Mirror, Mirror - A New Website While Still Making Here

 

Today I launched my author website. It's been a very long time in the making. Not the website specifically, though that was it's own adventure. I speak of my latest incarnation as an author.

The bulk of my writing has been professional, much of it in-house or published under institutional or organizational bylines.

While my doctoral dissertation and this artist blog, Dante’s Wardrobe have my name on it, many other publications do not. I was the co-lead and major content provider for Writing@APUS, the author of user manuals and technical presentation guides for a major professional and scientific organization and several universities, the promotional writer and designer for an alternative health care provider and a singer-songwriter, a guest blogger for an academic marketing site, and the creator of scholarly book and journal indexes. And I have taught in both the humanities and social sciences, having written the syllabi, lectures, video tutorials and text-based instructionals for undergrad, master's, and doctoral courses in professional and academic writing, science fiction and fantasy literature, information organization, and database indexing.

But I've been a storyteller/maker for as long as I can remember. Telling and making go hand-in-hand; in part, because my family are all natural storytellers who are also creatively talented, e.g., fine artists, wood crafters, writers, urban planners, calligraphers, automotive repair and paint artists, photographers, and clothing, costume, theater set designers. I myself have been a graphic designer, award-winning display window and exhibits designer, fictional letter writer, live-action role playing actor, theater designer and seamstress/sewist.

I am currently writing in three different genres (mystery, speculative SF, and magical realism) while trying to still keep one foot in the academic scene by researching material culture in utopian fiction. My pronouns are she/her/them/they; my honorifics are Dr/Ms/Mx.

Going forward, I will use this blog to report on my artistic work and interests. The Cool Books series will transfer to my author blog under the new title of Book Thoughts. 

I am so excited to be launching into this new work and thinking space. I hope you will visit me in both. 

 

J.A. JABLONSKI - WRITER

 

Happy Solstice 2016

"Winter is the time for comfort,
for good food and warmth,
for the touch of a friendly hand
and for a talk beside the fire:
it is the time for a home."

                    — Edith Sitwell

 

 

 

 

 

 

May the deeply dark star-filled nights,

the cold, bright mornings, and

the long shadows of afternoon silences

be yours and be for all who share your path.

 

 

 

Happy Solstice (2015)

May the delight of the child's heart be yours.

May your home be filled with solace, joy, and laughter.

May you have stories to tell and memories to share.

May you see beauty in unexpected places.

May there be magic, wonder, and tales of travel for you.

May the deeply dark star-filled nights,

the cold, bright mornings, and

the long shadows of afternoon silences

be yours and be for all who share your path.

And please, oh all that be, let there be peace on earth.

August Time Out

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Dear friends,

I am going to be Europeanish and take a brief holiday.  I'll be enjoying a Celtic music festival, canning tomatoes and a variety of fruit jams, and working on my graphic novel project.

Best wishes - See you after Labor Day (a U.S. holiday on 3 Sept this year).

Where Things Shall Be Made

 Folding Card, The Old Woman Who Lived in A Shoe

 6 April 1883. Noel Wisdom
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I come from a large family and the old farm house we grew up in, while large-of-room, was also limited in its number of bedrooms.  So I spent most of of younger years sharing space with several of my sisters while my brothers shared other rooms.  For a time the only space I had for my own things was under my bed.  While there were downsides to the arrangement (at some point I was shifted to the top bunk and there went my place for things), it meant that I got to be up close when my many creative siblings were making stuff.  

It's a powerful thing to have a space to create - the room of one's own notion.  I can only dream of having a studio like American painter John Singer Sargent. 

John Singer Sargent in his studio.

From Archives of American Art

But, like many art making people of the current era, the making must be a part-time endeavor with part-time space allotted for it. So I feel very fortunate that I've been able to pull together two spaces in our rather contained flat for my creative work.

One of our main floor bedrooms has served triple duty as a work area, writing studio, and, occasionally, as a guest bedroom.  With the addition of the drafting table I first posted about in early February, I finally have a place for drawing the larger-scale works I've been percolating on for some time.

