Spirals

It has been a long time since I took time to write a blog post. Life got busy and I kept pushing writing off a day here, another day there. And suddenly seasons have passed and I haven't posted. And truly in all that busy-ness there was so much to do and so little time to think, so little time to process. Luckily, life is a spiral path and I have been slowly moving back to a place where I felt I had something that was ready to share. It isn't much, but it is a start: sometimes you just have to jump back in and trust that more will follow. I've learned that along the way. The spiral aspect of life, especially the artistic life, is one of the things that keeps us growing as we circle the mountain in ever rising loops looking to reach the summit. We can't lose sight of that.

The spiral nature of the tangle Printemp makes it one of my favourites. I can literally sit and draw it for hours, using it to fill in spaces while I calm my mind. The name of the tangle is a little bit of a jest, using the French word for the season of spring to describe the spiral. (The actual French word for an actual spring is ressort I believe.)

When I began drawing this tangle I am going to introduce you to I wanted to use the same sort of jest when I named it. It is a wave and I call it Boucle (without an accent because that is too hard on an English keyboard) instead of vague de l'océan which would be the correct word. Vague just seemed wrong. Boucle is a twist in the yarn used to make a fabric and it looks like a pin curl. This tangle reminds me of that and also, back in the day, women referred to getting their hair permed as getting a wave.

I like the image of the wave. For me it represents happy times at the seaside, Caribbean warmth stolen in time away from the punishing winters devoid of light. It represents the crests and crashes in life, the ebb and flow rhythm we all experience. It represents the salty solutions. As Isak Dinesen said "The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea." And I love that this wave is doubled in the tangle giving it the feeling of yin and yang.

So without further ado here is Boucle (boo-clay). My apologies if this already exists in the tangle universe - it has become nigh unto impossible to keep track of tangles. It fell out of my hand one afternoon while I was working at Ogonquit in a class led by Kate Lamontagne. It was a lovely gift from the universe and I am grateful.

 

When you bring the strokes out in Step Two and Step Three it is important to go back into the circle and branch the strokes out naturally. This gives a better flow to the strokes and it also slows you down and makes you more mindful of the shape you are drawing. The wave strokes can be drawn in the opposite direction if that feels more natural or you want to change up the look a little. I showed that in the last box. The second from last box shows a couple of the strokes doubled, again to give more visual interest.