Linda_Hensley

"Forward"

2012-01-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe you’ve had this kind of thing happen – my boss’ brother’s wife’s mother had a project. The artist who moonlights tarot readings was out with the flu. “Hey! I’ve got something for you!” Oh sure. How was I to know that “something” was going to take a couple of years, a complete redo, and war threats with at least 3 far eastern countries? Thankfully, I really liked my boss’ brother’s wife’s mother, and it was fun to work on something out of the mainstream.

I don’t know how much more “forward” we can get than talking with a psychic. Sandy often came in with insights about what was going to happen next, with or without dropping stones on the latest layouts of her game. She was usually right. I can understand why she has her loyal patrons. Everyone in the office eventually got their fortunes told. It’s hard to say you don’t want to know the future, even if some people feel like it’s against the rules to play.

I don’t think there’s much of a line between intuition and psychics; it’s just that the psychics exercise a muscle most of us don’t bother to acknowledge in the first place. How many times have we gotten a feeling about something without really knowing why? Maybe Jung had it right when he talked about the collective unconscious, or maybe it’s God’s way of clueing us into important things, or maybe the universe is a whole lot bigger than any of us is really comfortable accepting? I know I’ve gotten those feelings, and life has definitely gone smoother for me when I paid attention to my stomach when it’s squirming. Of course sometimes maybe I should’ve eaten something different for lunch, but there are those other times I have to wonder about.

Of course there are charlatans too. If you give me $3,000, I’ll pray over some crystals. No, wait! Give me $5,000 and I’ll lift that curse off of you that will prevent you from every success or happiness for the rest of your life. Come to think of it, I see you having $10,000 in the bank that will really motivate your spirit guides and angels – once your $10,000 is in my loving care of course, which means the check has to clear before any real spirit action happens. Okay, yeah, those people exist too, and if you call the psychic hotline, they’ll keep you on the phone quite a while to tell you about how you should be careful with your money. We can exercise some common sense while keeping an open mind about some things.

I used to have a job where I scheduled events. This is a tricky thing when we consider various religious and government holidays, conflicting venue’s events, school schedules, Ohio weather… The first time I sat with my pile of conflicts, I felt overwhelmed. I jabbed a pencil at the calendar. The 20th! Okay, why not? The 20th was as good as the 27th, right? And for some reason the 20th felt better, so I filed the appropriate forms, sent out my PSA’s, etc. Blue sky on the 20th, blizzard on the 27th. Call me superstitious all you want, I scheduled the rest of my events according to my gut. Good weather for all of them. My method worked for more than 4 years when I quit scheduling those kinds of events. BTW, I told my ex-priest boss about my method, and he approved.

The game is fun and requires absolutely no skill to play. You drop the stones onto printed fabric, then consult the booklet to understand the meanings of the stone placements. You can buy it here, though I don’t get anything if you do. Sometimes I think I should make commission.

"Versatile Blogger Award"

2012-01-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit it, I love awards. Many thanks to Sharon for nominating me for a “Versatile Blogger Award”. Woohoo! Thanks Sharon! Visit her blog to see her art, crafts, recipes, travels… I’m feeling less versatile all the time while thinking of everything Sharon has been doing lately :)

Here’s the rules…

1. Thank the person who bestowed the award on you
2. List seven random facts about yourself
3. Spread the love by passing along the award to five other bloggers, and let them know

Let’s see, 7 random facts. Hmmm…

I’m great at growing aloe vera in pots. I like to give the babies, because we can’t have enough burn protection.

I straighten pictures on other people’s walls when nobody’s looking.

I collect rocks. Not fancy rocks, just regular rocks. It’s a genetic problem I inherited from Mom.

Sharon can do over 50 pushups. I’ve never accomplished one. Never, and I’ve tried.

I always have at least one dog, except for about 3 cumulative years when I was either grieving or pining for a dog.

I think dogs are easier to live with than men.

I can’t turn down cookies.

I hate picking favorites amongst my blogging buddies, but I’ll play by the rules.

Bella Sinclair
Otto von Munchow
Paula Kuitenbrouwer
Sarah Melling
Josh Pincus

I gave some awards out last year, so I picked new people for this one, but I still love my previous winners whom you can see here or here.

"Twirl"

2012-01-20T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail. No beginning, no end, and therefore a symbol of the eternal cycle of things. There’s a lot of mythology that goes with it, and if you’re interested, you can go here to read more about it. I’m usually a very 2-dimensional girl, but I made this out of Sculpey. I don’t like the biting part, so I made my snake never-ending without pain. I suppose that’s unrealistic, but that’s the way I’d like life to be.

Today was one of those days when all the old people escaped into public places -- the nasty and/or daft old people. You know them. They’re the types who run over your foot with the grocery cart, stand in the middle of the aisle so nobody can go anywhere, and drive about 15 mph below the speed limit in a 25 mph zone. They don’t remember how money works any more, but they can tell you about how they used to grind flour between stones.

As I was stuck driving home behind an oldster straddling 2 lanes of traffic with the left blinker permanently on, it occurred to me that just perhaps, the old people were only there to annoy me because I wanted a distraction today. My mind was twirling with worries about other problems, bigger problems I can’t do a thing about because it doesn’t matter how much wisdom I acquire, people are going to make their own mistakes. I really hate that. I guess that’s why it’s just easier to get mad at old people, while I worry about how they’re going to carry their groceries inside, if they’ll have an accident, and why aren’t their relatives taking care of them anyway? Then I feel more impotent aggravations on top of my other impotent aggravations.

Ohmmmm…

It all boils down to what goes around, comes around. All of us came into the world naked and helpless, go to school, despair over pimples, get our hearts broken, get jobs, fall in love, go to the grocery store… and eventually we’re old, and eventually after that, we’ll die. We’re replaced by younger generations who will go through exactly the same things, the same way we replaced the people before us. I’m not sure if this provides me with comfort or a sense of futility about all of our struggles.

My mom’s neighbor gave me an old newspaper a while ago. It’s dated October 8, 1914, so British troops rushing to Antwerp was the main headline, but they found a lot of space for gossip on the front page. People don’t seem very different then than they are today.

Let’s just sing with the Byrds :)

"Prepare"

2012-01-13T14:31:00.000-08:00

We can do the best preparations in the world, but if our brains aren’t in the game, that preparation isn’t going to do us a lot of good. It’s hard to consider follow through on action plans when my brain feels like a bag of gray worms hibernating for the winter. Maybe this recent train of events might explain a bit of my frame of mind lately…

My tea kettle had a plastic trigger to open the spout, which I broke at some point. I got some wire and twisted a new trigger for it since the whistling part was still working. The wire could get very hot while boiling water, but I figured I’d solved my immediate problem.

Mary Lou came over and didn’t understand the new rules for pouring boiling water. I tried to explain the proper method, but she opted to buy me a new tea kettle for Christmas that year. Life went on. Many pots of tea were brewed. Some eggs were hard boiled in it too. All was perfectly functional in the realm of tea kettles until the day I set the water on and then spent a couple of hours in my studio. I went into the kitchen to refill my glass and dimly wondered what the odd smell was in the kitchen, but PhotoShop was calling me. I didn’t have time to worry about odd smells when I had IDEAS that needed creating.

Sometime later, my glass needed refilling again, and the odd smell seemed stronger. PhotoShop was still calling me, but I absent-mindedly looked around the kitchen to discover that the stove was still on high and the tea kettle I had put on hours before looked something like a crashed UFO, with the plastic handle oozing a toxic lump into the cracks between the burners. My puppy Penny looked up at me with a doped up, questioning look about why I was making such a malodorous art project on the stove. I looked at it for a while before feeling an external, imaginary poke in my back to turn off the burner and get rid of the toxic waste.

Oops.

After much scrubbing and windows open in winter (again!), my house seemed safe for human and puppy habitation once more. The aloe plant sacrificed another limb to salve my burnt finger when, of course, I picked up something I knew was very hot. Sometimes I don’t feel very connected to the mundane things of this planet. Did I mention I had IDEAS? Who needs to think about “hot” when there are important things to get done?

When life had returned to a shade of normal, I did the natural thing and called Mary Lou to tell her the tea kettle bit the dust. I offered to share responsibility with her for its demise, but for some reason, she seemed to think I needed to shoulder the full responsibility myself. She didn’t see the simple logic that I couldn’t have melted the tea kettle if she hadn’t given it to me in the first place. Some people just try to duck blame no matter what, though it was nice of her to give it to me in the first place.

I found the old tea kettle in the basement and boiled some more water. The special knack required to open it seems to require a skill that I’ve allowed to rust in the intervening years, but I have tea again. The old kettle is polished up and pretty on the stove, and I’m choosing to see my wire handle as a sign of my can-do problem solving abilities. Or… maybe I should switch to Kool-Aid? Wait! Kool-Aid, colors, IDEAS!!!

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BTW, my apologies if you've left a comment that didn't appear on the screen. Blogger is trying to protect me from people I like and choking when I try to see those messages. I appreciate everyone's comments!

"Grounded"

2012-01-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

Cleveland Museum of Natural History used to have a research outpost in Willoughby, Ohio. Young scientists were housed in the white barns on the school administration grounds with rows and rows of algae-filled fish tanks. I loved it there. Dad liked to talk with the scientists while I looked at turtles and fish and whatever else they might have. I think the scientists enjoyed my absolute adoration of everything there, including the scientists.

They always seemed pleased when I brought them something to research. They were especially excited when I brought them a soft-shelled turtle. The “finding” of this was as simple as stepping on the poor thing, but no one had seen them in my river before. The scientists plunked him into a fish tank with promises to love it as much as I loved it. I transferred some of my love to the blonde scientist and vowed to bring him more things of interest.

The opportunity for another visit to the research scientist came when I watched a big chunk of cliff fall into the river. KABOOOOMMMMMM!!! That was exciting. It will always be a mystery why I am standing in just the right place to see such things. The huge pile of rocks held some treasures, but I wasn’t allowed to play on it since the adults had some piffling concerns about more cliff falls. I had to wait until after the next spring floods had abated to find the fossils in the red shale littered around downstream. I wasn’t terribly impressed by the fossils because they looked like crayfish in mud, but I would take any excuse to visit the blonde scientist and his fish tanks. Dad didn’t take much pleading to take me.

There was quite a pow wow around my rock in the research barns. Nobody had seen anything like it before. The softness of the rock made these kinds of prehistoric fossils very rare. Could I bring more? Sure! How many do you want? As many as you can get. This of course was an insane instruction to a bored and lonely child in the woods. The next day I took the wheelbarrow down the road, across the rapids, across the broken rocks downstream, loaded the wheelbarrow with fossils, back up the broken rocks downstream, back across the rapids, back up the road. The fossils were dumped by the side of our driveway to be augmented by subsequent trips. I had a mountain of them by the time Dad came home from work. Dad laughed and promised we could deliver them that evening after I had bathed and eaten dinner. He didn’t understand my burning desire to go right away, and I’m sure I never ate dinner faster. I swear he ate slower.

It took some time to load up the car, even with Dad helping. When the tires on the car looked like they might explode and Dad was worrying about the shocks, I regretfully left the remaining small mountain of rocks by the driveway and we went to see the scientists. I was a little disappointed that they used a forklift instead of carrying them carefully with their hands, but they seemed pleased to get the fossils. Actually, they looked rather dumbfounded by the quantity, and they didn’t seem as rare any more. I decided that I wouldn’t bring them as many of anything in the future if it devalued my finds.

They closed up the research lab at some point, and I had to take my discoveries to the actual museum in Cleveland. The disinterested secretary didn’t set my heart aflutter like the blonde scientist, so my gifts diminished. My gifts stopped altogether when I found my turtle dead and mounted in a display case, without even a mention of me finding it on the little white card next to it. I felt burning resentment when I found my fossils in another display case, the white card naming a scientist for discovering it. HE didn’t push a wheelbarrow full of rocks across the rapids. HE used a forklift to move it across the parking lot. Dad said I shouldn’t care about getting credit when advancing science. That’s all well and good, and I agree, as long as someone else doesn’t get credit for my sweat.

I have more of these fossils laying around my house. At least I know who discovered them :)

"Highlight"

2011-12-30T11:23:00.000-08:00

As I huddle next to my space heater and peer at the computer screen through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes and type with slightly frost-bitten fingers, “highlight” holds a certain amount of irony while I wait for the furnace guy to call and explain why my furnace sounds like a jet flying through the house. The woman at the 24-hour phone service asked, “Is it an emergency?” In other words, do you want to pay triple to wake up the poor guy who actually fixes furnaces? “No.” Sigh. That was many hours ago. I’m starting to rethink “emergency”. It is winter after all. Maybe the “highlight” is that the temperature has worked its way up to 45F outside, which is actually rather balmy for this time of year.

I had a disagreement once with my sister about optimists vs. pessimists. My position is that all pain is temporary and it’s better to look towards future good when things aren’t going well. My sister said it’s better to always look at the down side of things because then you’re never unpleasantly surprised. In this case, she wouldn’t be surprised about a roaring furnace, but her resulting happiness would only be in being right about potential furnace disasters. That doesn’t seem very helpful when I’m cold and don’t want to hear anyone rubbing it in. Wait… extra friction might create some warmth?

When I visited California, my host apologized for the “bad weather”. Huh? I looked around at the blue ocean, the handful of puffy clouds slowly drifting across the clear sky, and wondered where the “bad” was hiding. He moaned that it was “so overcast”, and I laughed. My friend Korki recently said it was a good day because she “almost saw blue”. Yeah! Toughen up California boy! People in Ohio actually live longer than you people with reliably pleasant weather. Of course we might have a heart attack digging snow out of our driveways, but at least that’s a quick death instead of your prolonged skin cancer. Yep, I prefer looking for positives.

Of course I can get down just like anyone else. In fact, I can get somewhat more down because I’m a competitive perfectionist. Why experience a simple down when you can experience exquisite misery? Obviously you’re just not trying hard enough. On the other hand, how can I be anything less than grateful that the furnace broke on a Friday instead of on the weekend when the repair guy wants to party on New Year’s Eve and charges holiday rates on top of weekend rates? I’m glad that my furnace problems happened in 2011 instead of bringing unpleasantness into the new year. I’m glad my brother Pete gave me some beautifully split firewood. It’s all a matter of perspective.

I often think the pessimists have me outnumbered. How many people are waiting for the world to end in 2012 because the Mayans quit filling in their calendar? Church people love to predict disasters too. “Do what we say or bad things will happen!” I mean really, what’s worse than perpetual hell? Why not focus on the promise of perpetual heaven? A lot of people listen to the negative rants by politicians too, which is why we end up having wars and doing a lot of other stupid things, but they always seem to be looking in the wrong directions. Why get riled up because some people are gay? Isn’t that the gay people’s problem if it’s actually a problem for anyone? Let’s talk about pollution instead which we can prove causes cancer and other unpleasant and preventable problems. Of course the longer I sit in the cold, the more negative things I’ll probably think about. At least I’ve got a home and a warm puppy, which is more than a lot of people. Sometimes we all need a reminder to be grateful for what we have.

I like making snowflakes. I liked cutting them out of construction paper when I was in elementary school, and I like drawing them in PhotoShop. I used bevel/emboss just to highlight the highlight theme. I don’t know why I picked these colors. They seem illogical, but seemed logical in the cold.

Happy New Year everyone!!

"Messenger"

2011-12-23T15:14:00.000-08:00

Doves have been the messengers for God and wars. Even the extinction of the passenger pigeon was a message of a sort. Too bad we’re such slow learners, but tis the season for peace on earth and good will towards men, and the dove is a symbol for that too.

I don’t really have a good story for doves though, unless you want to count the time my dad caught a snow white bird and thought he might be able to hold it for ransom with the rich people up the hill. Alas, it was just a snow white pigeon. I would’ve been willing to keep it just for its tame nature and beauty, but Dad released it back in the wild.

I have successfully taught my dog to leave the mourning doves alone when they splash in my miniature pond in the back yard. “Whooooo whoooooo” in the mornings is a happy way to wake up, and Penny has my full permission to chase as many bunnies, chipmunks, and ground hogs as she wants to chase. She can leave my doves alone – though for some reason I can’t fathom, hunting mourning doves is legal in Ohio. That’s hardly a fair fight when all they do is walk around and peck at bugs on the ground. Am I allowed to use a Bloom County comic here? This has been in my box o’ stuff for maybe a couple of decade because it cracks me up…

The sad thing is that I have personal acquaintance with “fat-bellied stogie suckers”.

But getting back to my miniature pond in the back yard, I keep a pump running in it through the winter. Birds can usually find food, and lots of people put out seed for them, but water can be hard for them to find in winter. The pump keeps the water from completely freezing solid, which may also be keeping my goldfish alive. I’m not really sure about that though because it’s entirely possible that something ate my goldfish. It’s hard to know for sure because the fish like to hide when I come outside.

In case you can’t tell, I’m feeling pretty scattered at the moment. Holidays create chaos, and I’m just typing random thoughts before the next burst of activity. I hope everyone has a happy holiday and a merry new year!

"Sink"

2011-12-16T12:35:00.000-08:00

I “borrowed” my dad’s new fishing rod once. He was very proud of it. The length of charcoal gray graphite gave him an ecstasy I didn’t really understand, but I took it with a clear understanding that getting caught in my theft might constitute a death sentence. I suppose I was certain that I could return it without him finding out about it. I didn’t count in the thought that he might get off work early that day. I didn’t consider that I could get caught red-handed with it when I was standing in the river, unable to flee to safety.

A fish jerked the rod out of my hands just as I turned to see Dad running down the hill towards me, and I saw a tough older boy running further downstream. “Vince stole your fishing rod!” seemed like the most logical connect-the-dots thing to say at the time. I don’t care if I was a little kid, and lying is a thing little kids do. I knew better. I don’t care that Vince was a rough, bullying kid either. Just because he’d done plenty of other nasty things, he wasn’t guilty of this. I started to feel shame even as the words flew out of my mouth. Vince isn’t his real name. I won’t add to my sins by naming him now.

Dad must’ve known I lied, but he told Vince’s father about the theft. Then Dad walked me past their house while the heavy slash of the belt and screams filled the air amongst the shouted obscenities. That was the way things were back then, which isn’t to say I condone that kind of thing. My remorse was real, but I couldn’t go into their house to say I lied. Vince’s father was a scary man, even without a belt in his hands. Besides, if I confessed, then I’d be the one getting the belt and Vince was already wounded by that time. Thus started a 20+ year penance of shame, guilt, remorse cycle. That cycle got even worse when I was wading in the river and stumbled into the algae covered wreck of Dad’s pride and joy fishing rod. Years of spring floods had only moved it about 10 feet from that fateful last sighting – which understanding the laws of river physics, is damn near impossible, and yet, there it was. It wasn’t even pinned down by a rock. It just laid in the place where it had sunk so many years before. Dad and Vince’s father were both dead by that time, Vince was even bigger and scarier than he was as a kid, and there was no redemption for my sin. Repentance sucks.

Some years after finding the lost rod, I ran into Vince in a fashionable bar. We were both drunk and happy at the time, and I confessed and asked for forgiveness. I suppose it was a selfish act to admit my remorse because I wanted to feel better about it, and my sister later said that was incredibly stupid since Vince still has a hot temper, but Vince laughed about it. He said he didn’t remember the incident, and what’s one more beating out of the many beatings he received? I don’t think it’s true though. Whether or not he remembers that particular incident, he now knows that I’m sorry, that someone else knew about the whippings, that someone else cares. It’s never too late to say you’re sorry. It won’t change past events, but it might help us look at the past with different eyes.

In the olden days, before selling indulgences to heaven or Martin Luther, confessions used to be given in the full light of the Sunday congregation at church. There was no hiding. If you sinned, you had to tell all of your friends and family what you had done. That’s real repentance. No hiding in a dark closet to confess your secrets to a priest with a chain of prayers for penance. Kneeling in the dark by the side of your bed didn’t count either. In the olden days, the people sinned against had some justice.

Solstice (December 21) is a traditional time of contemplation, letting go, forgiveness, and hopes for the future. The darkest days of winter lengthen into light, and we can let go of things that hold us back. If we can help lighten someone else’s load, even better.

My computer hates me again today, so I’m keeping things simple on visuals today. I think the bobber looks a lot like a Christmas ornament though, so let’s say I’m keeping things seasonal :)

"Separated"

2011-12-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

When Grandma died and we were moving Grandpa out of their house, I kept a lot of things that were meant for the curb. I didn’t want to let go of Grandma or the house. Keeping things that mattered to her helped me feel like I had something to keep her close. I was studying genealogy at the time and especially kept things I thought might help me verify family connections. Hence, postcards. Too bad the most interesting postcards didn’t have a thing to do with my DNA since they were written to my Great Grandpa (and his family) who was my Great Grandmother’s third husband, and not Grandma’s biological father. Even so, I knew Grandpa Winters, and it’s interesting to see that he was alive at the same time of steamboats (b. January 19, 1884). Time is a funny thing. Through Grandpa, I’m only separated by steamboats by 1 degree. The log cabin was from a relative of my Great Grandmother’s second husband, so not a direct relation either. I just find it fascinating. I’m not sure who Jerome Brown was, but I find that photo of Tokyo pretty fascinating too. Tragic, but interesting.

I’ve copied the messages as written, including misspellings…

To Master George Winters, Kokomo, Ind.
Jan. 20, 1913
Hello George
How are you by this time? Mabel got her ring last night (Sat.) and she said it was a daisy. She wears it all the time. George - Grandma and I are sending you a big box so write and tell me if you get it. Tell Mamma to send her pillow cases and I will stamp them. Time was out hunting last night with Pa. Be a good boy. Aunt Mary

Oct. 10, 1912
To Mr. Wilson Winters, Kokomo, Ind.
Dear Wils
You can now rest at ease for everything is alright at home. I am really telling you the truth about George. Mary W.
(This was written after a series of increasingly dire postcards predicting George’s likely death. He apparently fully recovered, grew up, moved to California, and made a million dollars. Good for him, but drat, why wasn’t he a direct relation?!)

Decorating Room of Crooksville China Co. Pottery
April 25, 1916
To Mrs. Rhoda Winters, Kokomo, Ind.
Dear Sister: Why on earth don’t you write? Are you sick or what is the matter? Mamma will be crazy if you don’t write soon. Papa said last night he thought it was strange you hadn’t wrote. We are all well and busy as bees. Susie worked Sat. night until 12 oclock and was all in Monday but is rested up now. Mabel thot easter was great. Did George get his box? I was going to make him candy but didn’t have time. I think he might write us once in a while. Now for goodness sake do write a card if nothing else. Love to all. Mary

(Mary nagged a lot about writing :) Grandpa worked at a lot of the different pottery factories in Ohio. He hated it, and would’ve rather been a full-time farmer. I grew up with a lot of Hall Pottery like this cup and teapot, and like to think of Grandpa making them.)

May 23, 1913
To Mr. S. W. Crawford, Fredricksburg, Ohio
Banditti (?)
Dear Bro: will send you a card (on no?) Bordetta (?) now so address (?? this Ohio (?) This is the N. W. corner of cabin inside. Everybody (will?) & hope you act the same (m?) roof. Your bro Hugh C. Wayne Co.

Destruction caused by aerial bombardment, Tokyo, Japan
ST(?) Sgt. Jerome B. Brown

*Note for posterity – Mom says Grandpa’s last name was Winter. Mom ought to know, but I always called him Winters with an ‘s’ at the end. Some of the postcards are one way, some another, but most have an ‘s’ and the card for his funeral had an ‘s’ on the end, so I’m going to continue with the ‘s’ until I find proof positive of the true spelling.

