Eating at Wangechi Mutu’s Table

I found this article incredibly satisfying- like eating someone's amazing home-cooked meal for my soul:

“Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It’s a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It’s also a way of remaining in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don’t know.”

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/wangechi-mutu-akademie-x-53414

Catching Up

She brought along her reading material to catch up on in the light of the old farm house windows. She turned on the forced air heating, his heating bills be damned.  The bottle of brandy was quickly replaced when I pulled out the last of the reception champagne, chilled as it was. Then we drank stiff, hot coffee from the thermos and she held me for the few minutes that I cried. 

Unfurling

Tight buds tip the bare limbs of the Chestnut trees along Putah creek; their smooth boughs pull up into puckered green.  Spring waits, holding its breath.  

The passage below resonated with me this week as I painted a series of images of my dog in motion for the Natsoulas Gallery BARK show next month.  I was drawn to a few photos I took of Moses as he was alerted to the house's front windows.  His young body twisted and tightened from a playful lop into a purposeful, masterly stride.  

The first two paintings came easily, speaking of hitting a stride. Though this is new territory for me - attempting to narrate moving flesh and bones- so I'm far from expertise or mastery or any great confidence in the idea that there is a Great, Grand Usefulness to my work, all of which is credited in the following description of a person's blossoming. What I do identify with in this passage is that, when I do my best painting often there a sense that I am opening myself, I am connecting to ideas and energies that are inclusive of me but also bigger than me. I become more open to the world, sensing a confidence to be there more freely, to take it in and participate in it without feeling entirely overwhelmed or overtaken.  Even in the face of a challenge or new experience such confidence and connection is grounding, offering me the feeling that I am at the right place at the right time. 

May this be my spring. 

Something about her. Something over the week had grown and flowered, something hibernating in the canyon had come out into the sunlight and liked what it saw. Hard to explain.

...No doubt there was expertise, an easy competence that needed no thought, a return to a hard won usefulness that make her to me seem bigger. I don't know taller, broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. But it was something more too. As if the arrival [here]... as alien as it was from anyplace she had lived before... as if it were an arrival she had been preparing for. For a long time without knowing it. Maybe. I don't know. Seemed that way to me. As if part of her relaxed, as if there were a shucking of some old skin. A husk of herself that had been a barrier I hadn't even been aware of. And in the sloughing off, she opened and flowered. Corny, huh? Not really. Magical. I mean to watch a person let go of something and flower. 

from Heller, Peter. "Dog Stars". New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 309-310. Print.

Motion

My second painting goal for the new year is to continue exploring the idea of motion.  How, in a still image, do we represent the more common experience of moving through our scenes? If you think about all the paused videos we encounter as thumbnail images on our various social media sites, or even how our camera phones are now taking brief videos with each photo, seeing action and expecting it from a 2D space will be all the more common.

I also think that exploring place will give me a buoy as I flounder in the rougher waters that figurative work is for me.  So, here I present the underpainting for a piece based on an evening coming home from the Capay Valley. We'd spent a lovely afternoon with friends, and I left them with the desire to not be leaving at all.  As I wistfully watched the miles roll between, I also watched the storm barrel over the mountains and drench the place we'd just been. This, dedicated to the joy I find in the "McSchneidly" family. 

Coffee and Cigarettes

Next, underpainting.

One Woman Down

This week I took the plunge. I'm diving into my new series: women and windows.  Another time I will explain why I'm drawn to this pairing. But most immediately, my challenges are physically intimidating: How do I get models? How do I help the models and myself survive the exposure? How does one paint a body? How will I paint them so they speak my words, my feelings? Will my abilities to represent both of these things contribute any thought to the world?  

But then again, painting is turning out to be one of those things that I'd rather do badly then to not do at all.  And, I have to say, I'm also looking forward to the laughter. Are we agreed on this? Any time naked bodies and learning are entwined there's going to be some humorous stories to take away. 

So, my first strokes in these deep waters confirm my ideas that THIS whole thing is going to be a challenge. Nevertheless I'm swimming out. Roethke said, "I learn by going where I have to go." It's my IEP.

