continuing

a slash of colour, watery, drifting across the paper, then another...

the pencil draws a gently curving line

grey ink, words flowing up on one side, down on the other

more colour, faint

exaggerated letter forms, ascenders rising high through thin winter light

words as lost on the page as they are when spoken on a frigid winter day, frozen in mid-air only to fall back to earth, breaking into pieces and lying strewn on the ground

my sheet is slowly filling, each section adding something different even though the words all come from the same place, repeated over and over in my mind and with the pen until we are one

I love that I no longer have to think what to write... the beauty of repetition, and a single source; the pen touches the paper and the words flow, one tumbling after the other

many strokes are shaky, tentative, still trembling in the newness, unfamiliar

there is a sadness in the knowing that with dedication to a daily practice the hesitancy that creates those shaky lines will eventually be lost and from then I will ceaselessly be trying to recapture it

tape as resist, creates interruptions and interjections... calligraphy following the "rules" of spoken conversation

there is a joy, a freedom, to be found in making a mark as you please, sending a line down when it would go up and vice versa, bending them this way and that

pushing the limits of how far you can take a letter from it's norm and still have it be recognizable, though perhaps not necessarily immediately

it becomes almost a game, one with no rules nor boundaries

there are only four spaces left to be filled on this large sheet of paper and then it gets made into a book, the folding, tearing and folding again creating new combinations and hopefully yet more inspiration

this has been a lovely, thoughtful and methodical way to close out the year and one I have truly enjoyed

wishing you all the best for 2026, and may you also find that which fascinates and inspires you

take care,

jillayne

word play

another quiet week...

I took the luxury of spending four days in the studio, working on some calligraphy ideas from a course I took a while back

trying all sorts of interesting techniques and ideas, taking photographs as I went

this one illumined one of those "happy accidents" that occur every now and again where two sections, done days apart, seem to come together to make a scene reminiscent of trees, a field and lines of grass

intrigued, I decided to have a play with the idea a bit...

thinking of a winter night by the river,  and wanting something not completely pictorial I settled on an upright slash of blue for the river, intersected with a full silver moon

a bank of trees on the right, using the words from the "Spell of the Yukon" beginning with:

"the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming

and the stars tumbled out neck and crop"

and continuing on from there 

as this was a "working out the ideas" piece I chose a fairly heavyweight cartridge paper but it buckled under the silver leaf sizing

other observations:

the band of the river is too wide for the size of the moon

I'd like the moon to have more interest - more texture perhaps and a crater or two

a bit of tweaking here and there with spacing and shape of the trees...

the ground needs to change

even with all that I'm very pleased and think there's good potential with this

so pleased in fact,  it spurred me on to try something else; a line of blue again, darker, and this time with the writing on top of it

I like it very much though I haven't settled on what to do with the rest of the space

and so the work on the large sheet progresses though I do want to try things that are little more involved

 it's all a bit out of my comfort zone so lots of trials and writing practice are happening, 

along with being on the lookout for any other interesting combinations or juxtapositions that happen on the page as I go

they do make for a nice side-step into further investigations

take care,

Jillayne

in the quiet

in the quiet of the past week I've been puttering away at organizing my studio working space

I am forever dealing with an incessant array of paper scraps with scribbled notes on everything from creative insights to process revelations and everything in-between along with small stacks of supplies for works-in-progress

those have now been brought back under control and as the quiet days of winter are here I finally find myself in a place where its time to choose what I'm going to work on for the next while

so back to the river I go

I have a loose plan for the work I want to do, based on the same ideas I've had for many, many months, some for a couple of years, but as time passed I found some of those ideas had lost a bit of their lustre; they are now getting a boost from new insights

to feed that thinking, and perhaps take some of it a step or two further, I pulled out a sketchbook where I had worked through different ways of depicting aspects of the river in paper, cloth and stitch

organic lines, straight lines - tucks and gathers and random stitches became water, ice, current, drift wood

lace for the water froth at the rapids

marbled paper for a swirling current

and thankfully, all are fully annotated

(insert a smug smile here)

I think this next page of work holds a lot of potential, especially that piece of ragged grey lace

it has me thinking of the small channels that open up in the ice only to disappear again

over the next few weeks I'll be taking some of the ideas shown here and working them in to what I'd been doing and try to finally move some this work forward

and there goes the state of the studio again!

Thanks for stopping by,

Jillayne

nourish

a slow week this one... some long-awaited surgery took place on Monday and since then I've been dealing with daily bouts of nausea and dizziness thanks to the after effects of general anesthesia

the urge to work creatively was a stubborn one though and I had in my mind a textured "frosty" base for some winter-inspired calligraphy

over the course of the last few days I made a start...

it began with layers of white gesso scraped and smeared on heavy-weight cold-pressed watercolour paper

alternating between smoothing and scraping along with some scratching into and then flowing on indigo pigment followed by granulating watercolour, I slowly built up what I thought to be an interesting surface, one that looked appropriately "cold"

using window mounts I blocked off interesting areas where a word or phrase could be penned

pleased, I started on a list of possible words:

frost

frozen stillness

snowflakes

snowdrifts

sparkling snow

you get the idea... 

next was to start playing with different ways of writing the words, perhaps adding flourishes, thinking about style - jagged and rough like the ice itself or the branches that have been frosted with it?

what about curved and flowing like the wind that blew the snowflakes down?

and what colour of ink?

it was all interesting and felt creative enough but it also felt over-planned... maybe contrived, perhaps not yet, but definitely approaching that state

as I sat debating the various options other words, ones I had read the day before, floated in my mind

"dive deeply into the creative instinct... whatever form it happens to take

nourish the imagination

cultivate a practice of attention, to the mysteries and yearnings of our own hearts"

- Sue Monk Kidd

a practice of attention, to my own heart

the words rolled around and around, and I knew instantly I had not been doing that, not for a while

I liked what I'd been working on, it was interesting and challenging, but it was not what I had to do, it was what I thought I wanted to do

I love words and paint and letters and I like working with them in ways that intrigue me but I don't yearn for them, at least not regularly

what does fire me up though, what gets the wheels turning, the what-ifs flowing, is textiles

its been a good long while since I played with fabric or ribbon or thread but it didn't take long for me to find my ribbon box and start pulling out everything I could find that spoke those same winter words through their colour or texture

just looking at them lit a spark, and there it was...

a little dose of nourishment for a creative heart

take care,

Jillayne