tradition making

A strange holiday to spend without family and relatives. Starting our own traditions as a little nuclear family, I suppose. A necessary step into empty space. It is nice but it still feels strange, embarking on a whole future life of such events. Wondering which actions will coalesce into hallowed family tradition. For instance, yesterday morning, Thanksgiving morning, found me over at Nate's house with our hands under the skin of another gorgeous turkey from Polyface farms, rubbing it with a pancetta-sage-butter-garlic rub (the same rub as last year- we couldn't help it- it was the best turkey any of us had ever had), and I laughed and said! "here we are again!" And in the spirit of that continuity, I pulled out the beautiful blue dress that Sava had just barely grown into last year (a present from the ever-lovely Susan Danis) and wore at last year's dinner, and it fit her perfectly, if a little short, and we gathered a group of friends around the same dining table as she excitedly chased Nate's basketball around the wide open wood floors of his loft.
It had been a wonderful morning of cooking: totally quiet house as Sava and Jamba took a nap (he had let me sleep in, oh joy of joys) and I bustled around dreaming up dishes to make. I played no music but just happily puttered in silence surrounded by billowing waves of smells: garlic and onions and burbling cream and roasting beets and chestnuts and almonds. I made a beet salad in an orange dressing sauce, with fresh chard and spinach from the garden. Oh! That was part of the loveliness. The day before, while I was finally getting the garden ready for winter (stealing bags of leaves from the neighbor's curbs to create a layer of mulch on the garden bed, then spreading the entire contents of our haphazard (but remarkably successful) compost pile over the entire thing) I found an unexpected late-fall harvest of beets and... parsnips!! What I thought were overgrown and tasteless celery stalks were actually the heads of two humongous parsnips. I was so happy-- i didn't think any of them had made it. So I made parsnip creme sauce, compliments of the Chop House recipe book (I am not allowed to give out the recipe, but I can report that it was delicious)
So part of the joy of yesterday's cooking was folding in the last fruits of the harvest into the feast. And I think that is what I would like to take into my future Thanksgivings. For me, the important things will  be to be concentrate on the celebration of the harvest of local food (preferably from our own backyard), and secondly to make sure that the turkey we are getting is from a sustainable, humane farm. I noted how joyful it felt, to be preparing a turkey without any of the usual feelings of guilt conmingled with the gratitude. It was an honorable feast.
What are your budding or hallowed traditions?

Fall Gifts

Happiness is....

a fresh palette

an easel in the autumn light. Painting to
songbird calls and shuffling winds.

new abstracts that will turn into birds

walks in the woods with child and dog

shafts of sunlight in a dimming world

new greenhouse boxes brimming with greens

Using the work "shock" as a noun. As in: "I keep
venturing upon these shocks of color in the backyard"

 

                             and out of all that happiness......  new paintings just hung at TYB!

 (here is First Bath)

Yellow Warbler

Varied Tit

The Choice

Slow lip of fire

here is the progression: 36 inches by 36 inches. Painted in the lovely late fall garden, soft and warm, which at the end turned frosty, as snow fell in tiny lazy spots. I have decided to call the finished piece: Slow Lip of Fire, after a song by Joanna Newsome, one of my constant studio companions.....

starts as a calligraphic scrim. I love it like
this but am given feedback that it seems
merely decorative.

beginning....

becomes punctuated by golden light

Playing with the idea of chandeliers dripping with beads

then, dissatisfied with scrim, decide to puncture
into the space w background

Finished! Needed, in the end to remove the beautiful
yellow to bring the painting into balance.
And a bird of hope to balance all the raw, fiery energy.

Two paintings in progress

some of you have shared how much you love seeing a painting develop, so I thought I would share pix of two paintings as they have progressed through time.  This first painting is huge - 5 x7? and has lived in my studio for almost two years now in pretty much the same state as photo #1... and I have been completely baffled as to what to do with it.. But my December show at Rockingham Memorial Hospital is looming, and I promised myself that it would be a show of abstracts, so I am jumping back into the murky waters....

