"Funk"

I saw the word and thought, "but I'm not in a funk!" -- which made me wonder what a funk is in the first place while singing Play That Funky Music in my head and chair dancing, physically demonstrating that I'm in a decidedly good mood for no particular reason other than the weather is spectacularly pleasant after a blisteringly hot week.

1. noun, North American, a state of depression

2. noun, British, a coward. verb, avoid (a task or thing) out of fear 

Oh funk.  I like to write about happy things when I'm feeling happy.  I took time to wash gooseberries.  The bushes have sharp thorns and are one of my few deer-proof garden happinesses these days.  Have I mentioned one doe has twins??  Not to be confused with that other doe with a single fawn.  My only competition for these berries is from song birds, and I'm willing to share with them.

I use gooseberries in chocolate cake because then it's health food (obviously).  I put in cranberries and/or currants sometimes too.  Chocolate cake is clearly the best way to get vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.  My latest, best cooking discovery is combining rhubarb and mulberries.  I cook it into a thick sauce to mix with plain yogurt.  The berries make it possible to drastically reduce the amount of sugar usually used with rhubarb.  I added cinnamon and ginger with just a touch of cloves.  Oh, oh, oh!!!  Mmm.

I suspect many, maybe most people don't know about these foods.  I've never seen gooseberries in the store, but I spent countless hours of my childhood laying on my back under my neighbor's bushes, carefully plucking berries off one by one and stuffing them in my mouth.  Sun warm, tart sweet, and delicious.

Perhaps I'm being a funk not to write about being in a funk?  I've been depressed.  It sucks.  I've been seriously, chronically depressed.  That sucks even more.  I found the best solution to that state of being was divorce.  It's amazing how quickly I got happy and healthy once my ex was out of my life.  This solution might not be advantageous for everyone, but I bet there are some who could benefit from it.

I've been reliving that period of time in my head recently to see what I can learn from it.  Simply, I put up with too much, waded past warning signs, allowed myself to be put down, ignored, overworked, and other unpleasantness.  I tried to resolve issues with someone who wasn't interested in resolutions.  It's no wonder I got depressed.  I was shoving every reasonable instinct and thought deep, deep underground.

I'm lax about showing works in progress so I thought I'd show a bit of my latest.  Sometimes I think showing finished pieces ignores the struggle to get there.  I found reference photos of baby food and UNICEF from the 1960s, which didn't exist the way I wanted so I pieced parts together for accuracy.  I'm not happy with where the train is so I quit working on it and will start over and repaint it -- despite putting the layout together in PhotoShop in the first place.  That stupid form in the background caused me all sorts of misery getting things to line up properly.

I'm not perfect.  I make mistakes.  I try to learn from those mistakes and persevere.  Then, I chair dance and revel in my happy days!

"Garden"

My new neighbor came over to introduce herself when I was picking gooseberries.  She's missing a cat.  Haven't seen it, but sure, I'll keep an eye out for it.  I offered her gooseberries, but I think she was confused by them.  I thought about making her a gooseberry tart in neighborly good will, but, well, you know, that would take effort.  Isn't the thought enough?

I brought the gooseberries and a colander of currants inside, then saw the deer eating my crab apples a few feet from the kitchen window.  "Scat!  Get out!!" He leisurely moved behind the garage.  I went back to my berries and he came back.  "Scat! They're not even ripe!"  Stupid deer.  My brother said he's beautiful.  Sure, majestic even -- but he eats everything.  Then the squirrel spiraled down the apple trunk and into the garden and I launched into the murderous thoughts of summer with venison fantasies.  I want a scarecrow with rocket-propelled missiles.

I like to garden, in a lazy way.  I put in seeds, watch the miracle of life, then eat the bountiful harvest.  Maybe sit and weed the garden a couple of times to make myself feel like I'm responsible and tidy about it all.  Maybe weed it a lot if I have stuff to think about.  I put all these berries in the freezer so I can put them in chocolate cakes, because you know, if chocolate cake has organic berries, it becomes health food.

I haven't made much progress on the dining room floor this week.  I took a walk in the park, obsessed about work, started reading a book about cults... You know how all this stuff goes.  I could make a lot more progress if someone would just pay my bills and leave me time for baking gooseberry tarts and creating.

