Tibetan Temple #2

From The Once and Future King by TH White:

“It is God who keeps the price secret, Uther. Not I.”

“God? God? What god? I have heard you speak of so many gods. If you mean Mithras...”

Says Merlin, “Mithras. Apollo. Arthur. Christ. Call him what you will. What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die. I only know that God is the source of all the light which has lit the world and that his purpose runs through the world and passes each one of us like a great river and we cannot check or turn it but can only drink from it while living and commit our bodies to it when we die.”

God is in the details. Of everything. And the Light.

The Shrines to the Divine project began in early 2018. I have cataloged here in the blog the process of the first little tea house and the final Japanese Shrine, the Zendo, both built in 2018.

Along the way of my life, I have had the privilege to study with, cook for and generally be around some lovely teachers, in the name of art, or food, or spiritual advice. I have sat at the feet of gurus, pranced around the fire as a deer with a Huichol shaman on Mt. Shasta, meditated on Paramahansa Yogananda's houseboat with Steven Seagal, studied with and fed Deepak Chopra and myriad other pop culture stars, looked at Tibetan Buddhism through the eyes of the Thangka painting monk, and cooked for large groups at a retreat center while spending my nights in a 400 square foot tipi. Alison Stillwell Cameron lived next door to my mother and sparked my interest in Chinese Sumi painting, my bookbinding instructors shared Japanese print making, Shibori fabric design, marbled papers and so much more.

I feel closest to the source of all the light when I am being creative.

The top image above floated across my Facebook timeline, posted by a friend. It is an art deco painting by Vittorio Zecchin who died in 1947. Look him up. He blows my mind. The Dominican nuns never showed us his paintings in Art Appreciation class.

When I saw this painting, not just the goddesses themselves but the intensity of the colors hit me like a whack in the chest. The moment pushed me into the long talked about Tibetan temple, because I had to get involved with those colors.

As a dedicated DIY nut job, I set out to make some fabric for the backdrop to the buddha's throne. Although I used red and gold on black in my first draft of the fabric pattern, the colors of the shrine with mimic those above in Zecchin's: orange and purple and violet ...with some red.

I took a photo of the finished 12 x 12 canvas and shrunk the design to the size of a postage stamp, repeated the pattern to fill an 8.5x11 sheet of paper-backed silk for printing, and voila!












A tiny silk curtain of my own design.

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Making Stuff - Japanese Teahouse #4

 Wow! I forgot how wonderful and fun it is to have little Xacto saws and a tiny miter box to use on Basswood and Balsa. Thanks to David for hunting them down. Now the tiny architecture and carpentry can move up a notch.

After creating the doors I made little troughs in which they could slide and glued them to the corner posts. The fabric that started this whole project, the quilters' cotton pieces with excellent tiny Japanese designs, was cut to make a curtain for the back room. All this trouble and precision just to hang that little curtain.

I made a little rod out of a skewer, punched holes in the curtain top, slid it all together and glued the rod to two pieces of trim wood.

 Next I'll be working on the roof.

Each part of the structure has to be measured and cut along the way. It's too late now, but I should have stained the "wood," but I would be sure to screw up the shoji screens if I did it now. For my next teahouse, I might choose all the wood materials and stain them red before I begin.

Ha ha ha. Red. Of course!

 All of this is reminiscent of the Gingerbread Farm I built in 2011, according to no scale at all - just another one of those projects that started out as an idea and went berserk!

Here it is below in progress. Note the toasted and dyed green coconut for the lawn, the pile of marzipan pumpkins, the pretzel chicken house, pretzel wood pile. Pretty proud of those two little marzipan doggies and the flock of chicks, too. The red door  on the main house is marzipan, too.

um

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Making Stuff - Japanese Tea House, Part 3

 I made these shoji screen doors entirely out of coffee stir sticks which cut easily with scissors. Instead of rice paper I covered the doors in muslin fabric.

Today I received a tiny Xacto miter box in the mail, as if by magic (thank you, David). While I await the tiny Xacto saw, expected on my doorstep Monday evening, I ponder and compare this experience to building Faerie Junction with my pals last spring.

First of all, my pals aren't here.

Secondly, our faerie scale was, "Whatever - just tiny. It's faeries."

Here, the measurements are a bit more precise. I want those corners perfect! I want those shoji screens to slide! Before I make my next cut (abashedly I admit to currently cutting with scissors and Xacto knives) I will have that little saw in my hand.