 

For some reason I want to call it "the loveboat"

but there is something plinthy and monolithic

about it. Sandstone cliffs, graffiti............

 

                                           almost finished!!!  Jamba says it reminds him of some of my earliest abstract paintings, when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.  It certainly owes a debt to Richard Diebenkorn, who I have been studying in the vain hopes that his genius will rub off on me somehow. It lacks his gorgeous looseness and his supreme painterly confidence, but I have to admit I find it powerful and striking, even in its unfinished sate.

                                          Finished! I have decided it is the teeming bookshelf
                                          of a rather unorganized philosopher of antiquities.
                                         I finished it as the first drifts of snow floated past my
                                         knuckles....
....................................................................................................................................................................

 Secondly... a painting which started as an exploration of a specific sequences of glazes (see earlier post) that has become a yarn painting of sorts.... inspired by the yarn sculptures of artist Judith Scott

very beginnings. I am so excited by the emerging forms and layers of glazes. but then....

the painting is rotated yet again: the blue is kept in hints and the figure is subsumed by scribbled lines. I love that the strange man figure has become a sense of openness in the center of the painting. I love the painting at this stage but feel it needs more complexity...

Wanting to coalesce those scribbles into a congealed form, so I overlay and overlay, trying to create depth and unity. It has been so beautiful and warm in these late October days I have been grabbing a rare chance to be able to paint outside. Perfect lighting, too- not too bright or hot.

a close up of scribbles: (this is the photo that inspires my final solution for the painting.)

   

The painting is almost done. I decided that I wanted to extend the yarn scribbles across the entire composition.. to have them play completely across the surface so that the painting becomes a chromatic experience of electric energy. For the last few weeks I have been visiting it daily to drop another colored yarn into the perimeters... slowly building up the edges with the same density of tangles as the original center. The painting is really lovely in person and a complete departure for me as a painter.

finished!!! I am really happy with this piece. Our soon-to be new roommate
came over and said it felt like "the happiness that lives in your chest"
and so that is what it is going to be called.

new abstracts: musings

something formless about them. a sense of calm patience. these are larger, more expansive. they are not begging for form but for small playful strokes: an exploration of layering translucents over one another. Perhaps hanging chandeliers, the endless beaded loops: a chance for more of my favorite oval form: but maybe something less identifiable. I do not feel eager with a large brush and broad strokes, or an urgency to cover the canvas and find a direction.

what are my thoughts... that there is something about my new environmental musings in it. what was it? on the road to pick up my mother from the airport, late night, dark and stormy night, pelted by swaths of rain and ambushed by roaring semi trucks, I calmly walked my mind around the surface of my new red canvas and the different colors to play on its surface. The lights reflected from the tailights in wide swaths of brilliant rectangular color.

Perhaps they are simply shadow-catchers. I place them in front of the play of light and capture the scene behind them, in endless layers. sketch form that is immediately dissolved at its edges.

or something about the acceptance of death.

the glazing is an issue... for some reason there are dry spots and wet spots... very distracting. and yet.. another guide (quieting down and following the small tracks in the forests). I paint some bright red in mimicry of the spattered oily spots, and then just try wiping the sheen off with a cloth: and reveal the most beautiful textured pattern: the original dull vermillion revealed like weathering: the surface of marined metal.

paintings in progress

September 29th

After sweltering weeks, it has cooled down with a nice cloudy drizzly three days... Ahhhhh. Garden has already sprung back into green, just in time for my mom's visit (she is coming tomorrow for 10 days!) Only, I went into my studio to paint and it was chilly! What gives?  Do I have to go straight from fans to space heaters? You know, I am not complaining: I love my backyard studio all open to the elements, perched up high amongst the trees. I have decided one of my favorite places on the planet is to sit on my top step, watching the sun and wind play on all that green, while taking a break from painting.

