What happened to these people, the Mimbres, who created such dramatic and elegant pottery? 

Emerging from the Mongollon culture, they were a later version of that group which lived around the Mongollan Mountains in Arizona and New Mexico from about AD 200-1450.  If I am correct, the Mimbres peoples lived toward the end of that period (1050-1200 or so). 

Eventually, it appears that they  abandoned their homes and cultural centers for unknown reasons.  Just walked away, probably dispersing into other groups or other areas of the country. 

Who were they and where did they go--and why?  So far, we have no answers to these questions.  They leave us their inspired, graphic, dramatic pottery, from which this tile is drawn.  Here we have the fish, the deer, the turtle, and the caterpillar, all very precious and symbolic to them.  We have the four directions, a stylized sun, some stylized feathers.  While we can say something about what modern generations of Native/Indigenous Peoples would say about these symbols, we can only guess at the full extent of what they mean to people from this era.  It's a definitely a mystery. 

Only their art speaks to us about who they were.

To a Mimbres Woman
by Marty Eberhardt

I see your thousand-year-old thumb print
On the plain brown potsherd.
My own thumb fits perfectly
In the curve you left.
Other more elegant pottery bits
Lie among rocks and junipers
On this hill of dry grasses.
Red-on-white interwoven geometry, 
A tasseled quail,
Designs fine as any
In the art galleries of the town. 
But it is this plain brown piece that draws me.
My thumb seeks the curved place, again.
I see you forming the pot 
From coils of clay,
You look out over fields of corn and beans 
In the valley below.
Then, as now, a red-tailed hawk dips,
A horned lizard scurries under a stone
That forms the village wall.
Beyond the fields
Green cottonwoods mark the river  
Between jagged hills.
The wind shakes their leaves like a gourd rattle.
In the quiet between gusts,
The river rushes below, monsoon-strong.
It is in these wild places,
Where our thumbs
Feel the curve of another’s hand,
Places free from cement, neon, asphalt, smog,
And deadened water,
Across years, 
Across cultures and countries,
Beyond all reason,
We find each other.

Practice will never make perfect, but it can certainly make things better--both visually and also with my internal weather system.  If I don't practice, I can tell the difference the next time I try to draw.  This is one reason I take classes frequently.  And if I don't practice I start to feel a build-up emotionally too.  Drawing repetitive lines is incredibly soothing, calming and meditative.

Speaking of which, meditation  is the same for me.  If I don't practice, I begin to see the effects almost immediately in daily life. 

I'm just better when I practice, whether with drawing or with meditation.

Yes, I'm now officially addicted to this tangle with its deeply graphic qualities.  I added some blue and gold rings in chalk pencil when I was finished, the colors of Ukraine, since the tangle is derived from Ukranian folk art (see yesterday's post).

Yesterday and today I have been experimenting with using a 9-pointed star as a string for tangling.  Below is my first attempt, done with Tomomi Galliano, CZT of the Pebbles and Drops website..  And underneath that is today's try.  I like this 9-pointed mandala a lot.  Nevertheless, first tries are just that:  first tries.  I can only get better with practice, eh? 

I posted my first try at this tile two days ago here.  Today I was wanting to make a card to accompany a gift certificate for a friend and decided to use the same tile design.  I'm pleased with this and hope the recipient likes it.  I made some minor changes in the design.

See an earlier stage of this project below:

Just getting started on the coloring, after creating most but not all of the linework.

"Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America."
(Amy Chua)

That's one reason I don't mind doing the same thing several times over.  I know I learn best that way.

This mandala was easy to draw this morning because one of the talented artists I'd taken a class with some time ago, Annie Taylor of the Arty Zen website, emailed a private video free to all her former students as a thanks.  It was a how-to of this piece, so I gave it a try.  Very fun. 

You can see the progression above, from the linework through the finished piece.  I like this mandala pattern and can see using it for other things.  Will be trying it again.  Thank you, Annie.  It's always wonderful to get a surprise gift.

And as I'm catching up on my back-to-basics 365 Tangle challenge, here are a few more super-basic tangles from early January.  The wind is howling outdoors; how lovely to stay inside and draw.

There are so many surprises in life.  This was certainly one of them. 

Zentangle® can be counted on for providing surprises on a regular basis.  You never know where you're going to end up once you begin.

