Last month was a milestone birthday. I'm truly an 'official' oldster now and I had a great time celebrating and my friends kept it coming all month. My friend April sent me an early gift and when I told her I wasn't going to wait for the actual date to open it, she celebrated with me by sending some more fun things. My husband was happy to gift me an 'official' Apple Ipad cover to replace the cheapo one I had bought myself which was splitting its seams and I got to have 'Happy Birthday' engraved on the back. Nicely bright red too. Hand-made books from my friend Perry. Lemon Meringue pie from Nora. A singing happy birthday videos from Amy & Sarah. Cool art design CD from Deb and many other delights. I was a totally 'gifted' oldster-girl.
But the biggest celebration was one I gave myself - a gift of body art. It came to me to go into this next part of my life with a little zest and zing and I decided to get a visible tattoo - a 'collage' on my arm.. I have a flying crow on my thigh, which was a celebration I had with my daughter Amy about 15 years ago and she took me to her favorite tattoo place in Chicago. My new art also reflects my crow totem, as it is a crow feather with crows soaring out of the feather itself. It also features a wonderful red spiral, another of my symbols that shows up a lot in my art. My other daughter, Mimi, was the contributor of the spiral and star part of the design. My tattoo artist Scott Wiecek drew a great synthesis of my tattoo ideas right on my arm and we had a great conversation through the whole experience with a nice sound track of a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds mix from Pandora. Scott is at Acme Tattoos in Staunton, VA.
I talked about doing this quite a bit and was very psyched. But I discovered once I made the appointment, I began having dreams where inner judges yelled out to me their concerns about the consequences of having a visible tattoo, ie, 'You won't be able to get a job.' This continued for about a week, culminating with a dream the night I actually got the tattoo. The next day I did a collage about these 'tattoo judges.'
I really like to 'work out' inner conflicts with art and now use digital collage most often. I find the whole process of immersing myself in the image search for the themes that arise in these conflicts powerful in and of itself. I like the feel of the 'back-burner' assimilating and organizing the images according to some 'resolving' pattern. As I said to a friend, I feel like I 'smash and flatten these issues and capture them in 2D'. Some element of resolution is always reached, even if the core issue might arise again.
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| Oldster e-girl collage |
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| Tattoo Judges |
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| Win-Win collage |
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| He Says - She Says |
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Thanks for sharing!