It’s been dark all day today Dark sky Dark light Dark rooms whispering dark news
But the soft air invites a sweater And the birds talk with me among the dogwood leaves in the rain outside my window
Heavy clouds all day. It was too dark to mix colors, too dark to photograph art. The news of the world was pretty damn dark, too.
But then I fed the wild birds on the porch roof outside my studio window. They were waiting for me, as usual – sparrows and mourning doves, house finches in their subdued red, jays in their glamorous blue. So much gossiping and yakking while they ate.
It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Sitting with them, listening to the rain and their voices, feeling that soft, damp, early autumn chill, it gave a strangely profound sense of perspective.
I have been off wandering in the weeds again, trying to figure out how to organize all the new tools and features I’ve been picking up in building my little corner of the online world. I have progress to report.
Behold!
It’s an org chart.
A Jen-style org chart – over-thought, drawn free-hand, complete with smudges and the ghosts of erasures, a big ol’ patch where I messed up in ink, and pencil notes indicating more to come. Terrible photo, I admit, due to having no scanner at the moment and the weather here being so stormy, I can’t get good light even with lamps. Oh, well, it’s a working draft, still in progress. The original is hanging over my desk now.
The point is that it’s all finally starting to make sense. Take a tour with me:
The Studio: This is where I work the magic, all by myself. This is my workspace, home base, refuge, and one-person think tank. Everything flows from here.
The Website: The official online hub for all things Jen Fries Arts. Whatever happens in the Studio ends up here eventually, and everything else revolves around this site. If you’re looking for anything to do with my work, this is the place. Over the next few days, I’ll be adding some tabs, updating some buttons, and sprucing the joint up.
Community: Free, public, via Patreon. The new social media arm of Jen Fries Arts. This the place to find frequent updates on WIPs and the Arting Life, engage in discussions, participate in challenges and prompts, and purchase digital downloads, starting this month. And we can do it all without the intrusive, passive-aggressive shenanigans of the social media platforms.
Patrons: Paid, exclusive, via Patreon. Friends of the Studio who opt to support me with a $5 monthly pledge receive exclusive content and benefits as well as my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation. Patrons will enjoy free downloads, discounts on purchases, backstage looks into my creative processes, discussion threads on art and writing, invitations to events, and more as we go along.
Newsletter: Free, private, via Email. The newsletter is being transformed into a monthly digest of Studio News and Community content for those who prefer to keep things mellow, far from the social media hurly-burly.
Buy: All the legit venues where my work is sold will be listed and linked on this site. Artrepreneur for original artworks. Patreon for digital images and files (coming soon). My email for commissions, licensing, or offline sales. And more to come, including art prints, books, and other stuff currently simmering in my head or in development.
Offline: I’m a real person living in the real world where I do real things. Watch this site for exhibitions, pop-ups, and in-person events. Check out my public, professional network. Someday, there may even be some courses and workshops.
An Alchemy of Dragons is very much alive. Chapter 4 is getting reposted in two parts for more screen-friendly reading length, with additional illustrations. Chapter 5 is written and waiting for its illustrations. Our second protagonist has arrived at last. Chapter 6 is scheduled for this month as well.
And I’ll be exploring the season with some witchy, autumnal moods. Be on the lookout for moons, dreams, and magical stuff.
Well! September got away from me a bit. I’m sure it did for many of us, what with one thing and another. Oh, well, we carry on. Pins and needles, needles and pins, as they say. The weather’s nice here in scenic, lovely Somerville, and fall is my favorite season. So I hope you are all safe, healthy, and ready for foliage, apples, and sweaters, because those are the things that keep us going in These Challenging, Unprecedented, and Extraordinary Times.
Let me catch you up on the studio news.
There’s Art for Sale!
Yes, you can actually buy it now. You will notice the shiny new Shop tab, above. It’s so pretty – and hard won, too, because this was the thing that held me up most of this month. You’d think, in the 21st century, it would be easier to create some linked pages and have them look decent, but it’s okay. I’m better educated on the backstage infrastructure of WordPress now, and I’m happy with this set-up.
The inaugural offerings are two of my artist books, The Doll’s House and The Sins of Icarus, a pair of affordable make-great-gifts items to celebrate hitting this milestone on my website. More works will be added as I get the pages looking the way I want, so watch this site, sign up for the newsletter, and/or follow me on Facebook for updates as they happen.
And if you are interested in any works I haven’t listed yet, please email me via the Contacts page.
