A new start
Before it melted, the snow was boot deep and crystalline. Now unseasonably warm rains have returned and the ground is slick with black ice at night. Above the bald mountains that rise up from the lake, the full moon was setting just as the sun was rising this morning, white and round like a plate against the pale tablecloth of pink and blue.
I’m busy again, but the past two days have been deeply satisfying. DH and I keep talking, and each time it’s getting easier and richer. We’re moving, not stagnant, and also we’re starting to train for a half marathon. Five miles at the gym yesterday, and then dinner all together. Ice cream with cherries for dessert, and Bean licking his bowl. We’re trying to be gentler with each other than before, and this is good.
I’m also back in the thick of creative work, which I love. Somehow I managed to forget I’m doing an art showing in a café and am supposed to hang my work this weekend, so now my studio is spread with frames and canvasses, as I scurry to prepare for the show. I like it this way, a patchwork of rectangles and brushstrokes.
A good way to start the new year.
Painting, My Studio, The way I operate, Daily Photo | Comments (18)Good vibes
My sister is here, from across the country, and she’s brought a good vibe with her. Aside from being a saint—making exquisite food, plying me with yummy wine, and bathing my kid, she’s also given me some space to unfurl a little. To talk, to feel safe, to unscramble. She’s perceptive and determined and encouraging, and it’s been just what I’ve needed: to soak up her affection, knowing that she gets me in a different way than anyone else does. And maybe because I’ve allowed myself to let go just a little, and let my guard down just a twinge, all sorts of good omens have come my way regarding grad school.
Whenever I’m contemplating big ideas or changes for my life, I sort of send out a universal query, before I wholly commit. Then I wait to see what the universe says. In this case, I got a big YES from four different sources yesterday, and that made me feel good. So good. So I’m trusting that I’ll get all the pieces figured out and get the applications sent in on time. Trusting that my life will take me where it needs to go.
It’s been the first time in a long while that I’ve felt like things were going to be okay. And therein lies the lesson: let go just a little and trust. See what happens.
Painting, The way I operate | Comments (7)5 good things
A recent painting (that I made for DH’s birthday). What do you think?
A three mile run tonight with DH along the muddy road. Rain falling softly. Leaves the color of ocher and rose drifting earthward. Cattle, with their ruddy brown fur and white bellies all facing the same way, grazing in knee high grass. The creek, a ribbon of indigo with cattails up to my waist.
Thai food, the three of us out on an impromptu date, at a tiny restaurant near here. The chalky sweetness of traditional Thai iced tea. Moo Ping. Tom Kha. Bean using a grown up fork to shovel fried rice into his mouth (his overall bib pocket was full too!) The leisure of sitting back, aimless conversation, and no clean up.
Ben & Jerry’s and a the latest Project Runway on Tivo.
And rocking Bean to sleep in the dark, his heart against mine. There is nothing sweeter in the whole world.
What are yours?
Painting, Mommy?!, Thoughts & observations | Comments (20)Summer
We blow a hundred bubbles one by one. Our breath caught up in the glycerin spheres that float up above the trees. Bean watches each faint rainbow circle as it drifts away against the backdrop of pale blue. It is the beginning of summer. Lazy afternoons in a plastic wading pool with a red rubber ball, with the smell of sunscreen slick on our skin. Days of short attention, and grilled corn; afternoon naps and magazines piled high on the coffee table. Popsicle days. Late evening ice cream stops in town. Firefly nights, lying on the lawn and kissing after dark.
Painting, Mommy?!, Thoughts & observations | Comments (19)The way imagination happens…and, a new painting
15″ x 30″ mixed media collage.
Here are some up-close shots.
***
Of course, the good ideas always hit at the least convenient times: in the shower maybe, when I’m out on a run, or just drifting off to sleep—any place far from pen and paper. I know why this happens. My mind will start to dislocate then, slipping out of the present and into the luminous space between what is real and what is imagined.
Then, images like bright sun spots start to dance across my internal page. Sometimes I’ll see an entire picture, as though the bulb on a slide projector were suddenly flipped on and the scene dances towards me on the particles of light. Other times I get only a slight inkling. A whisper of theme or color, wending it’s way into the chinks of my busy mind, catching my attention the way the tiny rainbows do, that scatter out about a café, refracting light from the diamond on a lady’s finger as she raises her cup to sip café au lait.
For days after I get an idea, I’ll carry it around in my mind like a pocket full of sea glass, carelessly fingering each smooth shard a hundred times. Then in an evening after the house is quiet and my baby is asleep, I’ll pick out a canvas, and begin, smudging the page with dark blues or pale ochres and white. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know the colors of the rainbow—nor can I remember not knowing how colors blend: my young fingers holding stubby beeswax crayons already understood that bright yellow mixed with emerald would make the chartreuse hue perfect for drawing new foliage.
Color always comes first, for me, followed by shape and the juxtaposition of realistic sketches and collage. It is rare that I am able to put into words what I will paint before I do. Even when I think I know exactly what I want to draw, I also know it will be different from what I’ve imagined when I’m through. This is the secret I am always learning: painting is about the unexpected, the crazy, haphazard, willy-nilly, process of imagination, and it cannot be defined or controlled.
