Category
Young @ Art
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05.08.08miss goody two stitches!
Daily, Ford, Please Bear with Me, Young @ Art (6)
Here is where I post pictures of the ebullient first hours after a vaguely dismal four days.
I have lots of questions for my doctor tomorrow, a few directly about my thyroid NOT really operating at capacity. And about those dreadful emo days that just make me want to go ahead and cut myself as I recall them in the joyful days that follow.
I think I need to upgrade.THIS, this is the quilt I made with Ford’s kindergarten class:
I kept all 20 of the students after school one afternoon and we monoprinted like mad with little bottles of fabric paint, 5 plastic plates and one very popular brayer.
It rocks!!! Surprise for the teacher tomorrow, just to let her know we’ve enjoyed those daytime hours this year, all free of sibling rivalry and backtalk. It’s been awesome!
Still, I spent this afternoon drafting a master plan for next year, and may lightening strike me, it involves homeschooling!
Tags: quilt, quilting, Ford, psychosis, hormonal crap, whatevs
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03.04.08
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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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01.29.08more fronts & fungi
Chas, Daily, Exploring, Ford, Home, SillyValley, Young @ Art (5)Sillyvalley was scoured clean again by another front and today, awestruck, we were witness to some kind of crazy glorious spectacle of snow-capped mountains atop the massive bowl of San Jose, all purple and crytallized behind the field outside the kitchen window, which is, for its part, cloaked in a riot of yellow mustard. I just didn’t know what to do with myself, standing there in the playground after school, staring at the immaculate horizon.
Then, as with all cold fronts, the sky started weeping. Under a rainbow we walked home and decided to hunt for mushrooms in the backyard under the oak canopy, savoring the last bit of afternoon light, regardless of the rain.
And what do you know? The rain stopped just long enough.
We gathered a handful of mushrooms, no idea what kind yet, just for something to draw or paint while I started a pot roast. I set a pan of opaque watercolors out on the table and gave a quick basidio-lesson and painting tutorial. They did all the rest.
Ford picked up a paintbrush:
And Chas got sleepy.
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10.02.07mandalarama
Daily, Ford, Sketchbook, Young @ Art (1)Ford picks a pen and sits quietly at the table beside me. It’s so warm and sunny on our backs. I look over to see what he’s working on, and no surprise, it’s another mandala. It’s hard not to smile and approve him while he’s at work, but I do it anyway. I love his current obsession. As he draws upon a piece of previously-used typing paper, I reach from my corner of the table and pass him a small pocket-sized moleskine. “Here,” I nudge him. “You need a sketchbook for those.” And he has one of those grins that stretches from ear to ear, a really infectious smile, which rings melodious to “Thanks, Mama!”
Later, I catch him at the kitchen table before lunch, doodling away again
And I think to myself, this is so perfect and right, this meticulous new phase of his. I love the geometry, I love the patience, and the infatuation with such a universal, timeless thing.
But he’s also into school mode, which means he’ used to busywork already. I caught him copying some fleurydoodles I’d been scribbling in the studio, after he’d sat down beside me later.
He then challenged me to a duel. “Ok, you have to copy whatever I do, allright?”
Ok.
Which proved difficult.
I had to try about 4 times to replicate his design correctly. Instructing me to start over, I’d have to repeat the whole, “First, morning glories, then connect them, then three leaf stalks, then a stalk of wheat,” etc. Four times! I’d get three steps or so into each drawing and become completely self-absorbed, adding frilly tendrils and black-eyed susan vines…I think this copy was most accurate.
Still, he got completely frustrated with me and wound up storming off into the other room before I finished. He’s not a natural teacher, these days, and it has me wondering who he might be emulating.
That’s the thing about school; I can’t be a fly on the wall every day, so I’m left wondering who might be misdirecting him in my absence. Or maybe he’s just the perfectionist I see, slowly coming into focus.One thing is certain: his obsession is rubbing off on me….
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08.07.07I heart kid’s art
Chas, Daily, Ford, Young @ Art (15)
Both children have the most charming creative style. They like to have, at all times, paper on their easels, and they like to let me know when it’s time to refresh the canvas. So I clamp a piece of paper onto the easel, and the kids do all the rest.