The envelope at the top is part of a set of boxes I did for 1800 Flowers.

"Brigade"

2011-12-02T10:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about the Occupy Wall Street movement a lot lately. I don’t know how much people outside the US are aware of this movement, but the basic premise is people camping in public places in different cities as a nonviolent protest against the extreme wealth of the top 1% and the resulting anger of the remaining 99%. Well, I’m definitely in the 99%, but I really don’t want to camp in the cold to point that out. Various cities have started clearing out these encampments, often with harsh methods including spraying tear gas in the faces of people quietly sitting with their heads down. If the police wanted to shake my benign, hands-off attitude, they’ve done a wonderful job of it. I still don’t want to camp in the cold, especially if I could get tear gassed, but I’m feeling more motivated to express my moral support for the people hardy enough to do it. Something has to change.

The problem is, I really don’t know what to do. The playground bullies have a firm grip on business and politics, and they aren’t going to let go. I don’t have the money or influence to fight them with their own weapons, and I don’t want to let them drag me into that kind of a fight anyway. All I can do is say what I think and hope that others will agree and start speaking up.

My class was eating lunch in the cafeteria when I was in second grade. A girl demanded my apple. She offered to trade something insignificant for it. My hand was in motion when I realized I really wanted to keep my apple. I said “No”. All of the faces of my classmates snapped in my direction to see what would happen next. This wasn’t the first time Rosalyn had extorted food by charm and/or implied force. I could feel the hopes of my classmates riding on my resolve. Rosalyn backed down. When she tried her move on another kid the next day, she was met with another refusal. When she chose the weakest member of our pack, the rest of us stood up and told her to back off. Rosalyn learned to play by the group rules, and I was blessed to have the nicest class in our school.

In a way, this was a really insignificant moment in time, but it changed me. I learned to say “No”. I learned that the rest of the class was just looking for someone to say it first. They just wanted to hear the drum to know which way to march. I’m listening for a drum too to show me what I should do next. We are the majority, and whatever happens with the Occupy movement, at least they’re trying to lead the brigade by beating the drum.

Anatomy Correction

I have to admit that I didn’t really put my heart into my drummer. I was thinking about my general despair about the state of the world, but I really can’t ignore lazy anatomy. Instead of just fixing it and pretending I had it right in the first place, I decided to offer a basic lesson…

The size of the head is a standard measurement for the entire body. Despite what you might see in magazines which stretch bodies to 9, 10, or more heads tall, the average adult is 7 ½ heads tall. Basic points of measurement are the waist and elbows at 3 heads from the top, the crotch at 4 heads from the top. Keep in mind that we’re just talking the size of a bald head without factoring in hair or hats. Babies have bigger heads in proportion to their bodies.

I stretched my boy into less dwarfish proportions in PhotoShop, and narrowed his shoulders so he looks a less like a linebacker. I probably ought to fix his hands too, but I never meant this to be fine art in the first place :)

Karma Coins Continued

2011-11-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

I’ve decided to give my little dog Penny a karma coin, even though she has received some recent demerits…

“Your dog was in my yard.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve got her back.”
“I don’t want her to get hit by a car, so you better find her.”
“I’ve already got her. I’m sorry she bothered you.”
“I just don’t want her hit.”

This conversation with my next door neighbor John Sr. went on a while until Penny came out and wagged her tail. It was nice of John to come over, especially since he isn’t moving very well anymore and has to use a cane. He obviously can’t hear either. Then I had to listen to his wistful memories of his past dogs that were all some mix of wolf, tiger, shark, and dragon. I’m so glad John Jr. has a nice indoor cat these days.

I took Penny inside and discussed her sins…
“You have to stay in the yard.”
Penny gives me a slightly concerned look.
“Inside the fence is ours. Outside the fence is everybody else. You stay inside our yard.”
Penny thumps her tail on my leg and nestles into my side. We both sigh.

“Hey! Your dog is in my yard!”
I look up and see Penny making gleeful circles around John Jr.
“Alright, I’m coming over.”

‘Coming over’ requires slopping my way through the back 40 of my yard, through my house with muddy boots, and slopping my way through the Johns’ yard where I can’t find Penny or Jr. I slop my way back through their back 40, back through my house, and back to my back 40 – where I can now see Penny in the Johns’ back yard.

“Get over here!”
Penny obediently ducks through a previously undiscovered hole in the fence and wags her tail at me.
“You have to stay in OUR yard!”
Penny looks slightly contrite while I barricade her latest exit point, and watches while I mop muddy footprints in the house. We repeat the conversation about ‘our yard’ vs. everything else. Penny cuddles in my arms and puts her paw on my heart. I’m pretty sure she’s a slow learner, but she’s awfully cute. She breaks down my efforts at discipline.

A couple of cute little boys come to my side door.
“Did my dog get out again?”
“She’s in our yard, and our mom said we had to tell you. Can we play with her?”
I look across the street and see Penny licking the face of their little sister, who is rolling on the grass in hysterical giggles.
“Yeah. Keep her over there a minute. I’ll get my shoes.”

I point my finger in Penny’s face and explain how it’s bad enough to visit the Johns, but she is NOT allowed to cross the street. She licks my finger.

Wait a sec, am I really going to give this dog a karma coin? She’s lucky she’s so sweet and cuddly, and comes when I call her. She’s good for my heart. There’s a reason people with dogs live longer. That’s why she gets a karma coin.

"Round"

2011-11-25T18:29:00.001-08:00

I was doing my usual stuff on the computer, but left the room to take a phone call. When I came back, I was met with a black screen. This can’t be a good thing. I’m feeling like I must’ve done something terribly wrong to be punished like this, and that’s nothing compared to what John’s going to feel when he checks his messages and hears my distress call after he’s spent so much time and effort already on my last computer disaster. Ohhhhh!!!!

So… round? Maybe the circular nature of computer problems? Maybe something to take my mind off such things? What goes around, comes around? Blah, blah, blah. It’s hard to be philosophical when faced with a black computer screen, or maybe it’s necessary to be philosophical at times like this. Isn’t some of this how the idea of karma started?

I don’t remember when I first heard about karma, but it made sense to me – at least in a general way. Or maybe I just wanted karma to exist? Good is rewarded, bad is punished, and the world makes more sense than when obviously bad people get ahead in the world. Do we really want to live in a world where the robber barons buy the best seats in heaven? It’s far better to think of them working in the coal mines in their next lives to pay for their sins. Maybe my desire for karma to exist is a simple plea to the universe to make sense.

Once, I held a door open for a woman going into a store. I didn’t have to do it since she was several yards behind me, but it was raining and she looked rather miserable. Her surprise and gratitude hit me in the heart. I felt like I got a karma point that day. Well, being a collector of things, I figured one karma point was good, lots were better, so I started holding more doors open. No more karma points were awarded. Apparently you don’t get karma points by doing things for karma points. People actually started being kind of nasty to me as they walked through my open doors. I guess they caught onto the fact that I was trying to make myself feel better and they weren’t going to play my game. Serves me right.

After some consideration, I decided the only real way to collect more karma points was to consistently do nice things for others and hope some good would stick along the way. It makes for a much simpler philosophy, and is much easier to maintain. I hold open doors when the person behind me is the right distance away for that to be appropriate or if they’ve got their arms full. Anything more seems to fall into some level of codependency. It’s a complicated world, and the longer I live in it, the more rules I think I understand. At least they seem clearer sometimes. The rest of the time I feel like I’m just grasping at rationality because the world is actually as insane as it seems. Even so, my ideas of karma make my path clearer, and help me walk around with my head up. More doors are opened, more people spread sunshine, and the world makes more sense.

I doodled my karma coin today with the thought that John deserves karma points for his computer help. I’m not sure how that fits into his Catholicism, but I figure he’ll understand my intent. I had already tried restarting my computer earlier today, but since that didn’t work I started unplugging things so I could force Korki’s laptop back into service. I was thinking about my gratitude to both Korki and John when the thought occurred to me to try plugging the power back into my computer. Presto!!! My computer booted up like it was just waiting for me to do exactly that. Can you hear the angels singing?

I’m not sure who’s karma points got cashed in for this latest miracle, but I’m not rocking the boat. I’m fighting the urge to go find doors to open for old people.

"Vanity"

2011-11-18T13:13:00.000-08:00

Growing up as a lonely wolf child in the woods, I didn’t develop the usual self-awareness of my appearance. It didn’t help that I went from a beautiful child to something, em, not cute. Adults made loud statements over my head. “What happened?!” “She used to be so pretty!” Nobody bothered to point out when my gawky parts started to actually work together in a more acceptable way. If a guy gave me a compliment when I got older, I dismissed his comments as an obvious attempt to get me into bed, with the understanding that guys will do anybody if given the chance. Compliments didn’t put a dent in my inner laments about my unfortunate looks.

Even so, sometimes I got dressed up and people responded well enough to me. I figured it had something to do with being pleasant and/or interesting. Since I knew what it felt like to be dismissed or insulted for my looks, I wanted people to value my insides because looks might be taken away in a car crash, or will definitely be taken away with age.

When I was 29, I put on a black velvet dress. It was long-sleeved, off the shoulder, and tea length. I wore pretty high-heeled shoes despite the fact that my date wasn’t much taller than me when we were barefoot. I painted my lips very red, and caked on black eye liner. Ta da! My date looked at me with disapproval. He had shown up in khakis and a sweater for our double date to the theater. Since he had grown up in NYC, he thought he was more sophisticated than us rubes in Cleveland, and said I was overdressed. I didn’t care. I felt like wearing black velvet and I did. I felt like Madame X in John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait.

During intermission, I raced to the restrooms before the doddering old ladies could get there and reapplied my red, red lipstick. I descended the sweeping stairs of the Palace Theater, and paused on the steps with my hand resting gently on the balustrade. I was completely unselfaware at that moment. I was just searching the crowd for my date and friends, but I noticed a lot of men looking at me. I was confused. Toilet paper on shoe? Dress tucked into pantyhose? I looked for some sort of confirmation in the wall of upturned faces and noticed a local newswoman staring up at me with absolute hatred. Her face was pitted in a way I’d never noticed on tv, and hatred made her ugly. Why did she hate me? I continued to scan the crowd, found my date, and watched the men’s faces turn towards my date with some disbelief. Ha! So much for his khakis and sweater and disapproval!

He dropped me off after the theater, but didn’t come in. My brother was living with me at the time and joked that something was wrong when I couldn’t “get lucky looking like that!” There was a mirror over the mantle, and I examined myself in it. I had an absolute consciousness that I was peaking at that very instant. It was never going to get better than this, and I’d probably never wear velvet again. Everyone should know what it feels like to be the belle of the ball, at least once. At the same time, I also felt some loss. I hadn’t understood that I looked pretty good up till that point, and now it was going to all go downhill.

Having just lived through another birthday, with the usual inventory of my wrinkles and other signs of inevitable decline, I’ve had to face my vanity. I’m not 29 anymore, but I’m not 80 yet either, and I have at least one very excellent memory. That memory keeps me a little warmer inside when I walk past a mirror and notice that I haven’t combed my hair today and my sweatshirt has a new smear of paint on the front. Internally, I’m still the wolf child.

For the record, I also have some artistic vanity, and don’t like posting my art with one of the masters, especially when I whipped this little painting out this afternoon and Sargent spent considerably more time on his masterpiece.

“How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?” ~ Lou Reed

"Silent"

2011-11-11T08:56:00.000-08:00

“Silent” seems appropriate for my time of continued computer disaster. My friend John has rigged me up to the internet again, but it’s routed through my friend Korki’s old laptop. The laptop is not happy about the things I ask of it, so I’m keeping communications to the bare minimum with continued hopes that John will be able to rescue my hard drive and all those files I neglected to back up. He’s put in a lot of hours trying to help and I’m very grateful, and grateful to Korki for the loaner too. Forced inaction has led me to painting rocks, and there can’t be anything more silent than rocks. It’s an obsessive thing. Maybe I just want the stability they represent? In a way, rocks are a meditative subject for me. I don’t have to think very hard about what they look like. It reminds me of the beginning of one of my previous jobs…

I was assigned a quail illustration. I asked the art director where they kept reference photos of such things. They didn’t keep reference photos. Hm. Okay? ‘How am I supposed to draw it if I didn’t know what it looks like?” “You know what it looks like. ‘Real artists’ don’t need reference.” UH?!! What does a quail look like anyway? Grr… I did a search online, printed a very crappy reference photo, and growled through my painting. This was the first phase of the next couple of weeks where I said at least 30 or 40 times a day “I’m losing my f***ing mind!” It wasn’t a good start to a miserable job, but I was getting paid to paint, so I kept my swearing inside, to be vented in full steam to my friends on the phone when I got home.

Next assignment was a bow. I got a piece of ribbon, tied a bow, and sustained the almost continual criticism from the AD about how I was weak for needing reference. He stood over my shoulder and remarked about almost every color choice, every brush stroke. “Don’t you have your own work to do?” I smiled at him through clenched teeth. When I dropped my brush, he said it was because I held my paintbrush too lightly, and started to demonstrate the proper way for me to hold it. I picked up my brush, slammed it on my desk, and near tears, stormed into the big boss' office. “I can’t work this way!” By this time, I knew that the big boss and the AD screamed at each other at least 3 times a week, so I knew I had an ally. “Ignore him. Learn what you can from him, and ignore the rest.”

After taking a break outside for a silent primal scream, I went back to the office I shared with the AD, and resumed painting. He wanted birds painted without reference? Fine. Cardinals are red, right? Who cares about subtleties or accuracy? Here’s a red bird. Done. Next assignment. French horn? Sure, why not? I dimly remembered that they have 3 or maybe 4 places for fingers, a big bell at the end, and a whole bunch of tubing in between. Done. Who cares if that French horn would sound like a screaming cat if it actually existed? This was all the more ironic for me because in my previous job naturalists held me up arguing about the number of toes a salamander had on its front feet vs. its back feet. (5 and 4.)

In case you can’t tell, I’d rather deal with naturalists arguing over toes than fly blind over quail. Whenever possible, I did research at home before starting new projects in the morning. Eventually I reduced my mental F words to a mere 5 to 10 times a day. I got better, faster, stronger than I had ever been before. Now I feel annoyed when I actually need to take time out of my life to look up reference before starting something. It’s easy to get hooked on the instant gratification of picking up the paintbrush as soon as I have a new thought. Therefore, rocks. No research, and all the effort is in the color and form. It’s a silent meditation of stability.

"Stripes"

2011-11-04T07:52:00.000-07:00

I wished for more light in my garden. A huge tree fell down. I expressed my dread of new computers. My computer crashed. Obviously, I am all-powerful and inanimate objects bend to my will. I'm starting to think it isn't safe to have random thoughts any more. Let's hope none of my other "scary" ideas manifest any time soon. Through clenched teeth I've already faced more of my scary thoughts, admitting defeat and asking favors, plus generally breaking into uncharacteristic pleas to the deity for successful computer repair.

My poor computer is awaiting life flight and paramedic (thanks John!), so I can't scan anything new for IF this week. So much for my 100 posts celebration last week! I think the universe might be punishing me for something, but I'm not exactly sure what I did to unbalance the delicate tree/computer ecosystem. Um, well, I think maybe I was supposed to vacuum out the insides of my computer once in a while, and I'm real sure I should've backed up my files last week when I thought of it, but that really doesn't explain how I can cause trees to fall down. I'm also feeling the retribution for making fun of vegans and Mom at the moment since John is vegan and I'm borrowing Mom's computer to make this post. Okay, okay!!! I won't tease anybody any more, ever -- well, at least this week. Now I have to find a recipe for lentil cookies or something to express my appreciation to John...

I don't know when I'll be up and running again, so my apologies to everyone since I can't make return visits at the moment.

"Scary", Giveaway, & Granola

2011-10-28T14:02:00.001-07:00

“Scary” is the furthest thing from my mind today. I want to do my happy dance and sing about 100 posts! Woo hoo! Yay!!! Who knew when I started this blog that I would actually meet my goal of participating in Illustration Friday every week? Or that it would be so much fun to make the posts and find a community of so many interesting people around the world? Blogging is fun. Who wants to think about “scary”?

But let’s see… hm…things to be scared of…

Admitting fears, bugs with too many legs, a damp basement at night, neighbors with guns, public speaking, new computers, second dates, plumbing problems, car problems, pain, asking favors, bills, world chaos, loss, admitting defeat, blood, math problems involving trains going in different directions…

Let’s face it, we’ve all got fears. Your list is probably different than mine, but I bet you agree with at least one of my fears – which just goes to show that one is completely justified. I suppose (said with a heavy sigh), that we’re all supposed to just buck up and face those fears. Grow, live, expand our universe. Sometimes don’t you just want to shake those perpetually happy self-help gurus? Alright, alright… I’ve gotten over my basement thing. Mostly. At least I can manage to do the laundry at night once in a while if I really need that blue shirt tomorrow – but I’ll probably just wear the red shirt.

I suspect we learn all of our fears. That basement thing has got to have something to do with my skinny grandmother, not to be confused with the fat grandma who had preserves and games and a science lab in her basement. The skinny grandma probably had rotting bodies in hers. I wasn’t sure where the pull cord for the light was, and my sister screamed when she stepped on something squishy. It might have been a sock that dropped from the laundry basket, but it might have been a dead body part. Damp, dark basements probably have a lot of those bugs with too many legs too. And the angry ghosts of all those rotting bodies. Yep, completely justified fear, but it’s daytime now, and I don’t need to go to the basement. Life is good.

Giveaway!
Thanks to everyone who played, but the congratulations go to Josh Pincus! Visit his blog where he writes interesting biographical sketches about famous people. My niece pulled the winner before her weekly horse riding lesson. I took a very cute picture of her with the horse while she held up Josh’s name, but the camera experienced technical difficulties, so I can’t share the photo with you. Let’s just imagine the moment with this scribble.

Granola
Last week I mentioned Mom’s granola, which I admitted is pretty good. She found the recipe, which I assume originally came from Quaker Oats since it’s a printed card instead of the usual handwritten variety. I see she hid sugar and honey in this recipe. No wonder I liked this!

2 ¼ cups Quaker Oats
½ cup instant non-fat dry milk
½ cup sunflower nuts
½ cup coarsely chopped nuts
½ cup wheat germ or unprocessed bran
½ cup firmly packed brown sugar
½ cup butter or margarine, melted
¼ cup honey
½ cup raisins (optional)

Heat oven to 325F. In large bowl, combine all ingredients except raisins; mix well. Spread into ungreased 15” x 10” jelly roll pan. Bake 30 – 35 minutes or until golden brown, stirring occasionally. Stir in raisins. Spread onto ungreased cookie sheet or aluminum foil. Cool. Store in tightly covered container in refrigerator. Serve as a snack or as a cereal with milk. Makes about 8 cups.

"Fuel" & Giveaway!

2011-10-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

How am I supposed to write about “fuel” without launching into a lecture about how people should use less of it? That isn’t going to endear me to anyone except Al Gore and people who wear hemp tank tops – and those kinds of people invite me to vegan potlucks. I bet Tea Partiers roast whole animals over open fires and deep fry turkeys and candy bars. At least the vegans come to the party with homemade wine to help me forget that I got a splinter in my lip eating a lentil salad with a bamboo fork.

There are different kinds of fuel, but almost all of them have some sort of problem connected with them. Talking about any of that stuff is a drag, and I don’t have the ability to solve the toxicity issues of batteries or fracking or nuclear waste or deep sea oil drilling. Obviously, the real solution to this week’s Illustration Friday prompt is to talk about food. Not texturized vegetable protein burgers either. You can’t convince me that’s much better than chewing on tree bark, and a portabella mushroom is NOT “just like meat”. It’s a mushroom. It tastes like a mushroom. It doesn’t fill my belly with happiness.

Having been raised by lunatic health freaks, my fuel of choice contains sugar, preservatives, and artificial colors. Mmmmm!! Never again will I swallow cod liver oil or drink a smoothie with raw garlic and yeast. I don’t care if it’s got a banana in it, you can’t convince me that I’m going to live longer or happier for it. Give me a banana Popsicle.

Just to be clear, neither of my parents would’ve been caught dead in a hemp tank top or listened to the Grateful Dead while stoned. They did, however, feed me buckwheat. I’m still resentful. Mom told me she doesn’t think she’s coming off well enough in this blog and requested revisions. I said I thought that was an unfounded accusation (with proofs), and criticism of my free speech makes me ornery and quite likely to write something else that will make her nuts. (Something like calling her a lunatic health freak?) I’ll leave it to the impartial reader whether or not she was virtuous when she made unflavored, organic yogurt, baked granola, and boiled milkweed pods. You’ll have to imagine my screwed up face remembering these things. Okay, the granola was pretty good, but Mom went along with Dad’s crazy idea that we would eat everything Euell Gibbons said was edible. Euell was wrong! I don’t want to eat every part of a pine tree!

(Oh great, now I've got the Grateful Dead stuck in my head. I'm having flashbacks to a cross-country drive with my ex where we only had one tape to play all the way to Yellowstone and all the way back... and this is after I just spent a day with Australian songs in my head thanks to Andrew Finnie.)

Anyway, I suppose this history might explain why I liked doing packaging for confectioners? I especially liked it when the samples came in!

My friend Korki was clearing out her cupboards and gave me a bag of Ramen noodles the other day. A quick glance at the ingredients told me that this was fuel that would never have been permitted in my childhood. I defiantly boiled water with rapt appreciation for the old adage “Better living through chemicals”. Yum. It takes me back to college in a salty, artificial way when Ramen noodles were 5/$1. The problem with this moment of defiance is that I’ll pay penance with lentils or something. As much as I may mock my parents’ food choices, their lessons crept into my subconscious. I can’t eat cookies and ice cream without guilt. I’ll still eat those things, but I’ll eat my broccoli first and hide lentils in my soup.

As this most holy of holidays for sugar-deprived children approaches, I wish you all every sweetness life has to offer!

eeee GIVEAWAY! eeee

I’m offering my first giveaway to celebrate my upcoming 100th post. I really appreciate all of you who stop by to see my posts. All you have to do to be in the drawing is leave a comment and become a follower. (Thanks to all of you who are already following!) The prize will be a set of 4 cards with original watercolors (6 7/8" x 5"), which are shown in detail in last week’s post. The winner will be drawn on Thursday and announced on Friday.

"Scattered" and a Giveaway!

2011-10-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I live in Mayberry. I went to school with the same kids grades 1-12. The same kids at church. The same neighbors. One of my childhood pals even went to college with me. I say “Hi” to someone I know most times I’m in downtown Willoughby. They will obligingly give me the latest on everyone I’ve ever known. I swear I don’t do anything interesting enough for people to gossip about, yet they know what I’ve been up to lately, including medical, dating, and job status. Sometimes I feel like screaming, but I guess I’m a cog in the whole pattern. Mom told me about Dave, and I told her about running into him at Kleifelds Restaurant. Aaaargggh! I’m part of the gossip stream. Nooooooo!!!! I’m sorry Dave.

Sometimes it feels like no one ever moves away. If my nephew mentions a pal, I recognize the last name and ask if that guy is So-and-so’s son. Of course he is. Then I can’t resist laughing about what So-and-so did at a party or something. Then I hear about what So-and-so’s son did at a party. I’ll probably repeat this at Kleifelds and hate myself for it. Though just to be clear, I don’t divulge real secrets. Passing on information about births and deaths or somebody’s latest drunk and disorderly arrest isn’t the same thing as airing someone’s private pathos. I’ll take quite a few private confidences to the grave.