Degas inspires me with: "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things." May it be so.  

I decided to show my very first attempt just to be humble, to make visible how "you do not have to be good".  And also, I hope that we can all see over time that I will at the very least get BETTER.  I do, after all, have some pride. With that lowering of expectations, may I introduce the process of getting down my first woman. 

On the New Year: "to make and end is to make a beginning"

I wriggled haphazardly onto the hook of T.S. Elliot's work, held out by lines of the expert fisherman* Peter Heller. With hindsight, I may be able to tell you I recognized the lure, a titillatingly tied fly that I bit on like a hungry, small fry. But it doesn't matter, both men's work make for mighty fine meals. I swallowed Heller's hook, line, sinker and the caboodle, and gladly got reeled up into the fresh air of the Four Quartets. And it's my own prompt drowning that I mean to imply, for what else does fresh air do for a fish? 

Nevertheless, it was a great, small and short death. You know how it is, to bite into a slice of your own heaven: with some degree of unconsciousness, you pull off the shelf your favorite book or movie, despite the dizzying array of choice; or before you even realized you yourself punched their numbers, you sigh with the pleasure of hearing your friends' voices on the line; or after setting off for an adventure you find yourself setting foot on your favorite, familiar trail. Sometimes we are our own Rupelstilzkin's; we spin and weave our own gold, or at least we know where to find it in a place, or with a love, buried in wonderful words, soaring in music, seen in a painting, I dare suggest.  When you go into such a Counting House,  of course you go in expecting something good, but you always come out bearing a treasure of such weight that even you are surprised. 

Well this was my latest haul.  

In The Painter, Peter Heller quoted four lines from Little Gidding, the last poem that Elliot meant, with its salvific themes, to summarize his Four Quartets (1942). But Little Gidding also works to summarize and outline an exit strategy from my own late year. Sure, it's already 2016 but still I'm in need of some summary of What Just Happened and some perspective on the Days to Come. 

The last two months alone of my 2015 were so full: the opening and closure of the Skylines series; both my children's birthdays; the Paris attacks; the most recent tallying of mass shootings for the year in the United States alone- that are never far enough from my front door; holding my son through long days and nights as he was the sickest he's ever been in his short life, doing the same a few days later for my daughter; my choice to rearrange over half the furniture in my house and and all its inhabitants to establish a more secure studio area for myself; then pulling on, what I'm finding to be the dregs of, the Skylines themes to complete the last few commissions; finally, there were these little blips called The Holidays which required some gift wraps and bubbling drinks, and allowed for an amazing get-away and all-too-swift return thanks to an ambitious jet-stream.  

But regarding the Days to Come and my work specifically, what am I looking at? The emotions that pulled me all last year to the Skyline images are lingering but taking on new forms, and ironically there's some anxiety over moving on from them and seeing what they'll become. I handle transitions about as well as my kids. They're a bitch. Yet there's a welling up of hope and excitement as I approach this new year and new work.  I know it's all a tidal system: the ideas come and go, as does the peace; there's a shifting and pulling but the waters' wells are deep, and dilution happens ever so minutely; sometimes turbulent, some times green; sometimes blue, sometimes serene; and with the storms roll up new shells, weeds, even corpses. 

Speaking of weeds and corpses, if you are one of my local friends, you'll be sharing my sights of all the deadheaded grasses along the canals and the bare-limbed trees, some left behind by the drought. These days we luxuriate and dare to hope with the rain and chill, but still in amazement afresh since just weeks ago we were languishing in the dry heat and bleating electric road signs for water conservation (where have THOSE gone, by the way?); the return of spring we anticipate fairly shortly, and perhaps gladly already. Like the landscapes around here- the way the land and sky holds the heat or retains a frosty coolness- we are never far from one season or the next. So too, the visiting joys and sorrows of one year alter their form and knock again. Like Girl Scouts' cookies and their order forms.

So, it's with a wiser-Scrooge-like nod to the latest events and expectations of repeated themes, that I offer you these excerpts from Little Gidding to tempt you into looking up it up in its entirety for yourselves. 
 

