Mea Culpa with Miniature Cathedrals

I hope everyone enjoyed a warm, nostalgic, lovely Thanksgiving with family and friends! And ate too much, of course.

In lieu (yet again) of a new piece of artwork, here is a little bookshelf landscape, consisting of one of my assemblage pieces, called "Mea Culpa," and part of my collection of miniature souvenir cathedrals acquired in German fleamarkets. The red you see in the assemblage piece, is very tiny writing on struck matches, which states, over and over, Mea Culpa, It's Your Fault, Mea Maxima Culpa, It's All Your Fault, Mea Culpa...etc. The calligraphy is the Confiteor, a Latin prayer expressing guilt. A little commentary on one aspect of my Catholic school upbringing.

Abandoning my collage a day project has broken my heart. How I miss that feeling of accomplishment as I built up a body of work, day by day. What a thrill to be self-assured that I could call upon an inner source of creativity that would not let me down. How bitter that it was external circumstances that brought it to a halt—but how much more bitter if I’d had to quit because I’d simply reached the end of my ideas. Still, it is bitter too, to know that while I am up to the challenge creatively, yet I must let art that might have come forth, stay locked up in my mind, because I do not have the time and constitutional fortitude (sleep deprivation is impossible to sustain for a woman of my age) to bring it into the light of day. *sigh*  I feel all at sea. How typical of me to over-reach, then crash and berate myself. Well. This is a line of thought that will lead only to a dead-end. I’ve found myself in a morbid mood too often as it is. And please forgive me for splashing my personal angst all over my blog. But where else??

I’ve concluded that the collage workshop I took last month did more harm than good. I learned what I did not need, and very little that I did. Which is, of course, educational in itself, but still. So I’ve been trying to figure out what I expected from that course, based on the pre-workshop tasks we were set to collect samples of colors, texts, and imagery from magazines (both which we liked and didn’t)  and how I could achieve those anticipated goals on my own. An interesting exercise.

I suppose there are good points to giving up 3SIXTY5. I was working very small, due to time constraints—now I don’t have to. And it spawned many ideas which will require time to work out , that will beckon me into the future. My biggest stumbling block remains Time, as in, not enough of. Time, as in, spent mostly expending my energy on others’ concerns, in order to pay our bills. Time, as in, Running Out!