To Miz SmoochieLips, With Love....Bad Art..and My Muse....

This is for MizSmoochie Lips. It's to make up for being such a lame swap partner. She sent me a wonderful box full of wonderful things and I only sent my 1 art piece. I am soooo not cut out for swaps. I hope you like it Tia. I don't know why I felt the need to turn Glinda the Good Witch into a cupcake, but there it is. Did you know she was 53 when she played that role? Amazing!
Last week Tia called for people to post their art mistakes and I LOVE that idea. I've got tons, so I'm gonna post them every once in a while. Sometimes our mistakes help us grow to be better at what we are striving to accomplish. This is the first collage I ever made. I looked at Altered Art for over a year and collected things before I ever even put gesso to paper. I was so terrified of not making something good. Something I loved. I went about it all wrong. It has no soul. I basically went down a mental checklist of things I loved about collage and made sure each element was in the piece.

• vintage photo? Check!
• vintage eggs? Check!
• Crown? Check!
• little random triangles as border? Check!
• old text/ music paper? Check!
• wings? Check?
• bird? Check!
• mysterious phrase snippet? Check!

How could I go wrong? My husband took one look and said, "That looks like Monty Python". Ouch. I didn't make another piece of art for over 6 months.

I started small and this piece spoke to me. The haunted eyes of the children and father. The absence of the mother. Her image is the same one I used in my first collage. I like her better here.
This lovely lady is my Muse. She has no name, but I know she was meant to be mine. There is an old farm house across the highway from our neighborhood. The sweetest couple lived there and they always had huge, beautiful vegetable gardens. The man would let my son (then only 3 and brother less) ride his tractor and pull onions. He finally became to old to keep up with a 100 year old home and the land and it all was sold. He was so sad to leave his home and it broke my heart.

The house sat for sale for over two years. Then I noticed a sold sign in the yard. The new owners began renovations on the old house and used bulldozers to scrape up and turn over all the gardens. One day there was lush beautiful vegetable plants (they were growing wild now) and the next there was sod laid out in neat rows. Then they bulldozed one of the two barns. I so upset and one Sunday afternoon, when there were no workers, I went over there to look at the other barn before it was gone too. My heart was beating out of my chest and I just knew any minute a police car was going to drive up and I'd be arrested for trespassing. There was nothing left inside and the workers were using it to store the new wood siding for the house. Still I poked around and took a few rusty nails and found a glass jar with a rusty lid. I was poking around in the chicken coup and when I looked down there was a black piece of cardboard in the straw. It looked like the cover of a book laying there. I picked it up and turned it over and it was her. Left alone for all that time, laying in the chicken coup. There I stood in a hot, dusty barn with chills all over my body. It may sound strange, but I know I was meant to go there and find her before they tore the barn down. So she is my Muse. I don't think she needs a name. But her influence was enough to call me across the highway to her and now she has a home.