The Art Class, Rosie The Riveter and a Great Netflix Movie

Happiness comes in many forms and it was delivered this week with an art class that lit a fire under my pot of stagnant creativity. The three part class is being taught by an award winning college professor who is teaching the class as a favor to our resident, retired art professor. This summer the instructor is taking these same workshops to Europe to teach what she calls Handmade Artist's Books. I guess it's a popular fad right now and there is plenty of evidence online to back up her claim. When it's all said and done we'll have a book of abstract art pages that we'll embellish with whatever pleases us and what pleases me is I'm going to turn the pages into a poetry book. Since moving to my continuum care campus I've written fifteen poems about various aspects of living here in my eight's and I've been wanting to do something with them. 

The class was advertised as "experimenting with art materials" so I had no idea we were going to be taking a large sheet of rag paper and act like kindergartners slopping watercolors every which way, then turning it over and doing the same thing on the back side. Our next class we'll be learning to cut and fold the sheet of paper to form a book that opens up accordion-style. The third class will be the embellishment phase, which to me looks more like scrapbooking than art but, of course, those judgments are always in the eyes of the beholder. All I know is that since the first class and now I've also finished up a paint-by-number I started working on last fall and lost interest in and I've stretched a canvas to use for another customized paint-by-number that I promised to my oldest niece. Plus I dug out my folder of poems to print and use as embellishments, along with a few photos from around the campus.

I also took a trip to JoAnn's Fabrics going out-of-business sale, bought some heavy paper I planned to print the poems on and prompted screwed up my printer trying. It took me almost two hours to get it working again because the paper not only got stuck but it caused the ink cartridges not to read anymore and I had to change them, clean the nozzle and preform all the set up/alignment stuff I did when I first got the printer. Won't be trying to put heavy paper through the printer again. Now I have to dream up another project that will use fifteen pieces of great quality scrapbook paper bought at the ridiculously low cost of twenty-five cents each. I have always loved and lusted after good paper. Back in the days when all I thought about was art I had a great collection of handmade paper samples, I even took a papermaking class in college and just now I realized that the blender I donated to Goodwill a month or so again could have been put to use turning my junk mail into homemade paper. Oh well, I don't have time for all the could have/should have ideas that flit through my head.

Change of topic: If you live in Michigan and get a chance to hear a lecture about Rosie the Riveter or the Willow Run Bomber Plant given by Clarre Kirhn Dahl, don't pass it up. She's a retired history educator specializing in Women's Studies who spoke for an hour and a half on our campus without notes or missing a beat. She had us spellbound and laughing and so pumped with pride in the 269,0000 women in our mom's generation who worked in the factories during WWII building planes ships, jeeps, guns, bullets and making uniforms. Many of us had joyful tears in our eyes when she was finished speaking. She's part of Michigan Flight Museum  (an affiliate of the Smithsonian) and is an official 'Tribute Rosie' who dresses in the iconic look made popular by Norman Rockwell magazine cover and she crisscrosses the country to tell the stories of the American home front during the war and along the way she locates and documents as many the still-living Rosie's as she can find. I had an aunt who was a Rosie. Her two kids lived with us and their mom would visit when she could. For a few years I thought I had three brothers instead of just the one.

If you like Women's history another fascinating and inspirational thing I saw this week was a netflix movie that tells the true story of a black unit of the Women's Army Corp during WWII called The Six Triple Eight. Like the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black unit that served during WWII, it took decades to get the recognition they earned and deserved only to have Musk, this week, use his chainsaw crew to remove their records from military archives as being too DEI. Anything related to Black History month got removed. Even famed baseball player, Jackie Robinson's military recorders got scrubbed. Thankfully, there is an effort to restore the damage these clearly unqualified "Musk's DOGE kids" did purging and attempting to white-wash history. History is history! It can be disturbing. It can be inspirational. It can be a lot of things but what it can't be is changed into something it wasn't. And yet here we are….  ©