Na na na na Hey hey hey Goodbye

Neither gnomes, nor gnats, nor naugahyde will adorn the preschoolers' gift to their lead teacher, so you mightn't have expected the knife, knots, and knitting. Preschoolers can't give a gift of nothing to their teacher, so in the handmade spirit we have made a box of Nn. Naturally, the motives are twofold.

1. The students might learn something about the "Nn" sound.
2. This project will cost nada, nil, nothing, zip.  (Preschoolers often confuse N and Z)

The inspiration was part nasal exasperation. Our class is a championship caliber nose-picking team, no matter what measures we've take.

Our class rabbit is named Norton, so he's the star of the Nn box.

Having taught some of the kids to "turn sevens into stars", a few turned that back on me by refusing to practice writing numbers or letters. It's stars and only stars from morning until night.

Our box of Nn is almost done. And it's a good thing the semester is almost done, too. Enjoy some noodles, but use your napkin!

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Stile queen reverie

Not crossing over the fence in the photo, but sitting atop the stile. A rare photo of me from that era when I was the family snapshot taker. The SLR camera was new, so '91 or '92, an extravagant gift from my husband who wanted it himself and bought with time payments. First roll of black and white film out at Connemara. Oddly calm, almost bemused, pleased with my aviator sunglasses and bargain tan mohair cardigan, and for one tiny second sure my three sons are not breaking arms or legs or needing stitches. All the anxiety seems to be stored in that skinny, clasping wrist.

A stile is an arrangement to allow passage for creatures smarter than sheep and cows. Today I barely qualify, having left the wrong key when I dropped off my car for service. The stile photo is part of a collage about myself made a few years later while I was climbing over the fence of divorce, so '96 or '97. It hangs on the wall behind a door that's always open, so I'd forgotten the stile collage.

The collage is glued to a blueprint, appropriately.  My engineer parents created my blueprint, and regularly inspected the construction site. It is in heavy-duty laminating done by Kinko's that cost a fortune.  I hadn't asked the price, and was horrified to be spending the grocery money on laminating.  The collage was to be a talking-piece at my session with the therapist, but now I would have the dragonfly encased in amber forever.

Today I would say I'm still not over the fence, but I am not immobilized in amber or otherwise. I've supported several people making their passage to new meadows. I've watched hawks, bats, and scissortails swoop, hummingbirds and herons feed. My wrist is not so bony, and the hand not so clenched. I'm still borderline panicked about the grocery money.

Thanks to Kathleen for the image and poem that provoked this meditation. Thanks, too, to my extrovert sister, the Nebraska 4-H Style Queen winner. What year was that?

stile 

O.E. stigel "device for climbing, ladder," related to stigen "to climb," from P.Gmc. *stig- "to climb," (see stair). An arrangement to allow persons to pass but not sheep and cattle.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

There was a WormMama who swallowed a fly

I've been fussing around trying to make a worm blog on WordPress just to learn a little bit about making a website with pages and categories. Silly me, I still haven't figured out the new version of Blogger with its options for multiple pages. For the moment my efforts are WormMama's Travelling Worm Show.  I've got another vermicomposting gig June seventh.

At this late date in the school year some of the five year old students are figuring out rhyming words! Because why? fly? guy? eye? spy?

Because why I am also reading about Buzz and Fly Guy. The kids like the one fly in Lucy Micklethwait's I Spy Two Eyes, but they LOVE Can You Make a Scary Face?, by Jan Thomas.

We don't want our fly on the guy. We want the fly off the guy, and in the air. It's a positive/negative puzzle. Paul Klee does not rhyme with knee or buy, but sounds like clay, and he's our art guy!

So just a sample of our project masterpieces:

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Hark, hark, we must ponder bark

Backward brain slowly notices the nursery rhyme setting the rhythm for my walk around the Galatyn trail. Backward brain wonders about the chicken or the egg.  First?  Seeing bark everywhere? OR the rhythm?

Unwinding from the high-pressure multi-gabilliozon-dollar world of a Montessori spring festival set designer.  Oh!  The glitter!  The press!  The enquiring minds!  Holy cow.

But back to the bark.  Om.  It's unseasonably warm and dang muggy on the trail.  I'm getting a bad case of sweaty cap hair.  This trail is a little "gem" preserved between a telecom business district and the DART light-rail train line.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark!
Beggars are coming to town,
Some in rags, some in tags,
And some in velvet gown.

What does this mean???  For answers, I checked here. And it was "some in rags, some in jags" in early versions.  Jags are those slashings in the sleeves of Tudor costumes!

That is all the pondering for now.  Happy walking!

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

No tears for the end of summer school!  Just two short weeks before I'm back in the muddle with kiddies.  In theory, I will muck out the condo in preparation for the return of the Woolly Mammoth and a visit from my sister.  In reality, I will work all week at the library, then stare out the window at hummingbirds and anoles.  The zucchini vine will gradually conquer the patio, wrapping its tendrils anound every living and nonliving thing.

