Lekshe's Mistake

ok, ok it's a manic day

ok, ok get over here to this website called toothpaste for dinner

and buy a hoodie or something. keep this pen working.

Natural Egg Dyes

Tomorrow some friends are coming over to dye eggs. We'll use the dollar kit of cold water egg dye and we'll also use some natural dyes.

My favorite thing to do is to collect small, lacy plants and to lay a tiny plant on the egg surface and then to tie the egg (plant in place) in a nylon stocking scrap. The tighter and smoother the stocking is against the egg, the better. Then you dye the egg and let it dry. When you remove the stocking, the place where the plant was will be a lovely, white print of the plant. Try one.

Try natual egg dyes. They're so fun. Several friends, maybe even a whole neighborhood, can do this for under five dollars. It's legal. Gosh. Not many things fit that criteria.

Thangka

Earlier this week Carlos, on his blog, Mysterium, posted a link to some wonderful Buddhist cave paintings. I made a brief comment to his poste about how those images are made, and some reference to what role they play for practitioners.

I lived in Nepal for three years or so and when I was there I took up Buddhist icongraphic or thangka painting. It was a great experience. My teacher was an old Tibetan lama who had escaped to Nepal from Tibet during the Chinese invasion. He ran a small thangka "factory," which was a school or sorts, in a small Newari mud brick home he owned in the Thamel neighborhood in Kathmandu. He employed a half-dozen or so top-notch thangka painters. They were not monks, they were bluejean clad, headphone wearing, Arnold Schwarzenegger fans. But they took their painting seriously and they produced some of the finest Karma Gadri style work I have seen.

Since I was the only female student, I was shut in a room by myself for six hours a day, memorizing the complicated mathematical grids that the images are drawn upon. For most of the year I studied, I'd draw the grid, draw the face of the Buddha over the grid, erase it, and draw it again.

Magically, more or less each time I was done, the lama would knock, come in the room, sit down, say the very few words of English he knew, "Oh good," and then proceed to draw over my mistakes and erase the entire page (grid and all), smile and say, "Again." Arrggh.

Each day in the afternoon, a small, smiling, mute boy would knock on the door and deliver hot milk tea to my room. At this time, I was allowed to go into the other room and see the work of the other artists. We talked and laughed for a half hour or so and then I began the next drawing, alone in my room. In a year, though I had drawn for years, I never progressed beyond the body of the Enligtened One. And in the end, I had used less than one pad of paper. That was good practice.

These drawings are tools for memorzing visualizations in Buddhism, and they are drawn according to ancient tradition, evey small detail has meaning. The position of hands, or mudras, for example, can say much about what the painting is meant to convey.

There is a wonderful site, Dharmapala Thangka Center, with an extensive gallery of good-quality work, and a most fascinating "thangka cam," where you can watch a painting be created, step by step.

There is a reasonably good explanation of thangkas and their use by Ann Shaftel.

There is a an excellent book on thangka painting how-to, called Tibetan Thangka Painting: Methods and Materials , by David P. Jackson, Janice A. Jackson, and Robert Beer, a famous American-born thangka artist. The Dharmapala site also has a good listing of other books.

If you have interest in learning more about thangka painting in a fun environment, there's a great teacher, Sanje Elliot, in Portland, Oregon, who teaches from his home studio. Class schedules and prices are on the site, and they're very reasonable. What the site doesn't tell you is that Sanje is a total hoot--waaaay too much fun. Though some of Sanje's students are professional artists, there are a few who describe their skills as "I couldn't draw my way out of a paper bag," and they don't seem to have any less fun in his classes.

thangka being presented to Venerable Bokar Rinpoche in Mirik, India, 2003

More Postzegels!

I wrote just a bit about the stamps I'm making. and Susurra was kind enough to send along this cool link to a site where you can use your own image to create a sheet of postage stamps.

The image you use has to be 255K or less, and in jpeg format. There's a gallery to browse, too.

Of course, you'll have to add "real" postage to the envelope. But if you don't have time to watercolour a set like mine, by all means don't let that stop you from having and using original postzegels. Why should the post office have all the fun? If you do watercolour your own, you can colour photocopy them onto a sheet of sticky back paper.

