merchant of marvels: be still my heart

i'm not into antiques and whimsical, flourish, splatter paint; i just don't really get them. i find them surreal, then again i do not get most of the contemporary art. in the midst of post modern esthetics where it says everything is art, let's be honest — how many of us understand the function and meaning of abstract.

i learned about the existence of pinterest from this blog viewer link. i took notice of some beautiful metal and fabric works by few artists. one captivated me, nina bagley. like silent reverie; her artworks are so deep and complex, yet she delivers them in such harmonious honesty. they speak the foreign language i can comprehend. each piece with its meticulous detail tells a story, and they all have the same tune. nuff said...take a look at them yourself if you're interested. as for me, i can see alabama clearly in the near future; i give myself 12 months to personally learn what i could from her...who knows.

months ago, i lost interest in papers. i started focusing on familiarizing myself with the various materials of metal smithing. mixed metal work supplies are hardly available where i am and they're not easy to bring in due to the hazardous warnings. as luck would have it, my first stash got stuck. everything got abandoned, but not forgotten...until last month.

to distract myself from a sadness, last month i picked up where i left them. so they say a journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step. i did not have the weaponry and ammo for metal works....yet. i tried to make do with what i have and educated myself with trials the hard way, starting somewhere and step by step building the arsenal. on boxing day, 3 months later than expected, my stash finally arrived.

so...inspired by nina bagley and translating one of her work roughly into my own story...

memento

a copper plate book carefully aged; bounded with hand colored silk sari ribbon called love story and interlaced with some spanish lace and hand wrapped antique lily of the valley glass beads on silver plated wire. dangling on a chain are 50mm swarovski wings (the're called pegasus actually). not visible here are a couple of silver plated charms. i acquired antique frozen charlotte circa 1890 directly from thuringia limbach, germany. somewhat it supposedly stands for the winged victory of samothrace. on the cover is another swarovski pendant called the wild heart set on a silver plated filigree after my wild sacred heart necklace; except for here, i call it the pure heart after the welsh hymn calon lan. the word memento is engraved using a hand steel stamp.

you have to excuse the photo which i took with an itouch in my studio on a rainy day. (like i know how to take a better one on crystals and metals with a bigger camera). this is the better one of the couple i have which unfortunately not showing much. thus i tried to narrate what's happening on the cover without going into the symbolic details.

here is another piece based on what i saw by jen crossley which she call hers etched in time.

what i purposely didn't do was to call it alis volat propriis which i always thought of side by side with that goddess nike sculpture....one of my all time favorite by the way; the winged victory of samothrace that is. the cover is brass etched with tim holtz book cover stamp and coptic bound with black irish waxed linen. i chose each charms carefully within the symbolic context of ideas...from conception up to realization so that it worth to be the keeper of what would be written in it.

so now i have 2 books to write on in 2013. oh, i have a couple more actually. i made one the other night and bought one last week.

i'm excited about this new found interest and perhaps looking into making some small installations in the future...meta stuff i mean.