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At home with the dog, November 2012

Validation

I made this for a book cover I was working on but ultimately it was just an excuse to play a little bit with painting on chip board, some collage with lovely green images cut out of Vanity Fair. I made the photo of myself in my office. I like the back view, it is our most unfamiliar view of ourselves and I think represents all we don't know about ourselves. The brown leather suitcase was my mothers. She kept all her important documents in it. I should consider keeping her ashes in this case instead of the cardboard box where they currently reside. So many things to do. I was cleaning the studio tonight, the ritual reclamation of the creative space and the return to it. I made this piece when the weather was still warm and it came out as a burst, unselfconsciously. Because it was not chosen for the book cover, I cast it aside and then due to occurrences this week when I came across it tonight I decided to accept it as a valid creation. I have been reconnecting with some long time ago contacts in my field and that has set me to thinking about the nature of this work I do and helps me to see all that I have done and how to make it better. It's a time of gentleness.

Direction

I am lost in a forest of thoughts and ideas and they all look alike and after a time I realize I have been going in a circle because I am passing the same un-acted upon ideas and having the same negative conversations about why they exist and why I can't make them happen. I looked for a picture of myself today in a trunk in an effort to free myself from the concentric circles I grind into the ground and before I found what I was looking for I found what I needed.

This was the journal my mother took with her to Greece the September before she died. I made it and another one for myself so we would have some small books to document our travels. She was already very sick by then and so she only wrote in it a few times. I wasn't startled as I might have been that the last date she recorded nearly matched today's date. I took it as a sign. It is my discovery so I can attach my own meaning to it. My mother has stayed connected to me even though she is no longer here breathing the air, growing old, she faces no complications and so she has time to encourage me as she always did. I am struggling as I always do and now with the additional weight and confusion of peri-menopause which seems like a dragon I must fight with all the time that breathes fire onto my anxiety level and sparks it ablaze driving me deeper into the woods. I choose to take these small discoveries as moments of salvation where my mother reaches out and taps me on the shoulder and encourages me to move ahead and because I am a dutiful daughter, I do. I try to think of one thing at a time in order to get out of the forest of my mind that I so often get lost in.

The little photo I was looking for will be used in a piece I am making for a show in my hometown at a gallery that my mother was involved with for years. The piece is about who we are based on where we came from. I grew up in a northern town beneath a beautiful mountain with a sparkly blue glacier and everyday it watched me. If I can make the piece and get it off on time I think I will be making some progress in knowing the way out of the darkness I often find myself in.

Post solstice wrap-up

5 days into summer. The solstice came but I didn't celebrate on the day and instead I ambled next door and did it belatedly with some longtime friends on Friday. We sat around under my white — ever useful in many circumstances—farmers market canopy in folding chairs, while the rain poured with all it's might and we agreed that this was certainly the only way to welcome summer in the Pacific Northwest. The very next day I got caught out in a thunder and lightening storm that blew down trees around the county and soaked my jeans and shoes, and dog. Yesterday it was okay all day weather wise and I went to the Cone Sisters Show at VAG with my sister and seriously considered whether or not we should dedicate our lives to leisure and art. You know, make a name for yourself in better circles like those Cone Sisters did. My sister gave me change for transit because I had none and showed me where to catch the sky-train to visit our stepmother which I felt was terribly good of her. It felt exciting to be inside the Gallery. Matisse's Odelisques were inspiring and hopefully, affirming.

I started this painting. That is all I have to report. After I have made about 400 of these I will have more of an idea of what it is I am doing. I think I should spend some more time on this one and then make another one right away. You heard it here first. I saw my stepmother again today so that my dad could go freely to Walmart to replace a pair of pants for her. I rolled her out to the garden and we sat and she laughed out loud, almost hysterically at times at what was going on around her. She was lively for a time but then began to think that one of the men was her father. She said, "my father never wore white shoes". She looked lost and agitated. I reassured her that everything was going to be okay. "I feel mad with madness" she said. On the way home I got lost on United Boulevard amongst road construction and landfill traffic looking for the good fabric store. Mark wrote his final securities exam and we went for a walk in the late afternoon with the dog and it was hard to tell what day it was because we had not spent the whole weekend together.

I have been alone much of the last 10 days which has been somewhat novel and certainly rejuvenating. Initially I felt freaked out about releasing my death grip on my young charge but a cooler head prevailed and I took the time off willingly and I am glad I did. The growing pains we experienced a few weeks back are gone and a new phase is upon us. This parenting is a tricky game of push-me pull-you and I for one do not always see the changes in direction coming but clearly there is no stopping them and that as it turns out is a good thing. The process is much like painting, you start, the colors run, you try madly to see the shapes and values and then you wait, and when it's all dry it looks totally different to what you planned or imagined.

Painting Exercises

I've made a little book of a few of the exercises from my recent painting class. Beyond the paintings I really wanted to test drive issuu. Enjoy.

