Scrap Around The World September Challenge 2013

I am joining in this month at the Scrap Around The World Challenge site. The moodboard this month is dramatic, bold, and quite open to various interpretation!

Here is the moodboard for this month's challenge!


The moodboard seems to me to be all about feelings and emotions. I was inspired by the more somber aspects of the board - the image in the lower left with all of the thoughts radiating from the head, and the image of the face in the lower right, that look! I thought of my Grandmother, and her usually sad face.......

                                   
                                                              "Tesknota"  -  (Melancholy)

Here is my layout. My Grandmother, the photograph taken about 1935. The photo captures her sad face perfectly. She seldom smiled, and always had a handkerchief in her hand to wipe away the tears that seemed to fall on a regular basis. She exuded a certain melancholy - "tesknota" - a specific kind of Polish melancholy which for an outsider is hard to understand. It roughly translates as a nostalgic yearning or longing with tonalities of sadness, precipitated by a "forever parting", in which life figures as a river of pain and suffering.

My Grandmother was an immigrant from Poland, she was never really "happy" here in America. Here life was difficult and she never overcame the social, cultural and language barriers.

I hoped to create a layout which presents this sort of particular feeling of sadness. I wanted the page to be "moody", using the monochromatic palette with subdued "sad" purple/blue colors, along with black. I added some personal objects in the form of two medallions taken from old Polish rosary beads. One is of "Our Lady of Czestochowa", a special image beloved by Poles. A framed image hung on the wall in my Grandma's bedroom. I used two old keys that belonged to my Grandma, and also two vintage "jet" buttons. In keeping with the inspiration from the image of the head with radiating thoughts (on the moodboard), I used mists, inks and torn papers, but in a "downward" pattern, as down always seems to signify sadness. There are also tear drops falling on the lower part of the page, but they are difficult to see in this photograph.