There’s nothing like the thrill of adventure in your own backyard. I take regular easy hikes along the trails that run along Dry Creek near my house. And recently I discovered a new single track trail that someone forged and then carefully marked out with bits of yellow caution tape.
Several weeks ago I began to see those bits of yellow tape tied to branches or sticks next to small trails branching off of the main official footpath. I went along a couple of those trails toward the creek, took a quick peek, and then went back to the main trail. Then I began to wonder if those little trails were actually connected to each other. I was pretty sure I had figured out where they started and decided to test out my theory on my next walk. The weather has been pretty rainy and I didn’t get a chance to go out to that area for a little while.
Then about a week ago, I finally had a chance to try out the new trail. I was kind of excited, and there were places where the trail wasn’t very clear and I had to look around for the next piece of yellow tape marking the trail. I didn’t have a lot of time that day, but I did manage to follow it all along it’s length, crossing and weaving along the main footpath.
I’ve had a couple more chances to walk that same new path this past week, taking photos and even enjoying some sunshine. I’m looking forward to more hikes watching the landscape evolve with the changing seasons.
I have mixed emotions about Halloween. On the one hand, I have fond memories of being a child and dressing up as all kinds of things, getting scared at haunted houses and savoring candy for longer than most kids did. (I still take my time with whatever sweets I get!) When my kids were little, we did the same thing, taking them trick or treating, having fun with costumes, and being careful not to eat too much candy at once.
I’m not sure at what point certain aspects of the holiday began to bug me. I grew in my spiritual journey, and I began to experience some supernatural things, plenty of great things like being given images for artworks and learning about miraculous healings. But then I also bumped up against real evil and found myself contending for someone else against demonic oppression. It’s not my story to tell but I learned that seriously evil stuff exists, and some of the aspects of Halloween hit a bit too close to reality to make me entirely comfortable with images of witches and evil spirits now.
You might wonder what in the world am I talking about when I myself create imagery relating to death, using skulls and dead creatures to produce my artworks. Isn’t that a lot like the pot calling the kettle black? It’s true that I do not shy away from death in my artworks. But you might notice that there is also always something more in my works and that often the image is more about life and transformation than death. It’s funny to me that people have found some of my own artwork “creepy,” because I never think of it that way myself. So, I’m sure that I see other folks things through my own filtered views. At some point I might get past my discomfort with Halloween, or maybe I will just sit with the discomfort and be careful not to jump to any conclusions.
I know that most people are just having fun with Halloween, and I do sometimes, too. I certainly don’t judge anyone else for having fun with Halloween; it’s not really a big deal and I’ll just keep muddling through it each year. It’s just one of those complicated things, maybe you’ve got something like that in your life, too.
These are my newest little artworks, perfect for showing your love of nature.
Whenever I step outside, there’s always some small piece of nature that catches my eye. Stepping out my front door, I have planted lots of succulents that just give me a warm fuzzy every time I see them. There are so many little things that we can find in nature that can provide that little thrill, and I’ve come to think of them as nature’s little love notes to us.
So how perfect that I’ve been able to capture some of those little natural gems in photographs and then pair them with a small heart shaped piece of wood? It started with wanting to send a few special little Valentines, and then if I’m going to make a couple, I might as well make more, right?
I’ve only made two dozen of these little hearts, some are already gone – and I’ll be sending a few as gifts myself – so there aren’t too many left, but if you message me I can email what is currently available so that you can give a little love note to someone special, or make it a gift for yourself! At only $25 each (plus tax & shipping as appropriate) they are sure to be gone fast.
Hi there! I know, it’s been a little while. See, there was this thing that happened, and then another thing, and another, and well, here we are.
Some of you know that besides being a working artist, I am also a teacher. Since 2009, I have been an adjunct professor in the Photography Department at Sierra College in Rocklin, California. I primarily teach a beginning class, with more than half of the class taught in an actual darkroom. Sometimes I also get to teach an intermediate class which is only film and darkroom work, which I truly love.
In March of 2020, we were about halfway through the semester and I was teaching both classes, fully in the darkroom. And then we went to distance learning. Challenging is a bit of an understatement, but we all fumbled our way through the rest of that semester, switching to digital work, which is not the same.
Summer of 2020 I spent, along with so many of my colleagues, learning how to properly teach online, including figuring out how to teach the elementary class – which must include a darkroom element to meet student learning outcomes. Thankfully I work with an awesome group of photographers and we all came together as a team and created an online unit that instructs students on how to build a pinhole camera, a minimal home darkroom and alternate process chemistry called Caffenol to meet that darkroom requirement for the course.
