Just lookin'

Betty and I used to walk down the few blocks of downtown and into every store but the men's wear shop, the car dealership, and the beer parlor.  Maybe we had a dollar, maybe no money at all.  Didn't matter.  We were "Just looking."  We loved Jazzbo's (a mishmash of records, cookware, candy, and flowers) and the dime store next door.  

Cochran didn't have a book store, but you could occasionally find a random book in one of these stores or the drug store. 

Jazzbo sold new products but they were thrown willy nilly into bins, so you had to dig through a pile to find the records you wanted.  Same with everything else, no order at all.  

On the way home, we could stop by the library and check out as many books as we could carry.  Or visit my daddy's office at the courthouse, right next to the courtroom.   Sometimes we'd stop by the church and play piano and organ duets. 

Those were different days.  No doors were locked to wandering kids.  

This morning, Luci and I went to Jo Ann's fabric.  I bought a candle and black paint.  Luci bought nothing but got lots of free attention.  She gleefully licked and jumped upon a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named  Paisley. Luci knows stores by their smells and lurches to the front seat as soon as I pull into a parking lot.  Jo Ann's is pet friendly so there's always a chance of making a new friend. 

On the way home, I planned a few details for a project I'm working on--painting Rolodex cards.  If you're under fifty, you probably don't know what Rolodex is.  (I asked a clerk in an office supply store once if they had them and she suggested a jewelry store, thinking I meant Rolex watches?)

This is a Rolodex:

A lot of the things we love were seeded in childhood. I like vintage office supplies, as does Bob, probably because we spent time in our parents' offices--a Rolodex, colored pencils and phone number organizer in our daddy's office; a typewriter and an adding machine in our mother's. 

 

Nellie and I were talking one day about the images we're drawn to in art-making and discovered that we're both drawn to grids. Nellie thinks it's because we grew up in rural areas in which the landscape was a grid of fields--pecan groves, cotton, corn, and peanuts.   Grids also suggest the principles of quilt making and the arrangement of flower seed packets.

I also love circles: the shape of bowls and baskets and bubbles. 

In elementary school, I loved drawing houses--symmetrical with a chimney, smoke billowing, yellow windows, a big fat happy sun in the sky.  I've never lost my fascination for houses, drawing them, looking at them, decorating my own. 

What objects, human-made or natural, do you like to look at?  

Looking at (and for) what we find beautiful refreshes the mind.  It's always enriching to be on the lookout.  

In Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, she suggests having artist dates--not for shopping or producing or working, just for looking around and re-filling the well of creative possibilities. 

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