Each time I come to the canvass with my brushes, my pallet thick with paint, and my heart wide open. Then I follow with bold marks the wild flight of my imagination through some internal landscape of wonder.
PS–I’ve added this one to my gallery.
Painting, The way I operate, Thoughts & observations | Comments (22)I need your help
I’m ashamed to admit–I actually know next to nothing about web design and I barely understand how my publishing platform works. Are you surprised? Yeah, I’d like to learn–but seriously, where would the time for that to be found?
So instead of learning, today I am begging. If someone has the fancy shmancy web skills to help me integrate a gallery to display my artwork into wordpress, I’d grovel willingly at their feet. Doesn’t sound enticing enough? I can throw in a year of free hosting from Wired Hub. Better?
Email me if you’re interested.
And for everyone else, this is the best I could do. Enjoy.
Painting, My Studio | Comments (7)Time for sleep
Even now, after a year, sleep isn’t the same. Maybe it will never be like it was pre-baby: eight hours without a single moment of semi-consciousness. Now night is a blur of dreams, wide awake moments flushed with hormonal heat, moments yanked from sleep yet again, moments still nursing.
As a result some days my moods are like salmon migrating upstream. Often, they storm the turbines of my heart. Up, then down. Flailing. Inevitably.
Today, after a weekend of sun, fun, extroversion, and no naps, I woke up exhausted, with mastitis. Again. The cumulative lack of deep sleep has caught up. Things feel tangential and disconnected.
Most weeks I stay up late into the evening. These nighttime hours are my time for painting and writing; for locating the fragile connective tissue that holds my days together. This only works if I get a nap in with Bean in the morning, though.
We curl like puppies, a tangle of limbs under the down comforter. His bare feet pressed into my belly. We sleep like this for an hour at least. Sometimes two, and everything is okay. But last week there were no naps. Days of go, go, go. Days of longer sunlight. More to do. Friends visiting. Deadlines. It’s easy for me to try to live on credit with myself. To take out debt after debt in the sleep department.
I’m trying to learn how to listen to my body. To heed the warning signs. But it’s hard when most days I feel like I accomplish so little. A handful of sentences written maybe. Possibly a load of laundry. (And of course caring for Bean.) It’s hard to allow this to be enough. I’m so goal driven, so pushy, and impatient. It’s hard to bring myself back to the present and wait for the well to fill again.
Painting, The way I operate, Mommy?!, Thoughts & observations | Comments (19)Chiaroscuro of the heart
I sit at the dining room table with a good mechanical pencil and some soft lead. The house hums with the regular quiet of evening. Into the corners of my mind the hubbub of the day still seeps, like spilled ink soaking into a paper towel. I give myself a task: focus wholly on these two little boots. Let my eyes move along their contours. Stay focused. Follow with my hand.
I sketch the outline of each boot. My mind slips into a place between thinking and not—a place without language where I hover like a humming bird, millimeters from a flower anticipating sweet nectar. I start painting the shadows.
I’ve been trying to do this more: directing my focus towards everyday objects. To notice how things are. To try to accurately observe. Everything doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.
I’ve begun to notice this week how often I put value on moments, on whole days: “this is horrible,” I hear myself saying, or “I hate this.” Often I am overcome with these emotions—the value I give the moment obscures it.
The shadows are hard to capture. The quality of shiny rubber catches the light. The boots are still new, only used indoors by Bean’s small feet. He’s walked about in them like a bowlegged cowboy, high stepping, with a big grin on his face. Soon they’ll be muddy, their sheen tarnished with a glaze of puddle mud.
The shadows are important. They give depth and angle. Without them the contours I’ve drawn will look distorted and not like the boots at all. It is the shadows that bring dimension, and I’m starting to understand that about my life too. It is hard for me to allow the shadows to simply be, without resenting them, or allotting them a value. Hard to come face to face with my sorrow, anger, or aggression, without letting these emotions spill over my entire perception self. Hard to let them exist alongside my breath, without holding my breath.
I’m not good at allowing these emotions to rest in the open palms of my soul, without clenching my fists.
Some nights when I paint, I let things distort, grow wild, brilliant, abstract, but tonight I want to capture things as they are. Tonight I want the chiaroscuro to be as it is, there on the table before me. Light where the bulbs above my head illuminate the toe tips. Dark where the soles touch the table top. Light where my breath comes freely. Dark where my mind comes up against the sharp edges of undefined worry.
I recall reading about this years ago when I was trying to learn how to be mindful, rather than just being mindful. I never got it then: this process of acceptance. I never understood how hard it is to sit side by side with frustration, with self pity, with a knot of anger, and allow these things to be without allowing them to flood the page with darkness. To accept them, but not to give them reign. To see them as they are, without the distortion.
