#37, #38, #39, #40 of 100 Creations in 100 Days: Visual Journal entries, memorial to Lisa Fisher Johnson

Feb 7, 2019 was all about teaching and playing in my visual journal.  There are times when I don't have the energy to stand and work at the easel and I don't have any big ideas. That's when I pull out my journal and let myself riff on ideas that have been rolling around in my head for a while.  It's easeful and relaxing and generally satisfying.  It's about process, not product.  It's so good for me to move away from a product orientation because I generally don't let myself play and try new things enough.

Before I got into the studio, I taught my "Zentangle Ladies". They're a group of women to whom I was initially teaching Zentangles, but the group has morphed into a lovely amalgam of friends who do art together.  Right now I'm teaching them the Fundamentals of Drawing.  The first lesson I always teach is Blind Contour Drawing.  One of the more advanced lessons with Blind Contour is having them draw the person sitting across from them.  This drawing is by one of my students, Barbara.  I posted it because I absolutely love it!  It's funky and fun and weird and wacky and wonderful!  And it even captures the essence of the woman it's of.  It excites me when my students make such fun work!

Once my wonderful students left, I went out to the studio to play.  I worked with circles and Citrasolv and photos and whatever else was on my table. When we were in Wintergreen a few weeks ago, I began the picture on the left with all the intersecting circles.  It's based on fabric created by Knoll. 

I had the idea to take a page from a National Geographic magazine which I had doused in Citrasolv (it makes fascinating textures as you can see on the right hand piece) and cut circles out of it in the pattern of the piece on the left, then to glue it around the circles drawn there.  That didn't work well because I simply wasn't precise enough, but it did give me a lot of cool circles - and another idea!  The piece on the right was the result of those experiments. (The software for Blogger is again making me crazy!  I can't get the B&W ink drawing to stay next to the Citrasolv Circles, so the layout looks shabby.  Apologies!)

#38 Citrasolv Circles

#37 ink drawing based on fabric
design by Knoll

#39 Collage, photographs, calligraphy, citrasolv page

#39 I've been working with images of my husband Chris for a while.  I took a series of pictures of him to use in a David Hockney-type portrait collage.  I didn't end up creating that, but I have used the pictures to weave with, and, on this day, I used them to illustrate the quote "Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed."

January 26th, my esteemed colleague and dear friend Lisa Fisher Johnson passed away. She had had a brain tumor. She was an amazing artist and one of the kindest, friendliest people I've ever known.  She was a marvelous person and a good friend.  I will miss her terribly.  I attended her memorial service and the reception afterwards where I was hoping to talk to people and to share my memories and grief, but I ended up feeling a bit too shy to approach people to talk.  I left early and came home and created my own memorial to Lisa, these pages, where I wrote about my feelings and thought about how dear she was to me.  Art can be so healing.

#40 Memorial to Lisa Fisher Johnson