Storm MOON 3

For our March entry, I was inspired by Spring.  I know, “what a concept”.  But on one of our morning walks in late February, or early March, the birds were putting on an unusually full symphony.  The start of a new season, more light, longer days.  I decided then that if I could make a recording of that symphony and put it in Spot B of our little altars project, that’s what I wanted to do.  Well, after some thought, it seemed like that was a pretty unworkable idea – at least for now.

So I moved to some other approaches to my spring inspiration. For Lou’s box  I knew I wanted a color palette that would transition directly from Halloween to Spring.  I figured that would be a bit difficult, since the starting point was black and orange, and I wanted to end up with spring brights and the greens and yellows of daffodils and new leaves.  I think of spring as being pink and white, light and very bright.  And it looks like Lou has painted her box black.  I ended up with a dark background in watercolor washes, and some watercolor-dyed Japanese papers, and some shiny mica watercolors.  I knew I wanted flowers, so I tore the Japanese papers and layered them.  Then I stitched some (Peg) sequins from Turkey under some magatamas for the center of the flowers, added some acrylic too.

As I was sitting at my beading table stitching the beads on, I thought to myself, not for the first time, that this ended up not looking very spring-like after all. It was dark, and purple, and neutral, and orange, and green.  I’d really studied the colors I chose for going with black and orange, but it didn’t feel like I’d hit “SPRING”.  And then I looked across the room at the tulips sitting there (on the far end of their glory), and saw that I was STARING at the same colors that are in my little altars piece.  So I think I got to Spring after all, and in the process I enlarged my own perception of spring colors.

 Nancy Strahle