Poetry Inspired by Art

Jinksy and I recently started a collaboration, where we send each other photos of artworks we've made and in return write something inspired by each other's art. You can read the latest poem I wrote inspired by Jinksy's artwork here.

Jinksy in turn wrote a poem inspired by the above collage, which I originally posted way back for Inspire Me Thursday. I made the collage when I was a teenager and asked other Inspire Me Thursday participants what I could do with it. Their answers are still below in the comments section! And now, Jinksy's lively poem:

Whirling of petticoats,
flashing of eyes,
as couples gyrate.
See? Girls with their guys
flaunting bright cummerbunds-
colours galore
on softly draped neckerchiefs.
None can ignore
the traditional folk tunes
whose rhythmical beat
encourages dancers
to stamp their feet!

Autumnal Designs

I made these autumnal bookmarks and notelet from office waste, leaves found in a book and scraps torn from a Japanese poetry magazine. You can see an earlier card on the same theme here.

Inspire Me Thursday

Marzipan moon

marzipan moon rises slowly
through rusting clouds
shrinking herself paler
until she sits white
high in the sky

the lights of a plane
flash on and off
below her


I also have a piece about the moon up at A Handful of Stones today, you can read it here.

For a crafty moon please see Moonlit rabbit

Moon for Inspire Me Thursday

Silver envelope

I drink far too much tea and struggle to reuse all the metallic foil bags that most of my tea is wrapped in. I have used scraps of this material in cards (eg see this card) but that doesn't really use up that much of the stuff. However I recently discovered a great way to reuse the material, by making envelopes for greetings cards. The foil package is just the right size for a fairly small greetings card, I cut off the ends of the packet, glue one end down and leave the other as an envelope flap. Address labels can be glued or taped on the front.

Silver for Inspire Me Thursday

Excellent article on reuse on the new Ooffoo website here.

Elephants Never Forget!

This old notebook that i use for random notes and jottings needed brightening up a bit so I've added a drawing of a Sumatran elephant, made from waste paper.

Inspire Me Thursday - Elephants

Envelopes

Inspire Me Thursday's prompt this week is envelopes. I reuse envelopes all the time and try to do this in imaginative ways, you can see some examples of this here.

The photo below shows a page from a book of haiku and collages I'm currently putting together, using a book that I won in a competition in one of Michelle Ward's GPP Street Team Crusades. Inside the front cover, I've pasted a herbal tea envelope onto the page and used it to store a Japanese phonecard with one of my haiku written on the back.

Kitchen Tiger

This is cheating really, but Inspire Me Thursday's theme this week is Kitchen and I couldn't resist posting this little creature! Its cheating because a) I didn't make it, I only painted it. It's also quite old. It was originally given to me by a friend, as a kit to make a plant pot to grow cress in but now is filled with kitchen utensils. Tigers are one of my favourite animals, though rabbits certainly make better pets!


To find out more about tigers in the wild see: Tigers in Crisis

Binkying Bunny Card

Inspire Me Thursday's prompt this week is 'Leap'. This of course made me think of the binky (the rabbit leap of joy) which in turn seemed an ideal theme for an Easter card. So here is an Easter card featuring our much missed rabbit Anya binkying. The card is made from an offcut from a discarded publication that I rescued from the recycling bin at work, the paper is cut from an old letter.

Moonlit rabbit

This is my first project involving the felt I made from the shed fur of our rabbit Anya. As you can see from the last post about the felt, the rabbit face formed spontaneously in the felt making process, I've just added a button as an eye. The moon is the foil insert from a coffee jar, the wispy cloud is more rabbit felt and the black satin is from an old skirt that I had shortened.

No paint but a limited palette for Inspire Me Thursday

Diary from Reused Materials

I'm making myself a diary for next year and given that the Inspire Me Thursday topic this week is Diary, I thought I would post a picture of the diary as it is now. The covers are made from re-used corporate folders. The lettering and numbering on the front is cut out from magazines. The paper inside is reused out of date office headed paper. The diary is held together by an old shoelace.

Another Gift Box

It's an open theme at Inspire Me Thursday this week so here's another gift box! It is again made from a papier mache strawberry punnet from The Cyrenians organic farm just outside Edinburgh. They're the best strawberries ever too. See my first strawberry punnet gift box here.

haiga - light

A collage of old magazine images and reused wrapping paper to illustrate a haiku. The haiku is one of those I posted for One Deep Breath earlier this week:

clouds across the sun -

shade and light patchwork

the fields.

Light for Inspire Me Thursday

Connection

This 'Stay in Touch' card is made from Marimekko designs cut from a catalogue and photos from a review in an old issue of the List magazine.


Connection for Inspire Me Thursday

Favourite Souvenir

Inspire Me Thursday's art journal challenge this week is to journal our favourite holiday souvenir. This gave me an ideal opportunity to add this page to my still incomplete altered book holiday journal of our trip to Italy in November 2005. We bought the bottle in Ventimiglia, a lovely Italian town on the coast near the French border. It's a very beautiful bottle, but we were very disappointed by the quality of the amaretto that was in it! Never mind, it's still a lovely ornament!

From My Window

Inspire Me Thursday ask us this week to look out of our window for their art journalling prompt. The first photo here shows the beautiful old building across the road, it used to be until recently a day centre for older people but now has been converted to flats. It makes a nice contrast with the tenements surrounding it and the three cherry trees in front of it are gorgeous when they're in bloom. There's also a very convenient paper andpackaging recycling point there! My art journal page shows my favourite bird, the swift, which can be seen from our windows every day between May and August.

top floor flat window -

aerobatic swifts screech

across evening skies.

Sea Horses

Inspire Me Thursday this week offers us the prompt 'copy cat' as in 'the use of photocopies, image transfers, tracing patterns, repetitive images in your art.' I've gone for repetitive images using a rubber stamp of a seahorse. The image on the left is say 1970, the image on the right is say 2007.

The paper is reused office paper, the colours are pencil crayon.

More about seahorses and their conservation at The Seahorse Trust.

Round Rabbit

Environmentally friendly marker pen on re-used office waste paper.

Circles for Inspire Me Thursday.

Silence

There's the silence of peaceful contemplation, the silence of a quiet area of natural beauty, the silence of losing yourself in a good book. I wanted so much to post something positive about silence here, but the image of the bird with its beak tied shut wouldn't leave me alone so here it is!

Materials - reclaimed office paper (the textured recycled type), gold wrapping paper, photo of birds feathers. All 100% recycled and cut to size where necessary. Detail added in environmentally friendly marker pen (made by www.rosinco.com and available in the UK through the Natural Collection).

Silence for Inspire Me Thursday.

Foliage

sunlight glows through leaves

to dapple the woodland floor -

seedlings emerge.

Foilage for Inspire Me Thursday.

collage materials 100% reclaimed - black chocolate box filler, old wrapping paper, picture from magazine, foil(age).

To learn how you can help to preserve ancient woodland and trees, please visit the Woodland Trust.

Art Inspired by Words

This week's prompt on Inspire Me Thursday is to be inspired by words.

One thing I do quite often is to make collages or small artworks inspired by my own poems. Here is one I made earlier today for the poem below:

The Cultural Inheritance of my Hypothetical Granddaughter

Yellow butterflies drink salt from your tears,
drain your colours to monochrome.

Silence white margins your words
to endless winter.

Stillness so deep you can hear clouds
transmute to diamonds.

Check your shoes for black scorpions –
belief in Armageddon is self-fulfilling.


An end to all colour.