Vacant Hand

Amazing to think we have reached December already while outside the hollyhocks still flower and the last roses are hanging on. But fact is, week 49 of 2014 has arrived and our task for The Documented Life Project was to: Trace a hand on your page.

I can't even remember how often I have done this exercise over the years in a variety of art and personal development classes. I just wish I had kept them all. But at least I had preserved the last version mainly because it was used as inspiration for Journal Quilt no. 3 of the 52 Journals project. You can see it below and if you are interested it's for sale at £125. Just contact me by e-mail (address in the side bar). As the Journal Quilt is 10" square I enlarged my hand print and also changed the colour. The original hand was smaller and orange.

So I cut that hand from it's white background and adhered it to a gelli plate printed page cut to size to fit in my Moleskine planner. I used a variety of markers and watercolour brushes to integrate it further as you can see below.

It needed text (at least in my opinion) so I started to look for quotations about hands and came across this one by Sir Walter Scott in The Bride of Lammermoor. It's part of Lucy Ashton's Song and reads as follows:

Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,

Easy live and quiet die.

I found it on Saturday and have been thinking about this quotation ever since. Could it be true? And if it is, it must mean a difficult life and hard death for me, as my heart and mind are full to overflowing (although I sometimes wish for a Pause button on my thoughts!), my hands never still and my eyes full of wonder. Would I exchange it for that vacant heart, and hand, and eye in order to get such an easy life and death? No! And in fact how could you make that choice. Who we are and how we live, what experiences we have and what happens to us, is for a large part not in our hands. Even should we wish for a vacant life it's highly unlikely that we'll get it.

Who wants vacant eyes anyway when you can see so much beauty in the world such as this morning's sunrise. You can see the pictures below.  I'll take my chances with a heart full to the brim, hands always busy and eyes soaking up the beauty of the world. It is surprising what that quotation made me think about over this weekend. It took over my mind. Having it on the page will remind me of all those thoughts in the future.