Anyway, my two new abstracts are giving me paroxysms of happiness. Here they are stretched and with their first coats... the red one is going to be an adventure in which I repeat the journey i undertook a few years ago for a commissioned "rothko" color field painting. I found the scribbled map in my stuff and decided to do it again, only with form and play added in. So this is with vermillion, and a light wash of ultramarine blue...

also, the landscape continues to evolve. Maybe in a bad direction (?)

and finally,  finished two of those acrylic abstracts I started last week........ I love this one: it reminds me of a Norwegian folk art called Rosemaling  (rose painting), only, of course, more modern and loose.

abstract caterpillar chugging through space

Books that are shaking me down

I currently have three jobs (mothering, painting, and a night-time gig waitressing) and a million things to do on my list that simply go undone..... ugh. I start to sweat just thinking about it all. But you get the picture...

So: I have had to sacrifice one of my great pleasures in my life, which is reading, because I have an addictive nature when it comes to reading and will stay up all night with a gripping plotline. Such excesses are obviously unsustainable and laughingly self-indulgent and so I have quit, cold turkey, like a recovering alcoholic. 

But...... the other day, at the downtown library with my beloved Sava (we have re-initiated our Wednesday morning storytime ritual), a book called out to me from their Recent Additions shelf. "Eaarth", by Bill Mckibben. "What a strange title," I mused as I picked it up and checked it out on a whim.  Flash forward two weeks, and you find me a slightly shattered, altered person. Which is one of the wonderful things about books: their ability to infiltrate and rearrange the reader. But I digress...

Okay. So I don't know maybe I have been living under a rock the past few years but I had NO IDEA that things had been getting so progressively snowballingly worse for our planet and our climate, even since just 2007. I am embarrassed, because I am supposed to be an environmentalist and all, and I know I have been busy, but I didn't even really register the great debacle which was the Copenhagen convention of 2009, where the leaders of our nations met and failed to come to any type of agreement on how we were to all globally unify to dramatically curtail the warming of the globe.

So.... I read this book, Eaarth, and felt like I was sucker punched in the gut. Alternating waves of nausea, of hopelessness, and utter despair. Because he says, and this seems crazy to repeat, because I am ever the eternal optimist, that we have lost the fight. The planet is irrevocably altered, already. We have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that there is no real way to halt the process, and we look to a future of radical warming, desertification, water loss, famine and pestilence. We have already gone past the point of no return, and now we just have to figure out how to live on a dramatically altered planet. This means, for my daughter, that in her lifetime she will see her (mostly) green, verdant and lovely planet changed beyond recognition.

I cannot accept this. In my cells I cannot accept this. And yet I believe him. I think he is right. I grew up under the shadow of the fear of nuclear war, with a mother who fought for policy change and peace... but this is something different. This is.....

Like, what do you do with this information? What is the point of anything we do? Why go into my studio and paint silly, beautiful works of art that won't affect any type of real change? They are artifacts. If I am honest with myself, in my best moments I create only material goods, to hang on the walls of the privileged few who can afford them. That night I went to work at the restaurant and wove in and out of table in a state of mindless despair and utter exhaustion. All sense of purpose emptied out of my life. What is the point of doing anything if it is not ACTIVE, DIRECT engagement in policy change and technological solutions? But I am not political. And I am not a scientist. I am an artist and I love people and I love creating objects of beauty and I want to live in a soft green world and give that same opportunity to my daughter who I so fiercely love and want to defend.

