When I see all the images coming out of Japan — these are the most poignant I’ve seen –  I can’t help but remember when our studio flooded a few years ago. What we experienced was so nothing compared to what’s happening on the other side of the world right now.

I tend not to try to portray sorrow or pain in my art, because it only seems to make me spiral down. Somehow by looking for the small lights in dark days and recreating the world through drawings and poetry helps me to feel like like I’ve reversed that trend. That and trying to do something positive. In addition to sending money to international aid groups, here’s some different ways to help:

Comfort Quilts for Japan

Patchwork Quilt Tsushin is a well-known quilting magazine in Japan, and they have sent out a plea for comfort quilts. Comfort quilts are utilitarian quilts made for children, newborns, or adults that can help ease pain or discomfort in times of sickness or distress. Here is a blog post by Tanya Watanabe, a quilter living in Japan who has translated the message from the Patchwork Quilt Tsushin website.

She has the requirements for quilts and shipping instructions to Japan. If you are in the United States, she also has instructions for shipping by April 30 to Quilter’s Newsletter who is making a collection in Boulder, Colorado to ship in bulk to Japan, and the Quilter’s Newsletter call for Quilts for Japan are here.

eQuilter.com is also partnering with Mission of Love to send a shipment of quilts to Japan

And if you are in Europe, there is another collection point in France by Quilt Expo en Beaujolais.

Springfield Sister Cities’ Japan Relief Fund

We’ve been involved with Sister Cities for some 18+ years, helping with artist exchanges, festivals, and educational programs. One of our sister cities is Isesaki, Japan, and each time we’ve been to Japan, we’ve made a trip there to visit and stay with friends. We’ve also had many friends from Isesaki stay in our home here in Springfield, and last year we started the sister cities website http://peacethroughpeople.org which is coming in handy right now to publicize current fund-raisers.

Our sister city is near Tokyo and not in the one of the severely devastated areas of Japan. There was physical damage to buildings and only one death in the prefecture. But we hear from friends about the food rationing, power blackouts, bans on food and water, and in general the whole country is a mess because the transportation and deliveries everywhere are messed up, not to mention the fears about the nuclear crisis.

After 9-11 and Katrina, our sister city raised and sent money for us to put where it would do good – it was sent to the American Red Cross. After our local 2007 ice storm, they raised and sent $17000 to replant trees and later sent 9 master gardeners to help rebuild our Japanese Stroll Garden.

The motto of our local chapter is “Think Globally, Act Locally” and there’s already been a lot of local action. We’ve partnered with students from Missouri State University, Drury University, the Community Foundation to raise money. On Monday, at local restaurant Nakato Japanese Steakhouse will donate every dollar spent in the restaurant will go to Japan. And more fund-raisers are being planned.

If you’re in the area, come out to Nakato’s on Monday, or donate directly to the Japan Relief fund here.

I’ve had The Tao of Sketching for a couple of years, but packing it along on a recent trip to Mexico was a great opportunity to truly study the book. Chinese artist Qu Lei Lei covers using a wide of variety of media and subject matter. Here’s a good review of the book by artist and writer Katherine Tyrrell on Making a Mark blog. I especially like this quote she highlights:

Successful sketching depends on two distinct elements to be combined: the understanding of how each medium works and the ability to measure the amount of time you have available against the scene you want to record.
Qu Lei Lei – techniques

The samples of his own sketches drawn in many countries around the world are a delight to study, and the included demonstrations are not meant to copied, but to illustrate how the reader might approach their own subject matter and draw from the heart.

As I read his “Beijing Breakfast” chapter about drawing groups of people who are constantly in motion, it all seemed simple enough. Just draw one person, then another and another…then finally the background and furniture because that doesn’t move. But it really is a great challenge to do in real life.

Here are couple of my attempts during our trip. In “Lunch at Paco’s” I tried to capture the feeling of a group of people gathered around a table, listening to songs, and the colorful ceramic plates on the wall of Paco’s house. I sketched first in pencil, then watercolor washes, and last added the ink pen details. It probably took about 45 minutes.

I had less time for “Quinta Patio Evening” and so used pen first, then only suggested a few colors with watercolor wash. As Qu Lei Lei suggested, I wrote a few notes about the scene at the bottom of the page to remind myself of colors and mood at the bottom of the sketch.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I like to explore and photograph art in other cities, then try to write up some kind of original blog post about unexpected finds, like these in Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, and Kansas City. I don’t know why I’ve never thought to do this in my home town — guess the old cliche of something being too close to notice is too true.

Last month I heard about a blogger who recently moved here from LA and after talking with the husband, I got inspired to put on my stranger in a strange land glasses and walk around town. Partly this was motivated because I’ve been trying to document public art in our region and get it listed on our Springfield Public Art blog.