I go back over the boots, working with watercolors, adding layer upon layer of red pigment to create the shadows. I begin to notice that there is shape to the shadows. They have borders. I focus my mind on the page. The meaty part of my palm rubs up against the fresh paint, smudging it. A trail of dark pigment flecks the outer edge of my hand.
I realize that often in these past few days, when work has been highly stressful for DH, I’ve allowed myself to absorb his aggression and frustration. I’ve internalized it and allowed it to spread: an unidentified fear spilling across the page of my heart, and my whirling hormones (after two years, nearly, my cycle is finally returning) have added to the blur.
When I look closely, this is what I see: the boots. Two tokens of puddle-stomping joy to be had by the small boy who I love. My anger: not really mine, but absorbed from the environment of stress I’ve been in this week. My worry: money, always money. My fear: that I am not good enough.
When I observe closely this is what I feel: breath. Tension. Focus. Acceptance. Release. Here are the boots, and my soul as I see them tonight.
Painting, Illustration Friday, Thoughts & observations | Comments (27)Dislocation
I just finished this painting, and am fascinated by how it turned out. The process of painting is so organic for me: far more wildly right brained than writing is. I start with a canvass, and just push paint around. I let the background sit for a couple of days, there on my easel in the middle of the room. I allow it to saturate my subconscious. I think about it in the still moments when I’m nursing Bean, or rocking him to sleep, or when I’m lying in bed just at the cusp of sleep myself. If I’m attentive, images will often alight on the cinemascape of my mind. I’ll see stalky bird legs, or a particular wash of color. Or I might pick up on a mood.
Days go by this way. Until I find the right image to follow, and then I do.
In this painting the colors of the background were so moody, I struggled with how to extend an image beyond their sheer rawness. I wanted this piece to be another in the series I’m making for upcoming café shows, so I wanted to stick with the theme I’d chosen of juxtaposing organic and inorganic; detail and chaos.
Flipping through the bird book DH gave me for Valentine’s Day (along with a pair of incredible binoculars! Yes we’re like that. I gave him a telescope. And no, we didn’t discuss our presents in advance. That’s just how we think.) I found myself lingering over the image of the great blue heron: so majestic, wild, fierce, lonely.
After I’d made the bird, the dark city landscape evolved to go behind it. I was writing about dislocation and creating home at the time, and these ideas became the narrative of this painting.
In Connecticut, where I used to live and work, I’d drive along 95 and I’d feel heartsick at the trash, the urbanization, the acres of cement overrunning coastal wetlands and marshes belonging to egrets and herons, red tailed hawks, grebes, and mallards. Now I’m living northwards by several hundred miles and things seem more in synch. There are wide swaths of open space designated for the birds. Along the sandbar heading towards the islands in Lake Champlain, and huge osprey aeries sit atop telephone poles every mile or so.
But I can’t help feeling like somehow it’s up to me to be a part of making this last. It’s easy to feel entitled. Easy to say, “this is my land.” Harder to make actions reflect the fluttering wonder of my heart.
I am interested: what choices do you make consciously to protect the natural habitat where you live?
Painting, Our round planet, Thoughts & observations | Comments (29)Becoming
To grow is to go beyond
what you are today.
Stand up as yourself.
Do not imitate.
Do not pretend to have achieve your goal,
and do not try to cut corners.
Just grow.
–Svami Prajnanpad
***
I am surrounded by notebooks, and I am taking notes. Like an archeologist, I am looking for clues about the piece (a book?) I am trying to write. I want to find the veins that traverse it, that bring meaning to it’s peripheries. I am re-reading all the scribbled pages and documents I’ve written since the winter of 2004 when I was hugely pregnant, exhausted, and severely dislocated from my sense of self. It is startling and sometimes funny to go back and read all the thoughts I’ve dutifully recorded.
Over and over againI write the same things, tugging at the girdle of phrasing, couching my words this way and then that—trying to get closer to truth. And then over and over I forget.
I find I’ve written things down that make me laugh out loud. Like this:
“I look around the apartment today and think: god, I’ve all but killed the houseplants.”
Other things make me go quiet inside, the way a bird must feel after it has landed.
Like this:
“The map of your identity changes when you love someone. “
**
“On the train home, we slice through the dark—an isolated rectangle of light and breath and shifting weight.”
**
“The days of recovery from labor and bonding with Bean have blurred together into a continuous present. I find I am unable to think very far forward or backward and instead end up lingering in the moment doing nothing except watching and listening to my son breathe.”
**
“His little fingers curl around my thumb, and I am learning humility now. The moments of each days fabric have become a string of little wonderments. Little things matter now. Like coffee, and the incredible smell of his hair.”
**
“Everyone lives through periods of intense change, yet few give pause to these moments of turbulence. Few are present and reflective right in the moment of becoming.”
**
I’ve started to feel present in the story I am trying to write for the first time, and have begun to realize that it is more than a story about birth (my son’s) or death (my father’s) or love (my parents, my own). It is a story about becoming.
I want to know your stories of becoming.
Painting, Poems, My Studio, My Notebook, Thoughts & observations | Comments (11)