Since I became interested in Artist Trading Cards (ATCs: 3 1/2 inch x 2 1/2 inch works of art you can save and trade like hockey cards), I’ve taken some basic ATC art supplies with me whenever I go on holidays. The most fun is creating the cards as a group activity (if there are five people participating you create five cards, with each person adding something to each card, so that everyone ends up taking home one card created by everyone). I’ve done this with people who don’t normally make art, and they were surprised how much they enjoyed themselves — like they were kids again, allowed to play with paper, scissors and glue.

The card above is one I made with four women friends during a weekend getaway to a cabin in Manning Park (can you tell eating and knitting were two themes of the trip?).

And here’s one my mother, daughter and I made on a trip to Nelson, BC, the town where my mother grew up (includes images from a brochure on the town, bits of map, and a rubber stamp skunk bought from a Nelson artist, which reminded us of two skunks encountered on our trip).

I ended up doing a card to commemorate my Oregon trip on my own, which wasn’t as much fun (it encorporates bits of local newspaper and road map).

Visually, these aren’t my best ATCs, but in terms of the memories they evoke, they’re my favourite.

Here are some buttons I made featuring local graffiti art (my thanks to the unknown artists).

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve either been busy with various projects or resting my eyes. Right now I’m getting ready to be part of the first Spring Book Hatching at the Vancouver Public Library (June 9, 1-3pm, Alice McKay Room). Over thirty B.C. authors and illustrators will be there presenting their newest books for kids. There will also be activities, prizes and treats (Purdy’s Chocolates is one of our sponsors!). I’ll be there with my two latest novels, Dog House Blues and The Truth About Rats (and Dogs). (By the way, I’m on the organizing committee for the Book Hatching and did the “chick hatching out of the egg” part of the design below (Kari Winters created the original background image and Kirsti Wakelin did the overall design, making everything work):

I borrowed a one-inch button-maker from Blim Gallery this week and have been making buttons to sell at the Hatching or to give away to anyone who buys one of my books. I’ll be donating the money from button sales to the SPCA. Below are a few of the animal-themed buttons I made for the Hatching. I’ll post some of my other buttons later (I love the button-making machine!)

(art message on the wall of Blim Gallery on Main St. I stopped by there yesterday during open studio hours to try out their button-maker).

Detail:

Editing a novel is a back and forth process. I send the manuscript to my editor, then wait for her to get back to me with comments and suggestions. I make revisions, then send it back to her and wait for the next stage of comments and suggestions. I actually like the editing process, because I can feel it making my story better.

I’m waiting to hear back from my editor right now, and while I wait I should ideally be working toward crossing things off my long “to do” list or resting up my eyes for the next round of revisions. Unfortunately, I keep finding myself getting stuck on the internet (they don’t call it the web for nothing). Today I spent several hours looking up the websites and blogs of various artists, whose links led me to other artists, whose links led me……and so on. I also spent way too much time researching button-making machines (saw some cool art buttons in a little shop on Main Street yesterday, then saw something on TV about a one inch button art show… got thinking about how it would be fun to make some buttons of my own, as well as work on some other art, and ….. next thing I know I’ve been staring at the computer screen for two hours, and I haven’t actually made or accomplished anything).

Anyway, here’s a photo of two artists in Tokyo’s Harajuku district who were selling buttons and other things they’d made. Sadly, I just lost the button I bought from them last spring. It had a D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) and anti-war message. My goal for the next week is to take up the D.I.Y call to action and actually make some art of my own instead of just drooling over other people’s…..

P.S. I just checked one more site (how many times have I said that) and discovered Blim gallery rents out their button-making machine.

Here it is! A manga portrait of me done by artist Nina Matsumoto (aka space coyote):

Check out more of Nina’s art at spacecoyote.com. Recently, Nina’s manga version of The Simpsons (posted at deviantart.com) caught the eye of Matt Groening, and she was asked to do the art for a Simpsons comic parodying the manga cartoon style. Her next project is a manga of her own creation. I’m lucky she managed to fit in my portrait commission. I don’t look much like a manga hero, but I still like it much better than my photographs!

I would like to say a special hello to everyone who has been reading my novels about the childhood of artist Emily Carr (Discovering Emily and Emily’s Dream) — especially Mrs. Fung’s class at Lord Nelson Elementary School!

During Spring Break last week I spent a day in Victoria, the city where Emily Carr was born and spent most of her life (1871-1945). Walking around her old neighbourhood, I tried to imagine what it looked like when she was a girl playing in the cow yard beside her house, cutting through her family’s back field to Beacon Hill Park, walking along the road to the James Bay Bridge…. and later, being a landlady at the House of All Sorts (a house built on a piece of her family’s property), raising her bob tail sheep dogs, walking along the streets with her monkey, Woo…..

Above: Carr house in the 1860s and me in front of the house last week.

Above: The House of All Sorts (at left), which is around the corner from Carr House (Carr House is now a museum you can visit, but the House of All Sorts is a privately owned house with apartments, and there is still a mural that Emily Carr painted on the attic ceiling). The house on the right is where I lived during my last year at University in Victoria (a room-mate and I rented the top floor, just a block away from Carr House, and no, Emily Carr was not still alive when I lived in her neighbourhood).