Realizing how much I enjoy paper cutting, I've dug out my tiny, pointy Fiskars, and begun practicing again.  The effort takes such satisfying concentration, and clears my brain of a day's jangles.  It's a new direction for my year and a half old photo 365 Project.

These are my first three attempts combining photos with paper cuts.  The second cut has a disconcerting backward hand.  I'm playing with the paper cuts in the scanner and using Photoshop Elements to combine the images.  The paper cuts are real, hard copy scrap cardstock even if the collages are digital.

After sweaty evenings staring at a nonworking air conditioner, and the the wonderful working air conditioner, I'm into stripes and swirling.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Mary in Ohio With a Bouncing Bunny On Her Head?

Recently reawakened to my strange sensory connection to my college friend.  Why is it that whenever I tear the sheet of Bounce in half and throw it into the dryer load I think of Mary?  To the best of my memory Mary and I never did laundry together, or sniffed anti-static dryer sheets, although we were college students in those crazy mid-Seventies.  The brain is so weird.

I've been making a series of photo collages connecting student artwork with my photos.  Sometimes the photo experience inspired the art project. Often the connection of the two images is a moment of, "Oh, ho!  Didn't I just see that somewhere else?"  Construction, collage, and Hartfield-Jackson airport runway:

Our new favorite picture book in the preschool class is Sean Bryan's A Boy and His Bunny.  The boy has a bunny on his head.  He names it Fred.

When I saw the illustration my brain, which was lounging on a park bench and eating a ham and swiss sandwich  at the time, immediately said to me, "Cheap paper plates."  Now that I have the plates from the Dollar Store I'm starting to doubt my brain.  How did it sense I should have the students make bunnies to wear on their heads out of these plates?  Cross your fingers that my brain and I will reconnect in time to make a successful art project/surprise birthday party.  Thanks.  One of us will report back on the results.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Triple C 3-D darn Dubya

C

construction

cup

cave

cuddle

cluster

C

concentration

careful drawing

finding calm

clasping our hands

behind our backs

observing our constructions
from last week

@


I'm so immature

I still get a thrill

typing the AT in my email address

drawing the treble clef

curling an ampersand

circling the covered wagons

cooking chicken chili in the crockpot of letter sounds and fonts

uncapping the colored markers to write on the white board

C

collage

composition is improv, says the ballet student

in art composition is the play

the arranging

the dance with the elements I did not tell the kids

Sometimes you slide your whole collection of shapes off the paper and begin to create again.  

C

Self-publishing has a

concentric


convenient

lack of constructive criticism.

C

There are crocodiles in the moat.

C

calls today

from the care center

Maybe Dad was always a crabapple cluster bomb

I thought he was the master of self-control

critical he was of couse

but combustible not

kicking the bath aide in the abdomen and

throwing his shaver across the room

I just bought him the darn shaver last November

C

The cradle will rock

Considering various theories

tonight about just when

Dad got so angry.

W

When

Why

I blame it on Dubya.

Dad his old self would approve

Tonight Dad careemed

himself down the hall

in his wheelchair to shake a skinny

blue finger at the nurse and yell,

"You're a damn liar!" 

The supper trays weren't there yet.

He used to save that up to scream at Bush on tv

"You lied!  They died!"


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Someday my prince will bowl

See the princess with the bow in her hair?  I didn't either.  Small students were working on a collage of things that begin with S.  They were choosing images from a basket well-stocked with pictures of shells, ships, socks, soccer, smiles, sheep, snakes, snowflakes, plus sugar and spice and everything nice.

This is a bad cellphone photo, but you get the idea of their collage collaboration.  They found pictures of a snowman, spaghetti, the space shuttle, and Snow White!  Yes, that brunette with the bow in her hair must be Snow White, or at least Annette Funicello.

On a more serious note, Dad can no longer remember his SSN#, and he is hazy about his date of birth. This is complicating matters as we try to update his mailing address with various financial, insurance, and governmental entities. Banks want to chat with Dad about these security issues. Dad can hardly hold the cellphone to his ear, and he is pulling random numbers out of the air.


My parents did a great job of preparing for cremation, do-not-resuscitate orders, power of attorney, and many financial transitions. They faced their own mortality, stashed away funds for their old age, paid off their mortgage, and tried to arrange their affairs. Still, they couldn't visualize my father outliving his younger wife. They didn't realize their art teacher/power of attorney daughter would be so dense. They avoided the scenario of long-term care in a skilled nursing facility with vastly decreased cognitive abilities. Who can blame them? Who wants to imagine themselves in that picture?

 

Can you say s-s-s-s-SCARY?

