Category
Painting
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06.29.08ladybugzes
Daily, Nature, Painting, Sketchbook (3)
The other night, on our way down the bike trail, a ladybug landed on my arm and it hitched the whole 9 miles to the brewery. I made sure it stayed safe because there’s no insect cuter and I’m all for public transit.
With it in mind, I got to work last night at my desk. It’s a great group; I love this nature journal exchange we’ve got going on at Moly_x_9.
I’m mailing Scoach’s Moleskine journal tomorrow an it’s headed for Hawaii.
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02.12.08RISdee dee dee
Daily, Painting, Please Bear with Me, Thinking, Young @ Art (2)
I can’t do it. But I could.
I could say it at breakfast and he’d start helping to make it happen: we would both be on our computers, on the phone, in between meetings, ignoring less important matters. Mealtimes would come, we may or may not follow. At the end of the day, tomorrow even, we would have in our hands a game plan on recycled paper and napkins, bits of whatever we could find, printouts with cost analysis, a hotly written list of pros and cons, monkeys and butterflies romping in our stomaches.
I sit in bed typing this and look over at Chas, who is still sleeping in bed beside me with his arms outstretched, as he owns this bed now, as well as me. In fifteen years he will be in college, one can expect; in just twelve short years, so will his brother. College money. Though we are preparing, I am staggered by the costs of college, these days. Over ten thousand dollars more per year than when I was in school. That’s what I discovered when I browsed that graduate degree program in painting, tonight.
Grad school. I’m batting my eyelashes at grad school. Am I insane? I’m completely out of my head insane. I don’t need to give someone $70k just to prove it, AGAIN. Give it up already.
Doodle and paint, repeat. And don’t forget to feed the kids their meals tomorrow. Jeez.
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01.22.08over under and into
Daily, Listening, Painting (1)
I think I may be over another brief periodic creative slump. As annoying as they are, they tend to be short, and this one lasted less than a week. It hit me that the inspiration I need is at the beach, low tide, and I haven’t been to the tidepools in about a month. We were set to go this afternoon, Damon was actually going to get back in the water while I watched the kids, hunting for sea stars and stuff, but the cold rain started falling. Even though we didn’t make it to the coast, something within me stirred. After three days of fruitless painting, doggedly dabbling blind beyond enjoyment in a frigid studio, I’m finally feeling my own pulse again. Some mexican beer, lime and salt, red meat and Blonde Redhead seem to have helped.We saw Blonde Redhead in Austin a few months ago at ACLfest, where they gave a sweaty, ethereal performance in the midday languor, linen sticking on skin. Tonight I feel the music breathe like some sort of cosmic summer breeze through the house, and I begin to daydream about the long hot 3-day marathon date with my husband and of the stark newness, then, of Kuzu’s breathy falsetto voice, and of trying to sing, myself.Sometimes the surest way to clear a mental roadblock, or a loss of mojo, is to do something completely scary and new for a change, this I know. And Damon has challenged me to sing to his music. Playing bass along with him is enough pressure and I already met that challenge. He also challenged me to face my fear of surfing by putting me on a board before a wave in the Pacific. If for only ourselves, my heart still stops at the though of exposing this abstraction of my voice. I don’t consider myself a singer. But he believes in me. Within these walls I might venture beyond my securities. You won’t hear me, so I will try. But you can send me quiet thumbs-up, because I’m scared to sing. Me? Sing. If ever so imperfectly, I’ll try.
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01.15.08whining
Daily, Painting (0)
I turned on the lights, the griddle, the fan in the studio this morning at ten o’clock. Then I went into the house to stretch (I had just returned from a run) and then shower. If all went well, I’d be painting within a half hour. But Chas whined, something about wanting to play Bionicle games on the computer (something Ford and Dwight turned him onto) and I, in my defiance, refused to cave. I think this established his rebellion for the rest of the day. Twelve hours later, they are asleep in the bed and I am in the studio, the griddle and fan still in operation after hours of neglect, the windows open to pitch black cold outside. I spend ten minutes working manically with quick-shifting wax, which is hardening too rapidly in the frigid night air. And my fingers are numb. There is no way I can work tonight, I resign. It would be so much easier to paint if I could take it wherever I went. Instead, I leave my expectations on the table where I drafted them this morning, and walk towards the scanner holding the only handiwork I was able to accompish, which wasn’t within the course of today but within another scant ten minutes of yeserday.
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01.12.0810:: briar
Daily, Painting (0)
24″ x 23″ encaustic on birch panel.
The paintings are getting to big to scan. I’m trying to figure out how best to photograph each piece.
Maybe if I set it on a log in the backyard, I can catch a closeup of one section, for detail.
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01.10.08
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01.09.08
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01.08.08cabbage heads
Daily, Gardening, Painting, Sketchbook (0)
This old house.
Alis and I talked in the car on the way home from Half Moon Bay. We had spent the morning, just the two of us, in our now usual way, which is to say that we went first to the plant nursery there and then had lunch and coffee. Gorgeous sunshine. Her car was riding low in back with the weight of two oversized terracotta pots, big enough for either of us to sit in, lying on their sides in the back of her white wagon, and an overgrowth of pink grasses, red-violet oxalis, chartreuse cedar, etc. We talked, the way we do when we are making up for lost time, rushing through important topics in order to make room for the smaller musings that really connect us as friends.