Midwinter spring is its own season

... When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, 

... In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing

The soul's sap quivers...

...If you came this way, 

Taking the route you would be likely to take

From the place you would be likely to come from, 

If you came this way in may time, ...

...It would be the same at the end of the journey, 

If you came at night like a broken king, 

If you came by day not knowing what you came for, 

It would be the same, ...

... what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

... Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfillment. ... 

But this is the nearest, in place and time, 

...If you came this way, 

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season, 

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. ...

... In the uncertain hour before the morning

Near the ending of interminable night

At the recurrent end of the unending

...I met one walking, loitering and hurried

...I said: "The wonder that I feel is easy, 

Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: 

I may not comprehend, may not remember." 

And he: "I am not eager to rehearse

My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten. 

These things have served their purpose: let them be. 

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

By others, as I pray you to forgive

Both bad and good. ...

... For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

...See, now they vanish, 

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, 

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. 

Sin is Behovely, but

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, ...

... All touched by a common genius,

United in the strife which divided them; 

If I think of a king at nightfall,

... And a few who died forgotten

In other places, here and abroad, 

And of one who died blind and quiet, 

Why should we celebrate

These dead men more than the dying?

Who then devised the torment? Love. 

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make and end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

.... We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. 

... Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always-- 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well
 

*For whom fishing, is a particularly fitting metaphor, if you read his work. 

On Being Good

To Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" I do not need, nor should I,  add anything more than these words by way of encouraging all of us who set out to do what we love.  May it be a salve to our doubt, a buoy to our faith.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes, 
over the prairies and the deep trees, 
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, 
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
the world offers itself to your imagination, 
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

 I may suggest that her words are even better when read by Mary herself. 

On Truth & Honesty

It's been over a year of painting a lot of wires and sun-related skies. Now, I'm ready to do some naked people. I mean, ready to paint them. I mean ready to paint images OF them. And a few other ideas are in my mind. It's not that I feel that I've conquered the wire + sky business, but more a matter of needing new scenes. "As the world turns", I'll be exploring similar ideas but with new images. That's all it will come down to most likely.  But last week I found myself sweating under my hair net trying to whip up another batch of dawn/dusk and protruding pole combo with trees on the side.  Not to say there wasn't joy in yea ol' journey, but working on this piece took some particular, peculiar concentration. It's a curve ball thrown in the game to do something I love, but with ambivalence. Maybe like agreeing to a coffee with an old sex-object?

Lullabye, in progress. The underpainting. 

Lullabye, in progress. Mid-way through it got a little too winter-bare scary and cold. I liked this version quite a lot, but didn't want this sadness to go live with the paintings' intended family.

I conjured up some pretense in the end, letting there be a more brilliant, warmer color and precision to the silhouetted set of trees and softening the grasses along the tracks. 

Lullabye. 2015. Oil on Panel. 24 x 36 inches. sold.

I've already told you about reading "The Painter".  Here I offer an excerpt from a scene in which the main character, Jim Stegner, a professional painter and his girlfriend are considering the "trend" of southwestern paintings that typically include blue coyotes.  This scene speaks to my current feeling about having painted wires and sunrises/sunsets for over a year.  It also illuminates a bigger idea of why I think some things/relationships/stories/images work and others do not: our ability to empathize. Finally, I like this passage because I simultaneously nod along with Jim and laugh at him along with Sofia, his girlfriend. She starts off here:

"Look, look you big lug. This one. Stand here. No, here. Close you eyes. Now imagine there had never been a blue coyotes in the world. There was water, there was darkness, there was the Void, and then the Word and then there was a blue coyote! Voila!"

She poked me. "You can open your eyes now."

"Oh, sorry."

She was sort of right. To me. It was a good painting. That's probably how it happened for Heberto Nunez-Jackson. He painted the first one out of the Void and it was really compelling and he did it again and it was also pretty good and he got addicted to that relationship with Creation: him, the darkness, the coyote, blue. And the red moon broke his own heart one day. I got it. And then you have a habit and all you ever wanted in the world was to feel this thing about what you create, and then presto your coyote paintings begin to sell like hotcakes. And the people in the ski lodges and big adobe houses who buy them don't really care if their blue coyote has a hundred cousins, maybe they actually like it, it makes them feel part of a trend, a phenomenon in art that is repeatedly reinforced. And so everybody is happy.

