Smithsonian has an excellent short article this month on artist Janice Lowry's illustrated diaries which has made me long again for some kind of artistic talent. Here's a bit:

From childhood on, Lowry filled small notebooks with daily musings and drawings. Then, in the mid-1970s, she moved to a larger format, 7 1/2- by 9 1/2-inch notebooks. For almost 40 years, Lowry—an artist best known for her intricate, three-foot-tall assemblages—filled the roomier notebooks with jottings and sketches. The pages contain everything from original drawings, collages and rubber-stamp images to observations about herself and the world, including the commonplace "to-do" lists many of us make: "pay bills/make plane res/get asthma med/Judi birthday gift."

One of the great disappointments of my life is that I can not draw a blasted thing. I tried when I was younger, I really really tried but it was clear from early on that without some serious instruction I was never going to get beyond the stick figure stage. (We were not people that had money for serious instruction, so you can imagine how I ended up.) Now collage though, well that is something I can do although I never really thought it was something serious or even artistic until I came across Dan Eldon's journals and pretty much had my mind blown in the best way possible.

I can't begin to wrap my head around what a loss his early death was to the world.

From Eldon I finally found out about Peter Beard (I know, I'm not proud of missing out on him for decades) and then I started seriously looking for illustrated books and journals and finding more and more wonderful writers and artists doing exactly what I wish I had always been able to do. (Oh Barbara Hodgson, how I especially adore you! And Bryan Talbot! And Ann Marie Fleming!) (More on Ann Marie Fleming by the way during the Winter Blog Blast Tour in two weeks.)

Anyway....Lowry's journals, minus the actual drawing, are accessible. And they present an excellent peek into her mind, both creative and mundane (we all have to go grocery shopping after all). I know a lot of authors who keep diaries and even "book diaries" where they keep ideas as they create their first draft. But I don't know a lot of authors who illustrate those diaries - even with collage.

Can I tell you a secret? I do that.

It's a lot of fun when you're paging through a magazine and suddenly see somebody or something that makes you think of a character. I didn't do this with the AK book but with the western one it has helped when I've come across a bit of setting in particular. And as for fiction - well, if nothing else it makes those guilty minutes with Vogue or Elle easier to justify. I don't know, maybe it all just appeals to that eternal fourth grader who lives in my head and dearly loved those moments with scissors and tape. And hell - if Louis Armstrong did it then it's good enough for the rest of us right?

Janice Lowry, totally one of my new heroines.

[Post pic of Lowry in 1983 at age 37 with some of her journals and an inset of one of her books.]