Living near where I grew up gives me a sense of belonging to a larger family of often embarrassing relatives, but some people have disappeared and scattered like feathers in the wind. Of course, occasional updates of escapees will crop up. This guy is studying rocks in the desert. These two married and have an overachieving child or maybe a disabled kid. There’s a constant stream of gossip flowing through our collective unconscious.

In the olden days, my girlfriend from grades 1-12 would’ve lived her entire life in the same village. I would’ve gone to her wedding, seen her children and grandchildren grow up, watched her hair turn white, and eventually would’ve gotten buried in the same graveyard. In the real world, I lost track of her after graduation. I called, nervous about how she would remember me when my teenaged self-perception is full of self-recriminations. She was my “good” friend, the friend who stopped my bad behavior with a glance of blue eyes. In fact, I found myself sitting up rather pertly as I tapped her number into my phone. While she is still the “good” girl, within seconds the years fell away. We fast forwarded through the decades and laughed and commiserated about the turns our lives have taken. We learned the secrets of each other’s childhoods which we had both suspected but never discussed when we were actually living them. My heart filled with happiness connecting with her again.

This web of connections is visible when I look at Facebook and LinkedIn. Young faces cascade through my mind in a vivid waterfall. I feel joy when I find an old friend from public school, or college, or an old job. I loved these people, and they took part of my heart when they disappeared across the country or across the world. Collecting them lets me collect parts of myself and to give back parts of them too. It’s too easy to lose ourselves in the process of living and paying bills, and we often don’t see what we’ve lost, or recognize where we should look for those aspects of ourselves.

Finding old friends is a chance to say “You matter to me, and I’ve wished you well through the years.” As we age, we collect our scars and disappointments and lose sight of the fact that our lives have an impact on people we seldom think about any more. Some people I’ve known are doing terrific things. I smile at their postings on Facebook and feel hope for the world.

eeee GIVEAWAY! eeee

In this attitude of gratitude, I’m going to offer my first giveaway to celebrate my upcoming 100th post. Woo hoo!! Just 2 more to go! I really appreciate all of you who stop by to see my posts. All you have to do to be in the drawing is leave a comment in the next two weeks and become a follower. (Thanks to all of you who are already following!) The prize will be a set of 4 cards with original watercolors (6 7/8" x 5"), which are shown in this post.

"Contraption"

2011-10-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” I suspect that you have to be poor at some point in your life to become a true inventor, but some people are just born with an inventive spirit. I went to lunch with Mom today and told her I was having trouble writing this post. It seems like this ought to be a really easy word for me. I make stuff all the time. I just can’t think of anything interesting that I’ve made lately.

Mom says a “contraption” should include moving parts. Ooookay…? I suppose that rules out the brass eagle I turned into a lamp finial or my bookcase – though I did put sliding doors on the bookcase. I told Mom that I’ve made whirligigs, with pantomimed arm movements while I was driving. She told me “pin wheel and put-your-hands-back-on-the-steering-wheel”. Good point. This moved into a wistful memory of Grandpa’s weather vane that we should’ve taken when we moved him from his house and the supposition that Great Grandpa Winter must've invented a lot of contraptions because he was a contraption kind of guy. Uncle John was working on a perpetual motion machine before he died. Maybe this kind of thing runs in families?

People with money just buy the parts they need or hire someone with the right parts and actual knowledge of what to do with them. Poor people come up with different answers. For example, there was a time when I wanted my brothers to fix a lawn tractor. Brother #1 admitted that work was at a stoppage until Brother #2 arrived, took apart a ball point pen, inserted the little spring, waved his magic wand, and the motor began to purr again. I’m pretty sure that taking apart a pen wasn’t written into the owner’s manual.

I admire this kind of cleverness, and I might even have influenced my brother’s alternative solutions to mechanical issues. I had a house with problems when brothers #1 and #2 were little. We spent a lot of happy weekends over projects. Since we didn’t have brawn, I said we needed to think smarter. Pipes won’t come apart? Let’s discuss levers. Let’s discuss fulcrums too or the advantages of a longer lever. Maybe we needed to discuss a &*#*^$% sledge hammer too, but more often we opted for persistence (stubbornness) and teamwork. Our planning sessions were fun and intense. We gained an appreciation for proper tools, which often led to networking and finding someone who would lend them to us – and of course, tools are always a good excuse for garage sales.

These ads have been sitting in a box for a long time without any real reason for their existence any more, and the sewer rings were cleverness along the lines of ballpoint pen springs. Prior to this innovation, the ring that held sewer lids in the street were a set made of solid cast iron. There wasn’t a standard size for sewer lids, so if you needed to replace the ring, you had to custom cast it, which was expensive and difficult. Making an adjustable ring meant easier and less expensive road repairs. Sewer lid technology may have grown by leaps and bounds since I did these, but at the time, I was pleased to get the chance to do illustrations for a big art studio. Cleveland is an industrial kind of town, so I didn’t get to paint cute little bunnies very often – though I can show you endless how-to illustrations of hands holding wrenches, paint brushes, paint rollers, utility knives… Hey, if nothing else, ya gotta admit that’s a great tire!

"Hibernate"

2011-09-30T10:13:00.001-07:00

I have cycles, and sometimes those cycles require crawling into my den and hibernating. Sometimes I feel like a bear sleeping away the winter, and sometimes I feel like I'm hidden in my cocoon turning into a butterfly. Hibernating lets me rest and heal from my last burst of interaction with the world.

I’ve been on some employer-enforced retreats too, but it’s hardly an actual “retreat” when you take all of your coworkers and bosses with you. We shivered in cold cabins and bonded over flip charts while trying to make left-brained people understand the point of brainstorming without footnotes. Really, couldn’t we all bond much more effectively over dinner and drinks in a warm restaurant? I’m not quite sure why upper management guys seem to think climbing on ropes suspended on telephone poles is a good idea.

For all that, I’ve enjoyed work retreats. I’m a good camper and enjoy helping the camping-impaired survive campfire songs and toasted marshmallows. I like this kind of thing so much that I managed a retreat center for a year when I told my then-husband to getmethehelloutofIndianaand BACK TO OHIO any way possible. I made bouquets of flowers for the cabins, brushed away the spiders and chipmunk nests, and had some wine by the campfire – then retreated to my house with central heating. Good times. It was kind of like Girl Scout camp for adults, and I got to live in 130 acres of pristine woods overlooking the Grand River, one of two rivers designated “wild” and “scenic” in Ohio. (The other river with that designation is the Chagrin, where I spent my childhood.)

This retreat center is a rich man’s folly/tax write off. He is blind, so if you look closely in the photos, there are posts strung with rope along all the paths. This was a help to him, but also for the groups of blind kids who came out to catch their first fish. Blind kids fishing isn’t exactly a safe activity, but we all survived the flying fish hooks. My lifeguard skills came in handy for the double pools too, because a lot of those kids didn’t know much about swimming. I wanted to wrap some of those kids in bubble wrap during their visits. When guest-free, I liked to float around on my back in those pools at night and listen to the owls hooting in the surrounding woods. Blissed out.

The bell tower bonged every 15 minutes and chimed out every hour. I hated 12 o’clock. Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bonggggggggg… (Ironically, I currently live by Catholic seminary's bell tower.) The owner said he had his first wife’s skeleton in the basement of the tower, but I checked and it's a plastic skeleton. What's real is the 1500’s executioner’s sword mounted on the wall. You can tell it’s an executioner’s sword because it doesn’t have a point. There’s no reason for a point when you’re cutting off heads. The rest of the bell tower is a vertical art museum. I found that a bit ironic for a blind guy, but he also has a 4 foot tall jade mermaid in there which he can appreciate by touching. It’s a gorgeous sculpture, but very few people get to appreciate it since the tower is locked almost all of the time.

Managing a retreat center was actually quite a bit of work, so when I had the opportunity to move across the street to 100 acres of pristine woods without responsibilities, I jumped at the chance. That place became my actual retreat, and I came out of an artistic hibernation with a prodigious burst of paintings and a new style.

For those of you who read my last post, a big maple tree came down in my yard this week. I got out loppers, clippers, and a bow saw and dismantled the crown on my own. When my next door neighbor John Jr. came out, I offered him firewood for labor, and he came over with a chainsaw. When the tree bested his chainsaw, he recruited another neighbor with a bigger chainsaw. I heaved logs over the fence in a very messy pile while John Sr. filled me in on neighborhood gossip and the evils of government. There’s still quite a bit of tree on the ground, 15 foot long x 5 foot high, but it’s raining and I’m spending time inside with my Epsom salts. Maybe I can get some wet wood to burn in the fireplace?

"Flattened"

2011-09-28T16:24:00.001-07:00

The angel in charge of my prayer requests has a wicked sense of humor. At various times throughout the summer I have thought:

I want more exercise and fresh air
I’d like to see more of my brother Peter
I’d like my garden to get more sunshine
I don’t want the deer to eat my apples
I wish I had more wood to make a better deer barricade…

I think you can see the general train of my thoughts here. I didn’t realize that wishing for a better garden was going to result in a mature silver maple tree squashing the garden flat. Amazingly, even though an 11 foot circumference tree fell on my cultivations, I think my tomatoes and butternut squash survived the angels’ joke. It's a whole 'nother level of watching leaves fall in autumn!

Click on Marv Newland's art (or here) for a movie classic :)

"Ferocious"

2011-09-23T11:25:00.001-07:00

I decided to clean up my neighborhood for the first Earth Day. I got bags from Mom and picked up trash along the side of the road. I was told it was useless, you can’t change human nature, people will just throw more trash after it’s clean. My childish self asserted that people would see that life is better without the trash and would keep it clean. Everyone laughed at me. I’m a ferocious trash picker upper. (Outside anyway. Not so much inside.) I left the bags next to the side of the road so everyone could see how much garbage they were throwing away. Guilt started to seep in. Mom was only willing to sacrifice one box of garbage bags to my environmental concerns, so I brazenly knocked on the neighbors’ door and asked for more trash bags. Guilt hit a new level. Neighbors started picking up trash before I got to them. The Glen is trash free.

Years later, I walked in the woods and found the remnants of a beer party. I started collecting bottles for recycling. After I filled a very large bag, I hauled it to a front porch full of guilty beer drinkers and threw the box of trash bags at them. “I picked up one bag of trash, but this is your mess. Clean it up!” About 10 guilty young men looked at each other and trooped down to the woods with the trash bags.

This year, Penny and I have been taking walks in our current neighborhood for exercise. This got pretty dull, so I combined recycling with our walks and started collecting recyclables en route. Penny thought this was an improvement in our walks because she had more time to smell bushes and pee on things. I thought it was an improvement because I did more bending – but now we don’t have any more trash to pick up. The guilt factor seems to have kicked in amongst these neighbors too.

Some things are clearly right or clearly wrong. People know better than to throw trash out of their car windows. They learned this in kindergarten. Everyone feels better when the neighborhood is litter-free. It was true when I was 9 and it’s still true.

I think about people’s comments before I picked up my first trash bag. “You can’t change things… human nature… nobody cares…” I still hear these messages. We’ve let the littering bullies rule the world. Big businesses blow up mountain ranges for coal and pollute streams and drinking water. Fracking for natural gas without regulations destroys more water. The Chinese have turned their air into a toxic solid…

But we can do things. Think about all those plastic bottles I’ve picked up. Each bottle is made from oil in a faraway country which is shipped halfway around the world so you can drink NYC tap water with a fancy label while toxic chemicals may leach into the water you’re drinking. Oil for your bottle contributes to wars in the Middle East and pollution in the oceans. Even if the bottle gets recycled, it’s probably shipped back around the world to India where the reclamation process spews more chemicals in the air. So, if you want to do one decent thing for the world, quit drinking water in plastic bottles. Put your glass under the kitchen faucet and think about saving the world one plastic bottle at a time.

This art was created for my city’s initial recycling program. I have to admit I was kind of dumbfounded when they gave me a plaque, and it’s been sitting on a book shelf for 21 years because I can’t throw it away, but didn’t know what to do with it either. I also got the city and county park system to use recycled paper with soy-based inks. Obviously my ferocity about recycling isn’t a new thing.

Treat the earth well.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors,
we borrow it from our children.
-- American Indian proverb

PS – I was asked recently about how artists can get printed samples for their portfolios without working for a pittance. This brochure is a good example. I didn’t get paid for it, but I was happy to do it because it was for a good cause. And I got a plaque :) I had plenty of pieces for my portfolio when I did this, so my main object was making an inexpensive, clearly understood brochure. If you’re doing something for the printed portfolio piece, flex your creative skills through volunteering.

"Mesmerizing"

2011-09-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

I grew up near a large Italian family. I’m pretty sure they had even more children than we did, but they had an unfortunate genetic weakness making all of their kids some variation of blind. It seemed sad to me that they would never be mesmerized watching the ripples in the river, the vultures circling on invisible air currents, or so many other things that occupied most of my existence. I remember holding my breath as the mother led dinner preparation, but everyone cut up vegetables while maintaining their fingers. To tell the truth, I usually bled a lot more in the kitchen than they did. They seemed like a pretty happy family, and the kids walked around The Glen every evening after supper with their hands glued together in a long string of cheerful paper dolls.

I asked them once how they managed to get around without running into trees or getting lost. The oldest boy told me everything has a cushion of air around it. If you pay attention, you can stop before getting hit in the face. I found that fascinating, and since I had nothing else to do, decided to experiment. I folded up a washcloth for thickness and wrapped a bandanna over it, tying the whole thing around my head, covering my eyes so completely I couldn’t see any light through the fabric. I put on my shoes and tied them. Tying shoes becomes a very different experience when you can’t see.

I fumbled my way to the front door and adventured into a very different world. The birds sang louder, probably warning every other living creature to stay out of my way. I felt with my feet for the steps down the porch and steered in the general direction of where the road ought to be. When I hit the crunch of gravel on the edges, I picked a direction and started walking. It wasn’t too hard to stay on the road because it felt different to my feet than the grassy weeds on the sides. A car came by, and I did the obligatory wave. I’m sure whoever was driving waved back and probably laughed at me. Didn’t matter. I was determined to make it around The Glen without dying or cheating.

The road in The Glen is a 1-mile squared circle, or maybe a rounded square. All I had to do is keep track of the corners to know how far I had gone. I felt a little embarrassed when I passed the blind family’s house, but it wasn’t like they were going to see me, and I persevered. It felt like a lot further than usual when I couldn’t see my destination. The sun was hot and my stomach was reminding me about suppertime, but I made it home, made it up the porch steps, and slumped in the chair where my adventure had begun.

I was trying to untie the knot in the bandanna when Dad asked me to explain. I told him about my inspiration and experiment, and he laughed and said it was great. It would be even better if I kept the bandanna on for 24-hours. Uhhh, “But Dad, I’m tired!” Too bad. He thought I should “See it through” to get the full experience. “I won’t be able to wash dishes.” When I got excused from dishes that night, I might’ve considered staying blindfolded for a week or two. I tentatively ate dinner and cursed peas for rolling around so much.

24-hours included going to sleep blind. I was disoriented when I woke up, but it didn’t take too long to remember my predicament. I dressed and escaped to the river. The blind boy was right. There is a cushion of air around everything. I wandered across the field with my hands out and felt the grasses. When I got to the other side of the field, I felt the trees. I backed up repeatedly to figure out the maximum distance I could feel the air. I laid on my back and listened to a mouse rustling through the weeds.

When Dad came home from work, I was liberated. The world was unbearably bright, and I had to shield myself until I adjusted to normal living. I’m not sure if Dad was inspired or sadistic in this story, maybe both, but the experience was important to me. First lesson was to hide my experiments from Dad, but I also learned the power of my own underestimated senses. I feel things more acutely with my hands. I don’t have to look at my feet when I’m walking through the woods. I understand the birds. I appreciate the roundness of peas, and maybe most importantly, I appreciate being able to be mesmerized by all things visual.

"Boundaries"

2011-09-09T14:22:00.000-07:00

When I first moved into my house, my next-door-neighbors sat in their garage and listened to country music and drank beer. They wanted to chat every time I stepped out of my back door. My pleasantness wore thin rather quickly. I put up a privacy fence which didn’t block the #&*(@! country music, but I thought it would stop Charlene from gluing herself to me while I sat on my deck. No such luck. The neighbors simply turned up the country music and moved their chairs a bit further back in their yard so they could watch expectantly for my reappearance. I added fence. They moved their chairs again. I added more fence. My yard is skinny, but very long. If I needed to add 300 more feet of fence, I was going to do it, but eventually they gave it up and went back to their garage to listen to their wailing songs of how even the dog doesn’t love them and the wife ran off with the best friend but left the kids, and working fingers to the bone…

I hate country music. I cranked up vintage Rolling Stones to drown it out.

The neighbors on the other side are just as nosy, but they’re surly and unfriendly. The woman who never talks to me suddenly acted like my best friend when I came out with a date and dressed in my best. Good manners were beaten into me as a child, so I refrained from snarling “It’s none of your business!” while my date happily told her about our theater plans while I gritted my teeth in a painful smile. If she has locksmithing capabilities, she probably took the time we were away to break in and read my diary.

This extraordinary interest in my doings might make it seem like I do things worth spying on, but I don’t. Okay, I was dressed up for the date, but otherwise I just pull weeds in my garden or brush the dog. A neighbor across the street actually started looking in my windows too. I reported him to the police. Maybe I ought to move.

Boundaries come in different forms. A fence is a pretty clear signal of I’ll stay over here and you should stay over there, but mental boundaries get crossed all the time too. A few months ago I wrote about a disagreement I had with a woman about school lunches. I told her I’m never going to agree with her opinion that we should let children starve and said I don’t want to talk about it with her any more. She won’t let it go. She recently brought it up again in a group setting because she thought she had an ally. I said once again, I don’t want to discuss this with her because it just upsets me. She has sent me multiple emails pushing the discussion and I keep saying “I’m not discussing this with you!” She’s been relegated to the spam folder. I don’t know how I can be any clearer about my boundaries, but she still has a need to throw things at my fence? It doesn’t have anything to do with me or my opinions. She just wants to fight until she feels she’s won.

This is where I turn to Harry Potter. Obviously J. K. Rowling understands dementors, beings who suck the happiness out of people. “Expecto patronum” is a spell where you think your happiest thought to drive the dementors away. If it works in a children’s novel, it’s got to work in real life too, right? If I say “Expecto patronum” at my next meeting or family gathering, at least people will know it’s time for them to back off before I charge at them with a silvery animal protector. Maybe I should carve a wand too? I just don’t know where I’m going to find a phoenix feather or unicorn hair. Oh well, if all else fails I suppose I could just hit my dementors with a stick?

"Mysterious"

2011-09-02T10:55:00.001-07:00

I love mysteries. Not so much mystery novels, but the actual mysteries that surround us all the time – and we’re surrounded by them. Why do some cancers spontaneously go into remission? What’s really inside the nucleus of an atom? How does a whole tree come out of an acorn? What really happens to us when we die? How does intuition work? What’s outside of our universe? Is there an end to space? An end to infinity?

Some people roll their eyes and tell me I think too much, but I can’t help it. I never grew out of my terrible twos phase of questioning. There are endless mysteries and conspiracy theories and ghost stories and so many other things for which we’re never going to know the answers. Why shouldn’t I be open to the idea of the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or Chupacabras?

Professional debunkers make me about as crazy as the government policy to spread stories of swamp gas. Debunkers make their living from merely saying “No”, but you can’t prove something doesn’t exist. Scientists used to think a certain fish existed only in fossils and became extinct millennia ago… until someone caught one. If the scientists had listened to the local fishermen, they would’ve known that the fishermen had caught that kind of fish before. If more scientists listened to stories about lights in the sky, maybe we’d know what’s up there by now?

Or for a different example, let’s think about acupuncture. It was mocked in the west as an Eastern superstition until somebody actually dared to ask the question of “Gee, does it actually work?” Well, as it turns out, yes. Now we have a whole new tier of questions about how and why and where can we go from here. As long as people remain in lock step with each other, the world is going to remain flat.

I know I’m not alone. Conspiracy theories and ghost hunters wouldn’t exist if there weren’t people who wondered or saw strange things. Religions wouldn’t exist if I was the only one who wonders what happens when we die. Colleges wouldn’t have research labs if somebody somewhere didn’t ask exactly the same kinds of questions as children before children’s questions are squashed into conformity.

When I was a kid, my dad had a squeaky old oil can like the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man. I thought it looked a lot like a watering can, and I liked the smell of the oil, so I “watered” all the flowers by the side of the house. The flowers didn’t look too good the next week, so I “watered” them some more. The flowers got progressively more sickly looking, so redoubled my efforts to help them. For some reason they eventually gave up the ghost and died. Hmm… Interesting fact. Flowers don’t thrive in oil. Now how would I have learned that important fact if I wasn’t open to experimentation?

The crystal ball is super old art, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the word for the week. I made it for a newspaper section about predicting the future of business. I’ll admit it was never one of my favorite pieces, but I liked bits of it like the bird. I could do this piece so much better now. Ahhh… life before computers :)

The acorn is a quickie from today. I often type and free associate when I see the IF word for the week, and the idea of a whole tree in an acorn seemed like a logical visual.

"Disguise"

2011-08-26T10:55:00.001-07:00

I was minding my own business, just sitting at my computer doing the usual things when I became aware that the bottom line of my email was wavering and burning my retinas. With a quick expletive, I rapidly turned off the computer monitor, grabbed my required supplies, and ran to the couch, ramming on my sunglasses in transit. Penny happily hopped onto the couch with me and nestled against me with her happily concerned expression. She likes couch time, but can still work up a little bit of sympathy for my miseries.

No tv, no music, no computer. The technological world has ended.

The next step was to assess the actual damage. What parts of me hurt, and how badly? Would it pass, or did I need to contemplate my pharmacopoeia? I watched the pretty neon colors passing in front of my closed eyes and wondered if there was any meaning to the geometric designs flashing by. Sometimes I think the colors are the 1’s and 0’s of my internal computer system breaking down or rebooting. I’ll spare you the more unpleasant details of my misery. I rammed my thumbs into the back of my skull and hoped for the efficacy of pressure points.

That’s a migraine. That’s a light one to tell the truth. The really miserable ones are the same but worse, and often include the evil gremlin who sneaks up behind me with a blunt axe or gets in my face with a sharp ice pick. I hate that gremlin. I’m going to throttle him if I can ever catch him.

Illustration Friday’s word of the week is “disguise”, and while I made this art the other day just to record my demons, “disguise” seems kind of apt to me. Migraines can obliterate my ability to see the world, which is a much more effective disguise than someone wearing an eye patch and a pirate hat. In another way, sometimes I think migraines are my system’s way of shutting down so I can look internally instead of externally. How real are any of the things we see in our over bright world? Everyone wears their masks and we neglect to think about that until we’re reduced to throbbing blood vessels and exposed nerves.

I had been doing pretty well with migraines lately. Someone recommended taking magnesium several months back, and while I wasn’t sure if it was helping or not, I’ve been taking it until I recently ran out. I thought living without magnesium might let me know if they were actually helping or not. The answer? YES!!! Magnesium helps!!! I now have a full bottle and am resisting the temptation to swallow half of them in an attempt to rebuild a curative level in my system.

The text on migraine information in this piece is from Women's Health.

