A Bit of Background

My name is Sophronia Joyce. (Actually that's not my real name for reasons I'll explain later.) This isn't my blog either. An old friend offered to post my contributions on her blog. Yesterday's post titled "Details Matter" was the first one she posted for me.

Art journaling has been one of the activities I've been enjoying since I retired. I'm more or less 80 years old and arthritis makes it hard for me to get around as much as I'd like. Of course the Internet more than compensates. Not only can I order books and art supplies online, I can enjoy art-focussed blogs plus the growing number of amazing online digital archives of art I'd not have the chance to see in person even if I could get around more easily.

I'm just about to start a new art journal so that's what I'll be posting about.

Details Matter

One of the most striking -- and to the novice surprising -- features of magic is its meticulous precision. One of the instructions given to the Golden Dawn initiates is: "Above all things in everything occult we must earnestly beseech you to cultivate the greatest possible exactness. Every word should be accurately learned, every symbol accurately drawn." Whatever else the study of magic may be, it is a rigorous discipline of all the faculties of the human mind.

Kathleen Raine, Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn, The Sewanee Review Vol 77, No. 1, Winter 1969, pp. 112-148. (Available on JSTOR)

Wrapping up for now...

Here are some miscellaneous thoughts about my IFJM 2014 project. There are additional wrap-up posts which can be displayed by clicking on the "2014 FJ Wrap-up" link just below this post.

An advantage of doing something every day rather than doing more at one time but only some days is that I feel different on different days so there is more variety.

My character several times came up with creative solutions when I was having trouble with an entry. This means that I am capable of coming up with creative solutions.

When I look back at journals I've done, they typically make me glad that I've done them whether or not I particularly enjoyed doing them at the time. This is in contrast to looking at individual pieces of art later because I usually don't like them any better than when I did them.

Even simple sketches or bits of ephemera can really add a lot to a page.

I still haven't completely figured out why I have creative blocks doing art-related activities that I don't seem to have in other creative activities but my 2014 IFJM project has given me some new avenues to explore.

Guilt?

In the past few years I've tried a variety of visual art activities but haven't enjoyed doing them as much as I'd expected to and as much as I'd like to.

In thinking back about what felt different when I was creating my 2014 fake journal as opposed to when I've done other types of art-related creating, I realized that I hadn't experienced a certain special type of guilt that I typically feel. At first I thought maybe it was simply because I was aware that my making the fake journal could possibly be useful to certain other people. But I quickly remembered that I don't typically feel guilty simply because an activity isn't useful.

But then I had an insight. I suspect that this guilt only occurs when I know I could be doing something more useful than whatever I am doing. In other words, when I'm trying to create art, I'm apparently aware at some level that I'm wasting limited resources—my creativity, my intelligence, my ability to focus, my ability to learn new things, etc.—that I've used in the past to do something I have judged to be useful. This concern isn't relevant when I'm doing something like watching TV because then I'm not wasting these limited resources. That is, I do accept that I can only do so much that's useful at any one time.

Here is a link to a summary of a related discussion titled Creativity: Do You Feel Guilty for Being an Artist? Many of the commenters said things along the lines of art is hard or art is important. Here is one artist's comment that resonated with me:

Bridges, buildings, roads, the fabric of our world needs artists. Some work with paint, or stone or steel, others work with math, sound and genes. No, I don't feel guilty about being as artist, as such. I feel guilty that I have created so little when the world needs so much.

I'll be very interested to read your comments on this question.

Staying Seated

I finished my fake journal yesterday and am happy to say I did one entry every day in April and the journal came out much better than I'd hoped. (This post explains the journal.) There are probably several complex reasons why this worked as well as it did that I will need to think more about to understand. However there was this very obvious one: a strict limitation on materials. Since working on my fake journal only required two items, i.e. the physical journal itself and a writing implement, there was never any need to go look for either something essential I'd forgotten before I could start or something extra I'd just suddenly decided later that I couldn't get along without. (I did several times print or cut out something to glue onto a journal page but I did this in such a way that it didn't affect the time spent writing.)

Typically when I try to do any art activity including art journaling, I spend more time hopping up and down and looking for stuff than I spend actually working. (I should note I'm not usually this way when doing other creative activities.) I've tried limiting materials but this hasn't worked very well for me in the past. There are of course numerous other approaches that have the potential to improve this situation. I hope to use the momentum from my IFJM project to discover which of these approaches work best for me.

April 19th Entry

This page was about remembering how much fun it was when my father brought gifts for my sisters and me when he returned from a trip. I still have one of them: a small toy stuffed poodle. I lent the poodle to my character (who noticed that the poodle is missing its left eye!) and she traced around it with pencil at the bottom of the page where she had finished writing and then decorated it. The orange stamped images are wrapped gifts (from a set of Christmas stamps) that my character thought went with the text. (You can tell the actual size from the quad ruling which is five squares to the inch.)

April 15th Entry

I emailed the above picture of a vintage ad that I'd found on the web to my character and asked her to use it as a prompt for the memory I wanted to share for the April 15th entry in my 2014 Fake Journal. She'd already printed it out and glued it to the page before she called me.

Here's a copy of an extract from her summary of what I told her when she called.

...her father often told her that when she was born he'd promised his parents (whom he greatly admired) that S would never smoke.

S said that always made her proud & feel special & she thought she was obligated by that promise. She said she's often since wondered why she had such a positive reaction rather than being rebellious.

She was slightly rebellious her freshman year when she went to an out-of-state college where almost everyone -- including her -- lived in single-sex dorms. She bought a box of Vogue* cigarettes! She remembers the pretty colored papers & gold tips & she thinks a dark flat box -- "distinctive slide case" which she carried in her purse.

I probably should have mentioned that I also loved and admired my father's parents, i.e. my paternal grandparents. They were quite young when my father was born so I had them for a long time; neither of them died until after I was married and both of my children were born.

As best as I can remember I didn't smoke more than two packs of cigarettes the entire time I was in college. (I graduated in 1962.) I've probably smoked no more that half a pack since them. I've definitely never been smoker for which I will always be very grateful.

Here's a scan of part of the above extract as it appeared in the journal.