After yesterday's post I thought I would try another mandala but this time I would attempt to place the more complicated Punzel tangle in the round.

Success!  However, I ended up with something that reminds me of Brutalist-style architecture, my least favorite style of all time. 

You could say this got the job done, but although I technically succeeded I'm not in love.

Which leads me to wonder:  what would this look like if I ran it through an iPhone app?  Let's see:

In part of Mary Oliver's Poem, "The Turtle," she says:

...Crawling up the high hill,
luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin,
she doesn’t dream
she knows
she is a part of the pond she lives in,
the tall trees are her children,
the birds that swim above her
are tied to her by an unbreakable string.


For the entire lovely poem, see New and Selected Poems: Volume One (Beacon Press) or go here.

I think I like the iPhone variations better than the original in this case.

The temperature was zero Farenheit when I woke up and this afternoon has reached a blazing 11° F (that would be MINUS 11.6°Centigrade, correct?).  I've been basking in the warmth by drawing a blue and black zendala that captures the winter colors. 

Wind outside is howling, and howled all through last night. 

Daylight is fading.  Snow is on the way. 

Hot cocoa, anyone?

White-Eyes
By Mary Oliver

In winter
    all the singing is in
         the tops of the trees
             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
    shoves and pushes
         among the branches.
             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
    but he's restless--
         he has an idea,
             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
    as long as he stays awake.
         But his big, round music, after all,
             is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
    In the pine-crown
         he makes his nest,
             he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
         tucked in a white wing
             while the clouds--

which he has summoned
    from the north--
         which he has taught
             to be mild, and silent--

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
         like stars, or the feathers
               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent--
         that has turned itself
             into snow.

Holy cow, this was a hard photo to take!  Two of the mandalas would look great, the third would almost disappear; I'd try again, another two would look great and the other third would disappear.  I was gnashing my teeth.  This is the best I could do.

This is part of a series of moon phase pieces.  I have moon phases on the brain right now.  I am hooking moons into my latest rug, and also working on these drawings which I began in late 2020.

My heart is like the autumn moon
perfectly bright in the deep green pool
nothing can compare with it
you tell me how it can be explained
--Han-Shan

After watching my friend Jo Quincy, CZT, create a Mooka-Tipple combination tile, I thought I'd have a go.  I've done this tile before but not for ages.  Jo has damaged a finger on her dominant hand very badly and has been tangling with her non-dominant hand and producing work as gorgeous as if she was using the dominant one--she is really amazing.  (NOTE:  I used my dominant hand to do this one and it's not half as good as hers, done with her "wrong" hand.)

I tangled with a blue Micron 05 over a pre-prepped watercolored Zendala--on the left.  And then tarted up the piece with some watercolor pencils and gold gellyroll, on the right above.  Which one do I prefer?  Don't know.  My tile is totally inspired by Jo's piece, but of course it came out differently as tangling is like handwriting.  Hers is much more subtle.  To see hers, go HERE.  And as you watch, be aware she's using her "wrong hand."  Amazing!

Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery.

Finally, I had to play with them on my iPhone apps and producted these 2 versions:

Playing with "special effects" is always fascinating, especially any shift in color.  Knowing that we don't always see color the same way makes this even more intriguing.  Which version(s) do you prefer?

Continuing with zenAgain21:  Here's a Dali-inspired tile.  Mine looked quite different from those done by others (they were better at listening to the directions).

I know, scary stuff, huh?

"When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another."  - Dali

He's not one of my favorite artists, but this was a fun idea to experiment with.

This was done with brown and black microns, graphite, watercolor pencils and white chalk pencil with a touch of white gellyroll on a 3.5" white tile.

Somewhere during the four days, we worked on an Opus tile (10 inches square).  I have plans to re-do this one, since I liked the idea but felt a bit too rushed during the execution.  It was fun though.

I have a few other things to finish or re-do, so that's it for now.  What an opportunity.  To be tangling for four days straight was just wonderful.  And exhausting.  As Molly Hollibaugh says, "Drawing is a physical act."  True!

Sometimes tired old things just need to be dressed up a bit to shine. 

Cue the comments on whether that's true for all of us!  I'm talking about things.  Ha.

This morning I found a gray tile that I'd tossed some lavender-ish watercolor on long ago, in an early attempt to map-tangle.  The color had spread out over most of the tile, with absolutely no interesting shape, and was incredibly plain.  BO-ring. 