"Influence"

2011-08-19T07:07:00.001-07:00

I want the days back when artists were valued as magicians. We had status through the millennia, but our collective energy has been sucked into making endless ads for erectile dysfunction pills on sale today at Walmart. Not to say that keeping men happy doesn’t have its value to society, but it’s hardly ever a spiritual pursuit, and our magical potency in the world has been lost.

When cavemen painted prayers on rocks, their people respected them. The shaman’s contribution mattered to the hunt. Their spiraling calendars of light would determine when the corn was planted or when the winter camp set up or torn down. The pictograms translated across languages and eras. When Michelangelo was painting biblical stories on ceilings, he was illustrating the path to heaven for the illiterate masses. In other words, artists have been the spokespeople for God. It’s kind of a rough downgrade to selling antidepressants. In fact we’re probably taking antidepressants to get over our collective loss of influence.

I’m not going to make any value judgments about whether the caveman or the Pope was more right about what God wanted from people. What I’m saying is that the artist had a pivotal role in the religions. If you wanted a Christian or pagan amulet, the artist would be the one to make it. If the pharaoh wanted everlasting life, the artists were the ones who designed the pyramid and sculpted the sarcophagus. Even the tattoos on head hunters were visual prayers. Monk artists copied the Bible and illuminated its pages. Really, the more you start thinking about it, has anyone gotten to the other side without the help of an artist magician?

It makes sense to me. Artists by their nature are observant and meditative. They would be the ones to notice the length of days and phases of the moon. They notice the signs of the coming hurricane. They pay attention to their dreams. They understand which images speak most strongly to their people. They’re open to magic.

Artists used to be the scientists, engineers, and architects too. There was a time when we weren’t smashed into a single function of My Little Pony accessories. We were the ones who sculpted the fountains and built the cathedrals. We were the ones who truly understood alchemy as we made paint and stained glass from stone, and then we practiced the greater alchemy of taking colored mud and turning it into art.

The Illustration Friday word for the week is “influence”. I have been influenced by thousands of years of artists before me. I am also influenced by the artists who come after me. This piece is the result of a conversation with my 9-year-old niece about pictograms, and her purple crayon drawing of a turtle while we discussed the associations we have with turtles: wisdom, longevity, patience. I love drawing with kids. They seem to have an innate understanding that art is magic :)

A $5 Circle

2011-08-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

I got an email saying an employer was looking for illustrators and will pay $5/illustration. Okay. Here’s a circle. It seems like a fair trade for $5. After all, let’s think about the actual progression of events if I were to actually try to get my $5.

First, I have to turn on the computer, read the email, open Illustrator or PhotoShop, draw the circle, save it in both a jpeg and a final format, then compose and send my email with my bill for $5. I would also have to keep records of this munificence so I can properly pay my taxes – which means that I wouldn’t really be making $5 once I’ve paid my taxes on it. The customer might also want some revisions, so here are some alternate choices.

After deducting my time for more emails and bills, and assuming they won’t pay for 3 billing cycles (minimum), how much time could go into my hypothetical circle? Certainly more than 1 hour, and since minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hour, this isn’t a legally fair price to offer. We might as well pay these people for the pleasure of doing work for them.

“But”, you say, “I need printed samples for my portfolio!” Oh sure. Do you think a company willing to spring $5/illustration is going to treat your work with loving care or even cough up the $5? If you’re willing to essentially work for free, at least do it for a good cause instead of for blood-sucking vampires. There are lots of good causes out there who will praise you, thank you, and give you something for your portfolio – which also makes potential employers notice what a nice person you are since you do volunteer work for good causes.

Nothing good comes from $5/illustrations. You lose the rights to your work when you sell it, and they can profit as much as they’d like while you look for half-eaten hamburgers in the dumpster. When they get away with this kind of payment for services, it drives down the price of more legitimate employers. The only people who win in this are the employers, and artists are screwed as a group. Don’t do it.

I reluctantly deleted the email address for this particular vampire. I wanted to suggest sending the "Art Director” hate mail, but I suspect they could probably sue me and steal my circles in the process. Let’s just all think mean thoughts at the same time... Oh, alright, that’s probably not a good suggestion either. Let’s just hope karma works these things out, but somehow that feels an awful lot like believing in the “trickle down” theory. Maybe I’ll just put out an open invitation to vent your personal horror stories?

"Swell"

2011-08-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

Ivory, my Dalmatian, had a hysterical pregnancy. Her tummy swelled and she nested with stuffed animals. I was a complete novice on the subject, so I took her to the vet. That’s where I learned Ivory’s puppies were wishful thinking. Ivory didn’t make the vet visit any easier when she stole a puppy while I was paying the bill, and the office became absolute mayhem with screaming people jumping onto chairs away from the rabid Rottweiler mother. Ivory let me take the puppy back, but I wasn’t going near that huge dog who looked like she wanted to tear me to shreds with her very large white fangs. We eventually worked it out by sacrificing the vet tech as a go-between.

When Ivory’s tummy swelled again about 6 months later, I obviously didn’t take it very seriously. Technically she had had opportunity because I’d gotten a male puppy, but he didn’t seem too skilled at love. I wouldn’t have bothered to take her to the vet at all this time, but I figured I better go just to make sure, and sure enough, the vet said it was another hysterical pregnancy. I let Ivory build her nest of stuffed animals again and tried to reason with her.

As I was getting ready for work one morning, Ivory kept trying to sneak into my bed and walking around in circles. I called the vet. Was she having hysterical labor too? “No. Dogs don’t have hysterical labor.” Oops, oops, oops. If I had realized we were going to have actual puppies, I might’ve read up about how to be a midwife, but now I didn’t know a thing about helping. The only thing I was absolutely sure about was that she wasn’t going to have puppies in my bed, so I found an old blanket for her to lay on while the vet tech tried to penetrate my anxiety with helpful facts. “Something’s coming out of her!” I shrieked as what I was sure was Ivory’s innards started oozing out her back end. “Catch it!” yelled the vet tech. I quickly put my hand under her and briefly saw a puppy head inside a bubble sticking out of Ivory’s butt before a bloody blob of puppy sack fell into my hand. Ewwwwwwwww!!!! I sat on the floor in shock while Ivory ate the bloody sack off the puppy and licked her clean. Oh yuck, yuck, yuck. Somewhere in the back of my mind the vet tech’s voice penetrated through my brain enough for me to realize that this wasn’t over, and I was going to see this again, very soon. Ohhhh yuck!

I called work and explained I wouldn’t be in that day. By the time we got to Puppy #7, I felt like I had mastered midwifery 101. When Ivory started spinning in circles, I gathered the born puppies until the new one was clean, then gave them all back. They were adorable once they were clean and dry and before they started pooping and peeing on my hardwood floors. I love the smell of clean, milk-fed puppies.

Ivory was a good mother and had 3 more litters. She only had a problem once, when the sack broke before the baby was born, and the puppy got stuck in transit. A midnight call to the vet made it clear that there was no choice but to stick my hand inside her and retrieve the doomed baby. Ivory tried to lick it to life, but it was no good. I put the baby in a shoebox for later burial, but Ivory refused to have any more babies. I eventually had to take the shoebox outside and sacrifice a new blanket that didn’t smell like dead puppy before she resumed deliveries. Her last litter was a litter of 1. I figured that dead puppy was destined to be born, even as an only child.

This is pencil on vellum. I love the soft texture of drawing on vellum. It’s gentle like puppies :)

"Imperfect"

2011-08-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

I’m all for personal growth, but some ideas seem to be asking an awful lot. Debbie at Dosankodebbie’s Etegami Notebook wrote about painting bugs because they bother her, and I thought I’d give it a stab. Debbie’s idea actually made me want to wage an all-out chemical assault on creepy crawlies, but since I wrote about perfectionism last week, let’s talk about human imperfections in a different way this time…

My brother was staying with his friend in Columbus, Ohio. As fate would have it, they were living in the dorm across the hall from where I lived my first year at Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD). It’s a long drive to Columbus from Cleveland, my car didn’t have AC, and I was hot and tired when I got there. The door was open, so I went in and was vividly reminded of the squalor that young guys seem to thrive in. I gingerly shoved a lump of disgusting laundry onto the floor and collapsed into the contaminated chair while trying not to think about death by bacteria. After a while I cooled off enough to contemplate the fact that the hospital wasn’t too far away and I should probably get a tetanus shot before continuing my drive to Indianapolis, Indiana, especially after studying the smudged fingerprints and smear of lead white paint on the outside of the iced tea glass one of them handed me. I wondered if these guys knew about the existence of dish soap or how to use it. It’s really a marvel that males survive their first few years out of the nest without succumbing to foot rot or some other terrible disease.

Maybe this is a good place to insert that both of these guys are older and more sanitary now. I’m pretty sure they’ve both managed to master laundry and dish washing. I should also say that I really like my brother’s friend. I always enjoy talking with him and looking at his art – I’ve even watched him tattoo people, but maybe tattoos are a topic for another day. On the day in Columbus, I enjoyed looking at my old stomping grounds. The apartment was the exact floor plan as my old apartment except in reverse, and it was fun to remember old times while making a mental note to avoid all male dorm rooms in the future.

Eventually we decided to go out for dinner. Okey dokey! Back to the world of air conditioning and people who know how to use dish soap! We got up to leave and I hit a dead stop at the door. When I had come in, the door was open and I was tired. I didn’t fully take in my surroundings at that time because I was rather overwhelmed by the mountains of clutter inside the apartment. Now I was on the wrong side of a door with a variety of dead cockroaches nailed to it, arranged by size. The largest was hammered in with a nail about the size of a railroad spike. Uh, uh, uh, oh...

I eventually managed to force myself past them, towards the pizza and air conditioning. The dead carcasses quivered when the door shut, and I could hear the whispering crackling of their wings against the door. I don’t know Debbie, is drawing roaches really going to help me overcome this experience??? I have to admit that I got creeped out just looking up reference online. Ew, ew, ew, yuck!!!

BTW, it is probably obvious to all of you guys out there, but just to state the obvious, my brother and his friend were delighted at my bile-filled near fainting fit. They made plans to add to their collection and joyfully described their method of asphyxiating the victims with spray fixative before nailing them to the door. They still giggle over it. Guys are sick.

"Obsession"

2011-07-29T07:07:00.000-07:00

Keiichi, an older Japanese man I used to work with, said I was a perfectionist. “But I’m so much better than I used to be!” I sputtered in protest. “Nobody likes perfect” he said in one of his classic statements of truth before laughing and walking away while I was left pondering my OCD pursuit of excellence. Keiichi made me nuts, and I really hated it when he hit me in the heart of my disfunctions.

He was right of course. If art is “perfect”, it becomes sterile and unlovable. We can draw a line on the computer which is absolutely straight and perfect, and nobody wants to look at that. A straight line painted in watercolor is a whole different animal, and gives us so much more to look at. These poppies still make me cringe, but I’ve hung them on an odd wall in my kitchen as a reminder to myself to give up perfection.

I was given a completely unreasonable set of deadlines for major clients while 2 of my coworkers basked in the luxury of making art just because. In other words, they were making art that might be used in the future for a project, but without a real project in mind for it yet. Then our boss came in and said that we all had to do layouts for an important presentation that afternoon. I’d like to say that was an unusual kind of situation, but no, it was pretty common, and on this particular day I didn’t take it very well. I tried to make her see reason, but she demanded completion of my original projects plus the layouts for the afternoon. I plotted her murder while cutting every corner and whipped out these poppies in a frenzy of flying paint. One of my coworkers smiled smugly as he passed me and I decided to plot his murder too.

Predictably, the original important clients were unhappy with the cut corners and had more revisions. The afternoon customers picked a layout from my smug coworker who had had the proper time to do the job right. I slammed the poppies in a drawer and went home for the day, knowing full well that the whole situation would repeat itself at some point, and it did.

So, on the day when I was given 2 hours to paint the Sistine Chapel or its equivalent, I pulled out the poppies and slapped it on a layout. This time the customer bit. Yay! Until the bitchy saleswoman said she needed final art for the printer that day. What?! It was already 3:30 in the afternoon and as you can see in the layout, this wasn’t a simple rectangular box. When I asked basic questions like what goes on the back of the box, the saleswoman went ballistic and said I was being uncooperative. Ballistic was her default emotion, so I just continued the art around the back. The customer later had to have stickers printed to paste over the back with ingredient information because the saleswoman hadn’t wanted to look ignorant and ask the questions she should’ve asked in the first place.

So, the art was printed, and my perfectionist self made faces at the printed samples when they came in. There wasn’t much I could do about it, so I unsuccessfully tried to put it out of my mind. There’s nothing worse than having work you aren’t proud of reproduced hundreds of times, printed in catalogs, and plastered over the web.

But here’s the thing… The customer was happy. The customer’s customers were happy. My boss was happy and the saleswoman was happy. Everybody made money except for me, and everybody was happy except for me. I decided I needed to rearrange my attitude.

There are all sorts of things I would’ve liked to have fixed in this piece if I’d had more time, but let’s get real. Nobody would’ve noticed the differences if I’d had the time to fix them. People might actually like these flowers better because they were more spontaneous than my usual, uptight perfectionism. Okay, this is an internal battle I still continue to fight with myself, but like I said to Keiichi, I’m so much better than I used to be!

"Sunshine Award"

2011-07-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

Susanna Maier (Trade Your Talent) from Berlin, Germany gave me a "Sunshine Award". Thanks so much Susanna! She has a great site, so I hope you take time to check it out. She is currently working on a fundraiser to provide scholarships for young mothers and underprivileged girls to attend secondary schools in Ifakara, Tanzania, and has information about how you can help on her site.

The rules for receiving the award:
- Thank the person who gave you the award.
- Write a post about it.
- Answer the questions below.
- Pass it on to 10 bloggers who you think really deserve it and send them a message to let them know.

The questions:
01. My favorite color: red
02. My favorite animal: my little dog Penny
03. My favorite number: 4
04. My favorite non-alcoholic drink? limeade
05. I joined facebook, but not twitter
06. My passion: I can’t pick just one. I care deeply about the environment, children’s issues and education, and art in its many forms.
07. Getting or giving presents? Probably politically incorrect to admit it, but I like receiving, though giving gifts to kids is fun too.
08. My favorite pattern? paisley
09. My favorite day of the week? Saturday
10. My favorite flower? This is like choosing your favorite child, isn’t it? I love the smell of Lily of the Valley, and the complexity of iris, but maybe my absolute favorite is snowdrops because they remind me that spring will come again :)

10 Favorite Bloggers:
I hate choosing just 10, but excluding people Susanna picked and people I gave an award to in January (see here)…

Mushroom Tender
Federfund Illustration der Blog
Shirley Ng-Benitez
Krista Hamrick
Sharon Wagner
Indigene
Atelier Brigitte
Mardi Speth
Vilt og Vakkert
AbbyNormal

"Perennial"

2011-07-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Humans are creatures of habit. We get up and do the same things we did yesterday. That’s true for babies, teenagers, old people, and everybody in between. Some of us like to think that we’re different and unique, but our parents thought that too, and so did their parents. Everything and everybody is on a perennial cycle. I’m rather inclined to being philosophical today, but it’s too hot in Ohio for that today. I think I’ll talk about the perennial nature of light instead.

I said I might write something about reflected light when I made my lesson on shadows, but I think I need to talk about the nature of light first. Let’s just consider this a serial proposition. It worked for Charles Dickens, maybe it will work for blogging too?

Rule #1: Light travels in straight lines. We could talk about bending light with gravity or other cool things scientists talk about, but for our purposes, light travels in straight lines.

Rule #2: Light gets interrupted if things get in the way.

Rule #3: Light reflects. Light colors reflect more light than dark things. Yeah, I know, I just said I’m not getting into reflected light yet, but bear with me.

Imagine you’ve got a flashlight. You turn it on, and the light is brightest by the light bulb, and disintegrates the farther away it gets from the bulb. The light spreads out and gets fainter the farther away it gets from you. If you’re standing in dark woods, you may not be able to see what broke that twig in the distance, but maybe you can see the reflection of the gleaming eyes of whatever is lurking out there. (This would be a cool place to insert a ghost story, but I’m just not that good at that kind of thing, so try this out instead.)

Okay, after someone has dealt with the ghost looking for her golden arm or the hungry bear, what happened to the light from the flashlight? Remember rule #2? Light gets interrupted. Even though we don’t think about air getting in the way of things, it’s full of dust, campfire smoke, and bugs. Each dust mote can interrupt some of that light. When enough of that crud has gotten in the way, our light from the flashlight has been so diverted, it runs out of steam – but it might have just enough life left in it to reflect against those shiny eyes hidden in the dark.

These same ideas hold true in daylight. The reason that mountains or trees look bluer and foggier in the distance is because of all the crud in the air between us and them. Things closest to us will have a lot more details than things far away.

You can use these principles to enhance the mood of your art. If there’s a campfire, the smoke will affect the light. In fact, that’s a good reason to have a bonfire tonight. Once the logs have caught, look around. Sing some campfire songs too. If you’ve got someone with a guitar, even better. Who says research needs to be boring?

These are my tv time doodles, scribbled with a ball point pen on bond paper. I suppose it’s completely uncool to mention that I got into a whole side trip thinking about the nature of atoms and light while I was waiting for commercials to end, isn’t it? Ah well, that’s just part of my perennial nature of contemplating stuff that really isn’t going to get me anywhere. I also like drawing flowers. Seems like that would’ve made so much more sense to post for “perennial”, doesn’t it?

"Gesture"

2011-07-15T08:30:00.001-07:00

In the olden days, polite people made their rounds to each other’s homes and left calling cards with the servants who answered the doors. The lady of the house wouldn’t be home since she would likewise be making rounds leaving calling cards at other people’s houses. What a civilized gesture, and such a waste of time. If you really want to visit someone, why not show up when they might be home? Oh, right, because you shouldn’t expect to be entertained when you show up unexpectedly. That of course would be most uncivilized.

The relative beauty and expense of your calling card was just a part of the civilization game. If you had a really boring card, you must be either boring, or poor, or possibly really secure with yourself. If you had an extra fancy card, you must be interesting, or rich, or possibly really insecure with yourself. Odds are you probably had a card that fell somewhere in between, which added to the whole guessing game of where you fell into the perpetual pecking order.

This is all very quaint, outdated, and slightly disturbing. It’s a good thing our society has changed since then, right? Maybe not. We might slightly envy the elaborate dresses the fine ladies wore on their useless calling card rounds, but we also now know that they were being sucked in with bone crushing whale bone corsets and wore really impractical shoes. It’s much better to sit around in a t-shirt and leave a message on a girlfriend’s answering machine. I just wish we still had the manservant to listen to the messages and serve us tea.

Society really hasn’t changed very much. We just changed the rules. I go to your blog, you come to mine, I go to yours… it’s all very friendly and enjoyable, albeit with less fresh air than our ancestors got in the buggy ride from house to house. It’s all very civilized. Yep, very courteous and friendly, and I have to admit I really love doing it.

Sometimes visiting blogs is like visiting somebody’s house that has plants everywhere and toys in the yard and odd sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes it’s like going to the finest mansion in town and feeling kind of awed by what we find hanging on the walls. Sometimes we find out that our neighbors speak a different language or live in grass huts or igloos. It’s all really, really cool. Maybe even more importantly, we find out that there are a lot of nice and interesting people in the world, and we’re lucky to meet them.

These are calling cards I kept when cleaning out my grandma’s house. Maybe my grandma knew who Wm. Clouser was, and who he wanted to “Accept my Love”? The peacock fan is glued at the bottom and bends down to reveal Wm.’s name. Charlie Barro apparently thought that was a good idea with his disembodied hand offering a bouquet of roses “With love and fond wishes”. I wonder who he was trying to impress? Since neither of these men made it into my family tree, why were their cards kept all of these years? Were my ancestors heart breakers or heartbroken?

I scanned in the prettier cards in my collection. Others are simply script fonts engraved on heavy cards, but I like my great-great-grandmother’s card because she was studying penmanship, and that’s her actual writing – which goes to the point of why I keep these things I guess. They were in real people’s hands before they put on their gloves for the buggy ride.

Since it’s Illustration Friday, I put my own business card on top. I feel like I’m cheating a since I posted this hawk last year, but sometimes isn’t it the gesture that counts?

"Stay"

2011-07-08T06:03:00.000-07:00

My family drove past a mostly frozen lake in early spring. A doe and her fawn were crossing the thawing ice, but the ice broke and the mother fell into the freezing water. She thrashed and splashed her way to firmer ice and scrambled up, but the fawn was stranded on the far side of the open water. It was too far for the doe to swim back, and she stood on the ice in an agony of separation. The fawn skittered around on the brittle ice, but wouldn’t attempt to swim to his mother.

I can’t remember exactly how we rescued the fawn. I do remember getting long branches just in case Dad fell in. Maybe my sister was sent across the ice because she weighed less than Dad? The important thing was that we rescued the baby and found a tiny barn to put him in. My Mom and extra siblings went inside a big building, but one sister, our Dad, and I stayed in the shed.

I can’t remember how we got the shaman either, but if someone could find one, that would be my Dad. The old man came into the tiny barn after the sun was down and saw my sister and I playing with the baby. He laid out some interesting things on a rough table and told us to quit taming the deer. I was given the job of keeping it quiet, but told not to make friends with it. My sister and Dad sang and chanted with the shaman according to his directions.

It’s a pretty sing song cadence in American Indian prayers. The shaman rocked back and forth with his eyes closed, but my sister’s bright eyes took everything in while she played her part in the song. Dad seemed controlled and focused, and I held the fawn in place with the negative magnetism of my hands. Nobody told me how to do it. I just knew that my hands had energy to make him stay without touching. I was very serious about it.

This went on a long time. I had a lot of time to look at the fawn’s spots, eyes, ears, tail, feet, fur… I was lulled into the chant and both asleep and ultra alert at the same time. The fawn eventually laid down in the straw, and I sat beside him in the glow of the Coleman lantern.

I don’t know what nation the shaman was from (maybe Iroquois?), and I definitely didn’t know his language. Just the melodic syllables repeating in choruses, dried plants smoking in the air, waving feathers, more smoke, more singing, with the flute and a drum in between.

It could’ve gone on forever, but the doe appeared at last in the light cast through the open doorway. She was too nervous to enter, but the fawn knew she was there and stood up. The shaman gave me a nod, and I released him to his mother. They stood in the light for a moment and looked at the shaman before sliding into the dark woods.

The next day, I looked at a map and realized how far the doe had to travel to get around that huge lake. There were many inlets, and her path wasn’t easy. It’s no wonder it took so many hours for her to find her way to us.

I had a relationship with a shaman many, many years later. When I told him about this experience, I admitted that I always felt jealous my sister got to sing and pray for the doe’s return. He responded, “Did it ever occur to you that you were given the harder job?” Well, no, it hadn’t. But I like that idea, and feel very privileged to have had a place where I could observe magic.

This scratchboard art is small, 3 ¼” x 2”, but then, the fawn was small.

"Remedy"

2011-07-01T07:32:00.001-07:00

We often hang onto things that aren’t good for us. It can be a physical thing like Grandma’s broken figurine, but the really damaging things are the thoughts and feelings we keep in our mental basement. It’s like keeping asbestos. It’s not good for us, will eventually kill us, but we’re so used to having it we don’t bother to throw it away – or maybe we’re even afraid to throw it away without a HazMat suit? I dreamt of sending this garbage down the river in paper boats, one paper boat per person or situation, and the boats bobbed on the water in a long line, disappearing around a bend in the river. Seemed like an excellent “remedy” to put into reality.

First, I had to remember how to make a paper boat...