"What do you think?" she said, standing before [the painting] and gesturing with her hand like a game show model. "The only, the first. Look! The composition, the color. It's really good. How is it different than a thousand of your Diebenkorn Ocean Park paintings?"

I looked. 

"It just is."

"Ohhhh, snobbism. I never, ever thought I'd see that in Jim Stegner."

"Not a snob. I believe in truth. Which is also excellence, by the way."

She narrowed her eyes at me. "You mean raw, clumsy honesty is the same as excellence?"

"I didn't say that. Truth needs excellence. Honesty is not the same same truth."

"Huh." She frowned, willing, maybe, to give me the benefit of the doubt for at least a split second.

"Truth needs honesty, but that is not all it needs."

"Speak."

"Well, an artist can be honest in her rendition of say a hummingbird, in how she sees it, in her application of technique, but she may not be true to the bird."

"You mean in skill?"

"In skill, in her ability to see. To really see the bird. To see the bird as it bears its spirit forward into the world. In empathy. When all of that is there you can feel it. It knocks you over."

"Huh."

"There is something in even this coyote, this dawn of the world Genesis coyote, that is not true. He did not see into the heart of the coyote. And so I reject it. That is not snobbism."

"Huh." She smiled at me. She said: "He speaks, who knew? He's sort of a guru."

"You didn't think I had opinions on art?"

"Pretty much I just saw you as a sex object," she said.

"Hah!"

Heller, Peter. The Painter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 229-230. Print.

On Doubt & Faith

Over my Christmas vacation I had a little reading party.  I took pleasure in the company of Jim Stegner, title character in the novel "The Painter" by Peter Heller.  Simultaneously, Jane Hirshfield and her poem also muscled past the doorman to join my fray.  Together, they made for a heady crew, with whom I stare at the end of 2015.

So here's to my fellows at the pity-party. Cheers, with these two readings:

Nobody, not even artists, understood art. What speed has to do with it. How much work it takes, year after year, building the skills, the trust in the process, more work probably than any Olympic athlete ever puts in because it is twenty-four hours a day, even in dreams, and then when the skills and the trust are in place, the best work usually takes the least effort.  Usually. It comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand, they don't understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go. But now, sometimes the best work is agony. Pieces put together, torn apart, rebuilt. Doubt in everything that has been learned, terrible crisis of faith, the faith that allowed it all to work. Oh God. And even then, through this, if you survive the halting pace and the fever, sometimes you make the best work you have ever made. That is the part none of us understand.

 

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and love, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious? What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that life is art. Well. Cut us some slack. It's harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person. 

So anyway, best not to tell even your dealer that some masterpiece took you a few hours. (Heller, Peter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. 310-313. Print.)

 

My Doubt, Jane Hirshfield

I wake, doubt, beside you,
like a curtain half-open.

I dress doubting,
like a cup
undecided if it has been dropped.

I eat doubting,
work doubting,
go out to a dubious cafe with skeptical friends.

I go to sleep doubting myself,
as a herd of goats
sleep in a suddenly gone-quiet truck.

I dream you, doubt,
nightly—
for what is the meaning of dreaming
if not that all we are while inside it
is transient, amorphous, in question?

Left hand and right hand,
doubt, you are in me,
throwing a basketball, guiding my knife and my fork.
Left knee and right knee,
we run for a bus,
for a meeting that surely will end before we arrive.

I would like
to grow content in you, doubt,
as a double-hung window
settles obedient into its hidden pulleys and ropes.

I doubt I can do so:
your own counterweight governs my nights and my days.

As the knob of hung lead holds steady
the open mouth of a window,
you hold me,
my kneeling before you resistant, stubborn,
offering these furious praises
I can’t help but doubt you will ever be able to hear.

