Art and Life Are On: Artella’s Waltz of Words and Art

By Eugenia Toledo-Keyser

Artella issue 8, The Dreamworld: Night Sees the Day is an adventure in content, structure, and style. It surpasses everything that I have seen so far in art or literary magazines.

Artella’s Editor and Founder Marney Makridakis is, no doubt, a visionary and a passionate person.

This new issue of the magazine has a main subject: THE DREAMWORLD, and it was fueled by “dreams”. Marney tell us in her long story, written in verse, a piece titled: “Rolling Colors: A True Story”: “It’s true that synergy is everywhere god, everyfreakinwhere so many of my moments parallel to moments cradled by others… I wouldn’t put it past him to create art that he saw in one of my dreams……”

The words of Marney are an artistic statement for her magazine. Many aspects of her work come to her as a vision, a coincidence, a message, and she interprets and gives them life.

Well, the result of this community of dreams is Artella.

Each page of the magazine has a wonderful layout presenting the words of many writers and artists (to name a few, we should mention Dan Gremminger, Deb Silva, Zura Ledbetter, and many others). The magazine is an immersion in different worlds of different artists; some are the winners of ARTELLA’s Poetry Contests combined with the artwork of known artists.

Artella #8 combines art, music, poetry, “prosems” (prose and poems) collages, paintings and little surprises and pockets neatly put in certain pages. The magazine is like the stages of a butterfly; the reader is the person who will ultimately “make it fly” or transform it into a rich piece of literature. Everybody can read it and get something rich from it. The colors used in the presentation and the artwork are very well chosen. They go with the music, the drawings, the stories, the poems, and the overall intention of the magazine.

If you wish to read poetry, you could go through the poems only. If you want to read them with music, you can add musical compositions to your reading; you can listen to the CD included with the magazine while you read. If you want to inform yourself about your favorite author, you can read the interviews; they are well-educated people with fascinating vocations, virtues, and passions. If you want to play, you can look for hidden clues in the magazine that solve an online Mystery, and you can do artsy things with the curious gifts attached to the pages. Both Writing Workshops and Art Workshops are presented for those who want to get involved in creating things, themselves. It is an adventure, a puzzle, a box of treasures.

I do not know of another magazine like Artella that asks for the participation of the reader. It is an artistic object in your hands to enjoy and to assemble. Artella is a visual, metaphoric, musical, poetic, and psychological experience.

On the second page of the magazine you will find an eclectic group of words that can become a poem, or two poems, or three, depending on how you read it. It is called The Table of Dreams and is composed of an informal collage with words of the poems published in the magazine. From the very beginning, the dreamworld is alive and open to all of us…to enjoy and travel.

Marney, and the entire team at ArtellaWordsAndArt.com, deserve applause. •

About the Author
Eugenia Toledo-Keyser was born in Temuco, Chile. She began to write poetry when she was in her late teens, when writing was a necessary means for personal growth, inner freedom, observation and peace. She belonged to a group of poets in her hometown, and even directed a small group of poetry once. But she stopped writing, because "life" took her away from it. The Nobel Prize winners Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda motivated her to find her own voice, along with other Chilean women who write poetry. About three years ago, she tried to compose short stories. That became the source of her poems that she call "narrative poetry" or "pinturas habladas". Since then, she writes regularly, and reads the production of other poets around the world.

Books have been her passion all her life, since she is a Spanish teacher; which is complemented with her new incursions into the field of collages, art books, etc. She writes a lot about Nature and the elements, because she has lived in the south of Chile, and the Pacific Northwest.

Her favorite definition of art comes from a friend: "Art is a way of looking at things, and we need to have a creative soul and mind to do what we do. The process of creating is very intriguing."

08/19/05