Wednesday, November 4, 2015

What to Do with Your Rotting Jack-O-Lantern--Make Art!

Yesterday was one of those great days full of creativity.  I started out by writing--and finishing (but not revising)--a poem.  I also wrote 2 blog posts.

Most Tuesdays, I meet a friend who is also a colleague for a quick lunch between her classes.  Often, she brings lunch for both of us.  Yesterday, I volunteered to bring the lunch.  I'm still loving the eggplant/red pepper/risotto recipe I first wrote about here.  Yesterday I loved the feeling of being in the kitchen making something tasty and nutritious.  I didn't even mind all the chopping and the dirty dishes.

And then I moved to the visual art part of my day.  I have to provide cover art for my chapbook, and I've had some ideas about taking old watches and broken eyeglasses to the beach and seeing what I could set up there.

Yesterday I looked at the jack-o-lantern, which is rotting faster than I thought it would.  My spouse mentioned my poem, "The Hollow Women," which is part of the forthcoming chapbook.  It has this stanza:

We are the hollow women
with faces carved like pumpkins,
shapes that ultimately frighten.

I decided to play with the jack-o-lantern and the broken objects I'd been collecting.




I took some close shots, which intrigue me too.



Can you tell you're looking inside a jack-o-lantern?



At one point, I turned off the flash.  The pictures have a different quality.



Because the pumpkin was in such a place of rot, I took it outside.  My spouse has set up a display of coral, since we no longer have aquariums.  I couldn't resist.



I love how the side of the coral looks like a skull-like face in profile.



The pictures are in black and white, because the chapbook will cost $2 less with black and white cover art.  I also like the shift in perspective that comes with the lack of color.



I'd have loved to have played with photography all day--but I had papers to grade and office work to do.  How nice, though, to have a creative morning to provide a mooring for the day!

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