Next, I'll be making the sliders and  the roof. I want to put a tiny ceramic pot over a tea light for essentials oils. We'll see if the concept works. Stay tuned.

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Making Stuff - A Miniature Japanese Teahouse, or two...

Every now and then I get a creative bee in my bonnet. It buzzes around in my hair telling me it's time to make something. Really, to build something. I'm always making something (knitting, cards, dinner) but this urge to build is different. It's a feeling in the solar plexis that will not relax until I see the buzzing idea through, or firmly make the decision not to do the project at all.

These Japanese Teahouses have been in my hair now for months, ever since I was given a few remnants of Japanese cotton with tiny designs.

I instantly saw teeny little curtains and a miniscule zafu pillow in a teahouse. From that moment, every time I saw the fabrics, they pulled me into their colors, bring me down into that tiny world, reminding me of Faerie Junction, that wonderful time and space my friends Lea and Jois and I spent in our collective minds while building the faerie village for Hanley Farm in April 2017.

A few days ago, those tiny fabrics practically yelled at me, like, "Dude! Let's do this!"

So I surrendered. I have assembled all the parts for several teahouses (of course - you thought I might just build ONE?). The first will actually be a lantern, with three simple sides and an opening for a tea light. Then, as I advance in my building skills, I'll attempt a  teahouse with an actual interior. If it works out, it will be an essential oil burner, with a tiny ceramic "caldron" in the middle.

Along the right side here are the various parts, in order:

-the fabric and a susi roller I thought might work as a tatami mat
-crafts sticks in the process of being trimmed with scissors
-a 1/24 scale graph
-a little store-bought platform
-skewers, tiny stones wrapped in wire and an umbrella
-the creation of the first platform
-cut craft stick tips (they curled up in the cutting -
they might make good roof shingles)
-and the laid out platform waiting to be glued.

This is all very well and good, but anyone who has followed this blog will ask, "What? I thought you put all your three dimensional projects away in honor of knitting and Studio in a Basket!" So, right. This post is to say, "I surrender."

It's danged uncomfortable to stuff one's creativity down. Don't do it. The spirit of creativity has a way of getting under the skin. In my case, it's a muse I sometimes call Patricia, who dances down the hall and drags me to see moonshine, shadows, light. She sent pictures of teahouses through Facebook, brought into my fingers old books of Japanese designs collecting dust on shelves.

Before I knew it, all this paraphernalia was assembled on my workbench (I only spent $36) and I had three sets of Japanese teahouse plans in a folder on my desktop.

Stay tuned for the next installment of "Making Stuff - A Miniature Japanese Teahouse.

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GB's Love Notes

Writing notes is an art lost to the generations after boomers. It's quicker to send an email, or even a text. Or, perhaps a wave and a "Thanks!" on the way out the door is enough.

My mother was a perfectly imperfect human in many ways, and I have forgiven her, in absentia of course, for all the weird things she did, like make me wear tunics to school in the 7th grade to cover up my well developed you know whats.

But she was a class act. I say it that way because it was one of her pet peeves. She thought that if you had to mention it, you weren't. But, she was.

She drilled mega doses of manners and niceties into me that I cannot ever discard or let go. I thank her for things I take for granted:

knowing how to set a table
chewing with my mouth closed
opening doors for others
honoring elders
leaving a place better than when I found it
and
the art of the thank you note.

I supppose I have to thank the Dominican Nuns

for teaching me cursive writing, even if they did try to make me right handed.

I'll thank my father, while we're at it, for teaching me the art of inquisitiveness and a love of words.

In an earlier post, I mention the Studio in a Shoe Box of my childhood, filled with paper dolls, valentines and tiny plastic scissors. The box is bigger today, but the idea is the same: be prepared.

 These envelopes were made from a 4x6 template from old books, magazine and songbooks.