While I’m on the phone in the studio, Ford is kneeling on the floor before his easel, oil crayon in hand, gracefully weaving arabesques onto white paper like a dancer, partly like an experienced surgeon. He amazes me with his consistency and experimentation. At his age, I was drawing pure representation: rooms and school buses and horses, familiar things. Ford, thirty years later, has the same hair and chin, but the picture is completely different. He fills the page, works at will, picks up where he leaves off, whenever he chooses. One piece may hang, awaiting completion, for three days. He will flit back into the mudroom when I take a break to read mail, and will deliberately choose a medium, often something new that week, and experiment with the flow of the material on paper, the texture of its friction. Sometimes, he’ll add a Dalek, or a robot, or some other recognizable icon of current obsession.
Here, a Dalek for sure:
His abstract, expressionistic style has remainded consistent since he began making collages, at 18 months. Then, we used to sit at the dinette in the airstream, paper on the table and both weilding glue sticks. I’d ask him where this piece of torn paper wanted to go? Where does that piece belong? Do you think it belongs on the paper? Like conversation, documented in layers and textures, and I’ll remember this with a certain piognancy, as I remember his first steps (which he took in the same trailer!)
Chas is the same. Whether he has taken cues from Ford or not, he is also uninhibited. But while Ford’s marks bear a signature pattern, Chas’ style is vigorously expressive in one moment, exquisitely drawn in another. His hand bears dramatic pressure here, a faint scrawl there. Many times, lately, he is drawing something important to him, something concrete. A sea anemone, for example:
I look at them and grin, thinking to myself that it couldn’t get any better than this. It’s one of my most passionate goals, taht they retain this sense of urgency to create, to be free with their ability, uninhibited by convention. We will always keep a space for them, wherever we are, where their mind can pause (with or without the castaway shoes and fallen markers) and play with materials at hand.
I wish this for you, too.
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08.04.07Where we paint in August
Daily, Uncategorized, Young @ Art (10)
It’s not really all that hot here, by Texas standards. But this is California, so everyone here complains of the heat. Californians love to whine about the heat. They whine because they feel entitled to the good weather, now that they’ve spent 2 million on their fixer upper (read: they have)and because many of them, including ourselves, don’t have air conditioning. Oh God! What does one do when it’s 92 degrees outside and one can’t stay cool? You DEAL. But we deal in style. We bring the art studio al fresco, kick off our clothes, and paint like little devils.
It’s really easy to bring the studio outside. One easel for two kids, a couple of clamps for their paper, a stool or chair for a workstand, and a big (really really big) bowlful of water underneath the easel.
We paint; we paint paper and we paint each other. We paint the rocks and the easel, too. We paint swirls and stab paint and squish it between our toes. Tempera is a friendly medium. And when we’re finished, we wash up. A hose nearby makes a handy shower, and it splatters the tomato plants, sending tangy green-red notes into the air. That alluring smell of the garden in late summer, when everything is basking and ripening, sends us reeling; we can’t help ourselves, we spray everything: the walls, the trees, the easel, the sky. And despite the antics with the spray nozzle, we still patter into the house with bluegreen hands, streaking the hallway walls.
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08.02.07Music to my Eyes
Daily, Ford, Young @ Art (3)
He doesn’t have an agenda, he just wants to draw. His strokes are deliberate. Confident. I don’t believe he is attempting to represent anything in his latest series of drawings, only experiment with lines. It is immeasurable my pride as I watch him proceed from page to page, dancing with lines and pattern, like watching snow fall. It’s quiet, graceful, unrehearsed yet somehow choreographed subconsciously. Some would say this is scribbling. I call it music to my eyes.
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07.17.07Hidden Sickle
Daily, Young @ Art (4)
Ford, when finally finished with his painting yesterday afternoon, stood back and looked at it. I stood beside him. I remarked on the different greens, how each had a different color mixed within it. I asked him about the painting, about what he was thinking about as he painted. He told me that there were images hidden inside. Could I, for example, find the hidden sickle? “You know, like Cronus’ sickle. Can you find it?”
It made me feel victorious, that he’d actually absorbed some of the stories I’ve been reading lately. And lately, we’ve been reading about the birth of the Titans, and how Zeus and his children came to be. I had gotten fed up with Pokemon and decided to take Ford’s zeal for characters and funnel that passion into mythology; this time, Greek mythology. Last year, we lurked for a while in Norse myths, but the Greek myths are hidden everywhere, like little green sickles, in the best (and in Pokemon’s case, the worst) of children’s literature and comics. They’re all a bunch of trading card characters. Like, the free kind.
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07.16.07
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