fun with frames

Usually I approve of the simplest of frames for displaying etegami. Paper board covered in washi, with elastic stretched across the four corners to hold the etegami in place. Or maybe a very simple woven bamboo frame (flattish bamboo baskets make great etegami frames).

But sometimes I decorate store-bought wood frames, like the one in the photo at the top, especially when I have a specific etegami in mind. All I did was draw cat paws on the white frame with a permanent black marker. Then I recycled an old-ish but well-loved cat etegami to fit the frame's small-ish 9cm x 9cm dimensions.

Other times, I decorate with a season or mood in mind, trusting that the resulting frames will work with etegami that I have yet to create. I decorated the two box frames in the second photo by affixing shapes cut from hand-dyed washi using store-bought hole punchers.

Do you make original frames to go with your original art? If so, maybe you wouldn't mind sharing some of your favorite techniques and materials with me.

flower salad

I try to get the Etegami Fun Club involved in the Flower City Fukushima Etegami Contest every year. We've produced at least two award-winners so far, although I do recognize that the Japanese judges probably give our entries special consideration because of the novelty of submissions from "foreign lands."

But the Etegami Fun Club is much larger now than it was a few years ago, and this year, members from Italy, France, Canada, the US, Poland, Belarus, (and more) came up with an unprecedented number of submissions. So many, in fact, that submissions from foreigners may soon become so blasé that it will be much more difficult to impress the judges. That, of course, is a good thing. It's further proof that years of effort to spread interest in and passion about the art of etegami has produced results.

The two etegami shown here are from my on-going Flower Salad series. The one at the top is my submission to this year's Flower City Fukushima call. It says "Let's eat flower salad and become beautiful." In Japanese, the word for "beautiful" (kirei) can also mean "clean, pure, pristine" much like the English word when used in a sentence like "What a beautiful day it is!" It is more than physical beauty; it can refer to the spirit or character and, most definitely, the heart. 

#efcmailboxchallenge

 

One of our Etegami Fun Club members, Kasia from Poland, suggested mailboxes (for sending letters) and letter boxes (for receiving letters) as our group theme for April. What immediately came to my mind was a collage series I did years years and years ago when I was still active in the international mailart community. I had combined vintage Japanese stamps with photos of the kind of mailbox that was common in Japan when I was a child. 

I thought of submitting one of the original series, but when I looked through my digital records, they felt much too cluttered for my current tastes. So I did a similar one using fewer postage stamps, hand-written words, and a properly "wiggly" hand-painted mailbox. I couldn't motivate myself to paint the postage stamps, as I have plenty of real used stamps that I'm always looking for a way to use in my art. 

Speaking of postage stamp art, I am a big fan of Jackie Long's "Stamp People" series and hope to do something like that with Japanese stamps one of these days.  I am the lucky recipient of several of Jacki's collage cards.

By the way, I did today's etegami collage in my "Life Between Cultures" etegami journal so that I could also post it on the Artist's Journal Workshop group page on Facebook.

time, time, time, see what's become of me

This etegami is from my "Life Between Cultures" art journal. As usual, I've tried to incorporate a kind of wordplay that gives the combination of words and image more than one level of meaning.

The image was inspired by the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro, a young fisherman who rescues a turtle and accepts an invitation to visit the palace under the sea where the dragon god lives. There he is lavishly entertained for three days, until he asks to be allowed to return to his village to check on his aged mother. They regretfully let him go, and the dragon god's daughter gives him a mysterious box called a tamatebako to protect him from harm, but which must never, ever be opened.

Taro takes the box and is escorted back to the shore of his village. But he finds that everything has changed. His home, his mother, and everyone he used to know are gone. It appears that 300 years have passed on land while he was at the palace under the sea. Bewildered and grieving, he absent-mindedly opens the tamatebako. A cloud of white smoke bursts out of it, and suddenly Taro is turned into an old, old man with a long white beard and bent back. I find it a sad and puzzling story.