Making Watercolour Stamps: creating a country

Someone asked in an e-mail, "How do you make those watercolor stamps?" Well...

First, I do some research so I may create the country. In looking for information, today, I ran across this, from a cooking site, where a method for cooking a sauce has been translated into English:

This entrement is of origin Italian is fluid and consistent cream wine-based, sugar and egg-yolk. One will find it presented out of cut, out of glass... Also, sometimes one is used it frozen after a passage after the negative cold. The basic proportions are appreciably the same ones.

And in another recipe:

The inhabitant of Beran sauce, is useful more tepid than hot, it is preferable to make with more meadows of the service.... But one can also leave the ultra classiques precepts, while employing tested method of the Dutchwoman who refuses to miss and apply this adventure with the Sauce Inhabitant of Beran introduced here.

I want to make this sauce. I want to make it employing the tested method of the Dutchwoman who refuses to miss and apply this adventure. Why didn't I know about that earlier? Why must I discover it so late?

By circuitous route, I have discovered the name of the country--Mostaza.

More Evans' Stamps

Here are near-life size photos of Donald Evans' stamps. Scroll down a bit to find them.

Postzegels

A friend reminded me this week that I spent a good number of years making stamps. Not real stamps, of course, but miniature watercolour paintings. This was painstaking work. I first imagined a country, its currency and its people. The stamps were then done in pencil and finished in either watercolour, or in some cases, technical pen. I then hand carved rubber stamps for making cancellation marks. The cancelled stamps were affixed to post cards from flea markets and bookstores and sent to friends.

I was living in a one-car garage at the time (with one other person) so all my painting had to be done at my studio, a small warehouse space I rented for $10 a month. Since the space there was 10 x 10, I did mostly small scale works, including the stamps and later, a series of faked documents. Most of the documents were sold or given away. All of the stamps have disappeared, I think.

The stamps were inspired by the work of watercolour artist, Donald Evans, whose story is described in a wonderful book, The World of Donald Evans, by Willy Eisenhard. The book was made in 1980 and printed by Harlin Quist Books in New York. The book describes Evans' work and his life, which ended at age 31 in a fire in Amsterdam.

Evans was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and began painting stamps when he was ten. In five years, he had made a thousand stamps. According to Eisenhard, "He invented fifty countries to issue them...Each had its own flag and coat of arms, currency and government and rulers. Geographies and histories were intertwined with protectorates and occupations, and unions and federations." Evans cataloged his work meticulously in a three volume work entitled World Wide Stamp Album, arranged alphabetically by country.

Evans eventually abandoned this boyhood pastime. In 1969 he graduated with a bachelor's degree in architecture. In 1971, he started painting again. This work continued until his death.

My delight in Evan's work was not only for the fanatical way he cataloged each issue, but also for the secret meanings in stamps. He hid friends' initials in borders and the issue dates or currencies often referenced personal events. He used words from many languages as the base language for stamps. For one set, "Katibo," his architect friend, Lucien Lafour, taught him the word in Surinamese dialect. It meant "black people who had set themselves free." Evans painted tiny portraits of les Katiboises, in three series of seven stamps each.

Many other issues had Dutch words, often in play of meaning, like the Nadorp set. In colloquial Dutch, nadorp means "after the village," or on the other side of town. It was also the last name of a friend of Evans, whom he named the ruler of this small country. The Nadorp set includes a series of vegetables, windmills, birds' eggs, apples and musical instruments, to name only a few.

The other thing I liked about Evans' work, and about my own stamp painting, was that it took one brush (a number two Grumbacher), a few pencils, a pen, eraser and a small sheet of Strathmore paper. An entire year's work, unframed, fit in a small envelope.

I moved last summer into a small 1922 bungalow. It's a delightful house with small spaces and I think I will celebrate now with a new stamp. We'll see if my digital camera can capture it for you.

In the meantime, you can see some of Evans' stamps on this site, as well as read a wonderful accounting of his work by the fellows at 2blowhards, where "two graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions..." Gotta love that. You can also see Evans' work at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where the format is a bit small for the resolution.

I am delighted if you have not seen this work and discover it now.