"Jail 2"

My dog won't eat rhubarb.  It's one of life's mysteries -- like why illustrationfriday.com forgets to post a new word on Friday (or sometimes, by Monday).  Therefore, we'll revisit "jail" with a blue jay feather.  Let's just consider it a jail bird, okay?

I danced happily around my house when Paul Manafort was ruled guilty last week.  I wanted to share my happiness with a friend and was surprised she was actually depressed about it.  "It's so sad there's so much criminal behavior going on these days", she said.  "Yeah, but we knew that!", I replied.  "It's a happy moment because one of the criminals has actually been found guilty!"  It was extra icing on my cake when I discovered Michael Cohen plead guilty in court at nearly the same time.

Manafort and Cohen's tax evasions cost all of the citizens money.  They stole from us.  If all this talk of Russian collusion turns out to be true, then that's another form of stealing from the people.  We should all be glad when criminals are caught and punished.

This goes beyond politics.  Republican Senator John McCain died this week and I'm sad for his family and the country.  I gave serious thought about voting for him once.  Of course this was before he gave us Sarah Palin, but I'm mostly over that now... well no, I'm not, but I'm working on forgiveness.

The point of my happy dancing is the feeling that maybe there are enough checks and balances and good people in the system to prevent the criminals around the world who are hell-bent on destroying democracy.  I want the guilty parties in jail and better laws to protect us from this kind of mess in the future.

Despite what we see, politics isn't a game or sport.  One side winning and the other losing is like a bad marriage.  The process of deciding what's best for a family is the same for our societal family.  For instance, when I was married every disagreement was war no matter how much I tried to find a middle ground.  I resented always being the peacemaker and never getting what I wanted.  When one side won't budge, there's no armistice, and eventually, no marriage.

In the 1860s, the US was in a similar situation.  The industrial North wanted to abolish slavery and punished the agricultural South with harsh tariffs.  The country split in two and fought the country's bloodiest war, and as it's been often said, neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother.  Those resentments still fester and play a part in the continuing racial issues in the country.

I want a better world and think it's possible to avoid this kind of conflict.  Compromise.  Punish criminals and traitors.  Protect citizens.  Do what's best for the majority while defending the rights of minorities.  It's possible.  Try.

John McCain often spoke about the need for regular order and reaching across the aisle, even when you have deep, fundamental differences with each other.  One of his best friends was Ted Kennedy, one of the most liberal senators in Congress.  May their lives be examples to all of us.

Unrelated to all of this, I keep meaning to take a new picture for my profile, but I never get around to it.  I've decided to let people see my inner child for a while instead, especially since my hair is kind of like this lately.

"Airborne"

I have a 5 mile commute to work every day.  It's a straight line on a back road, but yesterday I got caught in a traffic jam because some people just don't understand a 4-way stop.  I idly looked out at the big field of the county airport and fussed and fumed about being stuck.  A huge hawk flew past with a tiny black bird pecking its grievances out on the hawk's tail.  I figure that didn't bode well for me or the hawk.

Today I saw that same hawk flying unencumbered by a pesky lesser being with a sharp beak.  That seemed like a better sign.  I wonder why the hawk didn't just turn around and eat the little bird, but I guess it figured it was just better to leave.  Sometimes I feel like that too.  Mostly I wonder why little birds want to pester me in the first place.

This is actually something I've thought about a lot of times because I swear I've been pestered to death by little birds while I tell them to just leave me alone.  In case you're getting lost in the metaphor, I have been pestered to death by small people throughout my life.  They manipulate, nag, belittle, charm... whatever methods work best for them for whatever motivates them.  Sometimes I let my talons out and then nobody's happy.

I almost always regret losing my temper, and can self-punish about it for years afterward because I can be altogether too thorough in demolishing the source of my anger.  It's hard to stay airborne when you're eviscerating a little bird and wrapping its entrails around its head while pecking its eyes out.  See the pitiful little songbird flopping on the ground getting eaten by a bunny?  Yes, I know bunnies are herbivores.  Just makes it more sad.

I want to stay airborne.  I want to feel like I'm living my best life and in my perfect world I'd never have to get angry about anything.  I know real life includes some justifiable anger from time to time, and failing nirvana, I want to be able to express that anger without having to figure out where to hide the corpses.  It seems simple enough until a little bird pecks me one time too many.

This probably makes it sound like I'm the kind of person who lays on the horn while tailgating on the freeway and brings a machine gun to the movies.  I'm really not.  I give lots of signs that the end is near if you don't cut it out.  I think people don't believe me because I try to be nice most of the time.  I actually very seldom lose my temper -- but when I do, it's memorable.

How to express anger constructively is something a lot of people, including myself, find difficult because we haven't seen enough positive examples.  We're inundated with bad examples in every media and by the bullies on the playground or in business.  It just doesn't make for a good book or movie plot to calmly talk out differences.  The nice guy doesn't get elected or promoted.

I figure I'm a lifetime project, and this is one of my ongoing topics for improvement.  All I can really do is set my intention that this hawk is going to stay airborne as much as possible.