I will have a piece in “All Small” online at the Brickbottom Gallery, October 29 – November 22, 2020. Watch this site for details.
New Project in Development
A new assemblage is in the works, first of a series on the ghosts of old objects. This is one of those long-simmering, back-of-the-brain ideas. Finding an old paste brush on the street recently provided the missing hook for me to make it real. I figure October is a good time for lingering spirits.
Tomorrow dawns the 2020s, and I realized that exactly 100 years ago, the 19th Amendment became part of the US Constitution, and American women got the vote.
The parallels between then and now are uncanny. We were talking it over at dinner this evening. In addition to giving women the vote, the 1920s saw the rise of extreme political and religious beliefs, overweening morality laws and backlashes against them, social and political grassroots organization, massive advances in science and technology with accompanying benefits and abuses, domestic and international terrorism, a great flowering of arts and intellectualism, and fundamental, permanent changes in the ways people lived day to day. In the wake of WW1, it was a decade of no going back to the old conformist pantomimes of class and propriety of the 1890s and 1910s. We can debate whether it was good or bad, but it was truly a revolutionary decade.
I’m pretty sure our 20s will be revolutionary too, with climate change crashing into us, the return of extreme ideologies, science racing forward, and all of us facing the challenges of a shifting world. One way or another, I think we are all going to change our lives forever. I think there will be a lot of ideas to express. Who knows, but we might even finally settle some of the fights we started way back then.
It’s scary but also exciting. Maybe I’m just itching to mix it up with the world. Maybe I’m tired of the same old same-old. I can’t help it – I’m an Aquarius. We like new things. We live for tomorrow.
But tonight, I say farewell to the 2010s. Here is the last of my final project of the decade, the East Somerville Trees collages – preserved memories of autumn under our urban canopy, part of the Botanicals and Cities series. It’s about the things that really matter in the midst of all the changes.
These are destined for a book, so be on the lookout for updates on that.
Well, the holiday season is officially upon us, and in the midst of life’s battles, I have to admit I have a lot to be thankful for. We have our health at my house (knock wood). I enjoy my work, my town, my friends. There are birds outside my window and cats sleeping on my bed. What more can anyone want?
Later, I’ll rant about all the things that are off the rails, going wrong, just plain nuts, and utterly intolerable, but that’s not what this weekend is for. Today, it’s about feasting and merriment, football, parades, and King Kong. You know, the traditions.
I finished rebuilding my blue sketchbook into an autumn book for sketching, journaling, and collecting field specimens, all the leaves, twigs, feathers, etc., I tend to pick up. I was inspired by the “junk journal” phenomenon, which is a great way to find beauty and function out of detritus. Even these gussied-up pocket inserts are part of my sketchbook practice, as I used them to work out experiments in paper building and collaging with natural botanicals. The binding is my favorite tetsuyoso style. Superficially, it resembles Coptic stitch, but this is in fact a very old binding from Japan. It lacks the external knots of Coptic, maintains neater tension with less fuss, and is flexible and resilient. Traditionally, the covers would be pasted on, but I adapted the Coptic method of sewing the covers on for a totally adhesive-free binding.
It might seem a little odd to make such a fancy thing just to sketch and brainstorm in, but kind of the point of being an artist is to get our thoughts outside of our heads, to make everything be an expression of how we see the world, to unify the inside and outside realities. So I think the book where I work out the kinks in my creativity should be a product of my creativity. This is what I came up with.
And I made the pie this year. It came out fancy, too. 😉
Happy holiday, all. Enjoy. Relax. Express yourself.
As mentioned in my last entry, I was sick through much of October and had just over one week to try to complete four weeks of projects. I did better than I thought I would, and I’ve decided to cheat slightly by extending the spooky season to the end of this weekend, to finish a few things and tie off those loose ends.
Completed in October proper, two zine-type books:
– “Masquerade,” featured last week, a book about masks, disguises, and false fronts. The hand-typed text is taken from dictionary clippings and famous quotes, and the illustrations are paper collage.
– “On the Emergence of Ghosts,” a mini collection of monotype prints. These are some of my favorites from a recent printmaking session. I first made the Rorschach-like blot prints with ultramarine blue acrylic paint on sketch paper. Then, before the paint was fully dry, I took a ghost print from the blot by laying over another piece of paper and folding and pressing it again.
Still progress from October:
– “Cemetery Dance,” a zine on a memento mori theme with quotes from Shakespeare.
– Mini mask cards, just some small toys.
