Students - Today's poem is from April 30, 2015...the last day of my SING THAT POEM project for National Poetry Month 2015. Each poem that month matched a song tune, and this one matches the tune of Greensleeves. I chose to send this poem to artist Cathy Stephens Pratt during SPARK 41. She had sent me a whimsical image of her painting depicting a house, path, flowers, and mushrooms, and I shared the poem I wrote from it HERE.
Cathy made such an enchanting painting to go with this poemsong about Joanna. I asked her to tell me a bit about her process. Here is what she said:
Jone is hosting today's Poetry Friday roundup over at Deowriter with a magical poetry prompt fortune teller gift from Tabatha and some poems they wrote from it. Delightful! Don't miss Please know that we gather each Friday, sharing poems and poemlove, and all are always welcome.
Cathy made such an enchanting painting to go with this poemsong about Joanna. I asked her to tell me a bit about her process. Here is what she said:
Being an illustrator, what I do is take an idea or a story and turn it into a painting. I distill ideas into marks on paper. Sometimes I abstract the images to enhance or simplify ideas, and sometimes what I paint is simply a representation of the words. Amy’s written piece was so utterly charming I only wanted to support her words with simple images. I didn’t want to embellish because I felt like her words were perfectly lovely and told a story, a very vivid story, all by themselves.
I am grateful to have been paired with Cathy. SPARK always opens my world. And lucky me! Cathy generously offered to send me her painting, and I am excited to hang it up here at home. I wish I could find the real Joanna, the real girl who read to birds back in 2013. If I could, I would send the painting to her.
Do visit Cathy's website, and step into a world of color and joy!
The tag line for SPARK is "art from writing: writing from art." I think that I will go make some drawings and art today. Our writing selves do feed our art making selves and our art making selves do feed our writing selves.
In other news:
Linda Kulp of Write Time is the winner of last week's giveaway of I AM SOMEONE ELSE, poems collected by Lee Bennett Hopkins and illustrated by Chris Hsu. Linda - please let me know your snail mail address, and I will send this book your way.
At Sharing Our Notebooks, my other online home, I am thrilled to welcome Art Educator Matthew Grundler. Please visit his post about visual journals...and be inspired! (There is a giveaway there too.)
Please share a comment below if you wish.
