Year in Review

Tags

art, art journal, art therapy, blogging, endometriosis, graphic text, inspiration, Journal, Mixed Media, pain management, text

See the rest of my 2018 art journal on my other blog.

Thursday Doors: 2017 in Review

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2017, blogging, Church doors, Door, Door photos, Norm 2.0, Thursday Doors

Here are some of my favorite doors from 2017.

This is one of my favorite door pictures of 2017 and it was taken on New Year’s Day. We went to the Shore for the day and drove home through Princeton. This building was on the way home. I love the architecture and the light and I love my husband for turning around and going back so I could get this picture.

This is one of the houses on the Jersey Shore. The photo is from New Year’s Day. We closed the year with a trip to the shore on Christmas Day. I will post pictures of the trip tomorrow, but there are no door pictures so you will have to come back and see what we saw.

I was going to add a tiled mosaic of the doors of churches of Morristown, NJ that I photographed last winter. However, I can’t seem to do that and I can’t figure out why. I tried to insert mosaics of my photos from our trip to the shore, but I wasn’t able to do that then either. Any ideas? They are visible at the end of the published post, but I can’t see them when I’m editing.

So here is my other favorite door from the Morristown churches. I really like the half open look.

These are the doors to the Baha’i’ House of Worship in Chicago, IL. We stopped there on the way back to WI for my mom’s 80th birthday.

This was from our April trip into Newark for the Cherry Blossom Festival. The building is the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

I love this door from the Gillette Castle, CT. This was on the way to Providence, RI and the Certified Zentangle Teacher Seminar. There were so many fantastic doors in Rhode Island you really should check out the original posts. (There are links to 4 different posts) But here is my quirky favorite ‘door’ photo from RI.

This is across the street from the park where I met Claudia McGill in 2016. The first step from this door is quite a doozy!

This door is from Columcille Megalith Park in Pennsylvania. I went there for the women’s retreat with my Unitarian Fellowship.

I didn’t have a lot of photos of doors from the second half of the year. I had increasing health problems that prevented me from getting out and getting pictures. The good news is that I feel like I have a really good plan to get started on the path to better health in 2018.

Here is my favorite door quote and it seems appropriate for a year in review blog post:

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))

For more door photos from around the world check out Norm 2.0

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing it, between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time), by using the blue link-up button below. 

Best wishes for happy holidays and a peaceful and healthy new year to you all.

 

 

Gift of Art and Technical Question

Tags

blogging, illustration, painting

I drew/painted this as a gift for my son who is a composer to be used as cover art for an EP if he and his collaborator wanted. It wasn’t what they were looking for, but I thought it turned out interesting, so here it is!

Also, my husband told me that I need to upgrade my WordPress site because of increased security threats. Well, I started looking into it and discovered that I need to back up my site first and all the documentation to do that has me lost. If any of you can use plain language to help me with this I would appreciate it. Have you backed up your sites? In any case, I hope you have a beautiful day.

Awe and Words

Tags

art journal, Art Journal Every Day, blogging, books, collage, gratitude, Journal, Morristown, Naomi Novik, reading

This past weekend was really great. Saturday was spent at the Morristown Festival of Books, as you can see from the pieces of the flyer and schedule that I included in my gratitude journal. Hubby and I went to 5 different sessions where panels of authors were interviewed by other authors. I was excited to meet Naomi Novik and hear about her book, Uprooted, that is not part of the Temeraire series. I love that series and I’m looking forward to reading my signed copy of Uprooted! She had a fascinating conversation with V. E. Schwab and now I want to read her books too! I went to a Young Adult authors session and found another new to me author I’m really excited about – Meg Medina. Lots more books and authors and so many hours of reading to look forward to! Keep an eye on my Goodreads feed if you want to see what else I’m reading…

Sunday was a day surrounded with Unitarian Universalists. We went to the morning service and my husband had choir practice before it and I took that time to knit and listen. Then we came home for a quick (restricted) lunch and I went to my UU process painting class. We were painting adventure and I posted about it yesterday. After painting we had a more leisurely dinner and went to a Rosh Hashanah service at our UU church. I had never experienced it before. It was so wonderful! There was a point in the service when they talked about awe and I knew I had to include that in my journal. Also the line “the heart of the universe sings.” How lovely! It was a weekend of books and how fitting to finish the weekend with the opening of the Book of Life.

The background for this journal page includes pages from lots of books in a variety of languages (so the Rosh Hashanah program fit right in!) I’m working on Illuminated Box #3 and am using more collage materials to cover the box. I saw some collage art done on a background of full pages of text and really loved how it looked. I will update you later in the week as I complete a side or something.

What are you grateful for today?

Fabulous Journey

Tags

altered art book, art, blogging, butterflies, collage, gratitude, Journal, zentangle

Wow. Although I hardly left the house in the last two days I feel like I have been on a fabulous journey. Yesterday I spent hours exploring the blogs of those who had liked my recent posts. What a wonderful virtual world out there (or in here?). I have also finished my design for my first tattoo. It has taken a long time to come up with all of the components, but I think it is ready. I hope you enjoy this excursion, too.