discovered this beautiful site and project.  It is absolutely perfect for the scrapbooking paper I have wanted to use, and in a nod to Emerson’s Transparent Eye, I decided to try this project with clear plastic and make something like a non-glass, lighter-weight hanging terrarium.  I found the perfect weight of plastic craft sheet at Hobby Lobby, in with the racks of watercolor papers.  Also, I printed the project template at home, then went to the library and enlarged it at 4 different settings so we could make different sizes of orbs.

Our resources – we didn’t get around to using the craft or watercolor paper this time.  Be sure to have both matte and gloss tape unhand to suit your materials.

Fran is back!  She wholeheartedly accepted the invite to paper craft, so we got to work.  Our orbs turned out impeccably, despite a false start.  If you reference the project link above, you’ll see in the template that you start by cutting a strip of paper (or plastic), and then you need to score/emboss four arcs onto it.  When we cut our template strips, we cut out the arcs so tracing the score pattern would be easy.  However, when Fran realized she’d cut out the arcs as well as the paper strips, I suddenly looked at what I was doing only to discover that I was in the middle of doing the same thing on my plastic strips.  So we began again, with the mantra “OM PADME ONLY CUT OUT STRIPS HOM.”

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Our misstep above, from tracing the whole template onto our materials.  Also, I used a thin Sharpie to trace onto my plastic, but it does not wipe off.  I was careful to trim those dark lines when I cut my strips, and I also did not draw the arced areas onto the plastic on my second attempt.

Unfortunately, most of my photos from this turned out blurry, but this one sums up our success fairly well.  Fran said the scrapbooking paper was just the right weight for this project.  I enjoyed using the plastic as well, although there was one more misstep involved.  I got my three strips of plastic looped and interlaced, only to realize there was no good access point for putting something into the middle space of the orb.  In making the second clear orb, I found you need to put your inner items in when just two of the loops are laced, then you carefully add the third strip.  I had to use tweezers through a narrow gap between sections to tweak things before I compressed the scored sections to complete the orb shape.  More practice will definitely benefit the quality of the inner scene I create in the orb.

And, I tried the wire mesh – to no success.  It was too fluid and kept pulling out of shape when I needed to shift it around.  If I ever encounter a better-suited mesh, I will try again.

When the weather gets nicer, I plan to spray paint my first clear orb a metallic finish.