And now for something completely different....

Lighthouse at Fort Point, San Francisco --
Processed with Kim Klassen's "Felicity" and a texture I created from a photo I took at the fort,
 using the tutorial Kim shared in our "Beyond Layers" class
(linking with Texture Tuesday)

I'm taking a break from showing images from my trip to Thailand ..... Instead, my husband and I decided to take a quick trip out to California last week to visit family.  The weather was wonderful, and we were outside as much as possible.  One day we explored the parks around the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  

Although I've been to San Francisco many times (I even lived here for a few years when I was a child), I had never visited Fort Point before.  Fort Point was the main naval defense for the city of San Francisco until the civil war.  It is tucked away under the base of the bridge, and probably isn't high on tourists' must-see lists.  Despite my fear of heights, I had a marvelous time -- there were so many interesting angles to capture:

This was the walk back from the fort towards Crissy Field:

Crissy Field was originally an early aviation strip, and is now a well-used park along the beach.  It certainly is a magnet for dogs!  We met my husband's sister and her boys there with their Golden, Brooklyn.  As you can see from the first photo, he was so happy in the water (it would take an awful lot of treats to get our Golden, Jackson, to venture anywhere near it)!  I was surprised to see how many professional dog-walkers were out, too.  I am still a little nervous about taking pictures of strangers, so I only got a few shots of them, but they were legion that day:

And now, on a completely different subject......

My creativity seems to run in cycles, and lately all I want to do is work in fabric.  In the last few weeks I have completed three quilt tops.  I will send two of them out to be finished by machine, but I plan on quilting this one by hand.  Since it might be awhile (a long while) before I am finished, I'll show it now:

It's really big, so wish me luck!

The creative journey....part I

Lotus flower, Thailand
(processed with a layer of Kim Klassen's "Sweet Treat" and "Warm Grunge")

I always tell my children that it is not what happens to you in life that matters, but rather how you react to what happens to you that is important.  "Stuff" happens to people all the time and there is nothing magical about you that keeps the "bad" from happening sometimes.  The question is, will you allow it to cloud your life and your attitudes, or will you use the situation to change something in yourself.

My creative journey is so wrapped up in the circumstances of my life that it is hard to unravel the separate threads. I had a wonderful childhood and young adulthood.... I was happy, and things came easily to me:  academics, friendships, career, marriage and three wonderful children.  I expected that life would just continue along this positive trajectory.  And really, in a way, it has.... just not the way I thought it would.  For the most part, my life is picture perfect except for one rather significant thing: my oldest child, now a 22 year-old young man, has to deal with issues that significantly impact his ability to live an independent life.  The curve ball our family has been dealt in this life is not something that we recognized immediately or that came on suddenly -- rather, its severity has been revealed so gradually that, painful as it is, it has never come as a shock, but has settled down on us like a dull ache.  

One of my favorite journal pages...

The details of his story are my son's to share or not, but let's just say that the consequences of his illness have been the impetus for my own creative journey.  I have been "artsy" all my life, but the thought never even crossed my mind that I could be an artist.... after all, I didn't go to art school!  I knew that to ignore my son's illness -- or to wallow in despair about it -- were both useless exercises.  I had to turn to something to keep me busy and focused. I discovered quiltmaking when I was 40, and immediately fell in love with the way I could play with color without getting messy.  Not only that, but I could sew while still paying attention to my kids. 

This is the first quilt I made (for my son), back in 2000.  It was hand-pieced... I remember every stitch!

I soon realized that the quiet time spent making quilts was my spiritual solace, a time when I could reflect on my life and its lessons and to find beauty in fragments.  My needle and thread became the crucible in which despair became beauty, tempered by patience.  Quilting was a perfect expression of my need for endurance.  You can't achieve a finished quilt without putting in a lot of time!  As I moved on in the last few years to include mixed media art and photography, the sense of time as a vital element in my work became more and more evident.  I love using textures in photographs precisely because they introduce a fourth dimension -- time -- to an image, suggesting that it has withstood the ravages of time to exist today.  I am in this game with my son for the long haul, and that sense of time as a distiller of something exquisite is very important to me.

I am looking forward to 2012, and participating in the creative communities online.  By nurturing our creativity every day, we will envision a world that is better than the one we live in today -- and everyone knows that once we visualize something, it is on its way.