Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Under the C


The next few pages in my altered book are done in the same theme. I finally convinced myself to start cutting up those National Geographics from 1998, and I had a lot of fun finding images to use in this spread of pages. Once again I just played, chosing things that appealed to me as soon as I saw them, not worrying too much about why or where or what. Now that the pages are done, they suddenly make sense to me.


I had fun turning this girl into a mermaid with the body of a shark. Yet she is frightened of the other creatures that inhabit her world.


Hmmm, are you getting the feeling that the inside of my head is a scary place? Ah well, the idea I have for my next altered book is entirely different from this one. This book was started as a sort of therapy when I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of 2008. It was especially helpful to work in the book in those early days of fear and anger, but I can see that even now, almost three years since my last radiation treatment, I still have things I want to express about that experience. I have finished preparing the last few pages of the book and as I did that I realized that I wanted there to be 36 pages, because in gematria (basically a system of assigning numerical values to the letters of the alphabet) the Hebrew word for "life" equals 18, so 18 and its double, 36, (really any multiple of 18) are considered lucky numbers symbolizing life.

1 comment:

Stefanie said...

I didn't know you were a breast cancer survivor. What a warrior woman mama you are!
This is so neat how you alter this book. My girls would love to do something like that or even in a scrapbook.
These are my favorite pages of yours so far.