There are things you know immediately about someone who wears fire-engine-red glasses. Diana Brandt breezed into the restaurant, her silver hair cut chic and short. Her lipstick matched the sassy red frames and I made assumptions: artsy, outgoing, confident, with a tinge of quirky individuality.
She’d sent an email that she was coming to Bali and we’d arranged to meet for dinner. Within the first few minutes, I learned that she’d been reading my blog, Writing for Self-Discovery, for five years. Now that’s loyalty. I liked her immediately.
After an evening of intense conversation where food was an afterthought and drinks kept our vocal chords lubricated, she gifted me one of her handmade books. Pieces of wood carved Bali style and finished in a gold wash were front and back covers to a wealth of surprises: tiny envelopes folded from exquisite paper, a bookmark, a Rorschach-like stained teabag, and pages, enticingly blank, waiting.
That taste of Diana’s work served only to whet my appetite. I invited myself back two days later to learn more about her life, and her marvelous, mysterious books. This time I brought a friend who had been casting about for a creative outlet.
We spent an inspiring morning together that drifted into the afternoon. Diana demonstrated how the tooth of certain papers works with watercolors but not with ink. How liquid graphite pencil heightens the drama and enhances certain themes. She admitted to obsessions: expensive pens, Matisse markers, the Larry Post shop in Sydney, origami, and the Australian outback from thirty-thousand feet. She’d seen it from her window in the plane and painted its complexity in soft hues: dry river beds, lowlands, and drought-baked plateaus.
Her curiosity, her eye for detail, and her experimentation with line and color graced every page of her exquisite creations.
“But how do you make them, Diana? What keeps the pages together? It looks professional.” Surely she hadn’t done everything herself – start to finish – they were too perfect.
Our patient hostess adjusted her glasses and opened one of the books. “I stitch them. You need linen thread. I get mine from a saddlery. And blunt-ended needles. Then you make holes…here…like this.”
From a saddlery. Do we even have saddleries in the U.S? I should have known she wouldn’t leave a single detail to someone else. My jaw dropped and admiration for this industrious woman ratcheted up another notch.
The friend I’d brought along is a gifted artist in her own right and was familiar with the bookbinding process. But she listened intently and there was an ‘ah-ha’ moment. “I could make my own journals and use them to archive my adventures, my life stories.”
“What a great idea! I love it!” In that instant, I knew what I wanted to do with mine. “I haven’t written poetry for over a year. I think my new book wants to be filled with verse.”
Diana’s enthusiasm was contagious. Even though I’m not crafty (in the hands-on-projects sense) by the end of our time together I was ready to dash to the nearest art shop, buy beautiful papers, colored pencils, unique pens, and start drawing.
On the Primrose Paper Arts Inc. website, Diana tells about discovering box making. She began crafting boxes for her books…or books for her boxes. One example she entitled simply, Red. She says her next will be Blue. Of course.
Her list of achievements staggers the mind. Diana has written and published two books. It’s About Time instructs in the process of painting clock faces and The Rustic Charm of Folk Art outlines techniques and provides patterns for painting on wood. She mastered both those crafts before she wrote about them. On Oct. 20, 2018, she’ll be one of the demonstrator/artists for Matisse Derivan Open Day Fiesta in Rhodes, New South Wales.
But achievements and talent aren’t the only qualities that make Diana unforgettable. She’s one of those people who genuinely care about others. In her presence, I felt special, as though there was nothing more important to her in the entire world than whiling away the day in conversation with me.
writing for self-discovery 
Comments