#1 Get an 8 ½” x 11” piece of paper.
#2 Fold it in half. Ooh! A different pattern on the back side! I’m thinking darkness one side, letting in the sun on the other.
#3 Fold the corners down to the middle.
#4 Fold up the leftovers on both sides. Now you have a paper hat.
#5 Stick your fingers inside and squash your paper hat into a diamond.
#6 Fold up the point on both sides.
#7 Put your fingers inside again and squash it into a diamond again.
#8 Pull the tips apart, and presto! You have a paper boat.

Next, I had to identify how many boats I needed. I wondered, could I put Monica, Mark, and Sylvia on one boat, or did I need a separate boat for each of them? Could I make one boat for each repeat offender, or did I need a boat for each situation? It seems like an awful lot of boats to make, and just the idea of it makes me feel too tired to start folding, but it also seems like labor is a meditative thing in itself and worth doing. I’ll try not to think about littering up the river with a ream of paper.

I spent my morning fooling around with this concept, and it dawned on me to make boats like I did when I was a kid. Mom doled out paper like it was a precious commodity, so I made do with bark and leaves and other things I found along the side of the river, saving my paper for important stuff like drawing. I put flowers and bugs on my boats and sent them off with my best wishes to Lake Erie.

Mom will howl about how paper is expensive when she reads this, and say she was virtuously thrifty, probably with a side rant about my niece wasting paper after one line when she doesn’t like that line. Let’s make a boat for that too. We don’t have to remind Mom that I like making boats or point out I’m the one who bought my niece paper so she wouldn’t have to justify her creative pursuit of excellence.

All this garbage clutters my mind. It can be little stuff like Mom’s rants about waste, or it can be big things like getting stabbed in the back, or stabbed in the front for that matter. It’s all drifting down the river, around the bend, and out of sight.

Where Go the Boats?
By Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark brown is the river.
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating –
Where will all come home?

On goes the river
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore

"Midsummer Night"

2011-06-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday to all of my Cancers! I have to admit that I’ve never been able to find your constellation in the night sky, but after finding the Big Dipper, all the other stars look like a jumbled mess to me. My mind wanders when I’m looking at the dark and I often end up watching lightning bugs instead.

I used to live at a place that was buried in 120 acres of woods. There was a pool in a clearing, and I floated around on my back looking at the sky. The crickets sang, the breeze rustled the grass and leaves, and the frogs chirped and bellowed in the distance. Bliss. That’s the kind of noisy quiet I love best, and there are so many more stars when we get away from city lights.

I think of all those childhood camping trips where the adults talked in low voices around the campfire while I was supposed to be sleeping inside the tent. The closeness and distance was a lullaby of things that had nothing to do with me while the parents sang, and drank beer and told each other stories. I could smell the dew dropping and the dampness of the tent and hear my siblings’ soft breathing while I snuggled inside my warm sleeping bag which was strategically placed over the sharpest rock in the forest.

I can also think of wild nights of underage drinking, dancing in city water fountains, parties in the alley, intimate moments, and stomping home in high heels after a particularly bad date. Not everything that happens at night is a good thing.

The world is different at night. There are different animals, different sounds, different smells, and everything seems closer and farther away at the same time. It’s a time for reflection and thinking and hoping. Our nighttime thoughts and dreams are what make our daytime realities come true.

I’m losing myself in a cloud of memories while trying to write something worth reading. My memories of good things bump against my tragic memories of people dying in the dark. Do people ever die in the daytime? Or do people just let go when the night brings the other side so close to our consciousness? If I get my pick, I’d like to die in my sleep in a gentle drifting from one world to the next.

I made this crab art this week when I was thinking bright, happy thoughts for my Cancer people, but “Midsummer Night” has sent me down an unexpected path of memories. Maybe I should let my mind wander to nights spent with Cancers Jennifer and Harry looking for melon heads? Or discussing fission with Phil? Or drinking wine coolers with Phyllis? Or debating politics with Jerry? Or, or, or… there are a lot of Cancer moments to choose from because I seem to have an unerring ability to find them. Slow learner or destiny? I’m feeling a desire to go looking for melon heads tonight :)

"Launch"

2011-06-17T08:21:00.001-07:00

Aunt Linda is getting muzzled. This is as pitiful as putting an actual muzzle on a good dog, but I’m going to do my best when I visit my niece tonight. Since I’m not allowed to use her name here, let’s call her Taylor. I feel muzzled already at the thought of spending my very limited time with her with my mom and hers when what I really want is to listen to Taylor prattle about whatever interests her. She talked about plasma. I called Phil, my physics friend, for more information. She talked about ectoplasm too. I looked up stuff on the internet. We bought magnets at a garage sale, and Phil gave us experiments to do. We bake cookies when it’s raining. It’s not like I’m doing anything inappropriate, but…well, okay, this is where I could get in trouble…

She told me she didn’t believe in UFOs. I said “That’s interesting. Why not?” She said her mom said they don’t exist, which of course led to my completely logical query, “Why not?” Well, Taylor didn’t have a response to that, and had an expression of wonder that it hadn’t occurred to her to ask for a reason. So naturally I said, “There’s lots of opinions and information on UFOs. If you do some research, you can make up your own mind.”

Oops. And in case you can’t tell, I’m not entirely repentant about it either. Taylor went on a multi-year research campaign and knows more about it than I do. Her dad (my brother) laughed. My mom frowned. I have no idea how Taylor’s mom took it. Go ahead, question authority! For that matter, your mom doesn’t know everything!

Everybody who loves that child has a part to play in her development. My mom and hers are disciplinarians. Aunt Linda challenges her to think. Yes, there are real rules in life, and it’s usually best when you follow them, but what are the real rules? Do you really have to eat Brussels sprouts or is it more important to taste things before deciding if you like them? Or is the real rule that you have to eat vegetables with anticarcinogens to be healthy? Taylor and I have opted for broccoli.

Yeah, I’m probably going to get in trouble tonight. Best to stick to “safe” topics, but interesting conversations are seldom “safe”, and Taylor has probably stored up new controversial topics to discuss with me because she knows I’ll listen. She won a fishing trophy. Maybe we’ll just stick to fish?

Feeling muzzled is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while, and tonight’s adventure just makes it clearer. Because I want to spend time with my niece, I will play by the rules of the people in power, because I haven’t a say in this situation. The same holds true at work, or school, or church, or relationships. Somebody is always shutting us up because we’re trying to fit in or get approval. We lose a lot of ourselves in going along to get along, or by doing what we think other people expect us to do. Living our truth is hard to do when we try so hard to be “nice”.

Taylor is doing very well in school. Part of that credit goes to her mother’s discipline, but couldn’t part of her success be due to UFO conversations when we bake cookies? Taylor says something, I ask a question. She asks a question. When we have more questions than answers, we get on the internet or call Phil. He used to work at a science museum and has lots of kid-friendly answers and suggestions. How many other kids can claim private tutoring from a PhD in physics? He’ll have to take some of the blame if she ends up in the sciences.

In case it isn’t obvious what any of this has to do with “launch”, it’s because I’m trying to do my part in launching my niece into the world with as much of herself intact after enduring the socialization process. I can braid her hair to keep her neat in public, but her true nature will come out. She’ll yank out the braid or it will come undone while she runs in circles. I want her to see every color in the rainbow and feel the joy of the wind in her hair. But In the short term, I guess I can talk about fishing?

"Swept"

2011-06-10T09:36:00.001-07:00

I hate housekeeping. There has to be better ways to use my energy than chasing dust bunnies and spiders around the room. I said this to a date once, and he said the sexiest words a man has ever said to a woman: “We’ll get a maid!” He had me in that moment.

Looking around my room, contemplating “swept”, and considering if I should pick up some piles and actually sweep makes me feel the stagnation of energy around me. I hauled out piles of linoleum blocks and tools a couple months ago with the best intentions of actually cutting the linoleum into masterpieces of art. That didn’t happen, but the linoleum is still on my table. It sits on top of the world map, so I guess I’ll never know the exact location of Estonia, Zimbabwe, or Kazakhstan, and the map is on top of cork, and I swear I had a great idea for the cork. I just don’t have the faintest idea what that idea was any more. There’s also a pile of sketches on that table, but in order to figure out what that was all about I’d really have to commit to cleaning off the whole table. Is it really worth the effort? And if I actually put away the linoleum, isn’t that guaranteeing there won’t be any masterful linocuts in my immediate future?

Heave sigh, get a new glass of iced tea, and pack up the linoleum… I had the right idea about where Estonia is, but I was way off on Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe. I also found a sketchbook with a broom in it of all things! Who knows what I was doing for Halloween, or why that was with a bunch of cut snowflakes, but I have successfully found something for “swept” without actually drawing another broom. Now I’m painfully aware of the composting piles of paper on my computer desk. Hmmm… This could take all day, which is undoubtedly why I’ve been avoiding it, and will undoubtedly involve my piles in other rooms, not the least of which are the frames scattered around the dining room.

The frames mess started by trying to rescue a pastel done by my great aunt which Mom had stored in her garage. I couldn’t save it. Please don’t store art in garages! Since I know my broom isn’t sufficiently interesting for an IF post, I’ve included some of my great aunt Ila Rhea (Lee) Little’s work for your enjoyment. I suspect it really is time to attack some piles and get rid of the stagnation around me!

BTW, I think the back of the landscape is interesting too. I’m glad we can buy stretcher bars or even pre-stretched canvas these days! The wood is nailed together, and then the canvas is nailed to the board on the sides. That took a lot of prep work for something most people would never see.

And just as an extra postscript, I’ll tell you about the first time I saw these paintings. Ila Rhea was a very old woman living in a retirement high rise apartment, and Mom and I went to Nashville to visit. When we went to the front desk to ask for her room number, she was calling the desk at the same time requesting a nurse. We rode up the elevator to find Ila Rhea on the floor with a broken hip. The excitement of our visit had caused her to scurry around cleaning up piles of stuff and she fell in the process. (There might be a lesson in this for me, but let’s stick with the story…)

Ila Rhea was the picture of the perfect Southern lady, even though she was laying on the floor in what I must assume was extreme pain. We had to wait a couple hours for the ambulance, and she gave me the grand tour of her art on the walls from the floor of her bedroom. These were her favorite pieces from college in the 20s, in an era when I doubt many women were going to college in the first place. She got married and worked as an art teacher, but her college paintings were her favorites. She had grace and class, even laying on the floor. I wouldn’t wish that kind of experience on anyone, but she became a role model for me that day. I hope I can be so kind and hospitable if I’m ever in that position!

"Shadows"

2011-06-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

I watched “Food Inc.” on PBS last night. Seeing various factory methods of killing and butchering livestock is almost enough to make me a vegetarian. Almost, but not quite, since our factory produced produce is also disgusting. Saying I “watched” the show isn’t exactly true though. I furiously doodled the night away in an attempt to avoid looking at unhappy animals knee deep in their own manure and worried looking chickens watching their compadres getting their heads cut off. I guess some good comes out of my random doodles and a too-graphic show. I randomly sketched shadows, and wouldn’t you know it, Illustration Friday’s Penelope chose “shadows” for the word for the week. Yay! I’m ahead of the game this Friday. I give Andrew Finnie credit for the inspiration since he made a comment about how difficult it is to make the right shadow for a girl’s head on a pig. He makes me laugh.

Here’s the thing about shadows: first identify where the light is coming from. If it’s outside, that means the sun. Is it morning, noon, twilight, or a moon? Not counting street lights and such, outside pictures usually only have one light source which is pretty easy to identify. Inside pictures can have multiple light sources which can make everything more complicated, but let’s stick with a single light source for this particular post, and assume the light is going to travel in straight lines. Multiple light sources are just variations on these themes.

The second important thing to remember about shadows is that they follow rules of perspective. Things are bigger the closer they are to you, smaller the farther away they are from you. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the light is going to line up perfectly with your buildings in a landscape. If you want things easy, then line things up like first cube. More likely, you’ll have to figure out how the shadow is cast by 2 sides of your cube. You’re the god of your art, so make the sun where you feel like having it. Just remember that even virtual worlds make more sense when your world has a logical system.

Another thing about light is that it can leak around like water. Maybe I’ll talk about reflected light in a later post, but for now, let’s just assume that the shadow will be darkest at the bottom of an object, and lighten the farther it gets away from that object. The stronger the light source, the stronger the shadow. A sunny day will have harder shadows than an overcast day where the light gets bounced around through the filtering clouds. Making the shadow strongest at the bottom helps “ground” the item in your picture.

Speaking of ground, I finally got enough sun to dry out my garden and I’m going to plant things today. I planned to do that anyway, but PBS has definitely motivated me to have some non-factory food this summer.

Completely unrelated to shadows or food, I’m doing a garage sale this weekend. On the list of things that are going to find new homes is a leather jacket my brother painted and abandoned at my house. I just don’t think it’s my style, but I do find it interesting enough to show you some pictures. If anybody knows how to read runes, what does this say? Brian’s not telling.

"Asleep"

2011-05-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Who’d a thought a children’s movie would be pushing drugs? Maybe Oz was the result of L. Frank Baum taking opium before Sominex?

I have a love/hate relationship with sleep and dreaming. When all goes well, I get inspired. I see paintings before they happen. I have happy relationships with everyone. Passed relatives and friends come to visit. I’ve driven around with the Beatles, flown like a hawk, and had my best love affairs. But who knows what my subconscious is going to spit out at me? Body parts, rotting corpses, wars, blood, and fear can chase me through the night. It can be exhausting.

I’ve read a lot about “sleep hygiene”. Go to bed at the same time every night. Don’t eat before sleeping. Turn down the lights an hour or two before bedtime. I try. I fail. I stayed up last night rereading Harry Potter instead, and Wormtail cutting off his hand is obviously not the best way to prepare myself for peaceful dreams, especially since I already know Voldemort will rise again.

I had to resort to my fail-proof last resort – Bob Ross. I’m never getting that half hour back again. It’s not the first half hour he’s stolen from me with his soothing patter about “happy little trees” or the grateful squirrels he took in for rehab. Bob makes me nuts, and obviously, he is a guy to vent my frustrations upon, especially since he’s been dead since 1995 and was probably a really nice guy. I’m highly suspicious of someone who paints landscapes with house brushes, but his happy, soothing voice is the perfect lullaby.

I keep a dream journal for 2:13 dreams that wake me up. I don’t know why it’s always 2:13, but those are the dreams worth remembering. Okay, sometimes it 2:15, but maybe I’m just a little slow getting out of those. Do you think it’s because I was born at 2:13 in the morning? Born almost a month late too, and that seems to fit in perfectly too, because once asleep, just try waking me up again! When I was in college, the ceiling fell down in the night and I didn’t wake up even though everyone else in the building stood around laughing at the plaster dust on my face. I rolled over and ignored them.

I’ve heard about the people of some tropical culture who start every day discussing their dreams. Think of the intimacy and understanding that must foster amongst them. I watched my dog running in her sleep last night and wished she could talk about what she was seeing. I love hearing about other people’s dreams, especially children’s dreams before anyone tells them to quit telling stories or squashing their hopes and fears. I have dream-inspired drawings my brother drew when he was a kid. I can only wonder how he thought that stuff up.

Writing about sleeping is making me tired, and I feel like I’m just rambling today…

Dorothy and pals is an old piece, acrylics on illustration board. And yes, I know I forgot Toto! He must be running in his dreams or something :)

"Soaked"

2011-05-20T17:27:00.001-07:00

The word for the week is a bit too apt for me. I handed wrenches to my brother in the pouring rain while he fixed my car. Nice brother. Pat, pat, pat him on the head this week! But who wants to hear about car problems? The sun is actually shining for once today, and “soaked” seems like a bad dream. At least my water finds a way to Lake Erie and the Atlantic Ocean and doesn’t feed into the Mississippi flood.

I’m well familiar with variations on the “soaked” theme. It’s one of the things I learned to accept growing up next to a river. Falling through the ice, swimming, slipping on algae covered rocks, sliding down the rapids, falling out of a canoe… Ah yes, falling out of a canoe! There are lots of variations of falling out of canoes too, but at least most of those stories are funny. My river is too shallow to canoe most of the year, despite the fact that it’s actually the fastest flowing river in Ohio. I guess that’s the point, the water moves on so fast there’s nothing left to canoe in – except for the spring flood.

Spring floods can be devastating if your house is in the way, but thankfully I only shoveled mud out of our neighbors’ windows. Once the major chunks of ice melted on the river banks, the water remained high enough for people brave enough (stupid enough) to canoe it. There weren’t any surprises about where people would wipe out. My neighbors and I would take our lawn chairs to a lovely spot overlooking the rapids and wait for the next victims. It was a very pleasant time. People bundled up and sipped hot chocolate or coffee and laughed about the last round of idiots who got dunked.

Guy in kayak was probably going to get through. Single canoes were about a 50/50 proposition. Groups were sure entertainment because the odds of everyone in the group actually knowing what they were doing were very slim. I remember a group of 5 canoes all going down together, and you’ve got to remember, that water was ice cold. The neighbors placed bets whenever they saw a canoe come around the bend. I didn’t bet, but I did place my opinions with the others. Hey, you’ve also got to remember that there just isn’t very much to do in the spring thaw when you live in the sticks. Wet canoers were as good as we got!

We didn’t just laugh at the foolhardy. We fished them out and gave them something hot to drink. Somebody would take them home or drive them to their cars. We weren’t entirely cruel, but getting laughed at was the price of admission to our party.

My dad bet a couple of his buddies that they couldn’t canoe the river. Dad was right. Oh, I might’ve forgotten the part about where Dad bet them they couldn’t canoe the river buck naked at night? When 2 naked men showed up with icicles in their hair, my dad wouldn’t let them in because there were young girls in the house. Dad took clothes out to them before they could come in. Their dog was just fine. I think dogs may have more sense than men placing bets?

And just so you know that I don’t consider myself entirely superior to the icy, wet idiots in canoes, Dad and I canoed that same river many times in high water. Thrilling! Cold! Brainless! A friend told me years later that she and her dad bent a canoe in two when they got snagged by a water-soaked tree. That stopped my canoeing stupidity. Now I enjoy a gentle float on a warm summer day on a river meant for water travel -- with cooler full of snacks.

This art is a tiny acrylic painting, about the size of a business card.

"Safari"

2011-05-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

I imagine other people will create darling caravans of cuteness for this week’s Illustration Friday challenge, but I hear echoes of the old Japanese guy I used to work with telling me “You not cute!” Once in a while I did cute just to prove him wrong, but I don’t feel cute today. It’s dark and raining, AGAIN. Besides, I made this art this week, and would like some suggestions for what to do with it. I’ve been making a series of square, graphic things with the computer based on my nighttime tv doodles. I feel kind of compulsive about it, but I don’t really know what to do with them when they’re done.

Maybe this art is kind of like “safari” because I was thinking about Homer’s Odyssey when I was making it. It may not be the same thing as packing everything you own on a camel, but Odysseus basically had a nautical safari. The moon phases show the passing of time, and the suns show multiple days and seasons.

In a different way, isn’t “safari” a lot like questing? I don’t always know why I make the art I do, I just know it’s compulsory. I may not be after elephant tusks or Jason’s Golden Fleece; I just know I’m searching for something. Maybe all of the comments of “You not cute” or the judgments of others who try to identify me into a neat little box have created a need for me to make square art? It seems like people who try to put me in a box often have lists of things I “should” do too, and that just makes me contrary about their suggestions. Why don’t people say what we “could” do instead of “should” when they’re handing out advice? “Could” is full of possibilities. “Should” is full of restrictions, and I don’t want to live in a box someone else created.

Vive la différence!

"Beginner"

2011-05-06T10:25:00.001-07:00

We start out as beginners at everything. The only things babies know is how to breathe, eat, cry, and mess themselves. Everything else is learned behavior. We don’t care about the color of our president or the size of our house. All we want is to be fed and cuddled. I like to write happy stories, but I need to rant because good people aren’t speaking up to rhetoric in the media and in politics, and I’m hearing otherwise intelligent people repeating shocking things. Specifically, I had a disagreement with a friend. Now obviously, I’m going to tell you I was right. It’s my blog, so I get to be Grand Poobah of this virtual world and it’s important to speak against evil, no matter if the evil comes from the voice of a friend.

The topic was school lunches. I think schools should provide healthy lunches for poor kids. My pal thinks that there shouldn’t be any school food at all. Parents should pack lunches, and be punished for bad food choices. (She also thinks parents should be punished if they don’t supervise their children through 6 hours of homework every night.) She asserts feeding children is not the tax payers’ problem because their poverty is the fault of the parents. If parents can’t feed their kids then put the parents in jail and take away the kids. Problem solved.

Grrrrr…

Some people living comfortable lives don’t feel responsible for the less fortunate. They want to keep all their “hard earned” money, and too bad for everyone else. Take away the social safety nets for anybody unwilling to work as hard as they think they have worked. It’s easier to blame poor people for their problems instead of looking at the decades of political decisions that have led to the miserable lives of people who don’t know how to change their situations.

I want to live in a kind society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. Many people think that’s what we’ve got, but how many of them have spent time in the inner city or a trailer park? Sure, every now and then someone rises from the dregs of society and succeeds, but what about the vast majority of kids who never get the chance? Their schools suck, their teenaged parents never got an education to help with homework, Dad is in jail, Mom works 2 jobs, and the kids are so hungry they can’t concentrate on classes. That’s a reality. Not everyone comes from a “good” family. How can anyone look at a hungry child and say “I don’t want to feed you”?

When I was in college, I worked for the Columbus Tenants Union. I went to poverty-stricken neighborhoods and tried to get people to cough up $20 for membership with promises that by banding together, they could change their living situations. I sat on a woman’s couch looking through the car-sized hole in the brick wall of her living room and watched children playing on overfilled dumpsters with rats. The woman had already lived through an Ohio winter with that depressing view. The woman was disabled and on public assistance. What could I tell that woman? What could I tell the children playing in the dumpster? Can my friend understand their reality?

There but by the grace of God, go I. Or my friend. She just doesn’t recognize it. She credits her parents for a good example and herself for working hard without factoring in that she’s attractive, intelligent, and went to good schools. She never had to deal with a hole in her wall with no way to fix it. Is it fair for my friend to say too bad you didn’t choose better parents?

I don’t know how to teach people empathy, but I certainly know Jesus-loving people need shamed into behaving more Jesus-like. What would Jesus do? He’d feed hungry children!! If our society has gotten to a point where it’s socially acceptable to say “let children starve”, we deserve to fail. If good people allow others to make statements like that, we deserve to fail too. Children are more important than what’s in your bank account, and it’s more than school lunches. It’s also important to have social workers to protect children and seniors from abuse, good teachers in schools, and a lot of other programs that the Republicans are trying to cut while the wealthiest segment of the population gets wealthier. Of course it’s important to cut waste in spending, but let’s use sense and stop hurting the most vulnerable people!

Each time a new child enters our lives, we have a new opportunity to see life through their eyes. Kids have an innate sense of right and wrong. We need to go back to the beginning and learn better lessons. Most of all, the “Silent Majority” needs to find our voices and speak up!

"Bicycle"

2011-04-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

It’s funny, but I was talking about bicycling this week, but let me wander to that conversation the long way...

Mary Lou, Annie (ML’s teenage daughter), and I took a drive to Akron to see the M. C. Escher exhibit. We’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and imagine our dismay when we got there and a man met us at the door to tell us the museum is closed on Mondays. Arragggghhhh!!! (I have plans to go back to the museum tomorrow, so maybe I can tell you about the exhibit in a later post.)

