Coffee-Themed Artist Trading Cards and Etudes for Painting Practice

 On Friday, I met with my art exchange group to share and trade artist trading cards (ATCs) on the theme of coffee or tea. ATCs are art cards the same size as sports trading cards — 2.5" by 3.5" — made purely for fun and to be traded in convivial gatherings.  

Several of us chose to coffee-stain some watercolor paper as the substrate for either a collage or drawing/painting, with varying results. One person immersed the paper in a strong solution of instant coffee, adding extra granules for a grainy speckled effect; another dribbled the dregs from her drip coffee pot on the paper over a period of several days, plus setting the cup on it to form coffee rings like on a coaster—a variation of which two others employed. I had covered my paper with used paper coffee filters, immersed it in water, and added coffee grounds to the mix, expecting it to produce a splotchy brown result. 

Five "coffee" ATCs and one with a tea party theme. The middle one features the Ojibwe word for coffee, which translates as "black medicine liquid," she noted on the back.

I was wrong. My method barely stained the paper at all. So I tore up the coffee filters and glued them onto the paper to completely cover it to make my background. Once the surface was no longer tacky, I placed it under a stack of encyclopedias overnight to flatten it, then cut it into ATCs.

I used a brown pen to write on the background, mostly listing the various kinds of espresso drinks and then just copying other text from the website where I got the espresso words. Though not truly asemic writing, since it consisted of regular words, it was effectively that because it was meant to just add some background patterns and not really to be read. 

I was going to make a collage/mosaic rendition of our stovetop espresso pot, but quickly realized that would be too fussy for such a small format, especially making seven of them! (There were seven participants, but one couldn't make it to the meeting.) So I altered my photo of the pot to make it more colorful and give it a grainy texture, printed it in multiples on plain paper, and used the pieces I had already cut to replace the handle and, except for the above example, the knob on top. 

Oh . . . never mind. I saved the pattern pieces, though, in case I wanted to try another time. Maybe slightly larger.

Painting Etudes

Last week I wrote about noticing what I called asemic patterns, that is, patterns on various objects that brought to mind asemic writing. I thought I would try a little painting and drawing of those patterns, using the photos I took as inspiration. It's very challenging for me to extrapolate something abstract from something concrete, so I figure it's a good thing to practice. 

I started with the photo of my scarf, because the colors and texture are very appealing to me. I had to keep reminding myself that I'm painting the pattern, not the scarf!

Laying down some base color — the pattern, not the scarf 

 

. . . and some texture marks 

I don't consider the painting to be finished, but I might decide that I'm finished with it and move on to painting one of the other photos. I also have to remind myself that this is a practice exercise, an etude, not something that has to look polished and complete. Then again, I am feeling an urge to work on it some more.

Speaking of practice, I did remember that I wanted to practice my fine brushwork also, in the way of lettering, so I copied some of the exercises in the Speedball Handbook (which I introduced a couple of weeks ago). I guess if the scarf painting is an etude, this is like playing scales. (In case you haven't guessed, I did play a musical instrument in my school days, from fifth grade through high school. It was a cello.)

On my work table

I got a "restock request" from my friends at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts shop this week, for more of some of the zines that I consign there. 

Mini zines, which I call my tea zines for short, in various stages of assembly

I do not keep much of an inventory of finished works ready to go, preferring instead to make them as I need them. In order to facilitate that process, I fashioned several boxes, generally cut down from larger ones that once held envelopes and other supplies, to house components of zines, sometimes partially assembled to streamline the process of finishing them. Making boxes and organizing my various zines and other projects appeals to me as much as making the actual things. Sometimes more so. (Which can become just another way to procrastinate!)

Some of my ducks. In a row.

Recent Reading Just in Time for Easter

I am always intrigued by new scholarship surrounding the history of the religion I grew up with (Christianity), and especially sincere attempts to learn about the historical Jesus and his earliest followers. Like most Christians (I'm assuming), I had always thought there was a pretty straightforward narrative from the days following the resurrection that Western Christians will be celebrating this Sunday (Orthodox churches observe Easter on May 5), to the fourth century actions that formalized the institution of the Church in Europe.

But the scholars say not so fast! There were diverse schools of thought, faith and ideas in those early centuries, a great deal of which was revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered around the middle of the 20th century. A new book by Catherine Nixey, Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, examines the diverse narratives surrounding Christianity's murky beginnings. It's given a thorough and thoughtful review in the New Statesman that serves up a bounty of food for thought for anyone who wants to better understand the unauthorized versions of the Church's complicated origins. 

A Few Final Words for this Week

I'm switching my blog publishing day to Tuesday because Monday is a better day for me to work on it than the weekend. Next Tuesday I hope to have more little paintings of patterns to show you (see how I'm stating an intention here?), and I'll tell you about a book I just picked up from the library, called The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, by Anne Trubek. 

I had to return my library copy of Asemic: The Art of Writing, by Peter Schwenger, which I first mentioned in this blog post. I couldn't renew it because someone else had requested it (was that you, by any chance?), so I decided to buy my own copy from Alibris, a non-Amazon site that many independent booksellers use. In truth, I was having to resist the urge to write in the book anyway, which is often the case with nonfiction—I want to write in the margins and add my own entries to the index and such. But it's nice when I can borrow it from the library first, to see if it's something I really want to own. 

Seeing Asemic Patterns, Some St. Patrick's Day Observations, and an Oops

Happy day after St. Patrick's and day before the spring equinox! For many of the vegetables and flowers that gardeners like to start indoors here in Minnesota, now is the time to plant those seeds. Maybe that is the reason I tend to associate St. Patrick's Day with green growing things.

I have often started seeds of Dutch white clover indoors at the end of January in order to grow my own seasonal houseplant by March 17, since the plants sold in stores as "shamrocks" are really South American oxalis. It's one of my little pet peeves about how the day is marked, which I have written about in this 2017 blog post.

The other thing that bugs me a little — but just a little — is how the emblematic greenery is often depicted as a four-leaf clover, when the whole reason for its association with the good saint is the folklore claiming that he used the plant to teach his followers about the Holy Trinity. Never mind that there's no evidence whatsoever that he ever did that, it's just that it's so missing the point about shamrocks and St. Patrick's Day.

Patrick is the subject of a lot of historical misinformation, including in his own telling of his story, says historian Roy Flechner in his 2019 book, Saint Patrick Retold. Flechner argues that Patrick was never captured and enslaved, that he made up that story as a cover for his flight from inherited onerous duties as an imperial officer in Roman Britain. You can read a good overview and summary of the book on the publisher's page here, and an excellent review in the Irish Times here.

As to Patrick's own version of his story, known as The Confession of St. Patrick, you can read it for yourself on this website, and view facsimiles of the earliest versions known. The elegant Latin text makes me think of asemic writing: Both aesthetically pleasing and meaningless (to me). 

Seeing Asemic: Patterns Everywhere 

Image from Post, a blog of the Museum of
Modern Art

Because the Latin text has no meaning for me, my attention is drawn to its decorative form, the patterns created by its marks. While all asemic writing mimics the form of regular writing, some artists copy the form of printed works almost exactly.

For example, Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache (1942–2012) created "asemic versions of the daily newspaper, maintaining the layout, but substituting illegible characters," hence highlighting the patterns formed by the headlines and columns of text, wrote Peter Schwenger in the book I mentioned last week, Asemic: The Art of Writing. 

With that sort of thing on my mind this past week, I began noticing the text-like patterns in seemingly random things, like my scarf . . . 

and the seeds in a bell pepper . . . 

and my half empty latte.

My heightened awareness of patterns that resemble asemic writing got me to thinking about the tendency we humans have to not only see patterns, but to imbue them with meaning, as if they contain some message from the divine. You know, like, "Today I saw X and I believe that god/the universe was telling me something." An article I read some while back on the web journal Psyche nicely describes this phenomena, called apophenia.  

From Leiden Medievalist Blog

About that Latin Text

There is something about Latin text and other hand-lettered archaic languages that carries an air of mystery, don't you think? It evokes a magic spell or incantation, mainly because we don't understand it, and because that ancient script looks so fanciful and mysterious, especially if you've read any historical fiction set in medieval times. 

Both because I have read those kinds of historical mysteries, and because of all that asemic writing stuff echoing in my head, I pounced when I spotted a review of the book Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England, by Katherine Storm Hindley (Chicago, 2023). 

By "pounced" I mean I read the review, not that I bought the book. I'll wait for it to come out in paperback, or become available from my library. But the review by Tom Johnson in the London Review of Books provides an excellent overview. 

In medieval Christian Europe, the written word was highly venerated, from the opening lines in the Gospel of John to amulets made of text written on parchment believed to have the power to protect and otherwise benefit the one who holds it. Johnson describes these as a kind of "charm magic," that is, "words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge." 

The kinds of things people wrote down included "holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense." If that last part doesn't describe asemic writing, I don't know what does.

Apparently, the more undecipherable the writing, the better its magical properties; so while Latin was the primary language of these charms, they also incorporated lots of  "Greek letters, Hebrew, runes and all kinds of luxuriant gibberish," plus "sham alphabets, pseudo-writing and non-signifying marks." 

Fittingly, the author traces the decline in use of these written charms to the rise in literacy. "As more people came to be able to read, . . . it became harder to maintain the idea that writing contained occult power." 

Now I am thinking about a new variation in my 100-Day Project: asemic amulets.

Department of Oops: Pi Day on The Useful Calendar Planner 

My husband discovered a mistake in my planner this week. He wondered why I had put the pi symbol on March 12. I quickly checked all versions of the calendar, and the planner is the only one with the misplaced pi, which would have happened after I copied the calendar grid from the desk version and placed it into the planner document, then dragged it across because the planner calendar spans a two-page spread. I didn't notice that pi was left behind in that motion. I would actually be a little surprised if I managed to make all versions of my calendars without any mistakes! I tell myself that it will please the people who enjoy catching other people's mistakes.

It also reminded me of a custom I was told about when I took a quilting class many years ago, that of the "humility block." Traditionally, quilters were supposed to deliberately include one block in their quilts that contained a mistake, because only God is perfect. I thought at the time that it was a convenient "rule," and  I was certain I wouldn't need to do it deliberately.

But apparently the "tradition" is nonsense, as related in this excellent blog called Willy Wonky Quilts. 

On My Work Table

It's all quiet in Sharon's Compendium-Etsyland now, but the week started out with a mini flurry of orders over the weekend. Well, three orders, actually, but two of them had multiple items that I needed to make, so that kept me busy through Thursday. 

While I welcome the business, I really do, I'm looking forward to getting back to playing at my asemic projects, both doing some painting and drawing of the patterns I photographed last week, and playing around with those amulet charms. I also have a meeting with my art exchange group on Friday, and I've been pondering how I might incorporate some asemic writing into my coffee-and-tea themed Artist Trading Cards for that. 

I'll show you what I come up with next week, as well as whatever asemic marks I manage to put on paper.

Flowers in the House, Asemic Musings, and Being Particular About Notebooks

I want to start this week with flowers in the house. 

Years ago, a florist and blogger who went by the moniker Flower Jane would initiate a monthly blog chain called Flowers in the House, in which she posted several photos of flower arrangements she had placed in different rooms, and invited other bloggers to share links to their own pages showing their flowers. Even though her arrangements were quite impressive, she never made anyone feel that their simple bouquets were any less delightful, and would visit and comment on every blog that participated. As an occasional participant, I always enjoyed visiting blogs from all over, admiring their flowers, commenting and receiving comments, and reveling in the conviviality of the whole exchange.  

I don't know what became of Flower Jane, she hasn't posted on her blog since 2016. I know people get tired of blogging, or burnt out, and it really has become kind of a quaint way of sharing yourself online anymore. Everyone is on Instagram, it seems, or TikTok or whatever. I have an Instagram account, and Facebook, and Pinterest, and I find them all both inspirational and a little overwhelming.

If you care to share your own photos on Instagram or wherever about the flowers in your house this week, please comment and share a link. I'd love to see them.

My 100-Day Project this Week: More Asemic Doodles, with a Brush

Last week I mentioned a book, Asemic: The Art of Writing, by Peter Schwenger, which I said I would be picking up from the library, and indeed I did. I've only just begun reading it, but I did find the answer to my burning question: Where did this term come from?

It seems that the word was borrowed into English in the 1980s from French linguistics, in which it described an unintended absence of meaning or sense, such as occurs with a typo. The word is derived from the Greek root "sema," meaning "sign," which gives us words like semaphore, semiotics and semantics. "Sign" here relates to "signify"— to convey meaning. Adding the prefix "a-" changes it to not signifying anything, not having meaning.

Schwenger attributes this coinage to two men he describes as visual poets, Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich. (Here's an interesting interview with Gaze from 2009).

In my continued exploration of this art form, I decided to try working with a brush, in particular one called a liner brush, which is very thin and long and used for lettering as well as other things where a fine line is desired. I found a nice little six minute tutorial by Andy Jones that proved to be a fine introduction. (I used my watercolor paint instead of the acrylic paint thinned with water that he is promoting.) I combined practice and note-taking as I watched, and after. So I guess some of this is asemic, and some of it is semic.

I realized that what I'm looking to develop are the same skills used in hand lettering and calligraphy, and that I have a couple of nice resources about that already. One is a book that was my grandfather's (I know because he wrote his name in it). Published in 1922, Principles and Practice of Show-Card Writing is filled with elegant examples from that era.

The other is a relatively more recent paperback, the Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering. Mine is the 20th edition, published in 1972. I may have bought it back then, or someone might have given it to me, I really don't remember, but I've hung on to it all these years and it was kind of fun taking another look at it this week. The current edition is the 25th.

Probably the most valuable thing I've learned from all of these is that you have to practice using a brush just as you would practice a musical instrument. The various brush strokes — asemic marks, really — are like playing scales and etudes. I don't know why I haven't thought about it that way before, but it's kind of freeing and revelatory to me. Who knew?

On My Work Table

I like notebooks, but not just any notebooks. I like them to be small and easy to take places, have attractive covers, be reasonably sturdy, have a pocket in the back, with gridded lines that are pretty faint so they offer guidelines but don't dominate, and that are sewn rather than stapled.

You can probably see how this would lead me to making my own notebooks, and being an artist with an Etsy shop, how I might decide to make a few extras and offer them for sale, in case there are others who like those same things and don't mind paying for handmade. I actually only make two of a given design in order to create a listing on Etsy, then offer them as made-to-order items, so I don't invest a lot of time and resources in multiples of something that I don't know if anybody will buy. If nobody does buy them, I'll use them eventually. Having said that, I will note that I have sold a few of these, from time to time.

Shown here are two of my mini notebooks (about 2.75" wide by 4.25" high), I also have some that are half letter size (5.5" wide by 8.5" high), which have numbered pages and a different style of pocket.

I make the notebooks and most of my zines with a pamphlet stitch, which is quite easy and gives a satisfying result, in my opinion. I then run a glue stick up and down the spine and smooth it with my finger to reinforce the stitching. 

In case you're interested, here's where to find the notebooks and zines in my Etsy shop.

Thanks for looking. Show me your flowers! (If you want to.)

Playing at asemic writing, and a little detour

Asemic writing is mark-making that looks like writing but isn't. The practice as an art form has been around for centuries, but the term seems to be a more recent coinage, or else it's just obscure. When I searched for it in a couple of dictionaries, they either asked me if I meant "anemic" or said it isn't in the dictionary. But it does have a Wikipedia page, and a few books have been written about it, including Asemic: The Art of Writing, by Peter Schwenger, published in 2019 by the Univ. of Minnesota Press, which I'll be fetching from my local public library this week.

I first encountered the term on Pinterest a year or so ago, when some mixed media art that incorporated the technique came across my feed (sandwiched among cute animal videos—I have got to stop clicking on those), and it's been on my radar ever since. More recently, I stumbled upon a Facebook group, Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate, which has fed me a steady stream of inspiration and examples. 