And just to show that I care about other people's happiness, am somewhat aware of the world, and can get over my deeply held belief that sports shouldn't overlap and basketball is supposed to be over in winter...
GO CAVS!!!

"Tense"

I'm too familiar with this word for the week.  I came home from work the other day feeling like I had worked a month of Mondays and felt like I had to unclamp every muscle in my body in order to sit down and pet the dog.

Since out there is stressful, I've been improving my habitat lately and decided to get new living room curtains.  I wanted a floral, white and green and summery.  It seemed so obviously attainable, it didn't occur to me that stores wouldn't have them.  In the end I bought a paisley, but the tops weren't right, and the length was too long.  I dragged out the sewing machine.

I made the curtains what I wanted them to be, which involved all sorts of things that I don't do: ironing, pinning, sewing... and the curtains turned out to be a lot like the old ones, but I'm happier.

I made Sculpey flowers and pinned them on, and put Grandpa's bells on the tie-back.  I ran Sculpey through a pasta machine and made feathers too.  (Not to be confused with my previous Sculpey feathers.)  It's a whole lot of nothing for nothing, and the kind of thing I get into.  It's my world, my space, and I can do whatever I want in it -- and sometimes that's really necessary when the world makes me too tense to pet the dog.

I've been continuing with my linoleum blocks too.  This sun was just fun for fun.  I don't have any plans for it.  Some day I'll be tired of looking at Sculpey flowers and feathers and they'll go to the basement.  I don't know if anyone else will ever want them, and the bother of trying to sell them takes away from my fun in creation.  Sometimes I wonder if my relatives will throw all of it away when I die, and what's the point of any of it.  Sometimes I can go too far into the whole existential philosophy of why bother with anything at all?  Maybe I should mention that I went to another funeral this week.  That kind of thing spurs existential angst.

I told my brother the word for the week is "tense".  He drew tents in a military encampment.  I observed that his tiny 1 1/2" drawing didn't really show the tents well enough so he provided the enlargement detail.

Making stuff is one of the ways I deal with life.  Some people cook, knit, or make furniture in the garage.  It's good to bring something new into the world.  I know other coping skills too, like watching ripples on the river or waves in the ocean, meditating, reading, tv, planting something in the garden.  Whatever feels good to us is what we should do unless it goes against someone else's happiness.

Sometimes we all get to the point where we feel like lashing out and taking our frustrations out on someone else.  It's better to make stuff and think out better solutions to our problems.  Sometimes I need to remind myself of that and pet the dog.

"Toy"

Does Play Doh count as a toy?  I love the smell and the cool feeling of the stuff.  Something I love quite a bit less is Sculpey or Fimo clay, but that has the benefit of hardening in the oven.  It doesn't smell nearly as good though, raw or cooked.

One of my coworkers has been clearing out a house lately, and she's been bringing me presents every day.  Amongst the many interesting things that she's brought me is Fimo clay, and like the child that I am, I've spent my evenings making completely useless items with oven-hardened permanence.

There's a little sadness behind the house cleaning.  The adult daughter, got cancer and died.  A couple of years later, her mom got another kind of cancer and died.  No more family, the friendly neighbor inherited, and the house full of stuff is getting cleared out by my coworker -- and I get Christmas every day in January.  Woo hoo!  I'd like to think the daughter is happy her things are going to a kindred spirit instead of to the dump.

I haven't been in the house, but there's a castle room where medals from Pennsic wars tell a silent story of medieval wars in Pennsylvania hosted by the Society of Creative Anachronisms.  I'm told the proper way to display those medals are in cleavage.  I passed the medals on to someone with more ample cleavage and actual Renaissance costumes.

I've gotten a turtle quilt, necklace, and coffee cup, a smiley cup, giant sketch pad, a pointy silver thing that I was told to use on my voodoo dolls... Just to be clear, I don't actually have voodoo dolls, but my need to vent frustrations is obviously apparent.  I may have made stabbing motions after a meeting recently.

In any case, I have some new toys, and tv time to play with them.  I made feathers.  I made an atom, a flower... who knows what else will get oven-hardened next?

I'm a bit frustrated with my atom.  I wrote recently about my bag of copper wire that's begging for an art project.  My brother whipped out a tree, and I suppressed some 3D jealousy.  The best I can say for my wire projects is that I embedded wire into my atom parts so the electron bee has a stinger and antennae and all the atom parts have copper loops to hang them.  What I really wanted was wire circles for them all to rotate around and jiggle, but I was foiled by my lack of technical expertise to make this all work.  Now I'm intimidated by my greater goal to make a copper wire mobile, perhaps with Sculpey adornments and counter weights.

He who taught me about atoms might argue with me about my atom interpretation.  The parts all have names of people who play those kinds of roles in real life.  I figure the feathers are illustration in another form because I just painted with clay instead of paint.

What kind of toys do you play with?

"Voice"

I got more snow last night.  I can't say how much I miss hearing the sounds of birds' voices, especially the mourning doves cooing me awake every morning.  It seemed like a good day to paint feathers.

