Rock Paper Scissors Stone

It feels somehow wrong to be thinking (obsessively, in my case) about art, given the raw struggle for survival that people in Port-au-Prince and so many other places are facing right now. After all, you can't eat art, at least not directly. But that's where I seem to be--thinking in bright bursts of images and shapes; my hands itching to sketch, to stitch, to meld wool to stone.


I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday with a stomach ache and couldn't get back to sleep. As I lay on my side trying to will myself to unconsciousness, the image of great fluttering kites popped into my unquiet mind. Neat stitches secured the silky kite paper to the wooden frames in a neat cross, and the kites were all strung together on one long line, fluttering briskly above energetic ocean waves. I felt their freedom above the earth, their leashed power held only by a single thread.

So I went downstairs to the dining room table, which has become my craft area, and picked up a wool-covered stone, my canvas of choice lately. Japanese yuzen paper became the kites on the flat gray sky, and the fabric-like paper tacked easily to wool and stone. Single strands of embroidery floss suggested the waves and a lone cloud. Somehow at that moment it became a necessity to make these dream images real, to embody them in cotton and wool and stone, as if speaking aloud the words of a long-forgotten poem.

These dream kites are not the only images floating around in my head right now. And I'm trying to be cool here with this overload of inspiration. I'm trying not to flip out, to just receive it and process it all. I'm trying to allow myself to be . . . gulp . . . an artist, and to ignore the little voice that keeps telling me that it's my brother who is the artist in the family, not me; the other little voice that whispers that I don't have the talent or training to try to translate what's inside of me into this unlikely, crazy textile form that I've chosen; those other half-heard voices that try to distract me. (OK, now I *AM* sounding like the guy who cut off his ear. :))

So, gentle readers--if there are any of you left out there--bear with me. I may be doing a sort of data dump of covered stone love on the blog for however long this ride lasts. I am trying out new stitches and combining different materials, feeling my way to a stitched vocabulary that is distinctly my own. I will continue to donate the results of my covered stone explorations to the Haiti by Hand Etsy shop, where you can find this Rock Paper Scissors Stone listed soon.