Out came more watercolors today and I tarted it up, used my heat gun to dry it, and went to town with some of the Inktober tangles.  Better.  Every tangle except one was brand new for me.  Some of them turned out more successfully than others, so I'll re-do the ones that really didn't have enough room to show themselves off.  Perhaps that'll be the task for tomorrow.

This is what happens when I run out of black Micron 01s and still want to tangle.  Spynes, which I tried for the first time yesterday, is a really fun tangle for experimentation--I couldn't resist this second try.

The Stone House Runner is nearly done; just the usual finishing steps left.  Here it is:

A meditation on the preponderance of spirals in the cosmos.

"In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That's probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance to knowledge. We're out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade."
--Vera Rubin

I enjoyed every moment of this one.  Enough said.

How many ways can a drawing go wrong?

Just watch.

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.  Oh gosh, I started off drawing the tangle Dewd, which I have never quite grasped.  (an understatement if there ever was one)

The first thing to go wrong was that I discovered that my beloved Micron 01 was dying.  I searched for a new one, which was when I found out I did not have another 01.  What to do?  I picked up an 05 instead.  Oh dear.

That's one of the things that gives this very funny tile a look of having been drawn by Edvard Munch (the painter who created The Scream).  But wait, there's more!

Dewd is the tangle around the edges of this Zendala.  I kind-of-almost had it at first, and then totally lost it as I moved in toward the center.  At several points I thought, "Oh for Pete's sake--this is rubbish, I can't go on."  But hey, it's Zentangle®.  We always keep going and see what happens.  One line at a time.

So instead I started to laugh and plowed on.  I added another tangle in the center.  Oh my, a nice one but it didn't help.  Edvard Munch lives on.

Well hey, in for a penny in for a pound, right?  Will it help if we tart this up with color?  (no)  Out came the Silver Shadow Gellyroll pens.  These are always tricky to use as you never quite know how they will look when dry.  I followed that up with a liberal application of General's Colored Pencils in two colors.  Thus proving the saying by Oscar Wilde, "Nothing succeeds like excess."

Because despite it all, I kinda like it.  And I laughed my way all the way through, which is always fun.

It felt great today to just sit and tangle awhile.  Quiet and relaxing.  I'm rusty but the annual 'Inktober" Challenge adapted for tanglers got me going and I couldn't be happier, even though we're already nine days into the month.  I plan to do what I can and thoroughly enjoy doing it.  It's good to be back.

The people we tend to call Huichol in Mexico (they call themselves Wixåritari, or, The People) have a long history of art.  I've admired their beadwork, small glass beads pressed into wax lining the bottoms of gourd-bowls and other objects coated with a thin layer of wax, using bright, bright colors.  Check it out at the link above.  They work in many media in addition to beadwork--textiles, paintings, et cetera. 

This tangle is based on a shape common to their culture and others.  We see it in quilting patterns everywhere, and in many other cultural contexts.  Mexican CZT Celina Bonilla Martin gave a class using the form as a template.  I decided to go with a different colorway and did my own thing.

Tangles included:  Printemps, DoDah, Wadical, Umbler, Flux, Ko'oke'o. 

What interested me was that most of the way through working on this, it looked like it was going to turn out as an epic failure on my part.  It looked horrible.  I wish I'd taken photos during the progression.  And then I began adding the tangles and it turned around.  While it may not be a masterwork on my part, I quite like it now.

How many times have I said that here, and drawn a parallel to daily life?  Trying out new things often brings on a feeling of, "Oh my god, this is never going to work," and then somehow it turns out better than expected.  And with practice, we just learn more and get better and better.  This is certainly not true in all situations in life, but it's the case far more often than not.

The critical mind is always predicting epic failures.

Just ignore it.  See what happens instead.

A repeat of yesterday's tile.  This is version 2.0 since I gave away the tile I did yesterday as a thank-you gift to a neighbor.  I realized I still wanted a version for myself and redid it, enjoying every line.

In today's version I added substantial green coloring as well as the blue, and experimented a bit with placement of patterns.  This was just as much fun as the first one.

Another "learning tile" done very quickly from an Artifex video.  This was done fast as a thank-you gift for a friend who made me a lovely dinner.  I cannot cook so cannot reciprocate, thus I wanted to draw her something as a way of expressing gratitude.