I thought about writing about our misadventures for the day because it all seemed really funny at the time, but less funny when I tried writing about it. There was the part where we drove the wrong way on a one-way street, for which ML claims we share 50/50 responsibility since she was driving and I was a faulty navigator. We also saw a water tower rising above the tree line through mist and rain which looked like a UFO coming in for a landing with a sign “Space Available” in the foreground. Maybe you just had to be there?

Anyway, since it was raining and cold and there wasn’t much else to do, we took the scenic route home, which led us past the polo fields, and that’s where we get to “bicycle” because I used to ride my bike to the polo field when I was a teenager, and it was especially fun for me to remember my 16-yr-old self with Annie in the car. I can’t imagine her riding her bike 20 miles round trip, up and down very steep hills, no matter how cute the guys were on the other end of the journey.

ML pointed out that I’ve always had a thing for men in tights. Yeah, Mikhail Baryshnikov set my heart aflutter at that age too. Maybe ML is right? I could write about the relative merits of uniforms and my interest in the corresponding sports, but seems like I got in enough trouble recently for talking about Harold’s swimsuit, even though nothing sexy happened in the Bahamas. Nothing sexy happened at the polo field either. I’m just saying that my teenaged self was so motivated by the sight of men in tights on ponies I rode my bike 20 difficult miles. Oh, and maybe the cucumber sandwiches too. They treated people very well at the polo field.

Cleveland isn't noted for snobby, highfaluting activities like polo. We’re better known for defunct steel mills and a burning river, but there’s a lot of money around here too. Of course I never had any of that money, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy some of its afterglow. I packed my best clothes and sunhat onto my bike and showed up with a bright smile and impeccable manners. I learned to pack an umbrella too. Not for potential rain. It was a modern parasol to protect my ever-so-white skin that was only protected at polo. Nobody there needed to know that everything about my presentation was a lie, and I was a poor kid raised in the wild woods. I learned to avoid conversations about attending public school and ate another cucumber sandwich while my favorite old guy explained the finer points of polo strategy, and the rich boys in tights smacked the ball around, or maybe each other, and my innocent lusts were satisfied.

When all was said and done, I changed back into my shorts and t-shirt, packed up the nice clothes, got back on my bike, and started riding home. A long, long ride home, which seemed to be entirely uphill.

Would it have been better to write about bicycling to church? I did that too. The door was never locked, and I used to play hymns on the piano. I liked to pray in the sanctuary by myself and see stained glass in the evening sun. Yeah, forgive us our sins for lusting after men in tights!

This is old art again. I’ve been in my archives searching for the muse of my younger self. This was a self portrait I did in college based on a photo my roommate took of me. I posted an illustration of a tricycle a couple weeks ago, and painting a bike seemed redundant. Besides, this picture reminds me of the false front I presented at the polo field. Or is it really a false front? Part of me is the girl in the picture… with skinned knees :)

"Lesson"

2011-04-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

I doodle face parts. It’s a compulsion. Lots of happy eyes, angry eyes, scared eyes, surprised eyes have filled my bills, napkins, and notebooks, and I’m feeling a compulsive need to spread my compulsion. Let’s all really look at each other and maintain eye contact. Who looks away first? It’s a fun experiment, but looking at each other results in eyes that are drawn only from the front, with a nice round pupil looking back at us. Irises aren’t as round when a person looks away.

Eyeballs are called “balls” for a reason. They’re as round as a soccer ball. We just don’t see the whole ball because they’re sunk into our heads and partially covered with eyelids. Rules of perspective apply to everything, even eyeballs. As you can see in the ¾ view, the part of the iris which is closest to the viewer is wider than the part further away.

Rules of lighting apply to everything too. If you draw a white ball, it’s lighter close to the light source, and gets darker as it curves away from the light. Since an eyeball is a white ball, the same rules apply, even after you put the pupil and iris on it. When you draw eyelids, remember that they follow the curve of the eyeball too. They also cast a shadow on the eyeball. Since light comes from the top in most situations, that means the eye is usually darkest under the upper eyelid, but since the eyeball is curving under and away from the light, there will also be a lighter shadow near the bottom eyelid too.

Everyone knows that eyelashes are attached to the eye lids, but people often have a disconnect between what we know and how we think about things. Look in the mirror. Notice how far away your lower lashes actually are from your eyes. Notice that eyelashes can cause shadows too.

Paint/draw highlights last. Eyes are wet and glossy, and we can get distracted by the shine and forget all the basic rules above. If you get the structure of the eye right in the first place, the highlight(s) are just the extra detail that makes the eye come alive.

Some people view absolute realism as the holy grail in art, but these observations can apply to whatever style you want to work in. A darker line on the top of a cartoon eye suggests the longer lashes and the shadow of the eye lid. It works for everybody, even animals, in every style… except for my photographic model for this post.

Did you like my "lesson"? I'm never quite sure if people want this kind of post. If you do, I can do more of them. If not, I can go back to my usual ramblings. Or some combination of both.

M. C. Escher Exhibit at Akron Art Museum

As I said in the previous post, I went to the Escher exhibit last weekend. It was long-planned, plans thwarted, and finally, finally, I got to see it. Gotta say it was a bit anticlimactic. Most of the pieces were prints from wood cuts and lithographs, so there wasn't much difference in seeing them in person vs. seeing them printed in a book. Yes, they were somewhat crisper, but it wasn't like the first time I saw Van Gogh's paintings in person. Studying his work in art history class and out of books, I never understood why people liked Van Gogh so much until I saw his work up close and personal. The texture and color of his paint is vibrant and exciting. Escher's work is logical and disciplined. It kind of felt like looking at blueprints for a really cool project. In other words, the ideas are what excite me about Escher more than his techniques.

There were some original drawings in the exhibit. I wish there were more of them. The drawings were something that could've been pulled out of his sketchbook, but they gave me more of a sense of his thinking than the finished prints. There was also a foamcore model of one of his drawings with a peephole a few feet away to look through. If you just looked at the model, you could easily see how it just doesn't make sense. Columns that hold up nothing suddenly snap into position when viewed through the peephole.

I'm glad I finally got to see this exhibit. If you live anywhere within driving distance, I'd recommend it. It will be in Akron through the end of May.

"Journey"

2011-04-15T09:24:00.001-07:00

Didn't I do a version of “journey” last week? It’s a frustrating word for me at the moment because I’ve been unsuccessfully pestering my brother to fix my car’s wheel bearings and I feel grounded. I’m also upset because a friend of mine is taking a job in Afghanistan, and his idea of “journey” makes me think about people getting blown up. I’d like to forget about journeys at the moment and rototill my garden, but my efforts are being thwarted by a rip cord. Can we send mechanical engineers to an island with an active volcano, cannibals, and poisonous wildlife? Let’s at least threaten to send them there until they learn to make engines start with an on/off switch! My arm hurts from trying to pull the stupid cord and the garden still isn’t tilled. I suspect rip cords are man’s last attempt to show women that men are necessary, but I already got that message when the wheel bearings started making noise.

This art is ancient history. I did it when I worked at a newspaper, fresh out of college. I try to post relevant things on this blog, but I felt a need to revisit this. I used to work in this style a lot. In some ways, it's similar to the butterfly tag I made in the last post, but the process of making was much different. The landscape background in the Frontier Days art is acrylics on tissue paper, messily glued to posterboard. The man is pen and ink on wet media acetate, with acrylic painted on the back. This technique is moot since computers. It’s much faster and easier to just “fill”, but I want to get back into my younger brain for a bit. I used to see things more graphically, and was often accused of black and white thinking. Lately it seems like I see too many shades of gray, not to mention shades of all those other colors.

I have to wonder what my pioneer ancestors were thinking when they started walking over mountains from Pennsylvania to Ohio, or for that matter when they got on a boat in Europe? Was life at home so bad, or was it the thrill of finding out what’s beyond the next tree? I also wonder how much of them is still alive in me. Is my current restlessness the same as they felt? Since I can’t take my car until the wheel bearings are fixed, maybe I should start walking?

“Frontier Days” is a local summer festival with carny rides and BBQ. It was a fun time when I was an unruly teenager, and is still fun for little kids and their families. The art was created for a special pull-out tabloid section with activities and local advertising.

I learned how to shoot with that Remington .22 rifle, and I’m an excellent shot. My pioneer ancestors passed down some useful talents. Don't mess with me when I'm cranky :)

"Bottled Revisited"

2011-04-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of blogging is visiting other people's sites to see what they're doing. Heike did an illustration of bottles for this week's theme which you can see here. Apparently I liked her idea so well I dreamt of it this morning. Yeah, first Harold, now Heike. I guess I'm dreaming a lot lately :)

In my dream, I was filling jars with things I want in my life. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I briefly thought I should do something with the idea when I woke up, but you know how life is, first one thing, then another, and then the day is mostly shot, and I didn't do anything about it. So much for divine inspiration, but I had left a comment for Heike which led to a little back and forth email today, and voila, the desire to mimic her illustration came back to me.

My first daffodils are coming up, and I need some fresh life and fresh air in my home. I had other plans for this art, but butterflies on the mantle seem like as good a thing as any to do with them. Each tag has a different word for inspiration. Thanks for the motivation Heike!!!

"Bottled"

2011-04-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking about Harold. No, not Harry, the guy who messed with my head from 14-20, Harold was a seemingly random meeting with a guy in the Bahamas.

I was a little afraid to go to the Bahamas because whatever pigment exists in my bloodline, I didn't get any of it. While my peers baked on the beach in the noon sun, I took my floppy sun hat and walked in my long-sleeved dress under a line of trees along the beach. After a couple miles I looked back for signs of civilization and wondered if this was a really stupid thing to do, but I was committed to my stupidity by then, so I kept walking.

I was absorbed in whatever monumental thoughts I might've been having when a miniature crab skittled in front of me. I shrieked and jumped back. My natural agility barely saved me from landing on my ass, and I heard a snicker coming from the trees. I looked around, but saw nothing unusual until a white smile appeared like a Cheshire Cat amongst the shadows. My surprise only made Harold laugh harder.

He stepped forward and his enormously fit, enormously tall body separated itself from the trees like an African god. To say he was black is to say he had color. He was blacker than that. He absorbed light like a black hole, a vacuum of anti-color -- except for his blazing school bus yellow swimsuit. His very, very tiny swimsuit that looked like it was going to burst open with more astonishing blackness. Harold really laughed when he watched the direction of my eyes and expression of shock. He invited me to join him, and I looked helplessly up the beach for some sign of others. No one. Harold could rape and kill me, and nobody would know where to look for my body, which would no doubt be washed away in the ocean anyway. I sat down under the trees at a "safe" distance that only made Harold laugh more. Obviously, Harold laughed a lot.

It turned out to be a perfect, memorable day. He was a chemist taking a day off from work. He proudly told me about the Bahamas, and said not to hang glide because there's too many injuries. He foretold my future. He was kind, funny, intelligent, and so memorable I dreamt of him 20 years later. Maybe there are no "accidental" meetings?

My last trip to New York City was a work trip, and even though my boss was supposed to come, it ended up just my coworker and me. Tina is usually the friendly, talkative one. In NY, we switched roles. I talked to everyone. Everything was an experience. I made pals with everyone in the airport bar. I bonded with the guy who owns Diebold. I got a marriage proposal from a Turkish cab driver. I adopted a girl visiting from Florida and we saw "Spamalot". I got a reading from a gypsy fortune teller at 1 in the morning. Everything was happy. Everything was fun. Oh yeah, I suppose we went to the trade show and did actual work too, but nothing was going to spoil my enthusiasm for everything.

If you've read my previous posts, you'll know I'm a country girl. I like trees and the quiet to hear birds singing. NY sounds like the antithesis of everything that would make me happy, and while I would never live there, the freedom of being one of millions is something I don't often feel. Yeah, here's where we come to the point of "bottled". I feel bottled up. I need trips and new experiences and new people. I need the happy accidental meetings of memorable people like Harold, the Diebold owner, and the Turkish cab driver.

Tina came back from the NY trip and told our coworkers about the "NY Linda". They laughed and couldn't imagine my wedding plans with the cab driver and how I took note about how to impress his Muslim mother. I suppose they wouldn't understand my day with Harold either. Or that English guy at the South Carolina plantation... I know every quality I have and show when I'm away from home are qualities I have all the time if I can just find them in myself. I need to remember the path to my own happinesses. I need another trip! I need to break free!!!

The art is a print from a little linoleum cut I did a while ago. I really felt like painting something different, but this piece just insists on being posted today.

"Duet"

2011-04-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

I have to bake a cake. Through my own stupidity, or possibly unthinking generosity, I said I'd bake a carrot cake. That's 3 cups of grated carrots, and I don't have a food processor. I don't have carrots either. Or cream cheese for frosting. Or enough confectioners sugar. Or cake pans... (Making a list, checking it twice...)

My sister Gail came up with the idea to smash Aries birthdays together and have lunch. After a flurry of emails and phone calls, I warned Mom 8 - 15 people are coming over tomorrow. I suspect Mom is now in her own flurry of activity, picking up her piles of recent auction buys -- or she's yelling at my brother to pick it all up. There's a lot of noise currently going on in my head while I imagine everyone jumping into action.

"Duet" is a great description of how Gail and I fill our roles preparing a family meal. We each know our parts well, while menfolk park themselves in front of the TV or gather around some mechanical thing outside. I count it as a personal victory to have transferred potato peeling to men, but the rest of it is on us as we dance our parts in the kitchen, sometimes breaking out in an actual musical duet as the mood strikes us. Gail has a good voice when she applies herself. Both of her sons are quite gifted musically too.

I told Gail about Jane's recipe for rutabagas, but Sis says "NO!" Obviously we're both scarred by our bumper crops of rutabagas in childhood. We're going with asparagus instead, which has the added benefit of being the only cooked vegetable we're allowed to eat with our fingers if we choose to do so. Thanks Emily Post!

Happy birthday to Riley, Mom, Timmy, and Richard! Plus happy birthday to Craig, John, Lynne, Carly, and all of the Aries Marinos. Have I remembered everyone? I know there's a bunch of Aries pals in the blogging world too, but forgive me if I don't look up everyone's birthday to remind myself. There's a cake that needs baking. Just count yourself in my general wishes for happy Aries birthdays, and a happy weekend to everyone else!

P.S. I wrote this post this morning, then went shopping and borrowed necessaries. I thought this art would go fast, but alas, it took longer than intended. I stopped to get the cake is in the oven, which required breaking almost every rule I have about cooking. The first of which is to avoid appliances like a plague. It's far better to make an entire meal with one pan and one spoon. Carrot cake requires the food processor, mixer, carrot peeler, knife, spatula, bowl, spoon, beaters for the mixer, cutting board, cake pans, cooling racks, cake plate... This is ridiculous! On top of that, it requires me to break my other essential motto -- measuring is for cowards. (Okay, maybe I just don't like being told what to do?) AND NOW, I have to wash all that stuff so I can make frosting!

P.P.S. I was thinking "never again" while I was cleaning up, and licked the beater. OMG is that good!!! Maybe I'll forget about the mess and do it again another time?

CORRECTION!

The birthday party went great and the cake was a hit. Everyone laughed when my sister read this blog while we were sitting around after lunch. However, I had said the men wouldn't help, but as you can see, my brother Chris is in the kitchen scooping out seeds from a cantaloupe. Photographic evidence that men can and sometimes do help! He's even demonstrating composting, by putting the melon guts in the appropriate container.

My brother Brian also helped by preparing the asparagus. I said I would blog about that, but he said "No! People will think I'm a wuss!" So I said I'd blog his response instead, which for some reason is more acceptable than actually snapping the ends off of asparagus??

I'm not allowed to show pictures of cute children, so I'll just show evidence of their presence instead. My niece and my nephew's daughter had a bucket of chalk in the driveway and demonstrated artistic skills run in the family :)

"Toy"

2011-03-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

My niece tries to teach me things about playing. She tucks stuffed animals into my bed and instructs me to hold them when sleeping. She encourages me to talk to them and listen to what they say. I'm sure she thinks I have a mental deficiency requiring remedial therapy. She may be right. I think my dog Penny understands toys better than I do.

There didn't seem much point to playing with inanimate objects to me when I was a child since it seemed like I was provided with a seemingly never-ending supply of younger brothers. Why diaper a doll when the baby needs changed? And what's fun about that smelly mess? It was much more satisfying housebreaking those boys, but that activity didn't seem to be represented in the toy store. Besides, I rapidly came to the decision that babies aren't that much fun to play with since all they really do is lay around or cry, and plastic dolls are even less fun than that. At least babies start walking and talking and getting more interesting eventually.

I did play cards at Grandma's, played chess with Dad, and did science projects with my uncle. I used my brother's Tonka truck to make city constructions in the sand box while contemplating a career in architecture. I learned how to shoot arrows and a rifle, and learned the finer points of boxing. I played volleyball, badminton, croquet, and tag.

Looking back on my approved play activities, it seems like everything was designed to instruct, fight, or develop athleticism. Nothing was quite for fun. I just found fun in whatever I was doing. Well, maybe pelting Dad with snowballs, but snow came free instead of from the toy store. No, come to think of it, Dad wanted to teach proper defense and offense strategies which would theoretically be useful in the future. He was especially pleased with surprise attacks.

My most real toys might've been my crayons?

I certainly knew about toys when I was little. I lived near a very wealthy area, and there were the "haves" and the "have nots", and it was pretty clear which side of things I was on. The rich kids had everything a toy store could supply. I envied them for a while, especially for the metal pedal cars they drove around their perfect lawns, but you can only pedal so much before it starts getting boring. Why don't we bake cookies or climb a tree or something?

I often think kids are too spoiled these days. They have too much plastic junk made in China, and they don't really appreciate much of it. I see it on the tree lawns on trash day and want to scream about recycling, but I repeatedly give in to my niece's requests for stuffed animals at garage sales. I guess that's recycling, right? Maybe I'm teaching her a valuable life lesson because I'm thrifty? Okay, cheap, but I'll spring 25 cents for a plush something when it makes her so happy. I wonder what they talk about when she tucks them into bed?

"Cultivate"

2011-03-18T11:07:00.001-07:00

When I was little, gardening was a required activity. Dad spent this time of year discussing strategies with neighbors and plotting out his gardens on graph paper. When the time came to actually get out the shovel, he loudly sang Irish ballads in the back yard. If Dad was singing, the world was a happy place.

After the soil was turned and raked, my sisters and I were lined up for duties. Dad wanted mathematically perfect gardens, so our fingers and arms were measured to guarantee seeds were planted the appropriate depth and distance apart. Taut strings were stretched across the garden to ensure rows were perfect too. Despite Irish ballads, his German relatives must've had an influence on his sense of order.

I didn't care. I liked putting my hands in warm, dry dirt. I liked tucking loose worms back into the soil. I liked having a part in the new life we were inviting into the world. I liked watching things grow. I didn't like rutabagas, but I guess that topic can wait for another day.

Maybe it was an effort to get rid of excess rutabagas? I got the idea that our neighbors were in desperate need of fresh vegetables. I thought they'd be so glad to have it delivered to their door that they'd pay me for it. Dad liked that idea. Maybe he was sick of our bumper crop of rutabagas too? He allowed me to fill my red Radio Flyer wagon every week. I was allowed to keep my profits -- after "taxes". That was his somewhat arbitrary decision that he should get half of the profits to cover expenses for seeds and his labor in tilling in the first place.

To tell the truth, this was a pretty profitable venture. My old ladies loved my visits, fed me cookies, and gave me gossip for the next house. You'd think this would've made me a better gossip, but I didn't master the skill very well. I didn't see the point in telling anybody that Dottie was mad at the Hendershots or that the Taylor girl stayed out too late with her boyfriend. I think I just collected their stories so I could write about them some day. I got a lot of material from lonely old ladies.

I've sold produce as an adult too. I was onto organic gardening before anyone seemed to know what it was. I started selling produce, herbs, and flowers at a local farmers market. At some point I threw up my very tired hands and resigned, but my husband at the time contacted other growers, and we started buying and selling on a larger scale. "We" being a pretty generous term. He liked coming up with ideas, but I was the one who did the actual work.

Even so, I liked going to market every Saturday. It was kind of like having my old ladies back again. No cookies, but I still got the gossip. The patter of voices is a pleasant thing when nothing really comes out of it. People just want to feel connected, and why not connect over vegetables and flowers?

It has finally warmed up in Ohio. It could still snow again, but I saw my first buzzard yesterday and the mourning doves are back. Today I'm going to start some seeds in the window. I saved them from last year's garden, and hope to have a never-ending supply of heirloom tomatoes throughout the summer. For those of you who saw my last post, I'm thinking it's important to see new life when facing a funeral. Despite tears, life goes on. It's important to cultivate simple pleasures.

The art is a card I made for those racks of tourism destinations you can see at hotels and such. No new art today. I want to put my hands in dirt.

Geof Whitaker

2011-03-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I'm no good at grief. I find my best coping skills in cases like this is to pretend nothing has changed. I did that when my dad died. I went to bed one night with a super healthy 45-year-old father and woke in the dark to the news I didn't have a father any more. I just pretended Dad was at work. The thought that he was never coming home again was simply more than I could understand or bear when I was 15.

I feel myself wanting to fall on old patterns. My friend Geof has died. I saw it coming. I knew he was suffering. I wanted more time. Now all the people who loved him have to pick their ways through the shattered glass his death brings into our lives. Relationships need to be rearranged to patch the void left behind, but band-aids can't fill the hole some people leave in our lives. I want to pretend I can pick up the phone and ask Geof for his excellent advice about how to deal with his death.

Our first real conversation was a fight about abortion. We both got overheated on the topic, even though our perspectives weren't so different we couldn't have found a middle ground if either of us were trying to find one. We weren't trying. The next time I saw him, he met me at the door with "I'm so sorry!" and I responded with a fast "Me too!" More than anything else, maybe that moment cemented our friendship?

His wife Korki encouraged our friendship because she saw Geof didn't have enough creative playmates since he'd been forced to retire early from commercial photography after being savagely beaten by a lunatic with a baseball bat. Geof wasn't just a photographer, he was amongst the absolute best. He taught me things about color and lighting that will influence my work for the rest of my life. He critiqued my work without pity, but also with encouragement and praise. He was always right. When I critiqued his work, he took it in stride and I felt pleased to return his favors.

Geof quite possibly knew everything there is to know about everything. He could discuss quantum physics to politics to dandelion fluff in a seamless, amusing, educational stream of consciousness. He had opinions about all of it too, and his opinions were based on kindness and understanding. He understood me. In a world that has told me so often that I am "too much" of everything that I am, Geof understood and encouraged me to be all of those things.

Geof understood why I wanted to sit on the free side of a table, while he wanted to sit with his back planted against a wall. Korki obliged us both with good humor and sensitivity. I have tried to keep this blog a happy place with happy memories, but Geof knew about my demons, and he imparted a path towards peace with memories I couldn't see before. In the same way I didn't judge him for being beaten with a baseball bat, he took in my lifetime of traumas and praised me for surviving.

Geof came into my life at a time when I lost another dear friend, another close friend and her kids moved away, my heart was broken, and my health fell apart. It was a terrible year, and Geof helped me pick up the pieces. He let me ramble on and gave me sage advice how to deal with things. Sometimes the advice was simple, and sometimes so insightful, I couldn't understand how those ideas hadn't occurred to me before. His lengthy, daily emails were so important, I saved them in case I needed to take refresher courses in living.

He shared his own life too, which wasn't always pleasant or easy. He made sacrifices for his children that his kids will never know or appreciate. He was a complex, brilliant, sensitive man, and it was my blessing to have known him. When my friend Betty died, my sister said "Some people are irreplaceable". Geof is irreplaceable too.

