Agenda

I'm nearly ready for 2008. My year-end rituals include setting up the new calendar and organizing greeting cards by month. I buy too many. So if you get a birthday card from me it's probably in this photo. But at this stage I'm more pleased with the sense of order (thank you Russel + Hazel and Your M.O.) than I am with the enticing artwork. It's the crispness of the New Year that propels me forward. January will come and go like it always does, but this last week of December is like getting ready for a big event. I'm ironed, polished, and ready to be entertained.

Journey Book

I bought this hand-made book from lovelydesign.com. I've been using it the last few years as Postcards to Myself, a journey book wherein I write my travel itineraries on postcards and mail them back to myself. Though I always pack it, I seem to be too lazy to take my camera with me on excursions. Instead, I've taken to collecting paper ephemera, then gluing them into my journey book when I return. I fashion pockets to tuck my postcards into, like this one from Chez Panisse where we ate last December while staying with Lupé and Levi in San Francisco. I'm desperate to travel again ... it's been a year since that vacation. So I turn back to my journey book to remember previous trips: Atlanta, Seattle, Victoria B.C. I have room left in the book. Just need a ticket to anywhere.

Reverence for the Leaves

Time to share a treasure. Three years after graduation I finally had the courage to attempt to send Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple as well as my favorite poet, a series of paintings I did as a student based upon her work. The assignment was to make a stencil and use it over and over to create a series of paintings with a nice relationship to each other. I made a stencil from a leaf I found, and then created conceptual paintings based upon poem fragments from Alice Walker's anthology Her Blue Body Everything We Know. My series is titled Reverence for the Leaves. Though it took a lot of phone calls and being shuffled around, I was surprised how easy it was to get connected to her assistant, whom I unfortunately woke up one morning. Nevertheless, she gave me her address, and I sent a copy of the series to Ms. Walker care of her assistant—uncertain she'd ever actually see it. Shortly after Valentines Day, 1998, I received not only a card back from Alice Walker herself, but it was a handmade card on construction paper with a photo she took in Cuba taped to the front. Flattered beyond belief, I share it here.