BATTLE SPONGE: Mistress Axolotl needs a space-maker screen

Making your own safe space.

Mistress Axolotl needs a safe space in which to offer her tattooing/talisman/adornment/therapeutic service.

Designing for Mistress Axolotl's bamboo screen / space maker / room divider

Mr Van Gogh was right - Japanese art, their use of lines and limited colour in an image, is incredibly steadying.

Concept for screen designs: those small rituals that keep you grounded or refresh your soul, body & mind.

Mistress Axolotl sits at her cafe table and works and thinks.
Based on the E Tutto Qua cafe, Broadway, San Francisco.
I used to sit at this cafe every afternoon for a week and have a coffee when I was alone in San Fran and feeling sad after a friend of mine had died accidentally. On the last day the waiter brought me a whole three course meal for free. People are nice!

And this is what Patti Smith thinks of the value of lounging in a cafe chair day after day... right on P-Dawg!

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I've been ruminating on how adopting certain characteristics, behaviours or looks of people (or an abstracted notion of a person) that appear as iconic and guiding to you, can help you channel or explore your desires and intentions for the type of person you want to be, or even don't want to be.

Below is something from the final pages of Patti Smith's new book M Train.

She explains why she does her art; her writing, poetry, photography and also why she carries out her small ritualistic journeys and routines.

She's lost three important people in her life; her husband, brother and best mate, all too young.

I think she's trying to summon something of their spirit, presence or memory through her actions.

This is for sure what I do.

reverie: a state of being pleasantly lost in one's thoughts; a daydream.

In the bottom quote she mentions the way in which a longing for and indulging in something unreal, or no longer real, will not bring about a truth, but that's ok and as long as you realise that you can just live in the dream.

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Below.... working on customised folk dress in homage to four of my favourite musicians

M Train is like a portal to my own other world....

Patti's spiritual dream guide is a cowboy! Mine is a cowgirl! (Lone Cowgirl)

She conjures the spirit of dead loved ones through visiting places, taking trips, experiencing certain weather/landscapes etc, and carrying out rituals, and of course in her art/writing. So do I.

She finds sitting the same cafe at the same seat, alone, morning after morning, drinking the same coffee, to be productive for her imagination even though it appears as wasting time. She just loves cafes. Me too, and me too.

The whole book is a safe space for me.

She describes a reading room she arranges next to her bedroom.

So now I may make the Spirit Shed black!

Sometimes some words emit a strong symbolic or hypnotic pulse.

Sentences don't have to make sense. They can just be an abstract compilation of words that have good rhythm or individually transporting connotations.

That can be enough to set a scene into which you can retreat or explode, or through which you can wander.

As below...

This is a plan, based on the words idea above, for a sort of way-marker/totemic stake/flag, that hints at movement based on one's emotional state.

And you can use the scenes and words from varying cerebral and real places to write cringey but relaxing stories.

Now you have to endure my holiday snaps from the French Pyrenees last week.