“My old house is so high maintenance,” she began, about her little white cottage on the mountain. “It tells me precisely what it wants, and this makes shopping both easy and challenging. There is no room for compromise with her.” (Her, meaning, her house.) “Oh, and by the way, did I tell you about Seth and the house ghost?”
We laughed about the ghost incident, which is not alltogether surprising, given the context of our conversations, but then moved quickly back to plants, because I am convinced that this is the root of our friendship, regardless of the fact that we met in art school, when neither grew nor spoke of plants much, aside from what we ate and what we may or may not have watched others inhale.
“You know, I would have never planted primroses this fall if I hadn’t seen that one potted red primrose in your garden during the Christmas party. And then I fell in love with the idea of pale yellow petunias sharing the pot with the misacanthus,” I mused.
“A landscape architect friend of mine and I were talking the other day about how growing older and having kids has affected our gardening style,” Alis replied, “She and I have been friends for a long time, and after she started a family, she gave me a tip. She told me that I would start craving the most unusual, chintzy plant combinations that I never would have expected of anyone, save perhaps Grandma or Aunt Mae.”
Lo and behold! She was right. Look at those carmine primroses! The array of red flowerpots in the front entry, saccharin pansies and petunias. And ornamental cabbage, something I believed, for the longest time, to be the winter flowerbed choice of green-thumbed Asian seniors, has now become the winter doodles for my garden, as well as hers. It fills in with foliose texture and homeliness to exploding containers otherwise full of purple fountain grasses and chartruse millet. It works overtime trying to please me. And how so! I bought a whole flat of it and completely overused it in the containers, filling far too many corners of brown earth with the laquered porcelain tackiness that walks the fine line between experimentally curious and unabashedly tacky.
I can’t plant enough violas, and the cyclamen practically dominated the interior of our home this Christmas. I’m wintering the succulents in the mudroom but I am reconsidering placing a citrus tree in there too, in between the overflowing shoe basket and the two easels. I could go on and on. And I blame my chintzy plant obsession on this old house (1930) and the simple fact that I, too, am growing senile and ironically, quite broody.
Are Alis and I just noticing this ourselves, or are you, too, seeing your taste shift with age? I’m curious.
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01.07.08
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01.06.085 :: thicket
Chas, Daily, Ford, Painting, Seti (8)
It is a cool, damp, pristine Sunday morning, and we are in between rainspells. I stand in the open doorway, facing the garden out front, to finish a cup of rapidly-cooling coffee. My hoodie is in full operation, tucked beneath goosedown and pulled up over my head. The birds are going crazy in the Moneterey pine out back, some sort of starling gang sqwawking like Cantonese peddlers; the robins declaring spring on the clover, titmice hanging upside-down and talking, apparently, to themselves…in the oleander? I carry the empty glass mug by my side, out onto the footpath and start deadheading the frigid, rainpounded pansies and violas.
Before long, the honeyed beeswax scent catches up to me, and I’m quite distracted now, so Sunday-morning-giddy to hang out in the studio by myself, and I wipe my feet, set down the mug, and walk into the warm studio. Everything has melted in the tuna cans, by now: all the reds, brewing in a cluster; the turquoise in the corner; an array of brushes stand like swimmers for the next heat, poised and all facing me.
I take a wood panel and layer on color, in no particular order, but dictated by mental limbus. I can’t possibly stay away from the reds and the chalky turquoise. I don’t know why. And there they go, irreverently, in patches of relief on the woodgrain. That groove sets in, you know, where the cortex falls asleep and your body follows instinct, and your face relaxes, and your eyes no longer see but transmit data to your soul, regardless of judgement or analysis. That’s where I am when the kids wander into the room.
I love these kids, and I’ve mentioned that I willingly share this space with them, but I know that you know that I know this is craziness for a person in this current mindset of mine to accept, and I all but groan and whine when Ford comes up to me and tells me he wants to paint with wax. Right now?
And so does Chas.So. Behind his back, my brows cleave a furrow into my skull and I bite my lip. Sure, hang on. And he volunteers to use one of the panels from my stack of freshly-sawed plywood, the one my husband just dropped off on my desk, straight off the tablesaw. They’re still warm from the energy of being cut. He is holding a plywood square and standing before me. For a second, that selfish ass of me stands there, all pissy and annoyed, until my cortical brain emerges from deep sleep, probably high on particulates and formaldehyde effluvium, and lays a hand on the situation.
That’s so awesome! You’re going to paint with me? You rock. Wax is so much fun. Let’s open some more windows, ok?
And meanwhile, as I start scribing into the wax, somehow returning to the groove despite my mania, I look down to find Chas adorning Seti in wrapping ribbon. As if the preppy sweater wasn’t adequately humiliating.
We worked, in this manner, for about a half hour; shuffling around each other like moving puzzle pieces among the clutter. Finally, the rain commenced, and I lost the boys to the outdoors, where they ran circles around the sundial, in the middle of the lawn, trying to drink the rain in mid-orbit. The thing is, I’ll lose them, soon enough, to many other things. That’s what I’m trying to remind that harpy ego of mine, when she’s about to snap at these little dudes. It’s all good, it’s all fun. I can’t believe I even harbor her within me, but nobody, no parent, is perfect.
recent posts
- ladybugzes
- mapping my runs
- date nite
- It’s not just a marathon.
- indoor track & field
- Reliving fossils
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