One of my Caffenol prints, created with a pinhole camera, as a sample for my online photo students.
Fall of 2020 was my first semester of properly teaching online, which includes building a class in our school’s learning management system. Imagine taking sixteen weeks worth of instruction, typing parts of lectures in a readable format, curating videos and creating demo videos as well. I was creating the class, week by week, working a bit ahead of my students, while interacting with them as well. At one point in the semester, I was about three weeks ahead of my students, which was great.
And then we lost my mother-in-law. My three week lead vanished and the rest of the semester I felt good to finish by Friday what my students would need on Monday. We had other struggles in our home and needless to say, there was no time for art making for several months.
But after that semester, I had a six week break and from that point on, my course would only need updates and tweaks and I could teach two classes and breathe again. I even started making art again and had an exhibit at Sparrow Gallery in April 2021.
Next week I’ll be making a trip to Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale that was originally planned for April 2020, and I am so looking forward to it.
Thanks for sticking with me, I think things are going to get better again.
What the heck just happened to the past two weeks? Good thing I have a reminder set on my phone to do this or months would go by between posts. Oh, wait… well, I’ve turned over a leaf and it’s different now.
Life is getting back to normal here in Northern California again, at least as much as possible after disaster hits. It started raining, put out the fire and cleared out the smoke; flood warnings were issued and today has been mostly sunny. This will be my first Friday in a few that I don’t have an art reception, but that’s okay. The community college campus where I teach has been re-opened after almost two weeks of being closed for poor air quality and Thanksgiving break and subsequently the end of semester stress is thicker than usual, but next week is finals week and then we will all take a long winter’s break.
I have, however, picked up a new creative compulsion. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, most of us creative types truly need to create and often find multiple outlets. Ask my husband and he will tell you that if I’m not creating, I am simply not a nice person to live with. At any rate, one of the last little house I made for the “Home for the Holidays” show in Folsom had an underground portion that I made roots for out of wire. I was pretty happy with it but then I wondered if I could make a tree out of wire…
“Firmly Rooted” mixed media artwork by Judith Monroe
So I started playing with wire, making little trees and mounting them on polished rocks collected by my great-grandfather. (Don’t worry, there are really a lot of those rocks and Grandpa would love seeing art made with them.) I simply find these little trees so satisfying to create. They just come to life in my hands and I am having so much fun making them. Before I knew it I had a pretty good grove growing and now there are some available at Little Relics, my friend’s boutique in Midtown Sacramento. I also have some at the Ridley Gallery at Sierra College for their annual fund raiser, so you can stop by there if you’re on campus. I’m not sure how long I will keep this up, but if you’re interested in having a tiny tree, get in touch now!
Wire tree sculptures by Judith Monroe
Oh yeah, I’m also going to be painting live at Bridgeway Christian Church this weekend, and that’s a different kind of creative compulsion but maybe I’ll save that to write about later.
I don’t know about you but the whole holiday season can be a little overwhelming for me. All of the advertising, the busyness, the crazy onslaught of email and special events is enough to make me so uptight that I actually withdraw and disengage from some of my usual activity. I find myself craving simplicity and then trying to figure out how I can balance that desire to have less while being a person who needs to sell things for a living. How can I strive for fewer things in my life, advocate for a more simple lifestyle and at the same time need to be constantly creating and selling? It’s taken me some time, bouncing ideas off of others while engaging in serious meditation and introspection to figure out how to make those two things that seem contradictory to actually become one healthy whole.
The answer that I found was in the definition of simplicity, what living a simple life in this society really looks like. And that can be different things depending on your outlook. The first thing that it looks like for me is to really examine the stuff I have in my life, not just the physical stuff but the things that take my time. I have prioritized my activities and I try to keep a healthy balance of time commitments, including a regular rhythm of rest, like having at least one day a week that I really don’t work at anything. (So much easier said than done!) I have also begun taking a hard look at the physical things in my five bedroom house, and that is where I start to feel challenged. There are so many things in my house that have just been there for a really long time and they actually do nothing for me or anyone else that lives with me. It can be overwhelming, but I try to just focus on one small area at a time and then honestly appraise things. My closet is an excellent example – if I haven’t worn something in two years, probably it should go. The next step is to take that from room to room and be careful about new acquisitions. So far, so good.