You know the killing thing for me in all this? It is that I believe that humanity has received most of its good qualities from direct engagement with nature. That we are uplifted by our encounters with butterflies and thrumming honey bees: restored by our wanderings into forests. Our prophets come from the Wild. That our great metaphysical traditions evolved out of our relationships with the Great Beingness which is the interconnected life force of our vital, breathing planet. Okay... so a hurricane wipes out an entire village, and there is great suffering and loss and it is horrible. I am sad.. I grieve for their loss. But I am comforted to know that the natural world still surrounds the pain and will eventually heal those involved. What happens if our planet starts to look more and more like Mars?  Will we, as a people, become more war-like and less humanitarian? I mean, obviously there will be more wars, over the dwindling reserves of our planet... and less money and support to help those victims of local disasters.......but will we start to reflect the pestilence in our own souls even more? I am afraid of this. I believe in the essential goodness of people and I love this soft green planet so fiercely. It seems impossible that it is so very sick right now.

So what do we do? I have the good fortune of knowing a wise and gentle friend who has been battling these same issues for some time now, Justin Van Kleek, (who lent me the book Twelve by Twelve) and he came over to share some tea and talk with me. He is an activist, a vegan and committed localvore, and he doesn't really hold any hope for the future, but we had some relevatory talks that helped me to process it all. I won't go into all the details of our conversation, as this is already an absurdly long post, but I will touch on some salient points. Basically, we returned again and again to certain Buddhist ideas. One is: there is no hope. But, without hope, you commit yourself to working towards the change you wish to see in the world. We kept coming back to verse 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

"Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it."

And the bodhisattva vow: which completely distills this essence of hopeless action:
"Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all"

So.... this current world is perfect. My aching, grieving love for this green planet is a form of grasping, and thus I have already lost it. I am meant to understand that the environmental disaster is also perfect, in its own way. We are not meant to save the world... we cannot save something which is perfect. What a strange, holy thought. I feel at the precipice of some great change: to fall into despair or into an altered and more clear state of being.

Justin caught me using the word "should" a lot in our conversation. As in: "I shouldn't be painting: I should be working in politics, fighting for real change", and he told me that for him, once the word "should" enters the mind, it is like a death. That "should" breeds a force of misanthropic do-gooders, civil fighters that burn out during their attempts to save the world, rather than true warriors who are acting from a place of clarity and love, and renewing energy. The antidote to exhaustion is whole-heartedness. The antidote to the horror of hopelessness, is small and loving action. So, Justin implored me, (and I paraphrase)  "Do not give up painting and creating works of beauty. You talk about how buoyed you are by nature.. what makes you think you are not nature? Not a part of that same nature, and that your artwork is not as transcendent or uplifting as a tree?"  (Side note: in his own way,  Jamba is always talking about this. I cherish, say, a dragonfly humming around the garden and chatter excitedly to Sava about it, and a minute later I am smashing flies in the kitchen with a fly swatter. "Your mommy is practicing aesthetics right now," he will croon to her.)

What profound thoughts. How lucky am I, to have such loving friends to help guide me in this life. So, what next. I think I would like to act. I want to try to minimize my impact, and so I vow to reduce my own carbon imprint. I am going to commit even more to a localvore, and organic diet. Continue going to my lovely farmers market. I am going to try to be more successful and profitable in my artwork, so that I have more money to give to organizations that are creating and imagining a new world. I am going to start planting trees, and I am going to use my beautiful network of loving and amazing friends (YOU) to try to help spread the word. I implore you the read the book "Eaarth" if you haven't already, and take some time to digest the information in there. I think we all need time to prepare and adjust ourselves.

Next book on my list: Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken. I just read his article "Ecologist" in an anthology called A Passion for this Earth. He is talking about the millions of organizations that have sprung up in response to our humanitarian and environmental crisis, and likens their dispersed, decentralized formation to our own bodies' immune system. It is a fascinating thought, and I want to read more. But here is a quote from his article that I will leave you with; it is by David James Duncan:

"When small things are done with love it's not a flawed you or me who does them: it's love. I have no faith in any political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist in these strange times is by giving little or no thought to 'great things' such as saving the planet, acheiveing world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Whereas small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach."

and now, I am going to go paint.