The photo of cherries is Geof's work. In case you think that's an easy thing to do, try it sometime. I did. I failed. Add in the fact that he had a tremor from getting hit with that bat, and that he went blind in one eye, I think you can see Geof's knowledge and talents were remarkable. He knew when to get that shot, how to set the exposure and focus, and probably a thousand other things I'll never learn. Mostly I look at this photo with the knowledge that he gave it to me because I like cherries and because he was cheering me up one day. All I can think is that it was my honor to have known him while I cry a puddle of tears on my keyboard.

In Geof's own words...

There is a kind of mysterious way things work... By some manner of magic there are people who have entered your life who see the world the way you "know" it should be... I began living like I mattered, and suddenly I did.

"Stir"

2011-03-11T08:20:00.001-08:00

I've been playing with paper fish lately. I made a cut paper robin a couple weeks ago, had fun, and thought wouldn't it be nice to do something more impressive with the technique? Sounds great, but it stopped being play a while ago.

The original idea was to make a birthday card for my Pisces people. I seem to have a school of fish, and one card for all seemed sensible. Sketching out a couple fish was quick and easy. Cutting them out was easy. Then I was stuck with a couple of blue fish that didn't seem to be swimming anywhere. Most of my Pisces give absolutely no credence to astrology, so I don't even know if any of my efforts will be appreciated.

I thought I had a good idea in using a fish scale pattern in the background. That's a lot of cut/paste in PhotoShop, and I thought it would be extra cool to make the fish scales into a round pattern. Um, let's think about the mechanics of that for a moment. The first circle is only 4 scales. That's easy. 90 degree rotations for each. Next round is 8 scales. That's easy too. 45 degree turns for each. By the time I got to the biggest circle I was trying to figure out how many degrees I need to turn things for 44 scales, or maybe 48, and to make things worse my calculator wouldn't work and my keyboard is still mad at me for spilling tea on it a couple weeks ago.

Okay, duplicate file and start over. Stripes will be better, right? Seemed a little dull, but maybe I'm just mad at Pisces people. Okay, maybe I'm just mad at one specific Pisces person?

I wasn't thrilled with the stripes, so I wiped out the background altogether. That really looked dull. I made some circles to represent bubbles. Copy/paste some more. I'm not going to admit how long I spent stirring all these elements together, and I really hate to admit that I like the bubble version best when it was the easiest to do.
I think I'll go back to scratchboard or watercolors or something -- except I know me. I'll probably keep banging my head on cut paper for a while. What's any of this got to do with "stir"? Well, there's the stirring of elements, but it also looks like the water is stirred by the swimming fish. Oh, okay, it's a stretch, but it's what I've been working on, and it's what I feel like posting :)

In other news, I had an opening at a gallery last Friday. It was a nice event, lots of people came, and almost nothing sold. Multiple artists showed their work, so it doesn't feel personal. The gallery owner is pulling his hair out about the economy. The economy isn't my fault, so that doesn't feel personal either. I did my part in dressing up, inviting people, shaking hands and passing out business cards.

I met the owner of another gallery at the opening. He likes my work and made helpful observations and suggestions about it. I met with him yesterday, and discussed terms of showing my work at his place. I'm feeling very torn about this. Gallery #2 is at a prime location in the big city, and my costs go up as a result. Galleries want to charge a monthly fee for wall space plus a healthy commission. When you figure in art supplies, framing, and printing, I'll be lucky to get half of the selling price of a piece. Not to mention that all of the upfront expenses are on my end.

It's been recommended that I keep my originals and just sell prints and giclees. That means I can sell multiple copies of my images, but since copies sell for roughly 1/4 the price of originals, I'd need to sell in volume -- and no guarantees anything will sell in this previously mentioned economy.

Like I said, I'm feeling torn, and would like feedback. I'm thinking of trying the new gallery for 3 months, but wonder is it worthwhile to pursue sales in galleries?

"Warning"

2011-03-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

I've gotten a lot of warnings in my life, usually with that sick feeling in my gut that all is not well in the world. I've been thinking about that quite a bit this week because I've been trying to collect money from someone who doesn't want to pay, and I keep thinking of that moment when I set her key down on a table while my insides screamed to hold it hostage. I want to think the best of people, but I've seen this kind of thing before.

When I was a kid, a handsome young man pulled up near me and waved me over to his car. He looked as fresh and perfect as any image I had ever seen of the idealized All-American, but my insides spewed acid, and I didn't trust him. He talked me over, but I also hung back. "Closer! I've got something to show you!" he said, and I angled behind him so he couldn't grab me. More requests and demands to get me closer, and I eventually saw over his shoulder a porn magazine on his lap. He tossed it aside and was naked underneath. I ran.

I wasn't hurt by this event, but I've thought of it through the years. Trust my gut when it says "Warning!" I don't know how I knew the guy was dangerous. I don't know why I knew Stacey was going to rip me off when I turned in the key. I just knew it.

Maybe I should say that I know about contracts, and clear agreements are always a good thing. I've written lots of them. Most people behave decently, but there are those who seem to think the rules don't apply to them. I did web design for a guy with a clear contract, but didn't know his working methods would end up as a raw deal for me. When I tried to renegotiate, he was unavailable, but still managed to send more work while I kept saying "We need to talk!"

I'm imagining a very hot volcano where we can push these people in to save humanity, and artists in particular.

I'm also trying to push these thoughts out of my mind because I have an opening at a gallery this evening. I'm trying not to think about previous patrons who've tried to rip me off in a different way by negotiating prices down. The gallery gets its cut, the companies making frames and art supplies get their cut, and the only one who loses in the negotiation is the artist. Do plumbers have to deal with any of this? They work. They get paid. Nobody says that since the plumber loves his work he should give his time away.

Even so, my gut is peaceful today. The opening will be fine. I guess I needed to vent a bit, and I'm shoving these negative thoughts aside because it's like dwelling on the last bad boyfriend's behavior and projecting his actions on the new guy. Each boyfriend and job has been a learning experience, and in the end, each painting needs to find its home.

This illustration is on scratchboard. I added the red in PhotoShop because I felt like having some red today, but I'm thinking about hanging the original in my office as a reminder to get the money before turning in the key!

"Swarm"

2011-02-25T12:36:00.000-08:00

Did I say something nice about the weather last week?! It's hard to imagine as I listen to my neighbor gunning his pickup truck over and over as he tries to unstick himself from his driveway. The bottom of his truck is resting on the snow, and he's a little dimwitted about how to rock himself back and forth out of his current situation.

I had to drive into the city today when the snow was falling 2"/hour. That's a lot of snow, on top of the snow we already had, and all the snow that fell 2"/hour while I was pleasantly dreaming. The freeways hadn't been plowed or salted either. Thankfully (just in this case) everyone is out of work in Ohio, so I didn't have to worry about rush hour traffic while I inched along in a white out. For those of you lucky people who don't know what a white out is, it's when you literally can't see anything except white snow in every direction. It would've made as much sense to stick my head in a bucket of white latex paint as to drive to Cleveland today.

I guess we'll just skip over the part of why I was there learning about how "paraphernalia" is a misdemeanor felony in Ohio. It wasn't my paraphernalia. I don't smoke pot, but obviously there's at least one person in my life who does, and someone I just can't leave in a Cleveland jail. Maybe a year's probation, Alcoholics Anonymous, thrice weekly piss tests, and counseling will end up being a blessing in disguise?

But onto a happier subject...

Yesterday the sky was blue for a little while. There was snow on the ground, but it was the manageable kind. Altogether, not a bad day for February, and I watched the birds outside my kitchen window. Then I realized I was watching a robin. Yay! The first sign of spring! (Okay, I see the irony of this considering today's blizzard, but let's stick with the happy thoughts...)

The robin was hopping around on the snow, and I noticed another robin. Then another, and another, and more. It was a swarm of robins! If one robin is good, then a flock of them must be better, right? I'm ready for good things to start happening now. Okay, maybe after I find my driveway under the 15" or so of snow, then happy things! Alright, maybe after my coronary getting rid of those 15" or so, then happy things! Right?!

I drew these little sketches on a paper towel today while waiting in the car outside the Justice Center. Paper towels are terrible for doodling. I really need to keep better emergency drawing supplies in the car. The dead robin at the bottom reflected my general attitude after waiting hours for legal things to get processed, but you'll notice most of the birds are up and hopping around.

Ultimately I am an optimist, and as I was cutting paper for this post a certain someone showed up and shoveled the 15" or so off of my driveway :)

"Layer"

2011-02-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

Ohio is actually warmer than Florida! Woo hoo!!! The heavy snow has mostly melted, except for dirty mountains left over from plows in parking lots. Funny how that never gets shown on greeting cards. I took the opportunity to work off some of my winter confinement by raking the leaves I neglected last fall. I only got as far as the first big maple tree, but I'm feeling a sense of accomplishment.

I suppose I could act superior and say I was allowing the leaf compost to nourish the yard, but it isn't true. I just plain didn't feel like doing it last year. I spent last summer and fall fixing my house after a plumbing disaster, and then got blinded with migraines that seemed to go on forever. I can only do so much.

But raking leaves on a warm winter day feels like a blessing instead of labor. Seeing actual green weeds looks like a blessing too. Yeah, I know, they're going to get out of hand before the snow really melts once and for all, but at this moment even weeds are welcome if they're green. Maybe my deer will eat them instead of my apple trees? I had a vivid fantasy about eating the deer when I was surveying the damage. One way or another, I want to eat apples!

"Layer" made me think of M.C. Escher (b. June 17, 1898 -- d. March 27, 1972), a Dutch artist who liked playing with reality. I admire the way he made waterfalls and steps that led to their sources, and birds that turned into lizards, or maybe lizards into birds, and spheres that can be clear, opaque, or reflective. I can admire the way his mind worked, but I have to admit I've never managed to get a lizard into a bird in any kind of believable way. I can however simultaneously look through and at water. We all have to work within our limitations. Just imagine what Escher could've done with computers!

I started the snowflake with something else in mind, but what the heck. It's a study of layers in PhotoShop, and makes me feel like the seasons are moving in the right direction. I'm tired of trying to think nice thoughts about people in the Southern Hemisphere soaking up the sun.

I wasn't that excited by my first effort, so created another color scheme in the hope I'd like that better. In the end, I decided they make a better pair than either individually -- but then again, maybe I've just been looking at this too long? I'd rather go outside and enjoy 54F degrees! In Cleveland, that's swimsuit weather! Yay!!!

"Sweater"

2011-02-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

"Sweater"? How does that fit into my carefully planned rant against Valentine's Day? I had amusing anecdotes to share about wrestling my roses away from the senile old woman who lived next door, and listing inappropriate gifts I've received from men, the worst of which was a toaster. Or maybe it was a blender? Either way, men should NOT give kitchen appliances on a romantic holiday, especially when they're the ones who want the toast or daiquiri in the first place.

I also had thoughts about showing all the cool stuff I've designed in the past for the holiday. I've done everything there is to do with a heart -- twisting, turning, stretching, black hearts, green hearts, upside down hearts... the possibilities have been endless. I have examples of clever die cuts, uses of metallic inks and varnishes, and cute attachments, but nooooo... the word for the week is "sweater"!

Okay, I'm adaptable and can do anything. Besides, this is my blog, and if I feel like ranting against Valentine's Day, I can -- and hopefully everyone else will indulge me, because I'm tired of a holiday bent on reminding me that I'm single at this age. And even though I'm quite unreligious, I'll leave off my ranting with one of my favorite quotes from the Bible, Song of Solomon 2:5...

"Comfort me with apples for I am sick of love"

"Reverse 2"

2011-02-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

My friend Phil read my last post and suggested I ghost a picture of myself over the old photo of my great great grandmother. That sounded like a much better idea than the more practical thing I was working on in Illustrator, so I dumped that project for now and followed his suggestion.

Eerie.

I know I made the comment that our faces aren't new, but I really hadn't realized how much Lizzy and I look alike. It was easy to line up the ghosted image of my face over hers because the placement of our features are in the same places. Our chins, mouths, foreheads, ears are all the same. Yeah, creepy! Good thing so many people said so many good things about her when she was alive!

She obviously had better clothes and a better hairstyle than me though, so I made a composite to imagine living in Victorian times.

This was kind of fun even though it did freak me out a bit. Maybe everyone else should do this with pictures of their ancestors?

"Reverse"

2011-02-04T15:48:00.000-08:00

"Reverse makes me think of oppositions. Happy/sad, good/bad, male/female, past/future... and that train of thought reminds me of the time I spent this week scanning old family photos to share with younger relatives. Ancient people long gone still have an effect on young people, even if they don't know it yet. The shapes of their eyes, chins, and cheekbones aren't new. They were on someone else's face 150 years ago. Their faces are going to reappear on young people's grandchildren.

We can't escape our genes or the influences previous lives have had on our own. We can't help ourselves from influencing the younger people who come after us, any more than we can change the color of their eyes. I see my grandmother's face in my niece. Life is lived in reverse and forward all the time.

We're all getting older, every second of every day. Quite a few of us spend a lot of time worrying about it, but worrying isn't going to change reality. All we can really do is leave a mark on the world we live in. I don't have children, so I think about my legacy in other ways than passing on genes. Maybe my paintings are my babies? Maybe baking cookies with my niece is a way of leaving something of myself behind? Plus, it lets me leave something of my mother and grandmother, and probably their mothers and grandmothers too.

My great great grandmother fascinates me because she was a doctor before women did that kind of thing. There's something in her portrait that commands respect. Laura Elizabeth "Lizzy" (Poulson) Cramer was born April 16, 1854 in Holmes County, Ohio. She died in 1910 in Fredricksburg, Ohio. She was married May 17, 1877 to Bertram "Happy" Cramer, who was a blacksmith. You've got to love a guy named Happy! He was born in March, 1853 in Fredricksburg, and died in 1912. They had 3 children, John (Helen Lemmon), Charles (Ella Snure), and my great grandmother, Jennie Marie (Jefferson Joseph "Joe" Benson).

Lizzy used herbs in her healing. I grow them in my garden and make healing teas. My sister Sue is a nurse. The string of blacksmiths in my family might explain why my brother and uncle love making jewelry, or another brother's incessant banging when he was a kid. Happy played the violin, which might explain my nephews' musical talents. Not to mention Happy's father was a type maker, which might explain my love of lettering class in college?

Maybe sometimes looking forward also means looking in the rear view mirror once in a while? I'm also feeling gratitude that I'm not the first packrat in my family interested in history :)

"Surrender"

2011-01-28T07:20:00.000-08:00

To submit is to be submissive, and that's something a lot of us have been fighting against for centuries. Submit to your parents, spouse, teacher, boss, church, God... We're told to surrender so often, do we even know what our personal will is any more? This can create a lot of unhappiness, but helps society run smoothly, and isn't society more important than any of us mere individuals?

Um, maybe not.

I was talking the other night about Dorothea Davis, "The Sheep Lady". She was one of my personal heroes, and anyone from my neck of the woods remembers her. She inherited a prime piece of property when the area was less developed, and she refused to move along with "progress" when progress absorbed everything around her. The city tried everything to get her to move on, but she fought them in the courts for decades -- and won.

Whatever people might've said about her muddy sheep pulling out the grass, huddling under trees, or wandering into the main street, The Sheep Lady was always called a "lady", and that used to mean something. She was educated, polite, and gracious. She was our librarian, and her lanolin soft hands were beautiful as she wrote out due dates on cards tucked into the backs of our books. She also had a fierce mind, and didn't give in to the powers that be who wanted her messy sheep out of their pristine suburb.

I'll never forget sitting in her kitchen and drinking tea from a fine porcelain cup while a sheep butted its head against my skinny legs, and more sheep pushed through the open doorway. I tried to balance the saucer on the little table and worried about breaking the cup while Dorothea pleasantly discussed my future and the need to follow my talents and interests. I suppose she asked my mother to bring me over because as the librarian, she knew I was different. I took as many books as I was allowed every week, and didn't stay in the children's section. Maybe she knew I was a younger version of herself? If I had a sheep farm, I wouldn't sell it to the city bullies either.

They condemned her house after a fire, and she slept in her car while volunteers rebuilt it for her, minus a fireplace. I wasn't the only one who admired Miss Davis. She died 7 years ago, and people still talk about her with warm affection. Some day I hope I can be remembered with a bit of what Dorothea left in the world. She never surrendered, and lived the life she wanted to live. She died on the land she fought her entire life to protect, surrounded by her woolly friends.

If you have memories of The Sheep Lady, I'd love to hear them!

"Dusty"

2011-01-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

One of my early jobs was at an art studio. It was the good old days when illustrators, designers, retouchers, and production artists all worked in the same building. We laughed and played while we did the serious work of selling stuff we really didn't care much about.

One of those products was a feather duster. A dull product if there ever was one, and this didn't even have feathers, just plastic bristles. Someone named it "Webster", and the creatives had fun playing with it. We put a face on it, and it often appeared around corners to watch artists at work. Our play turned into memorable packaging with a funny face wrapped around it. Awesome! Brilliant! Lots of projects and money resulted for the studio. To be clear, this was another artist's work. I'm just passing on the process of the inspiration. I did however take part in the mock battles we had with them when the product samples came in.

I miss the old guys and going to work with people who play. I miss Brian's collection of model airplanes spinning in the warm air by the heating vent. I miss the camaraderie of going to bars after hours. I miss learning from the masters of the craft. I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to experience that moment in time.

It's tougher to dust myself off without my happy companions. I've gotten into comfortable, nonproductive habits, and my life needs stirred up. Bills need paid, and I need to kick my muse into gear. Besides, I'm happier when I'm productive.

I suppose there's lots of people who don't value social networking, but we can't all live in vacuums, churning out brilliance in the privacy of our own homes every day. Play matters. Creative competition matters. Feeding off of each other's ideas helps all of us to go further than we can go alone -- and makes the journey so much more rewarding!

As for the illustration... let's call it virtual housekeeping. I don't feel like actually cleaning house today!!

This is my niece's interpretation of "dusty". I love the bunny's face!

Stylish Blogger Award

2011-01-19T14:31:00.000-08:00

My first blogging award! Thanks Michele! You can see her blog at Mushroom Tender. She does some great posts, so I'm thrilled to be included on her list.

As part of the award, I'm supposed to say 7 things about myself...

1. My favorite color is red, followed in descending order by green, blue, purple, orange. I really kind of hate yellow.
2. I'm third of 7 kids. Yeah, 7. I wasn't consulted in the family planning.
3. My great aunt was an artist too.
4. I love dogs, especially my little mutt Penny.
5. I enjoy learning new things, and studying things with my niece.
6. I love water sounds -- as long as it doesn't have anything to do with faulty plumbing.
7. I really want people to buy bath tissue made out of recycled paper to save old growth forests!

Michele already claimed some of my favorite blogs, so check out her site to see her recommendations. Part of the fun of getting this award is that I can spread it around to 15 others, so check out these sites...

Ces & Her Dishes
Chopoli
Curious Art
Richard Ewing
Andrew Finnie
Jack Foster
Patti Gay
Susan Sorrell Hill
Jane's Journal
Debra Keirce
Land of Whimsy
Tony LaRocca
Rand MacIvor
Nancy Bea Miller
James Swanson

Public Service Announcement

2011-01-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

Hi to all,
I'm not big on contests that cost much to enter, but here's a new one to me... by entering, you sign away all of your rights, and they don't even guarantee prize money even if you win. Check out this literary agent's blog for more details -- if you can stand it. Reminder to everyone, read your contracts!

"Chicken"

2011-01-14T08:25:00.001-08:00

I don't feel much guilt about eating chickens. They're nasty animals with sharp feet and hard beaks -- and dirty besides. Okay, a pretty black and white hen nestled in my arms once, but she was the only nice one out of the whole species.

You might be able to tell that I have plenty of chicken stories, but who really wants to contemplate my terror of flying talons, dusty bedding, and egg thefts? Or plucking singed or boiled feathers either? Or seeing my paternal grandmother demonstrating multiple methods of killing the unfortunates? I'm still living the trauma.

Maybe it's better to think about the chicken soup I made yesterday? Making soup is a contemplative activity for me. Chop, chop, chop, simmer, chop, simmer... It takes an afternoon, and I had stuff I wanted to think about. Actually, chicken soup takes 2 days, because I boil the bones the night before. I deny any responsibility for anyone getting a bone in their bowl. Just goes to show it's real.

All modesty aside, I make the best chicken soup -- with the exception of Mary Lou's Italian wedding soup, but I'm not going to compete with her specialty. My soup is more traditional Ohio than Italian. She gave me some of hers at Christmas, and I'm going to give her some of mine when I see her later today. It's a good trade.

The chicken art is a reject if you can believe it. I had good plans for it too, but nooooooo. My nemesis found black and white clip art which was used instead. Such is the life of an artist! Maybe my fears of chickens came out in the art?

"Deja-vu"

2011-01-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

I've actually experienced deja-vu. I took an impromptu trip to Washington, DC and got lost. Somewhere in a pretty neighborhood of brick streets and large brick homes, a little dog ran away from a couple of children. I told my companion everything that would happen next as this little, seemingly inconsequential event played out in front of us.

I can't see how this moment in time mattered. I don't know how this odd wrinkle in time happened in the first place, but it makes me wonder about how the universe is stacked together and what role I play in it. Maybe I dreamed it before it happened? But even so, how would I know to dream it?

I was a poor college student at the time. I came home from class, and my boyfriend had packed the car with clothes and supplies, with our bicycles strapped to the back. It was probably his most spontaneous and best idea in our 10-year relationship. He didn't tell me where we were going until we'd hit the Pennsylvania border.

The bikes were great for riding from monument to monument, he had planned for me to see a friend living in Chevy Chase, and we ended up sleeping in a pup tent in a fishing camp on the beach facing the Atlantic Ocean. Lovely, wonderful, my first view of the ocean when the sun came up in the morning, and looking for seashells in the morning mist was magical.

But why did I have deja-vu in the first place? Why did the children and dog matter? Or maybe it didn't matter at all? We get to thinking that our lives are important and the world revolves around us, but what is life really all about?

Sometimes I think of this blip in time and simply remember the feeling of wonder I felt in the moment. Happy, laughing children and a dog running free may be the most important things in the world. The memory gives me a sense of peace and pleasure, and maybe that's enough of a reason for a fold in the continuity of time?

"Resolutions"

2010-12-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

I've been posting something on my blog every week since last February. So not quite a year, but that has to count as holding up one of my resolutions. I decided to look back and see what I've done in the last year and pat myself on the head.

I'm not much for making New Year's resolutions. It seems like a false set up, and less likely to succeed than a determination I make at a random time of the year... but...? My friend Geof had to quit smoking because of his health problems, and that reminds me of the dangers of sucking nicotine -- something I've done myself for a very long time. I'm starting to feel the effects of it, and have been thinking about quitting, even before Geof had to go to the hospital. I had nonsmoking company this week and slapped a nicotine patch on my arm so I could be pleasant through the visit. Who knew? The things actually work. Now all I have to do is figure out how to make my brain work too.

The problem is nicotine patches can't eliminate my need to be contrary, self-destructive, or infantile about my addiction. I like smoking. I also like blintzes, ice cream, Pepsi, and who knows what else that isn't good for me. Obviously my oral fixation is my mother's fault for weaning me too young. Okay, Freud identified the problem, but did he have an effective solution for it?