Oh, for the Love of Door

Here's a little story about why I gave myself a door for Christmas.

It took me about two seconds into this business of painting to learn that it would be best done with some distance between my work and the world. What I would need, at the most basic of levels, is at least a cushion between what I make and its hapless audience, a broadcast delay  de facto, a moment in which I can throw in a censor bleep or a toss up a cascade of those SMPTE color bars when things go to total ruin. Believe it or not a corner in a bedroom or a garage does offer much room for any of that.

More than having room for correction, I want room for obvious error. I want to explore the territory where I would be ok with ruined things, and allow the ruins to stand, to use them as the pavers for the way forward.  The next steps in this risky business warrant a little privacy.  A solid-core door would come into play. That's the philosophy any way.  It was the practicality that won out in the end though. I needed to protect the children. I needed a swear-muffler, and that's really how my door came to be.

Yep, I swore VERY loudly in front of my 5 year old. Why did I swear in front of this oft-time cherub? Upon knocking a wet painting face down in my garage studio space at the beginning of this month, did I employ such an apt word. The painting was rounding the corner of completion when I pushed it down inadvertently with the garage door. Why was I opening the door? Only in trying to get my little boy out to practice riding his bike, only in trying to be a good mother. Nothing more powerful than a mother-artist's true loves to make the cuss words rain.

Down the painting went onto dry leaves. Down it went onto the scattered cat litter. Down it went onto the broken glass and puddling mineral spirits. Yes, it wasn't content to go alone. It brought down with it a jar of lethal liquid as it slammed through a pile of expensive alizarin crimson pigment on the palette's corner. Up went my adrenaline levels. To the depths went my vocabulary.

No depth sufficed. There is not a bad enough word to describe how it feels to me this month to loose any amount of evidence that I may have made some slight progress as a painter. No word bad enough to describe the conflict between wanting to work and wanting to be a good mother. What worse waste is there than to pay for a day's work, at any expense to my children, only see the work fall to the floor? I measure out any painting at all, and measure it in such preciously small amounts, and equally carefully I calculate the worth of what I can give my children. No, not a bad enough word to summarize what it means to squeeze in minutes of work between children's fevers and playdates, to stay up all night even when they are well and make mac n' cheese suffice for dinner just to allow myself to get some work done. And to have that work fall on the garage floor. 

As quietly and slowly as only a crazed woman can be, I then asked my son to please go in while Mommy cleans up. At this point, I wasn't sure if it was the loud cuss word or the following erie calm that impressed him most but he scrammed and fast. And I'm not sure exactly what he said to her, but he impressed his sister with his story and they... stayed... out ... of .... my ....way.  Jaw clenched, I cleaned up the shards and wiped blood red out of a pure yellow sky. Then in the most chipper voice I could muster, I gave the kids the all-clear and invited them out to ride bikes. And then, sweet Jesus, if the boy didn't go on to make fucking progress on learning to ride his fucking bike that afternoon, then I'm a monkey's ass.

Now you know, the final straw in deciding to take over my daughter's room as an art studio (just for a little while) was my own swearing. Mommy needed a muffler. It's a safe bet that I will end up using foul language much longer than I will use my daughter's room. So, kids, I may have packed up your beds into storage, given away some of your toys, made you share a room but I'm doing this for you. For your own good. Mommy needed a door.

So that's a little bit about that scene. Kids may have been harmed in the making of this story, but in the end they love their bunk beds, which they'd been begging for anyway.

Winter Work

I'm pleased to end this year painting a few commissioned pieces.  Two of these were designed in particular for nostalgia. The other painting is just about color and delight. This last one is a Christmas present that he is desperately trying to keep a surprise. Any suggestions for how to hang a painting surreptitiously on Christmas morning?  

"Courage, dear heart"

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. ~Anaïs Nin

Dawn Flight, in progress. 2015. Oil on panel. 23 x 50 inches. SOLD

Humbled

In the weeks leading up to my show's reception, anxiety crept in and put me in a choke hold. This wasn't the annoying bear hug variety my big brother used to give, followed by a noogie but all delivered violently and released quickly because, we don't want this to look like he's hugging his stupid sister. No, not that kind of choke hold. THIS anxiety took the sort of hold you might associate with straight jackets, a numbed neurotic state, and confinement in pale, padded rooms with soft moans filtering through the walls, but wait, not filtering through the walls, coming out of your own parted, pallid lips.  Yeah. That kind.

