Robert Frost aceo

Robert Frost aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

Sometimes when I'm driving I see old church graveyards and have to stop to walk between the stones. I like the quiet dignity that resides there. I like to honor those souls that remain... I feel sad that there are probably never visitors... the last burial probably hundreds of years before.

The grass is always soft and green, the stones always beautifully aged by weather....but there is a loneliness. A lack of new flowers left... No signs of recent love.... No hint of loved ones missed. I'm always glad I stopped to sit a while with people losg past missed... long passed remembered... Long past.



Robert Frost wrote a poem about these graveyards, In a Disused Graveyard, in his 1924 Pulitzer Prize winning book, New Hampshire (which also included Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening) To me, it says all I feel about these places. And perhaps more.



In a Disused Graveyard

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

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Happy childhood aceo

Happy childhood aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

I did this card a few months ago and liked it so much I kept it around. I don't normally keep cards because I need to sell them to be able to keep doing them but this one I kept wanting to look at and I wanted to figure out why.... I know now. This door way looked so happy to me... It's a door way that made me feel like I wanted to feel when I was walking home from the school bus. This picture made me feel how I wanted to feel as I got closer to the door to my childhood home. Welcomed. Happy. Joyful. You know good things happen behind this door... You know happy people live behind this door.... Kind people. Loving people.

I don't know how many people had happy childhoods, I've met a few...but just a few. The rest seem to be a combination of people who at best felt 'on hold' and couldn't wait to start their own lives or at worst were the walking walking wounded. Childhood is not for the weak.

I've heard the saying "It's never too late to have a happy childhood" for many years and I've taken it seriously. My inner little girl has liked different toys over the years and I've gone through all the phases with her - Barbie....Polly Pockets.... Hello Kitty... I try to reparent myself the best I can. I think it's possible to an extent.

Scars don't go away....but they do fade away... and so do memories.

There was something very nice about this card for me. It was a concrete place to focus my thoughts of "home".... A place to imagine once I went through the green door my happy childhood still lived...

Cocoon ACEO GIVE A WAY

IF YOU WISH TO BE ENTERED IN THE GIVE A WAY FOR THIS CARD JUST COMMENT ON THIS POST BY WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 5, 2008. I WILL USE AN INTERNET RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR TO PICK THE WINNER BASED ON THE TOTAL NUMBER OF COMMENTS.

If you don't have a blog please sign your comment with an email address so I can email you if you win - anonymous comments provide me with no information!

Please, only one comment per person. I will pay the postage myself, the winner will get the card mailed to them with no strings attached.... and my thanks for appreciating my art!
****If this is something that people seem to enjoy I will try to do this frequently*****
cocoon aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

I've worked with this image before because it tugs at me. Calls to me... It's special to me... It's simple and sad and nurturing at the same time. It's about caring for myself. It's about taking care of my mind, my sanity and my body... It's how I survive when all I have left is the shell.

I was drawing like this in the summer of '97, months before I was diagnosed but I was symptomatic. At that time I was more concerned with quickly getting feelings down on paper and I don't think I had started using colored pencils yet; I believe when I did this one I was still only using markers. They were fast to work with, had blazing, sometimes shocking, color and they suited everything I needed at the time.


I've done this card before with the theme of overwhelmed. About when it's all - everything and everyone - it's all just too much. How at some point you can't take a thing more - a good thing, a bad thing...anything.... not one thing more. And you know all that works to make it better is collapsing in on yourself. Curling up. Not hearing or seeing anything else until you are ready...

Every once in a while I redo this card because it has meaning to me and I always get emails from people who tell me it has meaning to them as well. Even people who aren't bidding. Sometimes people just write to say I gave words to their feelings... I think thats an important thing so I try and use this image on different cards. The other thing is when ever I list it people who didn't win the auction ask me to relist a card with the same image. I can't replicate cards because no two are ever the same but I can use a main image again.

When I was doing this card for someone an odd thing happened. It stopped being the card Overwhelmed and became the card Cocoon. With this card I put gauze over the image... Some with the traditional gauze look and some just shreds of gauze. When I stopped to look at it ...the meaning had changed. What was once a figure collapsing in on itself in protection was now a figure spinning a protective cocoon... being proactive. Taking care of herself... Waiting out the storm in warm safe place of her own making.

For me there was something very different about this card. It showed a stronger figure. A person who didn't just have to wait for the storm to pass while curled up and hope for the best...but a person who could self-soothe. A person who could make her own safe place. A person who was on her way to 'better' even as she waited.