When I was a kid, gooseberries were extra special because they were rare.  There were only 3 bushes of them in my pilfering range.  Now that I think of it, I was taught early to steal.  I ate berries, climbed orchards... whatever I wanted, and could get away with taking, was fair game.  It was standard, expected behavior from children in an area of summer homes and unattended gardens.  Children expected to get sworn at and occasionally threatened with firearms.  Bus stop conversations included tips for access to especially tasty treats while we waited to go to school.

We stole from adults we liked least.  Our ethics were nuanced, and had nothing to do with stuff we learned at church.  The adrenaline of possible consequences was part of the joy.  I was taught to be a risk-taker and rewarded with pie if I brought my pilfering home.

I just wandered into this bit of memory, but now that I'm thinking about it I have to wonder about how robbing summer gardens steered my life.  I feel a little conflicted, but mostly remember the sweet taste of berries on a hot summer day and laughter in the chase.

Then there's karma.  Maybe my gardening suffers from the consequences of my early pilfering?  Is that damned deer a reincarnation of one of my old neighbors?  Maybe I'm good at growing currants because I never stole them from anyone?

"Sweet"

I thought about ranting about my parents’ anti-sugar, anti-processed flour reign of terror for “sweet”, but that’s been done.  Let me instead tell you about my subversive tactics for lifting the restrictions of that awful regime…

I told Dad that there were ripe blackberries, giant, enormous blackberries that would taste wonderful in a pie, but alas, you just can’t make a pie without sugar and flour.  So sad.  No pie.  Such a shame too, because they were really sweet blackberries.  Wouldn’t hardly take much sugar at all to make such a pie.

I saw Dad’s resolve weakening.  He suggested honey, and I said that would make a gummy pie, but a touch of clove and cinnamon would really enhance those berries.  I let him gnaw on that a bit while I watched him swallow more than normally necessary and chew the inside of his cheek.

“Why don’t you go pick some of those berries and bring them home?” he said.  “No, it’s not worth the bother to bring them back.  I mean I would if I were making a pie, but you know berries won’t hold up when you’ve got to carry them that far.  They’ll get too smashed up.”

It was a standoff.  I watched Dad continue to swallow his Pavlovian saliva and contemplated my purple fingers.  Dad obviously wrestled with his conscience of healthy living and pie.  I could see pie was winning.

“Why don’t you take me to where you found them and I’ll just eat some there?” he countered.  “No way!  You’d eat them all.  Besides, they don’t care if I eat them, but they won’t like it if you go there.”  Check.  My 8 or 10 year old self could pick berries lots of places a grown man couldn’t, and Dad knew it.  I didn’t bother to tell him that the berries were on free land.

“Don’t you like pie, Dad?  It’s mostly healthy.  I mean, it’s mostly fruit, and fruit’s good for us.”

Dad’s conscience was on the ropes.  I licked my purple fingers and started wandering very slowly towards the door.

“Okay!  Okay!  One pie!”  Checkmate.  I made two pies.  After all, the crust recipe is for 2 pies, and you don’t really expect me to know how to half a recipe at that age, do you Dad?

I made sure there was some sort of fruit or berries in season for the rest of the summer.  We ate a lot of pies.  Mom made strawberry shortcake.  Eventually we even got cookies.  Dad bragged about my pies to Grandma, and she taught me to use ice water and not to touch the crust except to put it in the tin and crimp the edges.  Sadly, this pie wisdom has been rendered obsolete by ready-made pie crusts, but I still could make a crust if I had to, and I cut air vents in the top in a wheat pattern like our women always have because as Mom says, “It’s tradition.  We have to.” Or for the longer Mom explanation, wheat represents plenty.

Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?  Can she bake a cherry pie, Charming Billy?

For those of you who read my post about spring water, I took pictures of one of the lawnmowers and a bit of the trout pond.  The kid is one of twins and they were awesome cute romping around.

The irises and the birdhouses are pics from work in the secret garden that only me and Br. Gary ever see, and in case you can’t tell from my general good mood, I think the internal audit of my department at work went great J

 

"Yesterday"

Something I know from racking up a lot of yesterdays is that most people don’t want to learn from the life lessons I’ve learned.  Oh sure, someone might listen to me when I say don’t order spaghetti on a first date, but other than that, probably not – and for that matter, go ahead and order spaghetti.  I had a date when I nervously jabbed a fork in my salad and sent the bowl flying across the room into an innocent waiter.  The whole restaurant laughed.  You can’t buy stories like that when you’re holding hands with someone special and laughing at your memories together.

