the artist in a bottle, Monotype of the Day #257

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Hospital stay 2- print 5

Between the form of Life and Life
by Emily Dickinson
Between the form of Life and Life
The difference is as big
As Liquor at the Lip between
And Liquor in the Jug
The latter -- excellent to keep --
But for ecstatic need
The corkless is superior --
I know for I have tried

http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/D/DickinsonEmi/Betweenformo/index.html

Possible release tomorrow. Keep you fingers crossed! 🤞🤞🤞

The Vessel, Monotype of the Day #226

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posting a monotype a day is that I can't judge my own work. Without fail, the pieces I'm reluctant to post get the most attention. Some days it's easier to suspend judgment than others. Interestingly, it's just as important to suspend judgement on pieces I like as it is on pieces I don't. I can't afford to get stuck in yesterday's piece. If I like something too much it can start to control what I'm doing today. I don't want to mentally repeat myself. Often, similar images flow through, but that's different. I see each piece as information being given to me, if images repeats, it's obviously something The Artist feels I need to hear. If I consciously choose to repeat images, that's the opposite. That's me refusing to listen.

Alchemist's Flask #2, Monotype of the Day #223

I used to be obsessed with the medieval alchemists who are responsible for so many of the recipes for early pigments. I made pigments from scratch, poured over ancient recipes, and even tried my hand at translating (very poorly!) a few from Latin. Much of the language is symbolic and it sometimes requires a lot of experimentation to get a recipe to work. I carry many of their ideas into my work today. People think of alchemists as trying to change lead, what they considered a base and impure metal, into gold, which was thought of as perfected matter. Some were acting out of greed, but the true alchemist was trying to heal matter of its imperfections. Their’s was a deeply devotional practice fueled by belief in the Divine. They believed in the concept "as above, so below (as in heaven, so on earth)". So, the physical world and the spiritual world were inseparably connected. For the alchemist, every external action in the physical world had a corresponding internal action. So when they healed the external world with their alchemical recipes, transforming base metals to more pure substances, they considered that they were also healing their internal selves. This idea fascinates me and I often find myself so connected to my own work that when I make intentional changes to a piece it really does change me. Alchemists often described their chemical reactions with symbolic drawings in flasks. The flasks in this series are describing my internal alchemy not actual alchemy recipes.