New Journal Page - Canadian Pride

 As a Canadian, the last several weeks have been frustrating, frightening and confusing, amongst other things. Talks of annexation by the United States, tariffs, and tension with our neigbours to the south have made for a lot of anxiety and worry. 

I'm finding it hard to concentrate on art-making, even though I know it is very therapeutic and I should be doing more of it. I've been turning to my art journal a bit more often because there are no expectations to turn out a good piece of art. I don't need to show any of it to anyone if I don't want to.

During the pandemic, a wonderful artist from Michigan, Kimberly Santini, generously produced a series short videos on Facebook called Journal Through It. I watched quite a few of them and still use some of the ideas in my art journal today. One of the things she does is to write down whatever is in your head: just spill it out onto the page. Write out all of your fears, angry thoughts, worries, hopes. Scribble it down fast and just keep writing. Fill the page, then turn your book and scribble more thoughts on top of what you already wrote. Keep doing this until you can't think of anything more. 

Then, if you want, cover it up with paint or collage or whatever you want. Leave some of it peeking out to remind you of what you wrote and how you were feeling. 

I used this technique and another one Kimberly showed us in my journal the other day. In her demo, she used a page that had many different colours of paint randomly brushed on the page. Over top she wrote a favourite quote in cursive, exagerating the lengths and loops of some of the letters. Then she went over the letters with a marker and made them thicker in places and joining some of them together, making them look quite abstract. She then painted around the letters with differenct colours, leaving the spaces inside the o's and e's etc. I wish I could find her original video, but haven't had any luck.

For my journal pages, I scribbled out all my thoughts and feelings, and then wrote some patriotic words over top. I used white paint to cover up some of the words, but left some showing, even thought you can't make out what they say. 

Here is a bit of a closeup:

Anyway, the bright side to this is that everything that is happening is bringing Canadians closer together and Canadian Pride is bigger than ever! Elbows up, Canada!