I couldn't paint. I couldn't write. I didn't want to talk about the show. I didn't want to see the work in the gallery. I didn't want to set the actual menu or grocery shop or even make any of that promised food. I didn't want to show up. Frankly, I was paralyzed with fear at the thought of being in the SAME room at the SAME time as you AND my work. It was the combination that was lethal. Like waking up especially early AND waking up to find no coffee in the house. Both are very survivable conditions, but please dear god, may they never occur simultaneously.

But back to this art thing. Sure, I like to be with my work. Sure, I like to be with you. But really, the two shouldn't meet up for a mixer. Because- and here's the news flash- you don't have to like my work and you just might not!  Sharing a room with you AND my work seemed synonymous with performing amazing feats of pleasantries and magical tricks with euphemisms all to avoid the possibility that once you've seen my work you're going to have to hate me.

And only because I had promised, did I finally drag myself into the gallery for the first time a full week after the show was hung.  I was thankful to mostly be alone and with strangers. Few people who came in knew that the awkward lady standing in the room had made the work. What a relief to be anonymous, to not have to respond. I could pose as if a fellow observer, nod my head as if in quiet, calculated consideration of their comments.  I could collude with "Yes, what was she thinking?!" or "Hmm, yeah, that is rather neat-o. Take a pic!" Or, I could act as if I was just there for the free wine. 

But the next night. The next night I couldn't act. The next night, the room was filled with YOU. Familiar faces flooded, the introductions tripped of my tongue of the most important people in my life. My mind dizzied with the efforts people made to come out, vision astounded by surprise arrivals: You came?! You! And you! My hands busied with a hug here, a hail and hearty thump there on that shoulder, a pull of cheeks close for kissing. Into my ears poured the richness of "so good to see you," "how are you", "I'm so glad you're here", lyrics of our alliances, refrains of shared histories. Suddenly I realized the whole night was about YOU.  Let's be honest, nobody was really talking about the work. 

It wasn't all about me. It... the reception for this work... was about you. I'm not trying to make you self-conscious here. I'm still definitely talking about myself. What mattered most in the room was the work I had made with you, our relationships.  Our conversations were about neighbors and small worlds, and swimming practice and necklaces, and new houses and children, and vacations, and holiday stress eating and fly fishing and birdwatching and the weather... all of this in a continued effort to be connected.

I had to look up from my navel gazing. To keep on would have required the worst of pride, the vainest of egos. I had to abandon that adolescent self who, even in the limelight of an admiring gaggle might persist in whining "Oh my gawd, how's my outfit?! If he doesn't just totally go for me, then like I'm going to just totally die!" (And here, I'm totally fantasizing since as an adolescent I was only ever in the gaggle, not the limelight.) Heads up, Ditz-for-Brains, I wanted to shout as I did in high school. All these people love you!  It was a shocking, jolting, humbling thought to realize that what you cared about that night was me, and all that I cared about was you.  The art just sort of hung around.

Speaking of my pride and my ego followed by the verb humbling, let me clarify that I'm not implying that I was let down by the reception. In fact, I'm sure it didn't do much of anything to knock me down a notch or two.  Believe me, just painting and writing about my painting was enough exposure to chop me off at the knees. And if that wasn't enough to cut me down to size, being a mother surely is. My inadequacies were laid bare long ago.

So, more simply what I mean when I say I am recently humbled is that I was (re)acquainted with where I belong in the grand scheme of things; I am grounded, but I am not necessarily eating dirt*.  Being with you all during the evening of the reception reminded me of my place.  My place is with you. My place... my kitchen table, the gallery..... having it filled with you, is what truly matters.  So, thank you for helping me out of the Pain Cave, the padded room of my anxiety.  I'm glad to be with you. And thank you for letting my art hang out with us too.