Paintings at The Yellow Button

My show is looking lovely at TYB.... and I am happy, for now, to not be painting any more bird paintings. Amazing how my energy flows back and forth between styles... It took all these months of painting on wood panels to rekindle a thirst for painting on canvas. I feel like I have gotten something out, and done some retraining of hand and eye, with these figurative works, and am now broken open and ready to paint in the wide open realm of abstract again.


Four new big square stretcher frames now sit waiting for canvas to be stretched over them and stapled: I am ready for the voyage. In the meantime, on of those big canvases: a transition piece. A cloudy landscape with lavender fields. There is a fine line demarcating a sky full of storm clouds and a luminous abstract painting, and I am having a good time walking that line in this piece. Not sure if this will lead to more landscapes (those lovely autumn fields and soft warm winds are beckoning). Note: this painting is still in progress....(I am still working on the lavender fields) and was inspired by a local painter.

Also, in getting ready for the abstracts: I was having fun working with acrylic paint with my last few bird pieces... and decided to go out and buy some good quality acrylic paint and have some, just FUN on the last few wood panels I had leftover from my painting workshop. Practicing the gestures of abstract.





I have always had such a hard time with acrylic.. muttering at the dullness of the paint, but I found some beautiful tubes of paint that are blowing me away... quinacradone yellow-gold, for one! Does anyone else fall in passionate love affairs with tubes of paint like I do? Also loving the immediacy of the gesture, and the ability to paint and paint and bury strokes under one another, without the lengthy drying time. So I will close with pictures of these last few abstracts: they are about 24 x 30 inches, and 24 x 24: acrylic on wood.

billowing curtains

Sitting on the toilet, the fresh September night wind floats the brown floral curtains in fulsome billows, and you are crying for me, in a broken, midnight wail: soft. A moment ago, I had scurried upstairs to respond to your plaintive waking. Soft night terror: Something had woken you up, and you clutched me tight and feverishly- we pressed torsos together as we hadn’t done since you were infant co-sleeping bedmate. Relaxed immediately, from fear to comfort, breathing and sleeping into sleep. I could stand there and hold you forever, , rocking side to side like a gentle boat and remembering our puzzle piece interlocking, but I knew I know if I bring you into our bed you will fight and arch to get back into your own equilibrium. So I place you gently down into your crib, and you fuss and pull into your new comfort: Water: Water Bottles: at least two. Full, and please with ice “in there”. Not one but two, clutched to your chest, and I leave brokenhearted, to sit on the toilet and listen to you softly chant, Momeeee. Mommmeee- an idea but not really a request. Not: mama. Not the open ended Mama of your first utterances of the idea. Somehow over the months I have moved from source to object. Momeeeeee. With the winnowing of your tongue comes the muscle of ownership. Mom. Me. Mine and Mine and Mine. You are mine, as we grow towards our own separate, desperate longing for each other.

Full Heat of Summer

We are in it; officially in it. Heat swarms close like honeybees to nectar, extract sweat molecules from armpits, foreheads, lips. We eschew air-conditioning in this house, for a variety of reasons, but I like to believe that it is more truthful, somehow, to live with the reality of the summer (just do not ask me to do the same with winter).  To be forced out into shady lawns and hose wars and wading pools and to the community pool. To wake up in a cloying hug of warmth, toss the sheet (if you could even bear the sheet) aside, and start the sweat pooling. I ease into it, let my muscles relax, and let it drip. I sit or stand at my easel, with my latex gloved hand up at the painting, and watch the steady trickle of sweat pour down my lifted arm. It is just the rhythm, of these paintings and this time. It is no better or worse than any other. It is exciting, though, somehow.

If I could, I would be naked for months. There are a few dresses I can bear to wear- those with the lightest of straps and fabric, and I alternate them. Any other coverings are unbearable. The hair is up in a ponytail. There is such a simplification in all of this.

