Painting

07.02.06

While I’m not happy about the fact that you watch Chicken Little three times a day on occasion, I can at least smile knowing it slowed you down enough for me to paint your portrait.
Also, thank you for letting me paint again today while you watched the movie. Again.
I’m trying to be the artist who can write a check for a trip to the Cascades so you can finally see Ranier and Hood and St. Helens in person. Because you are so so so worth it. And because I love you so so much.

Well, I’d better get back to work.
xoxo,
Mom

06.26.06

Portrait of Christy and Peter
Painting (4)

I haven’t had time yet to whip up some code for a gallery. All those sequestered wee hours are for indulgent painting and online furniture oggling. There was a time, about six years ago, when I’d have been golden just to poke around with a tangle of hypertext markup language all afternoon, sipping a gin and tonic on the balcony in the quiet, self-indulgent pause of life just before children. But those children, they showed themselves up and, well, here I am pilfering those last scraggly minutes of my day, trying to spin gold from little piles of straw.
…By the way, that’s one of Ford’s favorite Grimm’s, which is funny because it was one of my favorites, too, growing up. Rumplestilksin is so greasy-good!

So, in lieu of a proper gallery, where I can tack up all my late-night progress notes, here’s a painting. It’s the wedding portrait that Tonya asked me to paint of her friends, Peter and Christy. It’s okay, I’ve been allowed to divulge it! But I still feel al little awkward in doing so. Anyway, Tonya’s springboard for me was the famous American Gothic. With that in mind, she sent me a few snapshots and some bio (the props in the picture hint at their interests). And do you know? It was FUN. And I hear they loved it. My work here is done. I couldn’t ask for a better way to put myself to good use. Well, except for the mothering part. That’s pretty fun, too.

06.26.06

…
Painting (6)

The encaustic class blinked by last week again. But so that I could start working with the wax at home, I thrifted a vintage electric skillet (to keep the wax in liquid while I work) and invested in a heat gun (which fuses the layers–a tutorial to follow soon). So, I’m sorry to all the spiders and cockroaches and trolls and whatever else crawls the garage floors at night: I’m moving into your space.

I almost finished a piece last week that I want to share, but instead I’m offering a quiet picture (above) of five minutes before class ended, a leaf, and some leftover wax. It reminds me of the ladies bathhouse atDeep Eddy:

Back to painting. I’m back in the game! My second commission of the summer (and a curtsey to Tonya!).

06.23.06

Illustration Friday: Dance + Rain
Illustration Friday, Painting, Sketchbook (16)

Scanner issues, again. I save my patience for my children.

Illlustration Friday.
06.10.06

Painting With Chas
Chas, Daily, Painting (3)

It’s really too hot to paint outside during that quiet time of the day when the kids are centered. If I leave Chas to paint alone on the floor in the kitchen, I begin to prickle with anxiety, because it’s never long before paint begins flying across the room towards the wool rug (which, being wool, easily stains. And which, for the record, I refuse to live without.) It’s a high stakes gamble, but one I can avoid if I sit him on my lap at the kitchen table.

So there we sat, yesterday, and I found I was able to engage him for a longer period of time than usual, simply by painting alongside him, on the same page. Normally, I’d discourage this–it goes completely against my teaching style, which is to let them simply create on their own. But he seemed to enjoy telling me what he was doing, which colors should go where, and he thought what I did was funny. He loved sharing the piece of paper, maybe it reminds him of sitting on my lap when we read a story. For this reason, it felt just right.
06.09.06

Encaustastic!
Painting (5)

Beeswax and damar resin fumes meandered out the studio door, through the live oaks and onto the lake, while I manically experimented with pottery tools and heat guns. My first encaustic painting class began today at Laguna Gloria., and it was so MUCH FUN.

I think the fumes may have gotten to my head. I drove home smiling at the deer, creeping along the ridge home. I had to get gas as I rounded our block, and found myself drifting aboard the slinking gas fumes, too. Tonight, the olfactory smorgasborg. But I made it home safe! I’m glazed over and staring at the screen, both boys asleep beside me on the bed. They’re angelic in their quiet perfection, framed between us old tired people. Every now and then Chas will flail his arms in dreamscape, eyes pressed shut. As always, he smells like some deep-fried dessert. GOD he smells divine. Hey, where’s the powdered sugar?
05.31.06

Breakfast Fuzzies
Chas, Ford, Painting, Sketchbook (2)
04.21.06

Illustration Friday: Robots
Illustration Friday, Painting (2898)

More robots at Illustration Friday.
04.14.06

Illustration Friday: Spotted
Daily, Illustration Friday, Painting, Sketchbook, Thinking (1887)

On the granite coast, I kneel down to see layers of round shapes in a tidal pool: the glistening curve of blue beach glass, ground shell, bits of marl, littoral litter. It is the texture of a cold and unhemmed coastline, a study in extremes.

Here, you have to hold on to your life. You have to blend in to avoid being hunted, unbruised by the pounding waves, while managing to stay wet in the face of sun and wind, maintaining your heritage by staying pretty in order to attract the opposite sex. Your existence is hinged on the passage of time, good genes and pure luck: will you survive until high tide?

This little intertidal oasis, paradoxically gorgeous, has a rainbow of life crawling within it: red, brown and green tranlsucences, bumpy lumberers, glittering gems, but it is growing stagnant by the minute. At noon, the water is warming up under the intense sun; in fact, it’s so sensuous to lie in the small ripples at the rim of the pool that you can hardly tell, with eyes closed, where the water ends and the balmy air begins. Then a breeze reminds you, as a shadow sheds some cool on your skin.

The estuary beyond the dunes, nursery for marine life, reminds me less of motherhood than these beautifully unprotected cavities. Here, time is compressed. Weeks become seconds. With little time to think, intuition develops. I slowly begin to trust my intuition as it gains conviction, but the experience that feeds it is time that’s lost: will I still be here by high tide?
02.17.06

Little Theories
Daily, Ford, Painting, Sketchbook (7)

Ford was his usual, curious self today, with the questions about Black Holes, wormholes and portals, wanting me to read A Brief History of Time to him so that we could dissect current knowledge together over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And then he sat still for a moment at lunch to ask the question,

“Mommy, does the sun love me?”

“Of course it does,” I replied cautiously, “Does the sun follow you around all day?”

“Yes.”

“And does the sun go to sleep with you at night?”

“Yes.”

I thought about this all day. How he takes apart our concept of the universe into fragments and puts the pieces back together (Big Bang theory, bits and pieces scattered, cooled, then formed planets; the sun is a dying star, etc) and reviews it out load (he did this with the digestive system to his pediatrician at his second annual checkup). I thought about the frequency of questions, these days, that I am unable to immediately answer. I thought about how uncomfortable I feel, anthropomorphizing the sun. I took a deep breath and started to paint. In a few minutes I felt much better.

As I pulled out of the parking lot tonight, I noticed the moon on the hill, squinting through the atmosphere in a sleepy haze. As I kept driving, damned if it didn’t surprise me in the way it followed me home. There was nothing usual about it. The sky was the color of the asphalt under my high-beams. Nobody else was on the road. The air, balmy and warm, smelled metallic and a light southeast breeze blew into the car at the stoplight. Winding my way home through the hills, the moon swung playfully left, and then right. It followed me out of my car and down the driveway and up to the stoop, before hiding behind the junipers. It tucked itself in, an hour ahead of the rain that followed. And then, Ford’s naive question made perfect sense.

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