But as these things go, the quest took on a life of its own. In attempts to profile public art works in their best light, I started visiting different city and park sites many times at different times of day and night. Getting out of my car and walking side roads I hadn’t traveled before was also a great excuse to get outside and soak up the wonderful October-November weather and brilliant turning of the leaves.

Since winter is just around the corner, there was an urgency to capture as much on camera as I could before the grass and leaves were completely gone — and the project became a little like a trophy hunt. And though most of the photos I was trying to get were rather didactic, I couldn’t help but stop along the way for other photos of lonely spots, unusual or forgotten things, and as my friend Christine says, “all things absurd, ironic and delightful.”

Here’s a few of my detour photos in the gallery below. Click to see larger.

As my collection of photographs has swollen out of control, I’ve been learning to use Aperture to organize photos – a very handy program indeed!  I’ve also been learning to geo-tag them and have gotten immersed in the world of Google maps and Google Earth — but that’s a whole other topic I’ll have to finish writing about tomorrow.

An ice house, I found out is a place were they used to cut up, store, and redistribute big blocks of ice that were brought down on the railroad from frozen lakes up north before there were such things as electricity, refrigerators, and deep-freezers. Hence the old-fashioned term “ice box” was a wooden cabinet where you put a block of ice below your food to keep it fresh.

For the open house of Marlin Company in their new digs, massive blocks of ice stood like sentinels at doorways and in the front lobby of the third floor of this massive old building. Blocks of ice with words in them.

Begging the question, I don’t know how to make such good-looking ice cubes, but here are a few photos. Not only did they look good, the quotes inside had inspiring themes such as “Build upon a grand Idea, and nothing can tear it down,” and “Creativity is the currency of Tomorrow.”

Marlin Company is a creative agency, and some of the people who work there are also artists. And they support local artists in a big way. The front lobby is full of art.

Here’s some of my friend Stephanie Cramer’s work in situ. I didn’t really know it was hers until I had to walk across the room because I fell in love with that blue bird — and saw her name on the tag.

The big gear coffee table? Made from a gear out of the old elevator shaft of the ice house by Michael Stelzer, president of Marlin Company who creates hand-forged sculpture in an old barn in his spare time.

The flowers were done by the Flower Merchant over on Campbell. Some of the arrangements looked almost like alien beings, and the main centerpiece like a formation of moon and the planets swirling around our solar system. And since Marlin’s specialty is working with national food companies, of course all the food was art!

Click on a thumbnail below to see larger images and captions:

For those who have been wondering if I fell off the end of the earth, unfortunately for many weeks I was teleported to another dimension called Really Hard Work. Not just the brain-drain kind of hard work, but also the kind that completely wears you out by the end of the day.

I was able to sustain my energy by ingesting vast amounts of red licorice, coffee and diet coke. But at the end of each day, I didn’t feel like writing blogs or making art — all I wanted to do was come home and fall asleep playing Plants versus Zombies on the sofa. And since I sort of lost my sense of humor for a while, it’s probably better I didn’t write much.

Now that I’m getting back into the blogging mood, here are more pages from my sketchbook. While in Japan, we visited a high school, and I got a chance to draw the girls in music class. The school has a blue uniform that sort of looks like gym suits and looks very comfortable. I wouldn’t mind wearing a uniform — It would save having to decide what to wear every morning!

Here’s some pages from my Japan sketchbook. At the Kitain Temple in Kawagoe, there is a small plot of land with rows and rows of Buddhist monks, carved from stone between 1782 and 1825. A note on the guide sheet said no two are alike. It’s not just that the statues are all different – it’s that each one has such distinctive personality, each one was doing something different or expressing a different emotion.

Some were laughing, some crying, some sleeping, fishing, praying, planting…. They were difficult to photograph because the area was dark and shady, the statues broken and covered in moss. So I started drawing. I wish I could have stayed longer and drawn more, but it have would taken a long time to draw 540.

If you can’t read the writing, it is a legend I copied from the guide paper that they hand out at the information desk. Our Japanese friend Kazuko said the legend wasn’t in the Japanese version of the guidebook.  So I don’t know where the legend came from, but I still like it.

“It is said, if you feel among the statues in the dead of night, you will find one that feels warm. Mark it and return in the day, and you will find it is the one most resembling yourself.”

I haven’t posted many photos of Japan, since I’ve given all those to Russ to organize with the thousand he took. But I’ve been studying the stone monks because they have become part of project I’m drawing, except instead of stone plants and baskets, my monks are holding cell phone and kindles. These photos aren’t very good (Russ has much better ones) but they give you an idea of the place.

Here’s another drawing from the museum of the Third Shogun which was near the stone monks. You couldn’t take photos in there at all, but I wanted to draw these things after I found out what they are.
Farm tools?

no
Torture devices?
no.
They were used when chasing people to catch onto their kimonos so they couldn’t run away.