But then I look at my work and I wonder to myself, “How can I ask people to buy my artwork while desiring to live with less myself?” If I don’t practice what I preach then I can’t have any respect for myself, so this is a really important thing for me. I have wrestled with this a lot lately, but then I came to a realization. It’s not that I want to live with nothing in my home and in my life, but that the things that I live with need to have meaning and be life-giving things. Kitchen gadgets that I never use have no place in my life. Artworks that speak to me and bring me peace and joy are another thing altogether. If I look at an item and it can transport me to another place, if it speaks truth to me and elevates my mood, then that is worth having in my home.
So I am looking at all the things in my home and asking, is this just stuff or is it truly useful or is it uplifting – is it art? And that is what I challenge you to do in your own life, too. Every time I ask you to consider purchasing my artwork, which I need to ask you to do, ask yourself if this is just another thing to you? If it is, then carry on without guilt.
Or instead is it meaningful to you? Does it speak to you and make your heart sing? When you look at it, does it capture your imagination and tell you a story? Then by all means purchase it! Contact me and let me know and we can work something out. You can ask me if you want to pay for it over time or if you’d like something else like it but a different size. However my work speaks to you and whatever happens, I really want to be adding something meaningful to your life.
“Attraction” Photo transfers and mixed media on 12×12″ cradled wood panel. Currently available $350.
If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know I have opinions about all kinds of things. In other venues, like this blog, I have been more circumspect about my opinions because I have been told repeatedly that business and religion and politics need to be kept separate. Maybe my faith can be mentioned in a polite manner, since it informs my artwork, but absolutely, under no circumstances ever should I mention politics because I could offend someone and then they may not want to buy artwork from me. And it’s all about business, right?
Well, I’m going to wade into dangerous territory. Can I be blunt? I’m about to break another rule (always appear successful): art isn’t exactly flying off the walls around here and what the heck, I’m just going to be honest and tell you that if you’re offended by my religion and by my politics then you’re probably offended by me, period. What is my art but a product of all that I think and believe and am? So either you’re open minded enough to like my art despite all of the things that make me who I am, or you’re not into my art. Or something like that.
After all that I’m going to disappoint you and not talk about politics at all right now. (It’s bound to come up sooner or later, have no fear.)
First I have to tell you about my faith and how I got to this point.
I grew up in a family and a church that put way too much emphasis on rules but I managed to be attracted to the love of God nonetheless and asked Jesus into my heart pretty young. (Totally weird way to put it, but how else do we talk about it?) As a teenager, I went to see a movie with a young man, which was strictly verbotten, and I realized that it wasn’t actually a sin. I knew that disobeying my parents was wrong, but there was nothing inherently wrong with the movie theater as I had always been taught. This was a seminal event that led me to question everything I had been taught. If they were wrong about this, what else were they wrong about? Eventually I decided that if it was in the Bible, I would take it, but if it wasn’t (and theaters certainly are not) then I would toss it. I have lived by that basic premise ever since, if imperfectly, because I am human after all.
However, after I was married I had had enough of churches and most people in them, as had my new husband, and we avoided them whenever possible. He joined the Army and we moved first to Alabama and then to Germany and it was while we were in Germany that I had the most amazing experience of my life, nowhere near a church.
At that point in time I worked as a graphic artist for the Army, doing things like designing flyers promoting the Officer’s Club and such. Like most offices, the Department of Morale, Welfare and Recreation was a great place to hear what was happening, in our case, in what amounted to the small town of the Army post we were located on. There was talk of satanic stuff going on around post, and a couple of my fellow believers were scared to death. This was around 1990 and new age religious ideas were prevalent; Shirley MacLaine had a hugely popular book about things like out of body experiences and it was a period of searching and questioning for me as well. Not content to let other people tell me what to think, I was looking and comparing things to what I knew was in the Bible and making up my mind for myself, thank you very much.
So one morning, in this environment of questioning and fear from other Christians, I started questioning as I began my morning routine of getting ready to walk the dog. “God, are you really there?” And the craziest thing happened. I got an answer,”Been here the whole time, just waiting for you to come back.” Wait, what? Wasn’t that a rhetorical question? Apparently not. Just to be clear, I didn’t hear an audible voice, but there was absolutely another voice in my head, no question about it. At this point, you might just write me off as a crazy person, and that’s fine. Or you can play along.
God and I had quite the conversation that morning, all during walking the dog and getting myself to work. At one point I asked whether or not I should be afraid of demons and the like. A car drove by and I coughed on the exhaust. “Nope, it’s just like that, my spirit is in you and will repel the evil ones as naturally as your lungs reject that exhaust.” I thought that was totally cool.