I could've been a writer instead of an artist.  I loved words and books first, but in 4th grade I wrote a poem.  The teacher made me stand up in class and read it out loud.  I thought I'd die from heart failure.  The paper shook so much when I was reading it that I could barely read it.

It wasn't the usual 4th grader's poem.  I spoke of my love for the river as if it were a real person whom I loved and who loved me back.  The poem was romantic and passionate in ways that 10-year-olds aren't supposed to feel or express.  I talked about the animals and the spring flood and everything else that was part of my intensely personal relationship.

The class was silent when I finished.  I figured that whatever chances I had of appearing "normal" were finished, when a popular, attractive boy clapped.  The rest of the class joined in.  I went from despair to surprise to gratitude, and I took that applause in and felt my heart expand and myself begin to change.  That boy will never know how much he changed my life.  He's in my permanent gratitude column.

You'd think this would've set me on the path of authorship, but there's more to the story.  The poem won a state prize and I was forced to rewrite it for the national competition.  My teacher, dad, and a sister took turns editing it despite my screams of creative pain.  I refused to write anything again that would open me to that kind of pain again.

I used to keep a diary, but another sister, mom, and a boyfriend all violated that sacred space.  I quit writing even to myself.

Many years later I told someone about another painful moment in my life.  He suggested that I write about it, and to take special attention to capturing every detail of it that I could remember.  I told him that I don't write, he pushed, I told him about the diary, and he pointed out that I was living alone and nobody could violate my thoughts on paper.

So I journaled about the poem.  It turned into 12 dense pages of painful memories, but the journaling made me start writing again.  At first it was just for myself, but now I put my thoughts and feelings on this blog and let everyone see it.  The process is freeing.  All of those words that I had bottled up inside come bubbling out.

I appreciate all of my blog buddies the same way I appreciate that nice boy in 4th grade. I see him once in a very long while.  I'm pretty sure he's long forgotten this moment in time, but he has a kindness that I hope has been rewarded.  He helped me find my voice.

A child confided to me about her shy anxieties.  I remembered the poem and told her that I think most people on your side.  Most people want you to do well, and sometimes they let you know.  Don't let the bullies change who you are.  Remember the nice people because they want to know what you have to share with the world.

"Beginning"

This feather was my first blog post.  I gave it away recently, and somehow felt like it flew to the right home at the right time.  I don't give things like this away very often because it represents two firsts.  First blog post and first art after a long break from creative things.  I like to keep firsts like this because it reminds me of my mental and emotional state at a different time in my life.

I really don't need things to remind me of the past, but sometimes a thing, or smell, or taste can bring that past up quicker and closer than just mentally trying to regrasp it.  I can imagine the sound of Grandma in the kitchen stirring cookie batter with a stainless steel spoon in a heavy glass bowl, and the metallic tink can remind me of the warm sunlight streaming through the white bordered windows in the turquoise room and the smell of vanilla...

When I was laid off, I had a lot of time to relive those kinds of moments.  I liked to write about them, and it seemed like people liked to read them to remind them of their own memories.  Since I've been working all the time lately, now I enjoy hearing about other people's happy childhood memories because it's a short-cut to my happy feelings.

Different pictures flit through my mind of crayfish hiding under algae-covered rocks, Mom's Chanel #5, Dad carving in the garage, my sisters laughing in the yard, red Kool-aid... the pictures come and go in my mind without any real pattern or story, just the bits of color in the pattern of my life.

Today, I told friends about being pushed into a 3rd grade math class when I was still in 1st grade.  I cried when I told the principal "I'm not emotionally mature enough for 3rd grade!" and surprised myself today when my eyes filled with tears again.  Maybe I'll never be emotionally mature enough for 3rd grade?

In the grand scheme of things, this was a little moment -- but it was a first moment too.  The beginnings of feelings of being out of step with the world around me.  I think everybody has them in one way or another, and we don't always get to go back to first grade and learn to adjust as I had the chance to do, with friendly, happy kids accepting me back into their flock.

I don't know how to understand "beginning".  The world is infinite, and infinity is beyond me.  I don't know where the beginning of space or time or God is.  The acorn is the beginning of a tree, but it's a bit of the tree that dropped it, so maybe the beginning of the tree isn't the acorn or the whole line of acorns and trees before it, but something that is so far beyond my sense of reality that it all blurs into... okay, this is probably why I get told to quit thinking so much?

The word for the week is "beginning".  The feather was my beginning into blogging.  'Nuff said?

"Scattered" and a Giveaway!

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.

"Dusty"

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!

Scratchboard Feather

I love working with scratchboard, but it seems like a lot of people don't know what it is any more. It is a heavy paper coated with a clay-like surface with ink on top. The image is created by scratching off the ink to reveal the white surface below.

The thing I enjoy most about this technique is that it's like a treasure hunt. You have to look in the dark to bring your art to the light like digging up buried gold in a cave and bringing it into the sunshine.

I tend to do very detailed pieces with this method, but it has also been used to do very simplified wood block kinds of styles. It's a good method for reproduction and also a good method for coloring over the top of the finished piece.

This is my first attempt at blogging, and invite you to look at my website: http://www.artbyhensley.com/index.html for more samples of my work.