Artist dates and other pursuits

I am participating in an online group, going through the book "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. The book is not new to me but it is a new experience to be doing it in a group and so far I have very little to add to the group. I feel like a fly in the wall and it is working out in for now. Anyway one of the exercise is to have an artist date. Go and do something fun for just yourself. Some kind of new experience. My camera is always at my side and I shoot whatever seems important at that time. Sometimes I like to manipulate those images in order to get some other look out of them. Once I got really exited about reflections on a microwave. I was in Seattle in a small hotel and they had a kitchenette in the room just across my bed. I woke up and saw the beautiful waves.... on the microwave. When moving myself the waves were ever changing. I shot about 50 images of that microwave. That started some love affair with secondary designs coming from window panes and other glass surface. At some point I had gotten a fancy for the photographic and poetic work of Viggo Mortensen. He has some really interesting fuzzy pictures, some were night pictures with long streaks of light in every colors possible, then some were circles. I started moving frantically my camera sideways, up and down and in circles in order to reproduce those interesting images. So fun. I still get a kick of what I come up with. Those I consider my Artists Dates where my mind takes me on new trails.

So I went to the local bead shop and discovered (new to me) some beautiful square stone beads. Of course they were filled with images. I thought it would be a fun exercise to do in the morning along my morning pages. Sketches of what I was seeing in the stones. With my last name being Stoner I can relate to rocks and pebbles more than ever. Why not?

So here are some of the ones that I made.

The interesting thing about those beads is that everyday I have seen different things in them. Depending on the light, my mood, the angle, the direction they reveal different parts of my mind.