I told a young couple once that the most important thing about making a relationship work is to stay engaged with each other.  They thought that was too obvious and thought that would be easy.  Of course it was for them.  They were young and in love.  Years later, they’re separated.  It’s sad.  Why couldn’t they learn from my experience that flying salad bowls aren’t enough to keep a relationship together unless you make an effort to keep laughing about it together?

I write a lot about yesterdays on this blog.  It helps me center myself.  In reminding myself of happy times, I can remind others to think happy thoughts too.  I mentioned to an old lady recently that the longer I live, the more I realize that everyone has a story and pain.  She nodded and gave me a little smile that made me feel like I passed a test I didn’t know I was taking. 

My mom is buying property next to the house where I grew up.  I have a lot of memories of that land, some good, some bad.  I’ve been thinking a lot that I have a choice about what I’m going to remember and how that’s going to affect my now and my future.  I’ve written about some of my conflicted feelings connected to that land last year here and here.

So, should I think about the bad man who once owned that property or my friend who died too young, or should I think about picking raspberries and making stuff from old farm equipment?  I can still hear aluminum pie tins tinkling above blueberries and crows calling and feel the warm summer sun as I lay on my back and look at the blue sky while I listen to Dad talk about how much lime to put on raspberries.

It’s a choice.  We can be as happy or as miserable as we want to be.  Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way.  If we’re grieving, all we feel is our pain.  We aren’t thinking about how fortunate we are to have had someone we loved enough to grieve over.  If our bodies hurt, we aren’t thinking about the times when all those nerve endings were exploding in ecstasy -- but we can rise above emotional or physical pain, and all those happy memories give us tools to use when we need them.

The sky is mostly blue today and it’s warmer than it usually is in March in Ohio.  I’m going to walk that property where I have all those memories and remember good things.  I’m deciding to have a happy day.

In Penny news, my geriatric puppy seems to be recovering from her emergency surgery last week.  She’s still got a cone on her head so she won’t pull out her stitches, but she’s eating pretty well and can do her business outside.  Yay!  Let’s hope she lives a long and happy life!

"Dessert"

I had a job making pretty boxes for chocolates and bakery products. This box was made for Mrs. Fields as part of a holiday series. I'm happy to say this series was so successful, I created new art for it every year.

This art started out as pieces of watercolor that I scanned and morphed in PhotoShop. I keep the elements on different layers because there are always changes. The background door changed from red to green to weathered white before the customer was satisfied.

All of the elements in this piece were created from very little actual painting. For instance, the berries were created from just two bunches. Copy/paste, copy/paste... except the Creative Director for Mrs. Fields is very observant, and had me alter the highlights on every berry so it showed the light source coming from one direction. Good call on his part. Silent groaning on mine. That's a lot of berries!

Even something like the bow was created in multiple layers. I painted a solid bow, tried out different colors, put a brocade pattern over it, and played with the shadows and highlights to match everything else. Even the tag attached to the bow took seven layers: background colors, star, text, grommet, and string.




It has to be this way in a corporate world. I loved working with MF's CD because he has a good eye, makes useful comments, and appreciates good work -- but he is only one cog in the corporate world, though a very important cog in that wheel. My art went to committees of people I never spoke with, and often returned with comments like "Put teddy bears in it" because somebody's wife likes teddy bears. Having a great CD can keep the teddy bears out of things because the CD can defend your work when you can't.

All of this is just the domestic side of business. I also created schematic drawings and printing directions for Chinese manufacturers, often for someone who doesn't speak English. I don't plan on learning Chinese, so we often had to rely on computer translations, which can be like talking through mud. Numbers and drawings they understand.

Samples of the boxes would come from China, product samples came from the customer to see if they fit properly, and I fended off my coworkers' appetites long enough to measure things. I loved getting samples. I really like Mrs. Fields' cookies, but I also got the most decadent chocolates from some of my customers... Uh, excuse me... I started having chocolate flashbacks.

Once all of the above was settled, I created final art for the printer. I originally started out just doing layouts, but when the okay came through for a project, they wanted it out the door immediately. It became easier to work on elements of the final art through the approval process, and adapting it to the final die lines.

When I started this blog, I had the best intentions of trying to say useful things to other artists. I hope this gives some insight into what it's like to make packaging art. I'm open to other ideas of what you'd like to see in the future too. I love getting feedback!