I can’t remember everything from that morning but I remember getting to work and excited telling my friends that I had been talking to God. They
“Attraction” Photo transfers and mixed media on 12×12″ cradled wood panel. $350 Contact for purchase details.
looked at me and smiled and nodded. As you might be now, and that’s okay with me.
Not long after that, I had my first prodding to speak. One of the gals I worked with was getting into some dream experiences and telling me things about it. Talking to God about it, it was clear that I had a message to give her. “Things are not always what they appear to be.” Uh, yeah… I’ll pass on that, it’s none of my business, thanks. But I couldn’t pass on it at all. Telling her that simple thing was my job and if I didn’t tell her that I would simply feel like I was going to explode until I did. It was her business how she responded and that was perfectly clear to me, too. So I told her and I didn’t explode and heaven knows, maybe she just racked it up to the crazy woman she worked with who had apparently gone totally round the bend.
That was a long time ago, but maybe you’re starting to get a better picture of what is going on now. I’ve had other things to tell other people over the years and now it seems like I need to start a new chapter and start writing things.
Don’t think that everything that I write here is like that, it actually doesn’t happen that often, but writing this post is definitely one of those things. Maybe it’s for you, maybe it’s just for me to get it out into the open. Up until now, I have been very careful who I told this stuff to, but I guess it’s time to start being a little less careful.
Peace, my friends. And feel free to tell me what a crazy person I am below.
P.S. It was still years until I went back to church, but I did. And the people I go to church with are pretty cool, just FYI.
“High Hopes,” “Moving On,” and “Mobile Home,” by Judith Monroe (photo transfers, ephemera, color pencil, acrylics & wax pastel on 8×8″ wood panels)
Sometimes images just come to me, like visions given to a prophet. That is how these shoes with nests came to me, after seeing the call to artists for Inner Soul, a show with shoe themed art. Somehow the juxtaposition seemed fitting. In a way, some people have only their shoes for a home, if they even have that. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write about this but there are no easy words for the subject of homelessness. The very thought that some people have no home or place to belong simply makes my heart ache, so the least I can do is to donate three pieces of artwork to help promote awareness and support for those less fortunate than I am.
Next Saturday (after the July 4th holiday) is the silent art auction benefiting Joshua’s House, a facility providing hospice care for the homeless in Sacramento. I’m praying that you can join me in helping to provide comfort and dignity to those among us who are homeless and terminally ill. You can learn more about Joshua House and how it came to be here. Inner Soul – Silent Art Auction – Saturday, July 8, 2017, 5 to 8 p.m.
Hosted by Uptown Studios, 2415 23rd Street, Sacramento CA (916) 446-1082
I don’t know about you, but my life doesn’t always go according to plan. Take the last year or so, for example…
In November 2015, I found myself sitting next to a young lady in church for the second week in a row. This was notable because I attend a church of about three or four thousand people on any given weekend and I’ve never found myself randomly sitting next to the same person two weeks in a row, so it really got my attention. I felt a strong urging to talk to her, so I started a conversation and found out she was looking for a job and somewhere to live and was hoping to start going to college soon. Then I took her over to someone to ask about housing but our church doesn’t have an organized program for that, and I gave her my card and made her promise not to disappear on me. She contacted me that afternoon and I was so glad because I had found out they were hiring where my son worked and I wanted to get her that information.
The next week she was sitting in front of me. I don’t believe in coincidence but somehow I wasn’t surprised at this point. We were texting that same afternoon and I asked how the search for housing was going. She replied that she hoped to have a safe place to sleep soon and when I asked where she was sleeping, she said that mostly she wasn’t, but sometimes outside or in her car.
My heart broke and I couldn’t say a word. I took my phone to my husband and all I could do was show him the conversation. We just looked at each other and instantly agreed that she could stay in our daughter’s room, who was away at college at the time. And that’s how we took in another child. She had grown up in the worst of circumstances and desperately needed a new family. Over the next several months, she became like another daughter to us and in August 2016 we adopted her at 21 years of age. We had learned that adult adoption was remarkably easy and we decided to make our commitment to each other legal. I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world but because of her past we are walking through recovery with her and none of it is easy.
My art-making has taken a bit of a back seat to being a mother once more, but it’s not a choice that I ever regretted, not when my biological children were small and not now when my youngest child needs me, either. But I’m trying to get back into the swing of things again, to return to a regular rhythm of communicating with my extended family and friends and supporters like you. Thanks for sticking around.