I am reading a beautiful book, lent by a good friend, called "Twelve by Twelve", by William Powers, of an activist physician who chooses to live her life in a tiny house of the above dimensions, on two acres of permacultured land. I am reading this book this afternoon on my tousled bed, with earplugs in, instead of taking the two hour nap I really so desperately need to take before work. I am so tired. So terribly tired. The antidote to exhaustion is whole-heartedness. But also, so is sleep: and deep long sleep is a luxury that seems for some reason unattainable to me in this phase of my life. A daughter who wakes at the crack of 6am is the main culprit, as is my trenchant loyalty to the joys of the late night. I don't have enough unbroken sleep, and thus I do not have a deep well of creativity, or the ability to think or feel deeply inspired things, but I can READ deeply inspired things and feel impacted by them, and feel the well of tears rise up in me which is my response to emotional truth.

I feel like my life is leading towards something like this book. A gradual simplification, a winnowing down. A spot of land, at one point, will come to flourish under my hands as I gradually learn the art of wildcrafting. So many things are pointing me in this direction, especially as we are all dawning in awareness of the closeness of the catastrophe that is the gross materialization of our culture. Living in a town where the semi's rattle past me with their cages stuffed full of bleached poultry heading to slaughter, but where I have also, for the first time, been able to afford to eat from the farmer's markets and our own garden. Anyway, where was i: oh yeah, the book. So far, what I have been getting teary over are some of the following thoughts:

-Alone, totally quiet, numb. The writer, a guest to her little shack doesn't know what to do at first. Gradually, he "began to feel my anxious mind slow down as the days passed and I tuned into nature, slipping into what the Chinese call wu wei, an alert inactivity. This is not considered sloth but a kind of "waiting" in the esoteric sense of the word: present, attentive, as when Jesus said to "be like a servant who does not know at what hour the master will return." An outward nondoing: an inner readiness." (THIS SOUNDS SO EXOTIC TO BE ALMOST ETHEREAL.)

-and, "Both Einstein and Jung said the same thing in different ways: the world's problems can't be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.' She added that do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner-city teacher, and the compromised activist. 'There is someplace absolutely essential beneath the doing,' she said, 'and it is the most important part."

-"The difference between being actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin."

That is all for now: So much to write, about our trip to California, our budding child, and recent paintings, but I am off to the studio to do a snatch of painting before Sava awakes. What I am painting:  more bird paintings. six or seven of them in the last few days. Trying to quiet myself down, find my intuition and follow the inspiration....

Sava by the Clotheslines

I am really excited about our upcoming trip to my homeland: two weeks back in Northern California in the beginning of July!!! I am bringing some boards out, to start painting my new Americana series (slated for a show next May for the Arts Council of the Valley).  We are going to be camping up north with friends near a river, and then spending a week at the family cabin in the Sierra Nevadas....

This cabin is the loose foci of the new body of work  that I have been dreaming about doing for about three years. It is going to be source from family photographs from my early childhood spent at the lake, and so I hope to find inspiration in the revisiting of the smell and feel of the crisp mountain air, and the lake gently lapping at the shore. I would like to get some of the pieces at least started there.....

But hell, in the meantime... some Virginia is creeping in. I can't seem to wait to get started on this new series. I am getting inspired by images of my daughter, Sava Talulah, playing amongst the gardens and front yards (littered with bunny statuary and bird fountains and decaying front porch couches....ahhh, a different vision of American, but potent and compelling all the same). Here is what is perhaps to be the first painting in the series..... Sava by the Clotheslines...still in progress-  so much to dial in!   But...

I love it.

The other cool thing is that I was looking at the top photo on the computer (the up close painted face), with Sava in my arms, and I pointed to the screen and asked her, "Sava, who is that?" and she looked at it and said  "Saba!".    Which is saying something... I think. For her to recognize herself in blobs of collected paint.

 

Maybe this series is going to be as much of an examination of childhood.... in particular, the mirrored and particular upbringings of myself and my daughter. What has changed... what stays constant? Are we able to experience an Americana that is not utterly personal?