Nonsmokers, and that's almost everybody else these days, often don't realize logic and lectures are ineffective methods of encouraging better behavior. If the source of the problem is neglect and criticism, lectures just reinforce the original issue. We all know smoking is a health risk. It says so right on the side of the pack. Lots of people will resolve to quit smoking tomorrow. Tell them you love them, then back away slowly as they nurse their hangovers and withdrawal. Or, keep them so distracted they don't have time to reach for old habits.

This drawing is old. I've kept it as my own internal nagging on the issue. Maybe, just maybe this time I'm ready to let go?

"Winter"

2010-12-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

"Winter" brings up thoughts of quiet contemplation, poetry, snuggling my puppy by the fire -- but tomorrow is Christmas, and it's hard to ignore the thought that my day will be noisy and happy as I spend the day with friends and adopted family. (Thanks Mary Lou!) My kin are scattered to the winds this year, and I don't mind as long as they are finding happiness and laughter too.

This has been a hard year for me in some ways, but it's also been a year of rediscovering old friends, making new friends, and I'm grateful for it. To everyone, wishing you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!!!

Please remember my friends Korki and Geof in your prayers. Geof started chemotherapy this week for liver cancer after resting from an aortic valve replacement. I would like to be able to list my gratitude for his recovery next year at this time. Thanks!

"Mail"

2010-12-17T06:35:00.000-08:00

I watched "The People Speak" yesterday. Now I feel a need to foment rebellion and civil unrest. The movie is collage of famous people reading or singing from Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, a book written from the point of view of real people instead of the politicians.

Never mind that I don't actually know which cause to foment rebellion about. I'm having trouble just convincing people to buy toilet paper made from recycled paper to save old growth forests. Bigger issues like fixing the economy and stopping domestic violence or wars are all important, but I don't know how to make a difference. I was a child when hippies were marching against the Viet Nam war and burning bras and flags, but nobody seems like marching any more.

Maybe an old-fashioned mail campaign is the way to go? My Aunt Hazel used to write lots of letters against pig farms, cutting down pine trees, or whatever else she was irate about at the time. I admired her energy. Too bad she isn't around to harass politicians any more.

I think most of us want to make a difference. We want to be good, and right, and courageous. We want to believe that right wins in the end, the bad are punished, and some day everything will be right in the world. Maybe what we want most is to feel empowered?

So, in the spirit of whatever holiday you choose to celebrate at this time of year, here are some inspirational quotes for us to consider...

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. ~ Anne Frank

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. ~ William James

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope... and crossing each other form a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. ~ Robert F. Kennedy

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. ~ Mahatma Ghandi

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito. ~ Betty Reese

"Phenomenon"

2010-12-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

The eye doctor made me look at bright lights with dilated eyes today, and I'm trying very hard not to think of the phenomenon of lights = misery for me. He was quite unhelpful about my recent migraines. He said my eyes are healthy, and I should have someone check out my brain. Go ahead and laugh! I chuckled too.

Since I have bug eyes today, I'm going with the simplest answer for "phenomenon"
since I've already been working on this piece for another purpose. Snowflakes are magical and wonderful, and I love putting them together. Sometimes I like to cut them out of paper like we all did as children -- well, all of us snow-bound children. I like the surprise of how the opened piece of paper will turn out. These snowflakes all started out as little doodles like the one shown at left.

I shoveled my driveway for the first time of the year today. My guess is I'll have plenty to say about snow in the upcoming months, and since I wrote a lot last week, I'm taking my dilated eyes to a quiet corner and letting the world go by for now.

BTW, no matter what size I make the original, this blog wants to make it small. If I enlarge it in the layout mode, it looks fuzzy. Clicking on it takes it to another page which looks cleaner. Anyone know a way around this?

"Prehistoric"

2010-12-02T12:30:00.000-08:00

I did this art for Mrs. Fields' cookies. You can buy it here (24-ct Tin, 12-ct Tin, or Gift Box), though I don't get anything other than personal satisfaction when someone appreciates my art. Maybe I should consider licensing and royalties? Mrs. Fields makes good cookies, so it's a win/win for you especially since the tins are on sale.

Do reindeers fall under "prehistoric"? Yes, definitely, after a quick trip to Wikipedia to look up Megaloceros. I think my reindeer look very similar, and I had already decided to post them since I think they're of the season and offer insight into the package design process.

A new banner for this blog was long past due, and I have lots of art for the holidays because I've worked years on Christmas projects, or Hanukah, or whatever holiday you'd like to celebrate -- which is pretty ironic since I'm not a holiday kind of person. (I'll just delete my ranting so it doesn't compete with the PBS soprano, Country Music Christmas, or kids singing Rudolf...)

Packaging is planned far in advance of the holiday. I showed my original design to the client at the end of February, and it was already too late for that year's catalog. My boss and account manager hated it. (Now I'm deleting my tirade about office slugs making design decisions...) Maybe it's my anti-Christmas sentiments, but I liked the graphic black with red and green. Luckily, the creative director at MF has taste and vision, or maybe I just think that because he often agrees with me, but in any case, the project moved forward the next year when I resubmitted it.

The original design only had 1 reindeer. Blue was deemed friendlier than black, and 2 reindeers deemed friendlier than 1. But wait! Maybe red was better after all? I was partial to my original design, but meetings were held, executive wives and the UPS guy were consulted, catalog layouts were revised, and I made changes accordingly over the next months. I'll admit some of these changes were even my ideas, and good direction from the CD yielded great results.

Final art was sent to China. This was a pretty straight-forward project except for my pleas to the Chinese printer for metallic silver ink and explanations to the customer that gradations of silver would be iffy at best, if not impossible. All of this was made more difficult due to a power move by the account manager, who instigated an in-house policy preventing artists from talking to clients. The policy was reversed after complaints by the customers, but reinstituted when a new guy was hired. (I'm sure you're already onto the fact that I'm deleting some more choice observations here...)

I, of course, handled all of this with grace and courtesy since nobody in Utah or China could hear my muttered profanities or how hard my fingers were striking the keyboard.

Printing samples came in the summer. You know how it goes by now. There were more meetings and more secretarial consultations. To tell the truth, I think this is a good time for secretaries' opinions because they can hold the product and represent the buying public. They understand objects better than layouts, and the questions to ask are "Would you buy this?" and if not, "Why not?". There's still time to adjust things if necessary, but usually things proceed with approval and final directions to the printer.

Real samples come in late summer, and hopefully everything is perfect. Once I hear everything is approved, I forget about the project until I actually see the catalog. Other people jump into a flurry of photo shoots, copywriting, and domestic printers. I've done that before, but this job was all about the packaging for me. I spend a blissful October looking at fall leaves and attending Halloween parties -- until November when they start with those incessant carols and holiday specials again.

-- Special note -- My friend Geof is in the hospital. He and his wife Korki are 2 of my favorite people. Prayers and healing thoughts for both are much appreciated. Thanks!!

"Savor"

2010-11-26T08:32:00.000-08:00

Living in the moment is something too many of us forget to do, me included as it was pointed out recently. It's important to savor whatever is in front of us at any moment -- warm puppies, happy children, the smell of pine trees, the Thanksgiving leftovers in my refrigerator.

I did the attached flower for no other reason than I felt like doing it. I savored the time of copy/paste/rotate/fill/emboss... When I was done with it, I wondered why did I waste time on something for which I don't have a practical application? There are so many "useful" things I "should" have done instead. I was following a friend's advice to "lighten up", and pushed myself to doodle while watching tv. The doodle seemed enough to computer doodle too.

I read the Tao of Pooh this week, and absolved myself for "wasting" time on impractical computer art. I greatly recommend this book. It's Eastern philosophy ala Winnie the Pooh, and one of my brother Brian's favorites. He has quoted it to me for years, and I finally read it after finding it in my niece's bedroom last weekend.

The lesson I've been contemplating this week is that water doesn't run in a straight line. Having spent so much time on the bank of my river, I've watched the water flow around rocks, wander to the edges, and go wherever it finds the least resistance. Thinking about this has let me give myself permission to quit banging my head on what I "should" do, and apply my energies to the things that feel more comfortable and happy. When I think of "shoulds", I procrastinate and spend my time in self-criticism. In other words, get nothing done instead of making impractical flowers.

Maybe the flower is important in ways I haven't considered? It reminds me of what I like to do, and another of the lessons in the book is to be true to our own natures and success will follow effortlessly. I look at other people's blogs and notice the cute children's art and funny cartoons. That's great for the people who like to do those things, and I like looking at it, but I like painting flowers. Sometimes impractical, fanciful flowers with no apparent use.

I feel lighter and happier to allow myself an impractical flower. I feel less restrained to allow myself to wander wherever the water wants to take me. Happy artists make happy art, and that makes the world better for everyone!

"Sneaky"

2010-11-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

Dad talked about elves and fairies as if they were behind the nearest tree, with a superstitious tension in his shoulders as he explained the ways and laws of their parallel world. "Always treat them with respect" was his most frequent advice. "They don't trust humans" was another of his facts. The main thing I took away from his stories was that elves and fairies could be sneaky and vicious no matter how beautiful they might seem. Walking through a fairy ring of mushrooms could mean death or permanent enslavement in their world.

I laid back and watched dragonflies dancing among the tall grasses and flowers, against the backdrop of blue skies and fluffy clouds, and knew the dragonflies were fairies in disguise. It's always best to be careful. I didn't fear Santa marking down my mistakes on his famous list. I knew the tag marked "from Santa" was in Mom's handwriting. I wasn't stupid. Santa was a myth. Fairies were real. I could feel them in the sparkling grasses next to the water. Listening. They are the spies of the alternate world.

I put my foot inside the fairy ring. Nothing happened. With one foot firmly planted on the outside, I put some weight on the foot inside the ring. Nothing happened again. That night I looked out my bedroom window and wondered if I could see the lights of the fairies' dance, and could almost hear their council deciding whether or not to punish me for daring to question their sovereignty.

The next day I ran through the fairy ring. I figured if I went fast, my feet wouldn't destroy their invisible houses. I nervously watched from my bedroom window to see whether or not they would come to punish me. Nothing happened. The fairies accepted me. I didn't push the boundaries again. I wasn't trying to hurt them, just test my own bravery. I passed.

Some of my all-time favorite books are the series of Faeries and other magical creatures by Brian Froud and Alan Lee.

"Burning"

2010-11-12T08:19:00.001-08:00

This is what it looks like inside a Native American sweat lodge. The fire burns outside of the heavily blanketed mound, and hot rocks are brought in so people can sit in the dark and sweat, pray, meditate.

My first sweat lodge was an accident of fate. Hoosier National Forest in Southern Indiana allowed the Lakota Sioux to have a Sun Dance in the park. The Indians took this very seriously, but in order to gain permission, they had to agree to allow parkgoers to watch. The Sioux resented this. I resented their resentment. The Lakota are as native to Indiana as I am. I also resented that they had a lot of unwritten rules that I promptly broke because I didn't know what they were. Alright, it's common sense not to drink pop in front of people who are fasting, but I didn't know they were fasting. I didn't know that I shouldn't pee in the sacred Port-a-Potty (reserved for dancers), or walk in front of the dancers when they weren't dancing. If they'd clued me in about any of this, I would've obliged. As it was, the Indians were annoyed, I was annoyed, but the Sun Dance went on with young men tearing the flesh on their chests where it was attached by thongs to a central pole and the drums beat and beat and beat throughout the heat of the summer day.

As I was setting up camp in the evening, my Blackfoot girlfriend came running to say we were invited to join the women's sweat. That sounded like Greek to me, but I'm game for new experiences. I ran after her, ducked inside the sweat lodge, sat down, and waited for something to happen. Hot rocks were brought in from the fire and put in a central pit and the opening flap was closed. In the pitch black, sage was put on the rocks for cleansing, and the aromatic smoke filled the cramped space in a pleasant, choking way. Water was ladled onto the hot rocks, and a cloud of scorching steam burned my nose and throat. I quickly decided that I had just allowed myself to be trapped in hell. I buried my face in my shirt to try to lessen the pain and misery while I became acutely aware of sweat gushing out of pores I had never bothered to acknowledge before. This is not an activity for people with heart problems or claustrophobia.

Eventually the pain and misery lessened, and I got tired of waiting for something to happen. I let my mind wander, and interesting things surfaced in the wandering. More sage was added from time to time, more scorching steam, and I had resigned myself to my entrapment. Then the prayers started. The leader of the circle stated the intent of the sweat. She said an opening prayer, much of it in the Lakota language. The Sun Dance was for preserving sacred places, and the Indians wanted patience in dealing with the white people. Okay. Asking for blessings for the preservation of the land is something I can go along with, and sometimes I need patience dealing with white people too. I was lulled into an interesting state where my body didn't feel real any more.

Then the next woman in the circle said a prayer. I had the first pains of panic as I realized they were going around the circle with prayers. How was I supposed to say a prayer to their God, for their purposes, without betraying my own beliefs?! I thought fast and hard while the disembodied voices crept closer to my place in the circle. I must've been exceptionally eloquent because the women slapped their thighs and voiced approval. I slumped in relief. I felt like I had just run a gauntlet. Then I realized they were working on another round of prayers, and I had used up all my material. Back to thinking hard and fast for another acceptable prayer. And on and on.

I had a glimmer of hope of escape when the flap was raised, but it was just to bring hotter rocks in. More scalding steam, more sage, more prayers. I wrestled between my feelings of entrapment, physical misery, and an increasing sense of the spiritual rightness in the universe. I quit working so hard on my prayers and just let myself flow with the movement of the spirit combined in the efforts of this small group of women. My meditation in the silence reached levels I hadn't considered seeking before. I quit thinking about my imprisonment and felt the moment suspended in an alternate reality of now.

When I was finally released, I suddenly realized I was the only one sitting in the dark fully clothed. My jeans were soaked through with sweat as if I had just gone swimming in the river. My husband of the time smelled me, and said my sweat smelled sweet and clean, more like rain water than sweat. I drank a gallon of water then slept like a rock in my sleeping bag, with dreams that built on my meditations.

The next day, my face shone in a different way. The surly shaman actually smiled at me. The women offered me breakfast. I peed in the right Port-a-Potty, and the Sun Dance made more sense to me.

"Afterwards"

2010-11-05T14:53:00.001-07:00

I'm sulking this week because I'm facing another birthday. I stood in line at the license bureau and contemplated my driver's license. I swear I've aged too much in the 4 years since the last picture. It was so different when I stood in line to get my fake ID as a teenager. This time I paid $80 for a little plastic sticker for my license plate and a crappier picture than I had before. It just doesn't seem fair. I'd like my $80 and 20 years back.

Of course we can't undo or redo things we've already lived through, but I wonder about some of the decisions I've made along the way. Where would my life be if I'd taken the job at Hallmark? What if I'd moved out after I threw the engagement ring across the room? I'm living with all the "afterwards" of my decisions. I don't really regret them, but sometimes I've just got to pause and wonder what if?

Part of the thing of youth is that "afterwards" don't get considered very much. If it sounds fun, let's do it! Experience let's me know drinking too much causes hangovers, spending too much causes debt, and most importantly, I'm not immune to those kinds of things. Wisdom makes life somewhat less fun, and I'm not even sure it makes us any more secure a lot of the time. There's got to be a proper balance between taking chances and hanging onto security.

When I was in Girl Scouts, my troop went camping in winter where there was a swimming pool with a thin layer of ice on top. One of the brilliant counselors suggested breaking the ice and "polar bear" swimming. A line of skinny little girls stood shivering in our bathing suits and looked at her like she was nuts. Eventually I decided I was cold either way, so I jumped in and started swimming. A few girls followed my lead, and the rest watched from the sidelines. Good thing we didn't die of pneumonia while we were led back to the lodge wrapped in towels, shivering hard enough to cause an earthquake, while listening to a lecture about "character building".

Since it didn't kill me, I think maybe it did build some character. I learned I had some leadership abilities, could make my own choices, and it's okay to take some risks. Sometimes we do have to jump into the ice, and even though I'm faced with another birthday, I'm not so old I can't jump in if I feel like it.

"Spent"

2010-10-29T15:27:00.001-07:00

I made this painting during a previous period of unemployment when I was making extra bucks substitute teaching. I was killing time during a free period, and it was pleasant to rag leftover tempera paint onto a scrapped piece of poster board. That didn't kill enough time, so I made circles over the background with a plastic circle template. I took it home and finished it with colored pencils. Somewhere along the line I decided all the circles represented coins, and I needed to bring more coins into my life. I liked the colors well enough that I hung it up at home, but I have often thought that I should've been trying to manifest dollars, not coins. I'm still trying to manifest dollars.

I liked substitute teaching. The kids were fun and often sparked new ideas in me for my own work. I liked popping in and out of their lives, hopefully leaving some useful tidbits behind.

One class, there was a very dry lesson plan about water cycles. Clouds rain, water flows downhill, evaporates into clouds... The kids looked like they needed poked with cattle prods. When I explained everything flows downhill, that all junk eventually ends up in their drinking water, they started to pick up a little. One punk kid made a joke about drinking pee. I said "exactly", and they all started talking. It was a lively, educational discussion, and I think I helped make about 28 kids more environmentally friendly.

Sure beats "killing time" between classes, but I guess even that goes to show that it's our choice what we do with our time. We can bitch and groan about time wasting, or we can use the time towards something more valuable.

On a completely different note, I found this Confederate money in a box this week. For those of you outside the US, America split in two in the 1800s over issues of states rights and slavery. A very bloody war was fought, and the Confederacy (Southern states) lost. My grandpa's family was from Tennessee, which is how this money ended up in my box. I doubt I could get $5 for it today even though it is 150 years old. Money from winners is always more valuable, isn't it?

The bill is very delicate, so I scanned it to look at it better. I haven't decided what to do with it yet, but it seems like there's an art project in it somehow? If nothing else, at least the South got an artist to design it in the first place, but it seems like bloody money. I just think it's interesting, and thought others might like to look at it too.

"Racing"

2010-10-22T15:01:00.001-07:00

"Racing" reminds me of a family camping trip where I met a bunch of Algonquin boys running in a field. They ran back and forth and back and forth all afternoon. They insisted I had to run barefoot, and I got spiked in the foot with some woody weed. I pulled it out and kept running, and they praised me for being tough.

I envied their freedom. Everybody got along, everyone laughed, and somehow running was something they were driven to do. They didn't care if I was a girl as long as I could keep up, and I think it was the first time I felt like my sex didn't matter. It was also before I wanted to be noticed as a girl. When they started tackling each other, I got tackled too. When I tried to tackle a big boy, he snatched me up and threw me to another kid who carried me like a football to the end of the field. I guess I should be glad that was before football players started spiking the ball in the end zone.

My first thought when I saw the word of the week is that nobody can make me draw race cars in my free time. My second thought was Winslow Homer's "Crack the Whip". It wasn't much of a jump to remember the Algonquin boys from there.

I love Homer's action and the balance of realism with loose, impressionistic brush strokes. Flowers are quick dabs of color, faces are smeared blobs, but the anatomy is correct and real. The painting is much smaller than I imagined before seeing it at the Butler Museum in Youngstown, Ohio. There is a lot of info about Homer online, and if you aren't familiar with him, I'd recommend looking him up. He did a lot of powerful work during the American Civil War, and spent his old age in New England painting the ocean. Much of his work has hidden social messages, and I admire his spirit.

Crack the Whip is a kids' game where they all hold hands and run together until the kid at the end stops and yanks the chain of children. As shown in the painting, the kid on the end falls off. I played this with my siblings when I was small, and it kept us occupied until we were all a sweaty heap of laughter.

When I started this blog, I had such different ideas in mind. I didn't realize it would so often become a diary of happy little memories of childhood, but the words of the week take me back, and I'm glad when my stories hit a note with other people. Grownups get too bound up with thoughts of bills, and what we want, or what we can't have. We forget what it's like to play, to feel free, and to see the future as endless as a perfect summer day running with healthy, friendly boys.

Homer's work speaks for itself. I wasn't about to paint a similar subject for comparison, so the top pic is something I did in PhotoShop, and the other is a pencil doodle to fit the theme.

Thanks to everyone for their comments about my "spooky" post. I'm sorry I wasn't able to return everyone's visit. I've been having headaches, which I guess is just another reason to think about happy summer days of childhood :)

"Spooky"

2010-10-15T08:31:00.001-07:00

I was in the woods once, walking towards a barn at night, and an owl flew right over my head into the open hayloft. Absolutely silent. If that's not awesome and spooky, I don't know what is. I don't care if I understand an owl's feathers have a special fringed edge to muffle sound. It's freaky when a large bird silently swoops over your head at night.

There are a lot of spooky things at night. The house can creak and groan when it settles, we can't see into the dark, and our imaginations can start running wild with wonderings about what is just outside of the light. It doesn't help when we actually experience things we can't explain or when other people tell us such things aren't possible. How can we be sure the things we "know" are really true?

There are two different worlds on Earth. There's the daytime animals and human activities, and when all of them go to bed, the others come creeping out. But humans still tend to circle the bonfire or eat at the brightly lit all-night restaurant, or work third shift under the factory's sodium lights. At heart, I think most of us are afraid of the dark.

The owl eyes are colored pencil on black construction paper. The bats are watercolor and pencil.

"Transportation"

2010-10-08T16:46:00.000-07:00

I grew up in an isolated valley, and one of the things I wanted most was transportation out of there. Nature is great, but I wanted a friend that didn't have fur, scales, feathers, or a shell.

The next-door-neighbors were "Summer People", meaning they came to garden in nice weather. They were "Old Country" (Europeans), and because of them I have the idea that all Europeans must keep everything they've ever owned. Instead of throwing things away, they had stages of storage. Good stuff in the house, okay stuff in the barn, junk hidden in a clearing amongst the pine trees.

I'd really like to make excuses about plundering their junk, but I mean really, did they actually expect me to leave their unsupervised stuff alone? The fact that many of the rusty old farm tools had wheels on them made them very attractive to me. I had endless time to clean and oil them into some level of functionality. I think it's probably a good thing I didn't know how to make a motor or I would've driven out of the glen without looking back.

My creations didn't get me out of the valley, but I had fun making them. I also enjoyed decorating them with pine cones and flowers while I waited for my fairy godmother to turn one of them into a carriage to take me to the ball.

"Beneath"

2010-10-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, I got a job as a lifeguard at a summer camp. When the counselors learned I liked art, my duties got expanded to teaching crafts to the "slow" kids. I guess it's all how you look at things, but I didn't think the kids were all that slow, but that was before half the kids were diagnosed with ADHD and given Ritalin. Maybe they weren't the best at school, but part of the problem was they really didn't like sitting still very long. They'd slap their projects together quickly, then look for trouble until I thought about the salamanders. After all, we were doing crafts at a picnic table in the woods.

I showed them how to look beneath rocks and rotten logs and sort through the leaves to find the squiggly little things, and taught them to hold the salamanders gently because they have delicate skin. The kids happily looked for bugs and grubs to feed them while the kids who liked doing crafts finished their projects. My class became their favorite, and the counselors ended up giving them to me through most of the summer. They were sweethearts.

There was more to the job because we were also trying to get "retarded" adults out of an institution and into group homes by teaching them basic skills. I was to teach them water safety. That's a story in itself because they really didn't get the concept. Also, about half of them weighed about half a ton each, and if they decided to walk on the bottom of the pool in the deep end, I was the one who had to get them out. But even with the scares they gave me, the adults were sweethearts too. I racked up a lot of love that summer!

The picture is wax pencil on coquille board. And yes, I know the terms I used aren't PC any more. I wrote this in context of the times and say "developmentally delayed" now.