Time to get to work...

… I have hardly done anything since my last post,

apart from some blind contour drawings for Carla Sonheim's LifeBook14 assignment, and a first attempt at a Princess for The Year of the Fairy Tale.

Below the Princess, and her Cat, you find:

a Zebra
Flowers in a vase, and a House (oops, these are contour drawings, but they are not 'blind'!)
another Zebra

Another work in progress...

This is the first step of another LifeBook assignment (second week of LB12).

The Earth Goddess

Here are some pictures of the Earth Goddess… I have not finished the assignment yet, but that may take weeks….

Really poor quality photographs, sorry about that. 

I rotated some of them, but they flipped back after copying them to my blog (I am clueless about how IPhoto works, and the help function doesn't help at all - because there is nothing in it - or is that my cluelessness, too?). 

But I promise I am going to learn how to Photoshop (I shall have to now) - it is one of my New Year Resolutions: no more crappy pictures on my blog!

Anyway, the Earth Goddess does look rather earthy now, with these artificial light colours…. in real life the collage is less green.

I Created...

Oh, yes, I did it: the First Assignment of LifeBook2014! And I am so proud of myself!

After signing up for many, many online courses the last six years (at least) - many of them Carla Sonheim's courses (and if she can't get me going, who can? - I Love Carla Sonheim) - never doing anything apart from watching the instruction videos and feeling utterly depleted and tired afterwards. Not to mention the Guilt I was feeling on spending money on courses and not even getting started.

And now, I realise that all this signing up, and watching, and dreaming - oh yes, I did that: I so wanted to get started… - has been part of the healing process. That all the art making I watched so intensely for so long, somehow planted the seeds for this 're-awakening', as I would like to call it. That I hadn't been doing nothing, but that creativity had been gestating, fermenting, growing all this time.

Looking back I can now see how old wounds were healing slowly, how I learned all over again that being creative is not about hard work and failing anyway. That creativity is about exploring and discovering, about letting your soul roam free and follow it wherever it chooses to go. All the while paying attention to what happens. Just following and paying attention.

There are some final details to be filled in, and then I will share some pictures of it here.

…………………………………...

Also, synchronistically, I picked up a small stone from the beach, a few weeks ago. It had such a pretty shape, I thought it would make a nice talisman for something or other.

A few days before LB14 began, I was fiddling about with a collage I had started. Adding some shade here and there. And found it was kind of looking like a cave. A nice place to create a shrine for some sort of Earth Goddess. And I remembered my beach stone: it was just the right shape for an Earth Goddess, so I made a little drawing of her in the cave.

LB14 started with a meditation exercise. We were to picture some sort of Guide to protect us from harm and (our own) criticism during the LB year, and then the meditation led us along a path that ended at a place of shelter. A place where we could find our Guide.

Not so surprisingly, I ended up in a small cave, where I found my Earth Goddess.

I love this, when two projects somehow lead me to the same place. It gives me this reassuring feeling that I am on the right track.

Pictures of Lente

Isn't he Beautiful?

Altijd-Lente

Some of you may have wondered why this blog is called 'Altijd-Lente', and what 'Altijd-Lente' means…

Lente is Dutch for Spring. Altijd is Dutch for 'always' or 'forever'.

Lente was also the name of one of the sweetest cats I have ever known.

In time I will share more about him. He died a week before Christmas is 2010, aged 15, after having spent nearly five years with me.

He came from the Amsterdam Animal Shelter, where he was left by people who had found him on the pavement, in the rain, shivering and frightened and wet. He was just lying there, and had given up on life.

A few weeks before the shelter placed an ad about him in the local newspaper, I started having dreams about a group of cats sitting in front of our apartment building. Sometimes they were sitting on the pavement on the opposite side of the street, sometimes they were in a builders container.

But in each dream, one of the cats, a white one with some black spots, would leave the group and approach me.

In the dream my neighbours and I would wonder how the cats got there, and where they came from, as they all looked healthy and well-fed.

When I had dreamt(/dreamed?) the same dream for the third time, I started to wonder if it might be the right time to start thinking about adopting another cat (my last cat had died five months before).

About a week later I came home one day feeling very, very tired, and I sat down on the couch and leafed through the local paper, which I hardly ever read. And there it was: a photograph of the exact same cat I had been dreaming about… in the animal shelter ad! He had been living in the shelter for eight months, and really needed a home.

That same afternoon, I took him home.

He was so frightened the first two days, that he would stand on his hind legs against the wall in a corner of the living room, pushing his little head agains the wall, trying to disappear into it. It was such a very sad sight.

Little by little he began to trust me. But he had lots of behavorial problems, he was very scared and would hiss and lash out at me for no reason, and he would scratch himself so much that he created a large open wound on his back. It turned out this scratching was caused by a chip under his skin that he was allergic to. But after it had been removed, the scratching continued.

He had to be kept in bandages for weeks for the wound to heal. And when the bandage was removed, he would immediately start scratching again until the wound was as bad as it was before.

After about a year of this, I finally called in the help of an animal behavioural therapist. She confirmed what the vet and I thought, that it was mainly due to stress, and that he had been mistreated for years, perhaps even for his entire adult life (he was about nine years old when he was brought to the shelter).

The vet had already discovered that all his molars had broken off just above the roots, which must have been caused by a fall, a kick, or being thrown at or out of something.

It took about two years for him to heal his psychological wounds. He needed a lot of love and patience. I also had to teach him tricks to help him bond with me.

This was the time of my burn out, so I was home a lot anyway, and Lente became my best friend. By the time I moved from Amsterdam to where I live now, we loved one another to bits. He was such a sweet and gentle natured cat. And so glad that he had found a home.

When he came to live with me, he would crouch low to the ground when he moved around the house.

After he had begun to trust me, he walked differently, there was a spring in his step, and he stood tall, and proud, his ears pricked, his whiskers curled forward. 'Bright eyed and bushy tailed'.

A year after moving house, I had the garden enclosed, so he could go outside (when I took him home from the shelter, I had to promise to let him out only in a secluded environment). A few months later, in the autumn of 2010, when we were taking our daily walk in the garden, he suddenly started whimpering and lying down every few steps he took.

I took him to the vet. Poor Lente was bleeding internally and had to stay in hospital overnight. Tests and scans showed he had a very large malignant liver tumor.

It was attached to a large blood vessel, and could not be removed.

Because I had had him insured, we could afford to give him radio-active treatment. It was the only chance he had to prolong his life and give him a good quality of life at the same time.

It worked, the tumor shrunk dramatically, and we had high hopes that he might live another year.

And then, on Sunday a week before Christmas, he started to throw up violently. He could not hold down food or water, and deteriorated rapidly. We called the clinic for advice. It turned out that what remained of the tumor was pressing against his gall bladder, and this was causing his nausea. There was nothing that could be done for him, and he was put to sleep the same day.

It was awful, having to say goodbye to my very sweet, very brave little friend, who had had such a long life filled with misery. He had had only a few years of true happiness. And he had deserved so many more.

We had him cremated, and his ashes put in a little urn, so I could take him home.

I keep him on the top shelf of the bookcase in his favourite room, where he belongs.

Pauline Agnew's Pop-Up Open Studio Weekend

Here are the results of my 'mark making to Vivaldi', the Open Studio assignment. 

Thank you, Frida, who shared this event with me...

It was a really fun thing to do!

http://www.seedbedstudio.net/mark-making-to-sound/