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Progression--Small stone #9

creamy nougat clouds

curtains of caramel light

another day coated in dark chocolate

gone in two bites

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Elephant/Not-elephant

Not getting much written about our current art project at school: 

• We are thinking sleepy elephant thoughts.
• We are discovering not-elephants when we find the positions to glue the gray shapes.
• We are wondering what will happen when the mouse squeaks.

• We are looking at negative shapes between the bare January tree branches and around the snowman.
 
• We are aiming for wisdom even when we aren't quite put together right. We are excited to paint tomorrow and learn the recipe for gray.
• We are considering layers of gray while bundled in gray slipper socks and an afghan.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

"If you didn't use your back-up plan, you played it too safe."

You just thought that quote came from the Dos Equis Most Interesting Man ad campaign. Where did he get that insight? From his budget-strapped art teacher, of course.

I just thought I knew what I was doing when I had the preschool students create fish tank aquarium collages on 8.5"x10.5" infrared transparency films. I got the boxes of transparency sheets at a recent WASTE giveaway.

My inspiration was a greeting card received a couple years back that was a combination snow globe and fishbowl. Been puzzling possibilities for an art project from that concept.

Last winter the preschoolers used their rolling pin motor skills to crush lots of eggshells. We dyed the shell bits with diluted pink glitter paint, and spread them out to dry over Spring Break.

Our materials for the fish tank collage included glue sticks, stringed sequins, fabrics, tissue paper, silver Sharpie pens, honeycomb packaging paper, tempera paints, along with the transparency films and dyed eggshell bits. I've sent a lot of weird collage materials through laminators to be sealed, but I must have pushed the envelope. With so many variables, I have no idea what made the first two collages turn black in the laminator. Oops. Those fish must be swimming at night after the aquarium light has been turned OFF. This mess didn't harm the laminating machine or set off the smoke detector, thank heaven.

Sealed the rest of the kids' projects with clear packing tape, and displayed them around the classroom windows. I like the shadow/silhouette possibilites, and will pursue them with older students tomorrow.

My students like this board book:

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Corks, quirks, and saving the world

In my escapist fantasies, I see myself living in a small cabin with a screened porch. The cabin interior is decorated in college town bar decor, but without the peanut shells on the floor. Every surface is covered with collected items--keys and license plates, especially, but also hardware, newspapers, vintage board games, maps, buttons. Tabletops and counters become an ever-changing collage of vintage sewing patterns, postage stamps, and magazine photos suspended between layers of clear polyurethane. The ceiling is hung with papier mache insects, wire sculpture lizards, origami, mobiles, Christmas ornaments and retro lamps. The floor is cushioned by mats made from thousands of donated wine corks.

My current abode has boxes, baskets, and jars full of wine corks (and no peanut shells). Friends and relatives have been saving corks for me for many years. Corks are useful for building art project palm trees on fantasy desert isles. Supply has exceeded demand in recent years, but I'll never turn down a bagful of corks. I appreciate the sacrifice that has gone into drinking the wine so artists can create.

Horror vacui is the abhorrence of empty space. Most art history students first learn about it when they study ancient Egyptian tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Tut and Nefertiti couldn't agree on wallpaper, so tombs are covered in wall-to-wall writings.

Tut was pondering large 3-D lotus sculptures entirely made of corks. Maybe Howard Carter should be my condo decorator. Tut. Stone. Silence. Inscriptions. Collections. Possessions. Overload. Alabaster canopic urns...

In my imagined abodes visual over-stimulation replaces excessive auditory noise. Since my sons have moved out, it is very quiet here. Quiet is good. In fact, I may have to track down George Prochnik's book, In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise. I heard an NPR "Fresh Air" interview with the author. He said studies show people eat less when the volume level increases, but they drink more alcohol...

When I went a-googlin' for other cork uses, I found an artist who covered her car with corks. The Skylark could be transformed into a CorkMama-Mobile.

With enough hot glue and corks we could aspire to far greater good. We could build shelters for earthquake victims in Haiti. We could mulch our organic gardens. Huh? I saw it on Google, so it must be true.

Caps For Sale surprise

My brief run through the Sheldon Gallery offered a real surprise. I had no idea that the author/illustrator of the beloved Caps For Sale was a pionerring American abstract artist. I've never even been sure if Esphyr Slobodkina was male or female. Now I know she made wonderful, whimsical found-object collages in two and three dimensions. You can see the works of the exhibition "Rediscovering Slobodkina" on flickr.

Reading about Slobodkina brought even more surprises, although I suspected the connection to Margaret Wise Brown. Slobodkina was born in Siberia, and grew up in Manchuria, before traveling to the U.S. to study art in New York City. Plus, the wonderful peddler of Caps for Sale has a name! It is Pezzo.




© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Frosty gets a glimpse of his own mortality

Sorry for all the posts about fickle fame and fleeting forever! Time to get more upbeat for the new decade.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Fabric designer of the future

Here's one last sample from the woolly bear art project. This student often surprises me with designs that would make fabulous fabrics. She is eight years old.




© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder