Cryptobiosis, a Concertina-book and Pink Grapefruit

In Dylan Thomas's 1954 radio play 'Under Milk Wood', there's a repeated phrase that acts as a leitmotiv linking together the separate vignettes of the small, fictional town on the Welsh coast: 'Time passes.' I don't know how many times it occurs throughout the text but it's frequent enough, together with a strong thematic emphasis on chronology more generally, to establish a familiar rhythm that joins up what might otherwise be seriously disjointed parts of the text and facilitates its flow. I feel I need such a phrase for my blog which seems fated these days to be less like Medieval farming (see my comments last year!) and more like one of those African lungfish that lie dormant for long periods in dried up pools or stream-beds, under the ferocious tropical sun until a sudden, rare rainstorm turns the pools to water again, the lungfish rehydrate and come out of their suspended animation for a brief interlude. Then the rainclouds fade, the pools dry up again for months, or even years, and the lungfish return to their long, clay-baked inactivity.  This remarkable ability to sit out and survive long periods of drought, (aka cryptobiosis, apparently), gives the lungfish a major evolutionary advantage in climatic conditions that are always unpredictable and often unpropitious. 'Time passes.' It's a year since my posts about participating in the 2018 Slamseys Summer Art Journal project and now the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge 2019 is here. Rain in the pools again! Hooray for lungfish and dormant blogs that just need a little water to come to life again!

This year the Slamseys Creative Summer Challenge 2019 is about incorporating creativity into every day and the challenge has begun with the suggestion to make a simple concertina-book that is easy to carry around for sketching, doodling, or jotting ideas in, on a daily basis. Last year I made myself a custom-sized art journal sewn together with Coptic binding which worked well for me - a good shape and size and not too precious or beautiful to intimidate me from actually using the thing. It had a patchwork cover-sleeve that was partly decorative and partly functional, holding myriad scrap slips of paper and preliminary sketches that I didn't want to stick into the book itself but nevertheless wanted to keep. I wrote about making the book here, if you're interested.

This year, I've made another identical art journal using the same type of paper and the same Coptic binding.

It too has a patchwork cover-sleeve made from scraps of fabric sewn together in strips. The appliqué swallows were left over from a project some years ago when I cut out too many and they just seemed to want to skim over the top.

But why have one art journal on the go when you can have two?! And I decided that it would be better to avoid the myriad-slips-of-paper-scenario and a simple concertina-book would provide a perfect repository for trying out ideas and sketches in a way that keeps track of the flow from one thing to another.

The instructions, which you can find here, are nice and straightforward and were perfect for using the long thin off-cuts from the pad of paper I cut up for my bigger art-journal pages.

I used six sets of strips rather than four to make the book a bit bigger and halved another strip to use as the reinforcing cover pieces. All paper otherwise going spare. Very satisfying!

So far so good.

The cover needed some kind of decorative touch. Nothing too considered or precious though. Colourful but not over-thought. The simpler I kept thinking it should be, the more I could not decide what to do and the more time I wasted. In the end, my eye fell on the bowl of pink grapefruit in the kitchen.

I love pink grapefruit - the sweet, sharp juice and the way the thick yellow peel is subtly flushed in patches giving away the secret of the glorious sunrise-pink flesh inside.

Some quick doodling with water soluble pastels followed by a bit of hasty work with a wet paintbrush to make puddles of pink grapefruit colours, filled in with a turquoise background and my covers were complete.

The more hastily and less self-consciously I worked, the better I liked the results. A lesson there, I feel!

Now to see what will arrive on the pages! Hopefully the pools will stay water-filled for the next few weeks and my cryptobiotic blog will have a new lease of life, pro tem!

E x