So I thought, what better occasion to try my hand at this intriguing art form than as part of my 100-Day Project? I decided to once again use a journal page for this week's work: I would fill the page with a single composition, rather than a collection of mini works, and I would limit how much I would work on it each day to ensure that there would be something more to add the next day. I started by writing my start date in the upper left corner of the page. I then decided that I wanted to include some collage elements to make the page more interesting.

Two things I noticed early on with this one. First, it actually took some restraint to not try to "finish" it each time I sat down to work on it, which allowed ideas to percolate in my mind and be influenced by works that people were posting in the asemic artists' Facebook group. 

The second thing I noticed was how, as I was making my various squiggles, I recalled doing something like this as a kid, before I learned cursive, when wavy lines filled with loops looked just like handwriting to me. It gave me a warm feeling of nostalgia as I remembered spending hours with my childhood friend and frequent drawing companion, Vicki, doodling and drawing together with no particular purpose in mind.

I had a couple of days midweek (days 4 & 5) when I didn't work on it because of other demands on my time and attention. Interestingly, the project emails that I got this week were about being flexible with yourself regarding what it means to "show up" for your project each day. And, indeed, I did feel that I was still working on it because it was on my mind and I was pondering what I wanted to do next.

On Saturday morning,  I took what I thought was my final photo of this week's work, and noted the date at the top right of the page. I wasn't sure whether it was actually done, but I was pretty sure I was done with it. Except I had a slightly nagging feeling that it still needed just a little something more. So instead of noting that it was finished, I just noted that I had stopped.

When I showed it to my husband, who is a writer, editor, and an avid reader, he insisted on looking for words among the squiggles. He pointed them out to me, saying this part looks like the word "anything" (later, he said it looked like "everything"). Then he pointed to the word "Zen," which was a little more plausible (see it in the upper right, by the blue dot?). Perhaps the whole thing is some sort of koan. 

I still wanted to find that "something more" to complete the work, so I picked up a small vintage paperback about photography to look for an image, and there was a black-and-white photo of a man looking at a script, which made me think of the way my husband looked at my squiggles, trying to make sense of something indecipherable. It felt like just the finishing touch it needed, to put that quandary right in the middle of all the asemic nonsense.

I like having this one in my sketch journal, because it feels and looks like a kind of sampler to me. I plan to continue working with asemic writing and collage, but move on to a different substrate now and quit using the journal (probably white watercolor paper). Enough with the brown pages! Plus I want to reclaim it as my visual/junk journal/scrapbook again, in which I paste various things relevant to recent activities, or put stuff in makeshift pockets, with (legible) commentary and observations. I'll show you some of the pages in a separate blog post another day.

A Little Detour, or Other Mini Projects

I was clearing some of the clutter on my desk this week when I came across a clipping I had saved earlier in the year. It was from my local newspaper, reprinted from the Washington Post, titled "Seven easy steps to a more fit 2024," by Gretchen Reynolds.

Keeping the clipping on my desk only to get buried by other detritus didn't seem to be doing me any good, so I thought I would paste each of the tips on separate cards, repurposing some playing cards from incomplete decks in the process. Because if they are in the form of a set of cards, with some splashes of color and a picture, then I'm sure to actually get out there and do the things. Right?

Meanwhile on Etsy . . .

I added my newest zine to my Etsy shop, titled Green: A zine about a color. You can read more about it and see pictures on the listing page. I'll be mailing that and the also-recent Zine of Days and Dragons to two of my returning customers today (Monday), with a couple of other things. I always include a few stickers with orders, and some other little freebies just for fun. Packing up orders and shipping them off is one of my favorite parts of having an Etsy shop, and I'm quite content with my slow pace of business, which allows me to take my time preparing orders—and to do other things, like the 100-Day Project. I used to try harder to promote my shop and follow Etsy's tips and suggestions, but it wasn't any fun and I never really had my heart in it, so I stopped doing it. 

That's all for now. I'll be back next Monday.