When I realized what I had in this card it was an empowering moment that I can't explain.

The card was done on a base of mat board cut into ACEO format. Through the main image you can see the base papers and I think that that gives even more of a feeling of vulnerability... The figure is not only curled into a fetal position but you can almost see through her...or partly...like she's fading away. Even so she is protecting herself against the onslaught of life

The third step aceo

The third step aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

Step Three invoves making "a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

I know and have known a lot of people doing twelve step programs and have my own experience as well. And for me I find the programs spiritual - as opposed to religious.... but I know that is me. I am comfortable because of the inclusion of "as we understand Him" . For me the programs wouldn't be workable without that. I was looking through some of the cards I had done and when I saw this one it said 'step 3' to me...








The card is a photograph I took at Cape May, NJ a few years ago. I collaged a mat board cut into aceo format and place the picture on the collage. I printed the photograph on an art paper, as I do most of the time so there are interesting inclusions through out the image. This one is a bit different because I finished the surface with embossing powder for a clear, hard surface. The finish isnt smoothe but looks like rain...

Fight stigma with humor aceo

Fight stigma with humor aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

Some days being bipolar amuses me; others not so much. Some days I'm dazzling and others, well, I can't string two words together. During times when I collapse into a discordant jumble of symptoms and side effects; bipolar primordial ooze, as it were, nothing makes me feel better than The Jerry Springer Show.

There is something oddly comforting about watching Barney next to his girlfriend, Thomaseena (complete with Adam's apple), being oblivious that this not so delicate flower of womanhood, is a man. I sit and scream at the TV, "C'mon, how could you NOT know?" Barney doesn't hear me. Jerry's audience is drowning me out.

Watching the show makes me feel better. I know it's not normal to see lace hankies walking up a flight of stairs. I know that, even as I hear their little stiletto heels clacking on the way up. But Barney. Dear Barney. Your girlfriend has a penis. How can you miss a penis? Which on a 6' 4" man, even a 6'4' man in a gold lame cocktail frock, must be of some substance.

I can't rationalize why society thinks it's scary that I see things that aren't there while its entertainment that Barney doesn't see genitalia that is there. Perhaps if I saw penises wearing stiletto heels clacking up the stairs. But I digress

The truth is there are plenty of undiagnosed folks; not all on The Jerry Springer Show. There is pathology on both sides of that locked door, and at times the undiagnosed scare the crap out of me. No one is free of idiosyncrasies. No one is free of things they would never share with another living soul. Everyone has a dark side. Not just the diagnosed. People forget that.

I'm tired of thinking about how people will see me if I come out of the bipolar closet. How can I lessen the stigma if I only let the socially acceptable bipolar stuff come out? You know the things I mean. It's the things that all the bipolar actors, writers, and newscasters cop to when giving interviews. The wanting to write/draw/paint/act all night long...and never needing to sleep ...the endless creativity... the ending up in rehab on a Caribbean Island. Basically, all the things that make people without bipolar think - That doesn't sound that bad, in fact it sounds kinda cool.

Do I go up to strangers to tell them tales of walking hankies? Do I have a bumper sticker that says, ASK ME ABOUT MY HALLUCINATIONS? No, that's crazy. And when all is said and done, I'm just bipolar... I'm not crazy.



This card is done on a matte board base with a collaged art paper background. The main image is printed on a plain paper but over the paper are many layers of thick acrylic - some with small glass beads. The card is thick and it looks like your looking at the image through rain.

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The sounds of silence aceo

The sounds of silence aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

The sounds of silence aceo
There is something peaceful about old church graveyards. Something in the dewy soft green grass and faded gravestones... How quiet it is among the stones. Even when the the graveyard is near a road... or a school....once you walk inside the walls a silence comes and drowns out any noise and thoughts you had before you entered the world of the stones.

It always reminds me of the beginning of the song, Sounds of silence....

Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

Pregnancy aceo

Pregnancy aceo
Originally uploaded by popcornfeet

It's hard to think of a time more filled with potential... more joy.... more fear... than when you look down and all you see is...well....belly! I usually write a lot to describe my cards but with this one...I think you're going to have to fill in your own words. A belly is a personal thing :)


I collaged a mat board cut into aceo format and placed the picture on the collage. I printed the photograph on an art paper, as I do most of the time so there are interesting inclusions through out the image. The card is thick due to many layers of acrylic medium - some with small glass beads. Its almost like looking at the image as a memory...

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