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Welcome

Welcome to Ginna Gordon 2018
the Diary of a Creative
300-500 Word Articles
Regarding Books, Ideas, Projects, Recipes, Quotes & Pix

My audience:
Boomers, authors, readers, crafters, cooks

My topics:
Books
Writing
GB’s Love Notes
Knitting
Crafts
Food/Recipes
Studios

My 2018 Goals:
Sharing ideas/recipes
Lucky Valley Press

I write about
• scaling down from an 800 square foot space to a basket of knitting and what that feels like after 50 years of large studio spaces wherever I have lived. I share the experience, physically, mentally and spiritually, and find out what other artists do at a certain age when it is no longer appropriate to spin in all directions creating in ten different mediums at once.
• being a writer, about re-writing when I thought the book was finished, about that process, which in the case of Humming, is months and months long: the fallow time of writing, when the characters are taking naps and your mind is filled with the many ways in which you could take the story instead of where you were going.
 • what it feels like to be doing the best work of my lifetime, about working with David, about creating in general, about being a creative, about being created.
• I’ll post recipes, knitting projects, stories, quotes, anecdotes about a client, book covers.
My blog wraps my creativity up in a package and shares it with the world.

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Studio #7 - On Main Street

After a year on Spring Mountain, I moved to town and got a job in a bookstore. I had decided to stay.

If this post were about my various homes, I could spend the next five paragraphs on the guest house: cozy, in the trees, private and charming and within walking distance from my new studio on Main Street in downtown St. Helena: now that was a shack, torn down years ago to make way for new potential, but in 1989, I rented it with glee: two rooms and a bathroom in a little converted shed at Highway 29 and Pope Street, between Tra Vigne restaurant and an architectural firm, with the Wine Train rattling by in front and acres of empty space behind.

You don’t see outside wall treatments like this any more - like someone slathered a pale green frosting of cheap stucco all over the building and then had a pack of hooligan boys throw glass and pebbles all over it, from the top of its flat roof to the bottom, nested on a sea of gravel. The walls glittered in the sun like costume jewelry.

The inside was the reverse - grey indoor/outdoor carpet, grey walls, grey curtains. I would never get away with this now, but they let me install my little wood stove. Who travels with their own wood stove? I stacked my wood, built a fire and got to work.

I produced the Cosmic Cloth series there - hand painted silk altar pieces with personalized symbols and designs, but the most relevant memory of that St. Helena studio was the line of earrings made from my collection of decorative papers. I had dies cut in triangles and circles and squares and created hundred of little paperboard shapes in black and hired a local bookbinder with the right skills to help me cover and glue all those shapes together. A rep picked them up right away and went off to the San Francisco Gift Show to display my paper earrings prominently in her booth. Nice start.

The trouble was, she got one order, for 400! All of the same danged earring! I filled the order, resentfully, and declared, “I am not a manufacturer! I am an artiste!”

I have several boxes of these earrings in my closet. What shall I do with them? I admit to a certain emotional attachment. They are each a little canvas, some hand painted abstracts, or French marbled papers, Geishas, Asian newspapers. I wouldn’t wear any of them these days, but they are tiny and unique bits of memorabilia from the ‘80s.

They still give me joy, so perhaps they won’t be thrown out today.

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Studio #2 - The Back Bedroom

In 1974 a friend and I cooked up a plan to write, illustrate and somehow produce children’s books. Research led to All Saints Day School in Carmel Valley where the Guild of the Book Arts met for summer classes. We jumped at the chance to learn about bookbinding and making paper and the fine art of calligraphy.

My studio of the moment was squeezed into a back bedroom of our new house, having graduated from the “far out little pad” down the road. Soon, we collected equipment and paraphernalia - book presses, drawing boards, trays for paper making and decorating. We dove into the pool of bookbinding so deeply that the idea of writing for children was set aside and instead we made beautiful  books: she studied antiquarian book repair and gold tooling and the closets filled up with Moroccan leather and gold leaf and paste. I focused on Japanese bindings, journals and scrap books, stacking the cupboards with rice paper and dyes and silk. Papers of all kinds draped over dowel rods hung along the wall like towel racks.

An electric hot plate burbled with a pot of fish glue which wafted fumes like anchovy pizza through the house. I could hear rain drizzling and, beyond the garden, the rush of the Carmel River.
We harmonized with John Denver: Country Roads and Annie’s Song and Sunshine on my Shoulders. We gossiped and shared secrets and talked about men and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and laughed and cried and created beauty with an ever growing assortment of materials.
It was powerful good fun in that back bedroom studio with our two workbenches facing each other under the window. In the winter, the wood stove in the living room and mugs of herb tea kept us warm while we examined and took apart old books and put them back together again.

Although I can say that I wrote my first book at nine years old (How to Be Obnoxious in Twenty five Easy Lessons - more on that in another post) and I have been in love with books and reading since long before that, those two seasons of classes at The Guild of the Books Arts took my love of books to a new level, where it is not just the contents, but the containers that inspire.

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