"These are a few of my favorite things"

I love pens.
At the local art supplies store they call me the Pen Lady.

These are not all my pens, they're just the ones I keep immediately to hand.
I have lots more, including the stash in my purse, the stash in my car, and the stash in my journal bag. Rapidograph pens, fountain pens, rollerball pens, calligraphy pens, brush pens, I've never met a pen I didn't want to scribble with.

My very first art class, in the mid-1980s, was a weekend drawing workshop for beginners taught by Robert Regis "Raffaello" Dvorak. No pencils, no erasers, just ink. We drew with fountain pens, reed pens, ink and brush, ink and stick, even ink and string. We drew ourselves, each other, and live models, right from the beginning. We had the full art experience.

That weekend I fell in love with drawing. I was already in love with ink.
I had written journals for more than a decade, filling them with page after page of black handwriting. Now I had a new way to scribble, wordlessly.

Unexpected meaning emerges as I move pen over paper, without intent, no picture in mind. Sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly, I see an image arise. I scribble on grocery lists, gasoline receipts, and notes to myself (even tiny Post-It notes), absentmindedly, just for the pleasure of moving the pen back and forth and seeing what happens. It's like slipping an exposed sheet of photographic paper into a tray of developer solution and watching something come from nothing. Magic!

Since I began to write and make art, I've been fascinated by artists and writers who combine the two modes of expression in one creative whole.
Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
The painted words of Edward Ruscha.
The photographic slogans of Barbara Kruger.
The graphic novels of Art Spiegelman.
The graphic journalism of Joe Sacco.
The mystery novels of Jane Langton, with architectural drawings by the author.

I hope Blipfoto will be a new way for me to explore the combining of words and images.