August Journal Is Under Construction

IT DOESN'T ALWAYS HAPPEN that I can be true to my word and keep to my agenda. More often than not something comes up to rearrange "agendas." This week things have been moving pretty smoothly (in that direction, anyway).
Last night I started painting this thick annual report with house paint primer. By the way, I am not endorsing this company. It just happened to come in the mail. The pages are similar to Kleenex. Cheaper to mail a phone book type document that way! We have since gone to paperless reports.
So here we begin. I used one of those sponge "brushes" and it was pretty handy. In order to begin reducing some of my collage collections, I took a brown paper bag full of inspirational pieces and just started pasting them in using the house primer. This is one of my favorite artists, Maira Kalman, and I really liked her New Yorker cover painting, so of course I had held onto it. Trimmed out and pasted down, I like the shadowy "self" behind the woman in front.
The words "Divine Companions" in the newspaper story about pets caught my eye too. With the "shadow woman," or maybe "soul" of the person Kalman painted, the phrase felt right. Sometimes - and I'll bet others will agree - the elements just seem to fall together and often they're right in front of your eyes.
So I'm on my way with this August journal. While I was waiting for the pages to dry a bit, I used the house primer to paint over the cover of another book and some pages in another. I liked the primer. It dries fairly quickly and isn't sticky. Makes a nice base for other things too.
When the Kalman page was dry enough I went on - and I'm painting together several pages at a time to save time and make the pages thicker. I don't want to paint every page in this thousand page document!!
So first I found the quote in the paper bag of "stuff" and then I found the ballet picture. The headline was with the dancers. Then this gent caught my eye. I don't know that he was really terrible. You can use your own imagination to interpret what the "seven minutes of magic" are. : ) A dance? A date? A ... .
Separating the pages with waxed paper was a good idea. It allows you to work on several at a time so long as they are not terribly wet. I used some gloss gel to glue down the pictures too and used a brayer which picked up a lot of primer. The brayer is now coated with the stuff and has a great texture. It will never be totally smooth again, but it does get the bubbles out of the glued down elements.
This last page was just a bunch of tags I made and found at the bottom of the bag I was trying to get to the bottom of. I think I got the window from Judy Wise and the mosaic came from a magazine ad on traveling to Turkey.
After all this gluing and painting, I was glad to have dinner and a movie ("Coco - Before Chanel"). Time to relax and peel all the gloss gel and primer off my hands!
More tonight, if I don't have to water the plants or make dinner or do anything else but have fun - femminismo
p.s. "Coco - Before Chanel" is very slow. Audrey Tatou is lovely and the straw purse she carries is to die for, but I wouldn't recommend it for an engrossing portrait of the artist.
p.p.s. Happy birthday to Peter, my little baby boy!