*An important distinction, as you'll recognize that like human, humble has the Latin root humus, for "ground" or "earth". Cool. I just let my OED Freak Flag fly.

A Night to Remember

What could kick start a better celebration than filling the house inside and out with loved ones?!

Even my grandmother (upper left in black and white) was able to come!

Heaven: a beer in hand; a kitchen full of food and friends! Disregard what may look like a pained facial expression. What was more likely was that I was actually singing a hymn here.

Because there's not adequate words to really describe her, I'll simply say, here is my best friend Carla.

On to the business of the evening: the venerable John Natsoulas at work.

Friends of all generations! 

She did an interpretive dance for my joy!

Was I explaining again how my 4 year old thought my pants were ridiculous? "Mom, THAT is not an outfit!" he declared after I'd dressed for the reception. See Son, there are are a few things you need to know about your mother's fashion sense...

Speaking of women who DO live and breath elegance: here I am honored to stand beside Judith Kays, a fabulous art educator and critic who has been working in the Bay Area for over 50 years.  She wrote the in depth analysis of my work for the catalog.

A dear decade-long friend who voyaged many hours to surprise me with her attendance! My daughter, who got to stay up past her bedtime!

My father (left) the reception's caterer and original underwriter. And my husband (right), the more current financier. 

why do I paint?

It feels like the right thing to be doing.

At Harbor

Untitled, in progress. 2015. Oil on panel. 18 x 24 inches. 

People fear leaving their safe harbor of the known and venturing off into the unknown. Human beings crave certainty- even when it limits them. ~Robin S. Sharma

I like food. Come to the show!

All of the Skyline series are framed, stacked, and waiting to be hung at the gallery.  

The catalog is written, the invitations mailed.

In preparation of fine appetizers for the opening reception, I'm already in the 4th turn of my Danish- scratch that- my local dairy butter-based pastry dough.

Um, well, not so much on that last bit. But in my consultations with Saveur, Martha, Pinterest and all other Google suggestions for fantastic finger foods, that's probably where I need to be at this point if I'm going to be ready in time to meet you with ma' bells on!

I've got my paper bag... thinking I'll be wearing that over my head when I greet you. I'm assuming you'll hear the bells tinkling, so you'll know it's me.  Yes, I'm nervous!  And when I'm nervous I like to eat, and think of eating. Where else in the world can one be nervous and eat so well as in middle-class, mid-valley California?!  We live in <bleeping> Produce-Mecca, I say, Bring on the nerves!

Come see if I meet my expectations for extreme-local food, the perfect pastry, and elegant bag-wearing: at the John Natsoulas Gallery on 2nd Street; the party starts at 7pm on Saturday November 14th!  

If you want to just see the paintings and not count my puff pastry's layers, pop in anytime between November 4th and December 5th. 

Empty Nest, revisited

I learned something exquisite: it does matter to me where my works go. Knowing they're in a good place is such a relief!  Maybe it's like visiting your kid at college, checking out the dorm, the bunkmates, the boyfriend, seeing that she's eating enough, and finding out that it's all really going great for her.  You can go home to the quiet that still seems surreal and have some sweet relief.  

The Buddah-Wanna-Be who lives in my belly mutters tones of acceptance and peace like a monk leading a retreat, but believe you me, there's plenty of other voices, sometimes quiet sometimes loud: a strident protestor; a sad miser with a hungry dog at her feet. They sit on the temple steps waving their posters or approach visitors with their clipboards:

What are the chances her work ends up in the dumpster during a remodel? If you could go back and make that financial choice again would you: a) take a trip to Pittsburg this winter; b) choose to go to Disneyland; or c) have three great sessions with your therapist?  Or, where would you most like to see this work: at PG&E headquarter's lobby or as playing cards?

A couple weeks ago I received a text from sweet friends who sent a photo of two of my works propped casually on the gallery floor with this precious title: these are all ours! xoxoxo. The instant I read that my whole being lifted in joy. It really did.  