I know for my online Japan Journal, I should probably first show you the pretty photos of snow-covered ancient pine trees in Nikko, but I have to start with the funky stuff first – because it’s my nature, and also I have a project deadline approaching, lol.

Always ready to have a project in pocket, I was happy to have something for my brain to gnaw on during this recent trip to Japan and decided to revisit my Wish You Were Hair series. What could it be I wondered? What hairstyle would express how I felt about visiting Japan this time?

At first blush, this is the scenic view of a drive-by in Japan. Some traditional house, farm fields, etc.

But on closer look, I started to notice antennas on the top of each and every house. As I took more photos of electrical poles, wire and cell towers, I reminded myself how our personal visual editing system is constantly removing things right in front of our eyes, but the camera can show us of what is really there.

There is this:

this…

and this…

Thinking about all these antennae and electrical lines, it makes me think how dependent we are today on the internet, phones, and at the most basic level, on electricity. But having survived a week-long city-wide ice storm and electrical outage a few years ago, I’m always reminding myself how fragile this lifestyle can also be.

Closer to Tokyo, I started to get more photos of all kinds of unique cell and radio towers, and wired buildings crammed together.

These were all shot out of a moving van on a rainy day, so excuse the blurriness. But maybe it sets a mood also?

Tokyo Disneyland and neighboring cell tower:

Tokyo Tower:

How do you get from Point A to Point B on an art project? I’m not sure of the best answer, but in this case, I took an overwhelming 242 photos (and Russ even more!) of electrical lines and cell towers in Japan , then didn’t look at a single one while I was drawing sketches like this on the plane home.

Now to just fit in some more stuff I feel sentimental about — like those 540 stone statues of Buddhist monks I drew near a temple in Kewagoe!

When traveling, it’s difficult to find time to post and write about many things we see. So here’s just a few images… as always the food can be so beautiful in Japan. I have no idea what it was — but it was delicious!

I know what this was though, sashimi. It’s now gone also – in my tummy!

It’s also fun to look for good Jaenglish — a sort of weird apanese and English words. Yesterday I was please to have Creap and “Slim Up Sugar” with my coffee.

Outside a karoke shop with my friend Buddha.  I don’t know the words to many songs, but I know “Yellow Submarine.

As always, it’s fun to delight in contrasts. A beautiful Japanese teahouse. I love the uncut bark on the the logs on the ceiling. A Japanese loom. I’d love to take this apart and put in my suitcase, but it’s already pretty full of stuff.

And then there’s huge animatronic mushrooms in this arcade ride.

In case you’re wondering, we’re here on a Sister Cities exchange trip to represent our city and help set up some new cultural and educational exchanges. So we’re traveling with a group, and not necessarily at our own pace. I’ll write more when I get a chance!

1. Draw your food. It probably looks better than it tastes anyway, and confuses the flight attendants who keep wanting to take the half-eaten food to get it out of your way.

It’s also good practice to start with something like food before you start trying to draw people in public. I’m a little out of practice of drawing in public, and had forgotten how people like to watch and see how it the drawing turns out.

2. Draw the people around you. It makes them nervous because you keep looking intently at them.

I love this overhead quote…. “I’m not creative about things like drawing and very compartmentalized. When she got to the break in the page…..and then went over it, I thought Whoa, is that allowed?!”

3. Go to the back of the plane and look at how funny all those little monitors in the plane seat look all light up with the lights out. They are kind of hard to draw, but it gets you out of your seat and confuses people who think you’re standing in line for the restrooms.

4. Draw the restroom. It’s very small, so the perspective can be interesting. My drawing didn’t turn out very good, so I won’t show it to you. Oh okay, here it is.

5. Stuff your big down coat into an Eco-sack, fold the handles over, and wala — you have a big fat down pillow. Especially good if the plane’s not too crowded and you can hog several seats to lay down.

6. Make an eye pillow out of fabric themed to the country you’re traveling, in this case I used a blue indigo batik. Try not to think about this project too far in advance — maybe not even until 10 pm the night before your flight. Then you’ll find no matter how much you sew, it’s hard to find a piece of elastic in the house that doesn’t sort of look like a bra strap. All night grocery stores have elastic headbands — cut one of these open, and you have a nice strap for the eye pillow. The eye pillow helps you sleep on the plane, which you need to do, since you stayed up all night making eye pillows.

7. Wake up and use your final slap-happy hour of the flight to write a silly blog post. It’ll make you feel better and look forward to getting off the plane and back to the world of the internet where you can post it.

This time I thought I’d start a journal right by working on the cover first! The “1″ looks like I got a little heavy with the hammer, but other than than, I’m pretty happy with how the letters turned out.