It is week thirty-nine in our fifty week calligraphy challenge, and the prompt was Anne of Green Gables. So many great quotes and stories from these amazing books, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery, who published as L. M. Montgomery, probably because her stories would never have been published under a woman’s name.
If you know anything about these stories, the main character Anne Shirley is precocious and thinks very differently than all the people around her, which is alarming and charming at the same time. In may places she talked about being “Ann with an E”. I grew up having to tell people I am “Ann no E”, so in this piece I played around with the letter E. Emphasizing it in every occurrence, what fun! I used gel printed deli papers for the background, the large squares are remnants of ink left over from when I clean my ink rollers, and the lettering was done with gel pens and sharpies. I made it up as I went, which proposed it’s own challenges and opportunities. Creating on the fly means you have to deal with the good, the bad and the ugly within seconds of working it…ink dries fast and that means mistakes or change opportunities fly away quickly. This is not what I imagined, and in some ways better than my original idea.
Not what I imagined, more often true than people think. Imagining – daring to believe that things could get better or smarter or more creative – means being charming and alarming at the same time. It means giving in, giving way or even giving up one idea to move onto a better one that would not have popped up if not for that first failure. As these words remind us, if you’re going to imagine, why not imagine something worth while? Something worth doing and working towards. Thinking small serves no one, in fact it can become a deadly habit that traps us into believing that we are not good enough. By pushing ourselves to imagine, think big, scare ourselves with our thoughts THAT is when we change. THAT is when we make the world a better place, even it is only in our own world.
FYI – tomorrow is October 1st, which means it is Inktober!!! I will be featuring lyrics by female song writers and performers again this year, so stay tuned!
Ann Art Gallery Blog 