For longer I've know that a few pieces are going to other friends' homes: two are full of children and their morning scrabbles and evening snuggles; other homes are quiet, including one that holds two of the most accepting, wise, and curious people I know. These purchases were more foreshadowed, and also the presence of commissioned pieces are loitering. While very gratified, when I stare at a blank panel with full consideration of the homes and lives of the people for whom I work, my efforts take on an intensified determination: oh please, let this be my offering that adds meaning to their lives. 

However swiftly they happen, the moves of my works into these loved ones' homes comes with peace and certain joy for me.  I find myself imagining what the paintings will be experiencing and feel blessed that there is a piece of me that will share in that: my toes stand in the tide as waves of love roll off these people's hugs at their doors; when they speak kindly to one another, certainly the warmth will radiate into my corner; when a child laughs with surprise or when guests listen with rapt curiosity, I too share in the energetic gusts.  A piece of me will bear it when tears and rage fly.  I'll be collecting the dust as their skins wear off in the day to day bustle of life.  What better place to let pieces of myself live, than in the midst of these people who I love? To know where some of myself IS does matter.  

The rest I have to let go. Like a farewell blessing for my college kid who's set on globe-trotting- maybe I should kiss each piece when it leaves my garage. Maybe I'll get a postcard, maybe not. Maybe she'll call at Christmas. I pray he doesn't get hurt. I pray that someone loves them and they feel loved.

Rain Makers

Now that the Skylines series is "in the bag", I feel a little dizzy. What to focus on next? Actually I have a pretty clear vision of Women and Windows, but until I lure some friends into the frame and work up the nerve to tackle figurative work*, I'm keeping my eyes still on the sky and land. 

The above image is from a walk I took with my camera a couple of weeks ago- when my curiosity finally met the opportunity to photograph irrigation in Yolo. Instead of hindsight, I thought it might be fun to offer forethought here in describing my creative process. These images may or may not enter my paintings, but here's what has caught my eye.  I like so much about these massive sprinklers: the arcing, veiling blurs connecting sky and land; the flimsy, filmy textures of the water meeting with the dark, hungry earth; the concepts behind this "rain"; and since October is the Month of Haunting Grief at our house, the concept of rows and rows of such clouds spoke to my mood of Rain by Patty Griffin.

Friends, peace be with you, and hold on. 

*Funny story and some disclose: a bit of my trepidation about including figures in my painting has to do with simple inexperience.  I haven't done much/haven't had a lot of opportunity to paint the flesh.  I mean, honestly, how would you approach someone if you're as socially-awkward, child- and economy-centric as I am: Erm, um, hey, can you sit here on this chair for a few minutes? For free, please? Um, I was sort of picturing doing this naked- I mean, YOU not having clothes on. I'm mean I'll keep mine on, but you know? Er, um, now, don't move ok?  Hey, don't MOVE. Oh, you got a text. Is that the babysitter texting you? It's mine? Oh crap, it's mine! Move! Move! 

Sometime, if there's ever a spare bottle of Allagash's Curieux to share, I'll tell you the more full, curious story of my first and only Figure Drawing class. In short, I was a wide-eyed 19 year old and had no idea that figure implied "nude". Certainly the latter wasn't printed in my small, Christian college's course catalog. Maybe there was something in my facial expression, coming in late to the first class nonetheless, upon seeing..... for the first time ever in my life..... a nude man, ...uncut... on a pedestal. I mean, you agree it would make an impression on a young soul, right?! Something in my demeanor, ever so slight I like to think, made my professor pull me aside.  And no, this wasn't a casual "You cool?" check in at the end of the session.  Oh no, this was a special meeting with the head of the department who, poor man, had been tasked with doing a "post-mortem/pick up the pieces of this innocent" during the following week. The faculty probably drew straws.  The only other time of I was asked to depict the human form was in the next year when I faced, palette in hand, a middle-aged primapara female. Since I fiercely hated my own body at the time, it was hard to accept the challenge of painting worn and tired-out breasts. It was sort of like an illustration that things were going to go from bad to worse.  Like I said, more details would be laughable over an Allagash, or sure, Maker's Mark if I have to.