This is the beginning of a painting started yesterday celebrating  my new birthday, one year after cancer surgery. I am one happy camper. Now I have a few paintings I’ve started. That is the easy part. I have to go back in and adjust or take care of areas that don’t work. This gets tricky because each stroke I make changes the whole painting, so I have more problems to solve. As, Henry J. Kaiser used to say, “Problems are opportunities in work clothes.”

This is Not a Flower  Pencil and watercolor

Unfinished Blue Painting  acrylic on canvas 52″ x 36″

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One year ago today, I was operated on for cancer at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. During my stay at the hospital, I made little paintings in a moleskine sketchbook. The whole time I was there, I was surrounded by an extensive collection of art. There was a volunteer who brought a cart full of paintings into my room each day. Patients could choose a painting to be hung in their room. Today, I’m going to work on a larger painting started yesterday. A lot can happen in a year. Art heals.

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May 18th  acrylic on canvas  42″ x 29″

I just got back from an intensive ten day painting workshop. I came back a better painter. When I went back to the studio and started painting, I had a new vocabulary. The old favorite colors came back in a new context. I knew what I wanted to say. This brought me back to my familiar warm palette, but the variation of color and shapes changed. It’s now very exciting and intriguing for me to paint. I have given myself so much more to work with. May 18th was painted on Friday. It might be finished or it may tell me, hey, where did you go? You need to work with me. What do you think? Is the painting finished?

There are phases in my life when, before I go to sleep, I think about my art. I wake up thinking about what I made the day before. As soon as possible, I go to that piece in order to find out what it has to say. The paintings, drawings and photographs are tumbling out of my body. Without judging, I keep going.

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In Morocco, moushrabiyas or geometrical screens keep Muslim women hidden from view. These screens allow women to observe their surroundings without themselves being seen.

When making an Artists’ Book with this beautiful young lady, I asked her in sign language if she had some scissors. She took me to her room where she flicked on the TV. A static zig zag pattern filled the screen. The room was set up for her family, three outfits hung on rope across one corner of the room. We tore the sheet of paper, folded it and sewed it together with a piece of thread we found. I wondered what this girls’ future was going to be. This idea was the impetus for my book.  Zellig, also spelled Zellige, is a collage of patterns making up the tile decoration in Morocco. When making the book I used a collage of my work made up of my poems, paintings, drawings and photography.

Iris printing, on Somerset 175 gram soft white, by Urban Digital Color.

Typography and letterpress printing by Norman Clayton One Heart Press.

A limited edition of twenty copies and three artists proofs
Bound by John DeMerritt, Emeryville.
Copyright by Carla Trefethen Saunders
San Francisco, California 2000 $750.00

Permission Denied  1999

This little book with layers of see through vellum is more abstract inside. The little tile was chipped out for me by a tile artist cutting the stone for a mosaic, while he sat back on his heels, near the square. He drew a comic picture in my sketchbook and signed his name.

Yarn, sequins, gel, Boku-eki sumi ink, graphite, vellum, rice and watercolor paper

Roses, street litter

5 ½ x 4 ½ inches

Snake charmers, food venders, jewelry sellers, a dentist and other people filled Djemma el Fna, a large open space in Marrakech. One night a man, someone said he was a fortune teller,  was speaking to a large group of men. He cleared a space for me to join the circle. Someone threw a rug on the dusty ground. I sat and sketched by the light of a kerosene lamp. Drawings made that night were preliminary studies for five foot oil paintings I produced in my studio when I returned home.

Lifting the Veil 50″ x 40″ oil on canvas 1998

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McGouna Rose Petals Slowly Dried in the Shade   2000

Small book inside, Xerox, newspaper, candy wrapper, stamps, transfers

Wire, gold shoe polish, wax, paint, dried pigment from Morocco

Feather, rose petals

10 x 7  inches

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Original sketches on arches 140wt. Rives BFK

Xerox and ink jet on vellum, watercolor

Caran d’ache crayons, pen and ink, gouache, dry pigment from Morocco,

Original poems by the artist

Accordion 8 x 8 inches opens up to 8 x 80 inches

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