I ran out of envelopes to send thank you cards, and the distributor had a minimum of 1000, but that’s not a hardship when they are orange. French Paper Company has been around since 1871, in Niles, MI, working on the 6th generation of Frenches. I didn’t know any of this until I ordered, since I was mesmerized simply by the orange color.
Mr. French of the French Paper Company
The box had customized packing tape, with a plethora of black illustrations by Charles S. Anderson. It made me want to immediately order more French Paper, which I am sure is the company’s goal. But they also have a database of Anderson’s images that you can use for free if you print them on French Paper.
Artist & Illustrator Lisa Congdon has a cat named Margaret(named for the artist Margaret Kilgallen, who I will save for a future Margaret Monday.) When I started drawing again, I found an online class from Lisa Congdon, which allowed me to revel in pens, and her encouraging nature. That she has a cat named Margaret makes me like her all the more.
American Kestrel by Wayne Stratz hanging out with Lisa M. Nelson’s Corvid painting
Stratoz and I were at the Bucks Guild ArtsFest ’15 and we both were taken by Lisa M. Nelson‘s miniature oil painting of a fine corvid. I was drawn to the orange and blue-black colors, and Stratoz has a thing for birds, so we took it home. It was great to finally meet Lisa, since we had known each other’s work through Team Hip on Etsy(Handmade in PA), and I had often put her brilliantly colored paintings in Treasuries of Etsy items. She is a daily painter with a love of animals, and welcomes lovers of shiny, pretty things. It made sense to her that I responded to the shine and texture of her painting, since my mosaics have the same elements. I do think I was a magpie in a former life.
Margaret Crowther(1936-), is a British textile artist who creates 3D tapestries by hand, many without a loom. She knots and twists and builds up textures. I am smitten with her use of orange, and color gradations, and the three dimensional levels.
Margaret Crowther creates custom work for homes, and Sinead Lawler describes the process of commissioning a piece, conversations about colors and textures. The artist created a special box (or as the author put it a “bespoke box”) for carrying it to the client’s home.
A Blue Sky Swirl by Margaret Almon, glass on slate, 7 inches.
I love to use levels in my own work, and the way they catch the light, and create a terrain.
I hadn’t done a Margaret Mondays in awhile, and then I found illustrator Sally Nixon on Instagram. She has a character named Margaret who seems to have randomly shown up one day, and kept coming back on Mondays. I love a Margaret who has a dog named Nora Ephron and reallys digs donuts.
I was looking for pen and ink drawings on Instagram because I started drawing again, and I am fascinated by hatch and cross hatch marks. Sally Nixon creates a wonderful atmospheric world from black lines. She mentions “netflixing the hell out of the X Files” to encourage the atmosphere, which Stratoz and I started watching this spring, for the first time. It’s definitely affected my dreams, though not with the same artistic flair as Sally Nixon.
This last one isn’t a Margaret Monday, but I love the quilt ~ reminds me of another my loves.
I have a compelling desire to create rainbows. I have made many of them in mosaic. Once a woman came into my craft show booth and was smitten with one of my rainbow panels, but said she couldn’t buy it because her husband would be affronted by the gay implications, and gave an awkward shrug. This made me both sad and angry.
With the Supreme Court ruling about marriage and gay folk in June, 2015, there is an abundance of rainbows appearing on my Facebook stream, and it’s outburst of talking my rainbow language, and to me this ruling good news, just as God’s love is good news.
Rainbow Nametag from Junior High Church Camp, circa 1982.
My love of rainbows began at Moravian Church Camp Van Es at Cooking Lake in Alberta. The theme in 1982 was The Rainbow Connection. We each had a slice a log, and a volunteer had applied rainbows and written our names. We watched The Muppet Movie with the theme song The Rainbow Connection, and learned the to sing it. We painted a large rainbow backdrop, in an open area in the woods.
We memorized Bible verses about the rainbow as a symbol of God’s promise to never again cover the earth in a great flood, a sign of God’s love. What gave it power was the idea that this love extended to me, though I felt flawed through my core, cracked with no method of repair. True grace is a very difficult thing to accept, because the bruised soul assumes it applies to everyone else except her.
The Rainbow Connection
I took the idea of hope and love to heart. I bought a pewter pendant cast in the form of a rainbow and embedded with an Ichthys fish(a visual pun, an acronym of the Greek letters spelling out Jesus Son of God, which also meant fish). I wore it often, as a way to remain hopeful.
Now, some 30 years later, I look at it and wonder at the grayness of this rainbow, and no wonder I feel compelled to create them in full color. For a girl of 14, coming out of a year of depression, the colors were intense. There is power in symbols, but also the power of color itself, the incarnation of beauty.
