Art du Jour 71

Can you make something beautiful out of useless advertising? Yes you can. Depending on your definitions of “useless” and “beautiful”.

Many trees died so that I could create something weird and interesting for you to look at. Even though we have put a vacation stop on our newspaper, those flyers just keep on coming. I’ve always thought it would be a great idea to put a blue box at the front door with a sign on it requesting that all junk mail be deposited in it. This would save me a lot of time and angst and energy. And all those colourful glossy Christmas ads could be used to wrap presents.

Although I have never done either of those things, now I can say I have recycled some of that great mountain of advertising into my art.

Will I be doing this with actual garbage next?  Well, probably not.  I did discover that grocery flyers are made of extremely cheap paper and ink not meant to last.  I guess that’s a good thing.

Considering my materials, I am very pleased with this end result and might even hang it up somewhere.

Before and After

A few hot days ago I took pictures in my backyard of bushes sadly in need of a trim.  I’m here to tell you my crazy slash-and-burn mad trimmer-from-hell of a husband would be very proud of me for making this valiant attempt at tree taming if he were here.  Although of course if he were here this would have been done a month ago and the trees would still be trying to recover.  He once trimmed a tree at our front door into oblivion.  All that remains is a decorative stump.

But enough yard history.  Today the heat is pleasant and bearable, so I ventured out amongst the squabbling magpies and got it done.

Before:

After:

Note the top of the fence for reference.

Before:

After:

Note the bottom of the kitchen window. Please do not note the dead grass. I’m not watering it, it’s only grass and it’s in the backyard and the magpies don’t care and neither do I.

I was hoping these picture would be more indicative of what a difference all my hard work filling TWO green bins with branches made.  I guess you will just have to take my word for it because I’m not sharing pics of my scratched up arms.  Now I will be spending the rest of the day brushing imaginary twigs and bugs off my body.

Happy 4th of July to all my American friends! I imagine your day has been slightly more interesting than mine because fireworks.  Yea!  Don’t set the grass on fire.

Three Quotes: The Beginning

 “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.”
― Max Ehrmann

Thanks Laura Bruno Lily  for this fun challenge – Three Quotes in Three Days.  I not only accepted the challenge, but decided I would also play by the rules!  Must be something in the air.

The rules of the challenge are:

1) Thank the person who nominated you.
2) Post a quote each day for 3 days.
3) Each day nominate 3 new bloggers to take part.

This is now your mission, if you choose to accept it.  If you don’t, we will put it behind us and never speak of it again.

Eileen at Laughter: Carbonated Grace

Pam at Catching My Drift

Alice at coffee and a blank page

 

 

Art du Jour 36

Finally got out my acrylic paints and a small canvas and messed around with a colourful sky.

Too bad I kind of suck at realistic trees, but the picture was crying out for trees. So there are trees.

Add splatter and snow splotches and voilà. Look how the color changes with the fading light.

Happy February Everybody!  We survived another January!  WooHoo!