"Aquatic"

I am just a little fish in a big ocean.  My one vote doesn't count for much, but in this election the majority of Americans voted with me -- and we still lost the election.  One shark can take out a lot of fish which is why fish often swim together for protection.

I accept the results of the election, while wanting to smack some heads (bigly).  I fear for the future, especially when I hear Sara Palin's name being floated for the Secretary of the Interior.  Everything I value, education, women's rights, the environment, world peace, a stable economy, feels precarious.

Such is the way of American politics.  I had hoped for a sensible election, but there were an awful lot of Trump yard signs in Ohio.  I was afraid, and sadly, that fear was justified.  Candidates and voters have the ability to be inspiring or not.  Hopefully we can salvage things in 4 years, and I really hope many of the current idjits will be voted out in 2 years.

I don't have much confidence in President Trump, actually none, but I have to accept they get a turn to mess things up for a while.  The eternal optimist in me hopes that there's some chance the idjits might actually accomplish something worthwhile without causing Armageddon.  If end times come, I kind of hope I get blown up in the first wave instead of watching the painful disintegration of our republic and world.

Elizabeth Warren gave a speech that echoes many of my thoughts and feelings about the election.  She commits to helping Trump if he strives to work towards positive changes.  She also commits to fighting him every step of the way if he works against the values we hold dear.  I'm with Elizabeth all the way.  If she runs for president in 4 years, I will happily knock on doors and do whatever I can to make sure she is our first woman president -- which actually would bring me greater joy than Hillary being our first as Warren is inspiring, intelligent, knowledgeable, and ethical.

I know many people share my fears for the future.  After all, we are the majority.  We need to remember this next time we vote.  Sometimes a good can come from disappointment.  Until then, let's remember Michael Moore's advice which he wants us to start implementing now...

Take over the Democratic party

Fire the pundits and pollsters

Obstruct Republicans in Congress

Stop saying you're "shocked"

Repeat: "Clinton won the popular vote"

"Summer"

I went to Michigan last weekend.  I had multiple reasons for going, and on that list was the Detroit Institute of Art.  I've been hearing about how politicians want to sell the art to bail the city out of its financial distress, and I needed to see that art before they get a chance to do it.  The museum is wonderful and I recommend it to anyone who can make it there. 

It's a medium-sized museum that's pretty easy to get around in.  The art is organized in a rational way, except I wandered around a lot to find one of the paintings that I especially wanted to see.  And then... I had a moment.  I started mentally hyperventilating over a painting I practically saw by accident as I was stomping around trying to find that other painting.  This is a terribly crappy photo of the Titian painting that gave me palpitations.  It doesn't even show the red stroke of paint that flopped over itself in such an expressive, Impressionist-inspiring way.

I studied Titian in college.  Yawn.  I knew he's listed amongst the greats, but you just don't get that feeling when you're subjected to endless slides of stuff to memorize in college.  I felt a similar rush of understanding the first time I saw Van Gogh paintings in person.  (Which they also have in Detroit.)  I also saw a room entirely painted by Diego Rivera whom I had also underestimated in those endless slides of stuff I'm supposed to care about.  I didn't get all jelly-legged in the Rivera room, but I do appreciate him more now.  I've been reading about Rodin lately, and Detroit has a lot of his sculptures, including The Thinker...

And so on.  I could rhapsodize about art a lot more, but I had people to see and places to go since I made the grand journey to another state.  I was given the desolation tour after going to the museum.  "Look, nice houses!"  One block over, "Look!  Destruction!"  Back to nice houses, then over a block to see all the empty lots where houses used to be.  My tour guide was funny and I had a hard time thinking that the revegetation of Detroit is all bad.  They're even talking about bringing in goats as lawnmowers for all those empty lots.  Who doesn't love goats?

Michigan people are very nice, and I got some pleasure out of the fact that my new car got a little attention.  One guy asked me to pop the hood so he could look at the engine.  I'm told this isn't that unusual in Detroit, but it was new for me.  I bragged about my hybrid's gas mileage.  My car tells me my mpg every time I turn it off.  I've been averaging about 38-55, but so far my all time high is 104.9 miles per gallon :)

So with that kind of gas mileage, why not drive across the state and see Lake Michigan?  Which looks just like Lake Erie except the sun sets wrong.  I managed to cope by making sand animals.  Okay, this isn't quite illustration, and I've been meaning to apply myself more for Illustration Friday, but I did make art of a sort.  I also started a painting this week.  If it works out I'll post it here so you can see how Michigan can inspire creativity.

Last summer was a blur for me.  I worked non-stop and I'm determined not to waste another summer like that.  Summer is time for trips and fun!

"Underwater"

I often think that kids are too entertained.  My childhood was perfectly boring most of the time, and yet it gave me enough material to blog about week after week – and I’m mostly cherry picking happy stories.  What will today’s kids blog about when they spend their days glued to TVs?

One time a friend and I were talking, and I said that kids don’t spend any time in contemplation. Or maybe I said reflection, meditation, rumination, or something when her son popped out of his video game long enough to ask for a definition of the word.  We described it as having time to think about things in a quiet way.  “Yeah, I don’t want any of that!” he said, and went back to his video game.  We all laughed because he was funny, but I still hold to my original point.  We need quiet time to reflect.

