Tuesday, September 06, 2011

A New Art Journal: Raw

 My Little Red Book has been completely filled. It was time to start to look around for a replacement. I loved working on the small pages ( 16 cm x 16 cm) of that little book. Luckily I had another version of that diary lying around and could not resist using that as a successor of the Little Red Book.

So there I went: tearing pages out, glueing several pages together to improve the strength of the pages and adding a layer of gesso over the page to hide the text underneath it.

I had noticed while working in the Little Red Book, that somehow I lost the idea of making the pages pretty or beautiful. Instead of artfully decorated pages, it soon became all about the thoughts, feelings and ideas that I wanted to express on the page. It was kind of raw, with everything on the page enhancing the mood of my expression with no regards toward art or rules of art.


Since I loved that feeling, I decided to work in the same way in this new book. Expressing myself in a free, raw way and leaving it up to the viewer to interpret the page and decide on  her/his own interpretation.

This way of working gives me a lot of freedom and helps me to express myself without the restriction of bearing my soul to the world of internet. You might understand what I am saying, or you may not understand it at all.
Maybe you discover a different meaning of the page, or maybe it stirs up your soul. Or maybe it does not say anything to you at all (and you get ideas on how to improve such a page).
Whatever it is that you feel while looking at it, I hope that it inspires you on some level. :-)

1 comment:

Marit said...

Het is inderdaad 'raw journaling' wat jij doet... ik vind dat persoonlijk een geweldige vorm, en ik snap helemaal wat je bedoeld! Ken je trouwens 'extreme journaling'? Hier is een link

http://extremejournalism.ning.com/

Je nieuwe boek ziet er mooi uit trouwens! Jij kunt vooruit!