– Die Fledermaus Crown, a piece of wearable art. This was my big project for the month, and I’m amazed I was able to get it about 80% done in a week. I wanted something wearable for Halloween, but I’ve been a little off masks; I need to think about them some more. Then the words “bat” and “crown” popped into my head. The first-draft idea was Dracula-esque, then it evolved into a kind of naturalist ode to bats, but you know what? It’s a bat crown. It’s neither possible nor appropriate for such a thing to be dark or quiet or serious. So it ended up inspired by the frilly, fizzy, champagne-popping operetta Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss, the Viennese Waltz King. I figure it will be just as appropriate for New Year, which is when most opera companies perform Die Fledermaus. Maybe I’ll do a series of opera crowns. The Magic Flute is starting to suggest itself.
In any event, the crown still needs a little construction. The stars, moon, and moths need to be added. And it needs color because, yes, it’s going to be in color. But I decided it looks mad enough to share.
If I can finish these by end of Sunday, I will call October a technical success and take a few days off.
Die Fledermaus Crown in progress
On the Emergence of Ghosts
And also…
Milkweed pods from the garden
A stormy day over the Tobin Bridge, with cormorant in foreground
Sunlight through a maple leaf
The same sunlight on a little black cat, Junior Studio Assistant, Scipio
We at the home attached to the studio have been sick as dogs since the middle of September, which is why I fell off the planet for a few weeks. But we are on the mend at last, and I’m racing to complete as many of my October projects as I can in these last few days of the month while still having fun.
First thing done: A zine titled “Masquerade.” It’s a little book of collages on the theme of disguise and falseness, social status and self-deception. It was inspired by Halloween, but of course, I took it in a weird, cynical, critical direction because that’s what I do. 😉 Soon, I’ll post information about hand-bound facsimile prints of this book, so please keep an eye out for that. Send a message via the Contact form or this site’s new Facebook page if you’d like to be notified when it is available.
I also attempted my first-ever video of a flip-through of the zine. Yes, it’s true, I have never tried to video anything before. I don’t know why. The video came out well, but the audio has an annoying buzz. Quick research suggests it’s probably something called a “ground loop,” having to do with the power adapter. I’ll have to solve that somehow without buying new equipment, such as a microphone like everyone else in the world uses.
Next, I’m cranking through to try to finish a wearable art object. It has bats on it! I don’t usually do wearable stuff, but sometimes you just have put on a bat. We love bats. This is Bat Week, though my wearable thing will be finished late because I didn’t know until this morning that this is Bat Week, and it’s already Friday.
I might not have time to finish the magic and reality essay book, but I’ll give it the old college try. Same with a zine about ghosts and an October-themed journal I’d very much like to make just for love. And I’ve been marbling and aging paper like a mad thing. All of this was supposed to be done over four weeks, but due to the aforementioned sick-as-a-dog-ness, I’ve had about one week of actual work so far.
In other areas of life, I have resurrected my vintage Olympia manual typewriter. Poor old girl needs a spa day, but I am so happy to be able to clack away noisily with her again. Most of the text in the “Masquerade” zine was made with her, and I can now print my fifty-word stories the way I want them to look.
The gardening season is winding down, but the raspberries aren’t quite done, and the sunflowers, zinnias and marigolds are nowhere near done. Bees and butterflies are still visiting so I won’t be clearing out anything for a bit yet.
Oh, and as mentioned above, I created a Facebook page for this site. Yes, it is the Evil Empire, and I have a dysfunctional relationship with social media, ranging from none to hostile. But needs must, and this is the 21st century, and if you can’t beat them, join them, and you can’t sabotage – um, I mean win – the game if you don’t play, so I have a page. If you Facebook, please join, follow, like, whatever it is people do, and drop me a message or a comment, ask a question, whatever you wish. I check the page just about every day, and will gladly respond in a reasonable time frame – health, work, and fate permitting. Click the button below to visit.
Work continues on selected projects, including some treats for Halloween, as well as coordinating the illustrated essay on magic, using a writing tool I’ll talk about more in a future post.
But the grand theme of the start of autumn has been the garden. Ten-foot sunflowers (brown Autumn Beauty and light yellow-dark brown Lemon Queen), pink cosmos, and 60’s-mod zinnias are off the hook, and the bees and butterflies are feasting to their hearts’ content. I’ve been basking in the glory of these final days of growing and getting ready to dive into the darkness of winter.
Jen Fries Arts 