 
And in the basement, I've managed to carve out a space for more craft-oriented makings.  The desk is a fine piece of golden oak with the added bonus of a spring-loaded typewriter desk.  The side trestle table currently holds the found clocks, boxes, and other miscellany that I am redesigning/repurposing as an entrepreneurial extension of last summer's wizarding theater project.

I shall continue to daydream of a someday studio like Sargent's - with tall ceilings and much open space.  Until then, these two areas are the locales for imagination and creation.

That Beautiful Line

Original Catalog Cover for the Dante's Wardrobe company

I have a thing for the clean, clear, purposed line of the drawn variety.  As a synesthete, my experience of the world around me always has this strong cast of lines.  A single movement can call up an entire image, drawn in full; a single sound can create a veritable light show of intercrossing lines.  Conversely, seeing a well-drawn image creates a kind of physical calm, an even plane of light and sound. 

Not surprisingly, I am drawn to artists with a strong eye and strong drafting hand.  Here are a few I have long enjoyed (and at the end, a new discovery).

Albrecht Durer

Drawing of Katharina

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Portrait of His Mother

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Venetian Lady

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Hans Holbein the Younger

Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk

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Anne Boleyn

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Study for the Portrait of the Family of Sir Thomas More

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Arthur Rackham

Hansel and Gretel

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Undine

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The Pre-Raphaelites

Jane Morris Photo & Painting

(Morris was a central muse for the Pre-Raphaelites)

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'Jane Morris' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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Rosetti: Portrait of Anne Miller

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Sveta Dorosheva

Sveta Dorosheva - website

Dante's Wardrobe Revisited

What is Dante's Wardrobe?  Best to say what it was.  In the mid-1990s I had a small mail order business for artist rubber stamps.  I named it Dante's Wardrobe.*

Dante after one of my favorite authors: Dante Alighieri (May/June c.1265 – September 14, 1321), the Italian poet.  (The image of Dante in the header of this blog is from the Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450.) His best known work, La Divina Commedia, was a mythic journey into the afterlife of the soul (as framed by the Medieval Christian worldview). 

Wardrobe comes from the C.S. Lewis work The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in his Narnia series.  I chose the name long before the Disney movie came out.  The notion of exploring unknown worlds as represented by the magical armoire was captivating.

My company was less literary than its namesake inspirations. The purpose of the business of Dante's Wardrobe was simple: fun, silliness, and creativity.  The stamps were mostly of my own design and focused on imaginary lands, fictional letters, and fanciful clothing.  The Anne Herbert quotation at the top of this blog was its mantra.  The company lasted only a year.  The current rage of scrapbooking and journaling hadn't hit yet. There was no real market then for my images and my ideas. 

Enter the 21st-century, and Dante's Wardrobe was reborn as a blog, twice in fact.  The original blog was a journal of my personal re-connection with art and its making.  This new incarnation is a return to my original intent: entertaining the world, encouraging others to entertain the world, and simply, to have fun.  Future posts will explore such things as decorated letterboxes, imaginary correspondences, mail art, letter writing, the sewing and design of clothing, and whatever else of a creative nature that comes to mind. 

As with any creative experience, it will ebb and flow.  My posts will be of a myriad rather than focused nature.  Images that intrigue, books I've read, people I find of interest, created and made things . . . whatever comes to mind.  It will be a microcosm of what makes the Internet such a fascinating world, a virtual cabinet of curiosities.

I welcome you to play.

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UPDATE (Nov 2023): In 2020, when Covid hit, I put this art blog mostly on hiatus. I also created a new website for my writer self: https://jajablonski.com/

I have a blog there that is more oriented to writerly/literary topics. Dante's Wardrobe will remain active, though perhaps not quite as often. (I also use my Instagram account for my visual art. You can find it here: https://www.instagram.com/judeajablonski/

Image credits:  The portrait of Dante is by Sandro Botticelli. The image is in the public domain.  The Narnia wardrobe is a photo from Barry Wallis' Flickr photostream.  It is of the armoire created for the Disney movie.