This street in front of the Empress Hotel (photo at left) used to be the James Bay Bridge, which Emily would walk across with her father. The hotel is sitting on what used to be the water of James Bay (the bay was filled in with earth, but sea water still sneaks into the hotel basement at high tide).

Above: The parliament buildings (behind the whale), which are across from the Empress Hotel and overlooking Victoria’s inner harbour (Emily Carr’s old neighbourhood is right behind them).

Below: Me dressed in 19^th century costume, reading in the Emily Carr section of the Vancouver Art Gallery a couple years ago (my daughter, sitting on the floor at left, is dressed like Emily Carr would have dressed when she was a girl).

99. Mexican folk art cross honouring Frida Khalo

100. Miniature art magnets, pendants and broaches (these ones by me and my daughter)

101. Snowperson eyes

(I also like to use old rusty flattened bottle caps found on the road in collages. My daughter thinks I’m weird and pretends she doesn’t know me when I stop to pick them up.)

Note: the detail in the photos isn’t very good, so I wanted to point out that the penguin’s eyes are made with little gold beads, which I thought was pretty cool.

When I was in grade seven, I used to walk to the local library every Friday after school (about two miles) to drop off last week’s books and select the next week’s. The way I picked the books I wanted to borrow was to walk along the shelves of novels in the children’s section until a spine or cover jumped out at me. This method led me to discover some of my favourite books, including “The Court of the Stone Children” by Eleanor Cameron, “The Book of Three” by Lloyd Alexander (which led me to all of the Prydain Chronicles) and “False Dawn” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (a graphic science fiction novel, which, as I pointed out to the librarian after I’d read it, definately did not belong in the children’s section).

More recently, this serendipitous selection habbit has led me to books such as “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingslover, “The Mermaid Chair” by Sue Monk Kidd, “Blessed are the Cheesemakers” by Sarah-Kate Lynch (a title I couldn’t resist) and “Down the Rabbit Hole” by Peter Abrahams (a mystery, which I found in the adult section of the library, though it may have belonged in the children’s section, but could work in both, I think).  

There’s something magical about feeling the call of a previously unkown book, or discovering the perfect book by pure chance.

Today, I walked into Chapters, killing time between a dentist appointment and catching the bus home, and not intending to buy anything. I wandered idly down the middle of the store and into the children’s section, turned around, and there was a bright orange and red picture book: “The Company of Crows” by Marilyn Singer. Poems celebrating crows and gorgeous illustrations (by Linda Saport) full of crows! I hadn’t even known the book existed. Of course, I had to buy it.

The cover and the first inside illustration also reminded me of the haiku my friend Jean-Pierre recently added to the comments of my November “Call of the Wild” post:

Eyes are everywhere
Peering through the leaves and branches
In the rookery

While I was visiting my parents over the holidays, an old photograph surfaced of me before a high school dance. There is much I could say about this time in my life, but when I look at the photo, it’s hard for me to get past the hair.

As a teenager, I was very self-conscious and embarrassed easily. When I decided (shortly before this photo was taken) to get my long hair cut and permed, I was hoping for a slightly new look, but not a drastic, attention-drawing change. Not too short on the sides. Not too curly. When I ended up with what could be best described as poodle head, I was horrified.

How could I face the stares and jeers of everyone at school? (Yes, it sounds self-absorbed and superficial now, but this was high school, remember). I called up my boyfriend and we agreed to skip school the next day and drive to Victoria (about an hour away) – where no one would recognize me.

I can’t remember exactly what we did all day, except that we spent some time wondering around the neighbourhood of James Bay near Beacon Hill Park. Maybe we parked the car and walked or maybe we just drove around. In any case, one house caught our attention, and we stopped. On the grass in front of the house, sat a small brown monkey. Neither of us had ever seen a live monkey up close before. When we approached, a middle-aged woman came out of the house. She was very friendly, let us meet the monkey, and chatted with us for quite awhile.

It ended up being a good day, but with a strange quality – as if we had stepped out of our regular lives and even out of time. By our return home, I had grown accustomed (or at least resigned) to my new hair and bolstered enough to face school the following day.

I didn’t give the episode much more thought until two years later, when I was living in Victoria going to university and became interested in the artist Emily Carr. I had known about her before, but now something about her paintings and her life seemed to speak to me in a new and personal way. She had grown up in the Victoria neighbourhood of James Bay (she was born there in 1871) and had lived there as an eccentric older woman with many pets, including a monkey named Woo. As I looked at an old black and white photo of a middle-aged Carr standing in her James Bay backyard holding a small familiar-looking monkey, an eerie feeling of deja vu came over me. Is it possible I might have seen the ghosts of Emily Carr and Woo on that fateful bad hair day?

I’ve walked around James Bay many times since then, trying to remember which house was the one where we’d seen the woman and the monkey, but I never could find it again. If it really had been the ghosts of Emily and Woo, did they appear just to help me through a bad hair day? Or was there some profound message that Carr would have liked to pass on (a P.S. about art or trees or life, perhaps)?

A few days ago, I paid one last visit to “Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon,” an exhibit which just ended at the Vancouver Art Gallery. As I walked through the rooms of Carr’s paintings, it occurred to me that she doesn’t need a ghost to pass on a message: her paintings have never stopped speaking. This is not to say I wouldn’t have a few questions for her, if I did meet her ghost….

[Click on “My Books” in the right sidebar for info on the two novels I ended up writing about Emily Carr’s childhood]