I looked at “underwater” and thought about my perfectly boring childhood by the river, and thought that I have too many choices to just pick one.  There was the time my sister got caught under the ice, or when my brother almost drowned in a lake, or when the ice broke in the spring and the water rose so fast I had to turn around and run to get away from it.  There was the year the whole Glen was underwater in the spring flood, or the year the neighbor drowned by the dam, or the other neighbor committing suicide off the bridge and laid facedown in the river until my sister turned him over.  Or, when I read in a book about a spy breathing underwater through a hollow reed and I found my own reed and spied on teenaged boys – but the teenaged boys were kind of dull and I went off to catch crayfish or something instead.

Maybe if I’d had playmates I wouldn’t care about reflecting time, but since I had more time than I knew what to do with, I spent a lot of time thinking about stuff and observing.  I also had the freedom to run around and find stuff to observe since I wasn’t bothered with pre or post school scheduling and my parents severely limited TV time.

I picked up a long blue heron plume from the water one day and stuck it in my hat and felt like D’Artagnan.  I posed for my niece, and she complained that I always find all the good stuff.  I told her that it comes from looking.  See how the water moves?  See how things collect at certain places?  Rocks and heavy things will land there, and feathers and light things will land here.  Fish will collect beneath that rotten log leaning over that still water, and it’s a waste of time to cast into the fast current unless you let the current take your hook to where the fish live.

I talked to my mom once about intuition, and she wondered whether or not intuition is really just observation.  There might be some truth to that even though I don’t think it fully explains everything.  I noticed that my boss’ color was bad the morning she died.  She was a little gray-yellow, and had on a lot of makeup.  Nobody else noticed, and it didn’t tell me that she was about to die, but it did explain something to me once she was gone.  No one else noticed the color of her skin because they didn’t spend so many boring hours looking at water sliding by.

Observing is a big part of art, but it’s an art in itself.  The more you look, the more you see, and the more things you see, the more it informs your life and improves relationships.  Or helps you catch fish and find the best feathers.

"Ocean"

What am I supposed to write about oceans?  My ocean is a Great Lake.  It’s not even the greatest of the Great Lakes, and has a bad reputation for pollution – though we’ve done wonders in cleaning it up since the Cuyahoga River caught fire back when.

I used to argue with my college roommate about ocean vs. lake.  She said I hadn’t lived until I’d seen the ocean.  I told her Lake Erie was better than the ocean.  It doesn’t have scary Linda-eating things living in it like the limitless depths of the ocean.  The lake is fresh water and you can’t see across it.  It has seagulls and waves.  We’ve got ocean-sized ships, and the Coast Guard protects us from unruly Canadians – okay, I’m pretty sure the Coast Guard’s main job is rescuing drunk boaters since Canadians seldom get unruly, but it is an international border.  What was different about the ocean, and why did I need to go?

One summer I went to the ocean, she went to the lake, and afterwards we both exclaimed enthusiastically about how right the other was about ocean vs. lake.  It just goes to show that we can have more joys and fewer prejudices the more we get out and live in the world.

When we look at the world from a narrow perspective, we might not be able to tell what we’re really seeing.  Is that the eyeball of something that would rip off your leg, or is it just a baby fish?

From an artistic point of view, sometimes we forget to let viewers figure things out on their own.  We don’t have to spell everything out.  It can be really boring when we do.  It’s like writing a murder mystery where the author tells you upfront who got killed by whom and why, and then you read the story.  Or maybe you tell someone the punch line of a joke, and then you tell the joke.  Okay, I’ve done that.  Telling jokes is harder for me than painting.

Sometimes the joy of living is being willing to see something from a different perspective.  One time I was having dinner with an extended family, one of whom I didn’t like very much.  He was one of those bombastic blowhards who eats all the mashed potatoes before anybody else gets a turn.  My buddy at the other end of the table took a different slant on the conversation, and just to be companionable, I took the other.  At some point, I said he had completely convinced me that he was right.  My buddy said “No, no, you’ve convinced me!” and we traded sides of the argument.  The mashed potato eater didn’t understand us at all.

Every argument has two sides, and there’s usually something worthwhile in each of those sides.  When we forget that, we dig in our heels and we don’t know how to find a common ground any more.

I’ll be the first to admit that I can be stubborn.  If I have an opinion, it’s usually because I’ve thought it over.  If I accept someone else’s opinion, then I have to do a lot of rewiring in my brain, and that seems like an awful lot of work when I thought I already had that issue settled.  It starts throwing in more questions about what is actually true, but it’s something we all ought to learn to do more often.  What if you took the other side of the argument?

"Stir"

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?

"Artificial"

Anything artificial isn't real. It's false. It's a lie. It's a deception to fool us into thinking that orange drink is something like orange juice, even though it's full of sugar, chemicals, and manufactured vitamins.

I've tried a number of starts for this topic of the week, and found them all rather depressing. It's just my nature to look for honesty in people and things. I want to look for the good around us instead of being sucked into thoughts of artificial things created in China with plastic made possible with Middle Eastern oil -- which then gets shipped around the world for purchase at Wal-Mart. I don't want to think about artificial people either. You never really know where you stand with them. I'd rather hear unpleasant truths than try to figure out what someone else might be doing or saying behind the scenes.

Fishing flies are artificial in another way. They are created to mimic things fish want to eat. Creating them can be an art form in itself, and I started painting them instead of fishing after meeting a Japanese couple in Yellowstone. We didn't understand anything the other said, but the man showed off his fishing flies, which were exquisite faux grasshoppers and other bugs. I'd still go fishing if I were hungry enough, but I'd rather order fish at a restaurant off the menu than cut off somebody else's head.

This is watercolor with rice paper on the border. I'm hoping next week's word is something nicer like "natural".