Pause and reflect - Art Daily Cafe

Moikka! Sunny start to the new week! Today I'm sharing my project for Art Daily Cafe with my take on the October theme (link). Autumn is a season of change in the nature. The fresh green sprouts that almost just emerged are now withering, turning brown and dying. Everything has its cycle. Somehow that makes you pause, seize the moment and realize that you need to let yourself be quiet at times. 

Autumn always makes me a bit poetic and while I don’t read poems otherwise that much, somehow the turn of summer into autumn makes me crave for poetry. I guess it’s again that idea of pausing, letting the words sink in and taking the time to reflect their meaning. Autumn also reminds me of one poem by Eino Leino, a Finnish poet, called Nocturne. Even though the verses say that it’s a summer night, I’ve somehow always paired the poem with autumn. To me it has the same air of letting go, pausing and quietness I associate with this season. “Time has ceased and weathervane is sleeping; stretches road at twilit end of day, bound for home unknown, I take its way,” the poem ends. (translation by Rupert Moreton) 

My inspiration came from the idea of pausing and reflecting. The color scheme with browns seems nowadays my “go to” palette, so it wasn’t hard to include brown in my project. I ended up using it quite a lot, in fact. To add that promise of spring, new life, sun and that the cycle goes on, I decided to add some gold to the brown. It reflects the sun rays, gilds memories and reminds us that nothing is as permanent as change. While there’s just one kind of brown in the page – the use of kraft cardstock in different forms – I used a multitude of different golds. The golden detail in the corner of the page is done using double sided adhesive where I brushed some Mica powder on top. 

This month’s theme asked to use a dried plant in the project. I chose to put that to the center stage and stapled a dried flower to a kraft colored tag. I gave the plant a little nest with two textures – first a dark and hard one using wire but there’s a softer one underneath the tag made out of jute cord. Both of these lead the eye in to the pale flower. 

Thank you for stopping by today. Have a great start to the week!

Materials: Prima Marketing, Sizzix, Paper Garden, Sinelli, Sostrene Grene