Deer Story

Generally I do not post twice in one day. Truth be told I wrote today's post yesterday and posted it this morning once I had regained my sobriety. But now, I have news! This short piece, excerpted from a longer short story I am working on, has been rejected by Geist Magazine's Postcard Competition so I am free to publish it here. I am not embarrassed to report my failures, why should I be? If you've been following this blog closely you'll know that failure gets us closer to success and if you've really been getting the gist of what I am putting out there, you'd know that success and failure are meaningless concepts. Just Do It, like the folks at Nike say and I did.(ps, if you read this post previously, re it again, I posted the wrong version of the story)

Deer Story

The woman who walks down the road each day, hound at her side, imagines the injured deer tucked into a little iron bed, propped up on thick pillows with feathers poking out under a duvet that is cozy despite being a little bit worn, attended by two doting deer parents. She imagines the deer is a
doe, immature, in her first season. White cotton bandages wrapped around her delicate legs, an ice pack rests on her head. Above the bed is a picture of a Robin’s nest filled with blue eggs, likely cut out of a book about birds, hung there to suggest beauty and perfection. It’s an old room built inside an
old growth tree stump by a small family of settlers who, with their jagged tools, logged these foothills ages ago. She imagines an opening in the forest canopy, a beam of sunlight raining down on the family assembled below. One resting, comforted by the other two who are feeling worried about their
only offspring. The woman projects hopefully that the patient will sleep for a few days and then the three will go back outside, unscathed.

She and the hound had arrived on the scene and had waited silently up the hill as the men stood below, talking and gesturing over the prostrate animal between them. The hound drew in the morning air, filing away the information, revealing nothing. No one seemed excited. The first man must have struck the deer and the second man stopped to help. The first man, picks up the deer, wrapping his hands efficiently around its fine ankles, two in his left, two in his right. He crosses the yellow line holding the deer’s body out in front of his own body pausing on the white line, rocking back on his heels engaging a pendulum effect with the limp carcass, swinging it toward and then away from himself and at just the right moment releases his grip letting it fly in a low unceremonious arc into the grass and skunk cabbage that fill the ditch at the road’s edge. The two men get into their vehicles and drive away. The woman snaps the leash, and the hound instinctively follows her in the opposite direction, the days walk cut short.

For weeks afterwards she searched the edge of the road and found nothing. No evidence. No bent grass. No indentation. No smell of rotting flesh by the seventh day. She considers getting down on her hands and knees, to follow the scent into the woods to where it crept away. Or was it dragged? Abandoning her sight at ground level, turning all her focus into her nostrils quickly drawing in air, considering the elements and implications of each morsel of humus
moving as the cunning hound does in a predetermined pattern in order to find the
answer she seeks.

Grocery Store Confessional

I got into one of those random conversations with a near stranger in the local Trader Joe's that got me thinking as I walked away. The cashier was speaking to the customer on line ahead of me. The cashier was confessing her lack of attendance at the gym where the customer worked. I piped up and said I have to admit I have never had a gym membership. It's true I am not a gym person, I go occasionally but not religiously like some, I prefer my long rather meditative walks. The cashier cocked her head and said well you're lucky, you're naturally slim. I scoffed at this a bit and it got me thinking.

I am tall, at over 6 feet, I am 60% leg. I weigh between 182 and 190lbs depending on what season I am in. I do not consider myself slim, in fact I most often see myself as slightly pudgy. In reality I am not fat. I have a round belly but my arms and legs are long and fairly free of fat. I have a flat ass, I can't sit on hard chairs without my it hurting. I recognize that my perception of myself may not accurately reflect my physical reality but maybe that's a good thing. Honestly I try not to think about my body as I find my size sort of freaky.

I am not going to confess an eating disorder here, I don't have one. What I am realizing though is that I don't see food as convenient entertainment, I see it as a necessity and it's preparation an artful practice that is orderly and logical and subject to much control. I am not a faddist. I am trying to maintain a healthy body and I have strict beliefs about how to do that. I have that quote on my fridge and the fridges I frequent, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants". I think before I put things in my mouth and there are many things I simply won't eat any longer. I buy whole foods, meat, cheeses, grains, fruits and vegetables. I have fewer and fewer presto fallback foods. I still get that feeling of wanting something naughty like a doughnut or cake, I generally want the bready or the doughy but if I can just think about it awhile in a rational way I can usually easily dissuade myself from the craving.

Consequently I think a lot about food and what I should eat to keep my intake well balanced and interesting. I have the big picture in my head of what I have generally been eating and what I have eaten on any given day. I carry the macro and the micro view around with me, always weighing the findings. Have I had enough beans or grains, enough cold water fish, too much dairy, too much salt, not enough protein? At the moment I am attempting to train myself away from white flour and sugar which when I went at it hard core before Christmas yielded a 5lb weight loss which was a pleasant side effect. More importantly I noticed that my general anxiety was much less severe because my blood sugar levels were more constant, this is what truly motivates me, a feeling of calm.

I have been accused of being controlling and it's probably true but in a world where we have so little control over most things I feel okay about controlling how I am feeling through diet and exercise. I am less concerned about how I look since my view is fairly distorted anyway it's hard to gauge. If I feel good hopefully I look all right and if my 501's fit me that's ideal. It's funny to realize that others make these assumptions about a person's body. If only that cashier knew that I spend my day weighing and considering what to eat making sure never to have too much, denying myself all sorts of things in the name of physical and emotional enlightenment.

New SIte!

…and it's live. The website I have been working on for the past year or so is finally here. The plight of the Shoemaker's barefooted children is true. I spend way more time on client work than I do on my own promotional efforts but like most things I set my hand to, they do get done, eventually. It is with great pride that I launch my fourth website associated with my own company. One tip, it works more like a book than a website. Enjoy!