However, I needed gray-toned paper to work with, and didn't have any.  What to do?  I grabbed a white tile and threw a gray wash on it.  Et voilà--it actually worked!  I'll give it to her this evening.

Whew.  When it doubt, improvise.  Always a big life lesson for me.

I'm turning into a major fangirl of CZT Emiko Kaneko, who has a fantastic Youtube channel and shares her teaching there.  This (above) is my version of one of her lessons after watching one of her free videos. 

Here below are a few of the stages this mandala went thru on its way to completion.  I photographed as I drew.  What a calming experience.

One line at a time. 
Stay present. 
Cultivate patience. 
Enjoy the moment. 
Mistakes?  What mistakes--a mistake can be addressed and learned from. 
Appreciate appreciate appreciate. 
Hold the pen (hold things) lightly. 

I love the lessons I learn from Zentangle®; they're directly applicable to meditation, to daily life, to just about everything.

Starting a new rug.  Some of the work is deceptively tricky but I think I'm getting the hang of it.  This is my second try and is an obvious improvement over the first.  I'm learning as I go.   That's the story of our everyday life, yes?  "Learn as you go. " No instruction manual, no do-overs. 

Taking each day as it comes.  Not so easy to do!  And not every day is a masterpiece either, that much is certain.   But day by day, moment by moment, we create our lives.  Hopefully, we learn as we go. 

At least with rug hooking, you get to pull something out and do it over if needed.
***                                                                    
"Yesterday I was clever, so I changed the world.  Today I am wise, so I am changing myself."  --Rumi

It's hot and humid outside, not my preferred weather.  Demotivating. 

However, I see the value of "warming up" in other contexts, like when doing any kind of art.  Warming up = doing anything mental and/or physical to get oneself going.  Even sitting down for only ten minutes when there is supposedly NO TIME.  Here's last night's warm-up below, a quick tangle done just before sleep, inspired by the Sunday night Tangle Time with Amy Kam.

This morning I noticed I didn't want to meditate.  Not. At. All.  So I applied the warm-up idea to meditation, telling myself that I only had to sit for ten minutes.  And reminding myself that I could look right at the resistance the whole time if I wanted to, and that everyone has resistance at times.  I did, and of course discovered that I easily meditated for my entire usual time (way longer than ten minutes) and enjoyed it.

Yep, warming up...I may not like it when the weather does it, but it's pretty darned handy for the arts and for meditation.

After warming up today, I did this:

I'm not sure it's finished yet.  Probably is.

This was my second try at drawing Tisoooh (see my first attempt HERE) and I could not believe how much easier it was.  So much easier!  I want to continue to explore. 

Thanks to my friend Susie Ng in Thailand, who actually tried the same video I described in my previous post about it and then went good-crazy into experimenting with Tisoooh on her own.  You can see her amazing results HERE (scroll down until you find them but prepare for a visual feast along the way).  Susie is a phenomenal artist, as you'll see!

So it started out this way...

I'm still "blobbing."  A great way to try out various watercolors and watercolor techniques.  These are Yatsumoto metallic watercolors.  Very subtle unless you really load your brush.

There was a teeny bit of Inktense Watercolor Pencil tangling going on in the upper left quadrant.

This is all I'm capable of today.  The night before last I had only 2 hours of sleep, who knows why.  All day today I've been dealing with credit card fraud in a major way.  It's taken hours to straighten things out.  And I made a major blooper with some friends that also took quite a while to straighten out (assuming I even did get it straightened out). 

Isn't this just how life is--some days great, some days awful.  (I could re-write that sentence substituting "hours" or "minutes" for the word "days" and it would be equally true.) 

There is nothing else to be done but to respond to each moment in the moment.  And what a challenge it can be to respond skillfully.

So all I can do is work on a few small blobs.  In fact, I am a blob myself today.  Neither happy or unhappy, but still just a blob.  Sometimes ya gotta go with the flow--even when the flow is temporarily blocked and becomes blob-like.

Here was how I started out, after watching a really fun video on IG TV by Yvonne West, CZT < @ywestart > which I thoroughly recommend.

My blobs before I tangled them.  The video was fun to watch and if ever you don't feel energetic enough to tackle a full tangle, this is a terrific exercise for experimenting with watercolor in a low risk way.