Where We Are/I am Now

I’m shocked to see that it has been nearly 2 years since my last post here. This is because my life has been taken up with sustaining a restaurant business in covid and now post-covid times, and caring for my 88-year-old mom. Not much time for creative work. That is if you see these responsibilities as non-creative. Takes me back to the days of having small children and grabbing a few moments for creativity while sitting at a soccer field, waiting for a traffic light to turn, in between delicious but exhausting attentions to my kids. And my mom. And my husband and business partner. And my yard. And a little yoga and maybe a walk in the neighborhood. Mostly housework. I carried a ziplock with blank index cards and pencils. I drew quickly, boldly, greasy with graphite and smeary from erasures. I drew figures, mostly, and then started to take photos. On the run. The abstractions of the places I waited, the streets, the fields. I loved the stripes on the tracks! So emerged an active creative life made from tiny moments, strung together, binding the years. The aloneness of covid quarantine inspired the small books, made easy on my photocopier, bound easy with thread, and sent around the world. To date, I have made 4 different books and sent about 500 of each out via regular mail. A made thing in the hand. I’m due for an envelope addressing session to get the last of Book 4 out, and mulling the content of Book 5. Just wanted to share a bit of how a tiny creative life can be, and how it can blossom and sustain. I do dream daily of a bigger life; I do have terrible fits of jealousy, envy, feelings that I am not really doing “it”, and not really an artist. You’re an artist by the way you see the world, my Dad would tell me. I’d say, yeah right. What about the gallery shows? You know, the dream demon, the awful self-talk. The destroyer. Seeing Wild, that’s my mantra now. Thanks, Dad. 27 years gone but giving me solid advice every day.

A day tHey call xmaS


25 December 2020

On a walk yesterday I got a solid view on how my heart is now: protected by coils and secured by straps, completely and nakedly exposed to all elements, landing, floating, incoming from above. I’m hoping this period of extreme fear and anxiety lays the groundwork for a more radical, determined opening, a font of delicate, genuine expressions of love and thankfulness for the chance to try. Try to say it, show it, try to stay attentive and highly sensitive. That’s my hope once we survive covidtimes. 

2020: Nothing Like We Expected

While I have never wished for time to hustle by faster (except maybe when I was a kid and always wanted to be older), this year of covid, well, I think we all wish it was in the rearview.

In spite of all the chaos, sadness and serious loss on all fronts (maybe because of it), these months in quarantine and constant worry have been highly creative for me. The absolute falling away of activities outside the home, away from the studio has stitched the hours and the days together in a way that, turns out, I desperately needed in order to get anything done.

My natural rhythm is to work on various projects at once, moving from desk to drafting table to photo studio to sewing machine. For many years I thought this was a sign of weakness, indecision, ambivalence; now I see it as a sign of strength. I have a lot of languages and I like to use them all, practice, get more fluent. Only in my artist fantasy life did I sit at one thing for days, weeks, months, years until some masterful behemoth of a piece was complete. My real life? Nothing at all like that!

The laundry has to get done and I prefer to do it when my head is flipping thoughts around, not when I have a precious portion of time to let thinking become doing become making become thinking again. Same with watering the plants, cleaning the sink, vacuuming, giving the toilet a scrub. I’ll fit it in when I need to get up because my butt is sore. I’ll do it when it becomes the one thing that must get done today.

Remove all the trips out of the house, and there is far more time to appoint to the important things, to the creative process, to the busy mind that (seldom) rests inside my head, to the deep emotional intelligence that lives inside me. Finally, thanks in part to the pandemic, I am staying put long enough to hear myself think, and to begin speaking out loud.

Quarantine Time

Looking at the date of the last post, I see it is just days before the Governor declared the state of emergency due to pandemic. Regarding the stay-at-home order the artist part of me said, OK, no problem. I started cleaning. The business owner part, with 6 restaurants at that, not so much. In fact, along with the rest of the world, a total lightening strike to all that we had done and known and thought about in terms of the future. Gone. Pizza, however, proves its’ magic once again. We were able to pivot immediately and stay open and so far we’ve survived. Much changed, but open for business, people coming to work, baking and delivering pizza to people. With all our collective might we deal with unprecedented challenges every day. Two days ago a man fell into and onto the floor of our Pearl restaurant, hurt badly but not bleeding (rubber bullets?) then fifteen police officers converged around him and they all left. Our already traumatized staff took the rest of the night off.

Along with many artist friends, I have not been much use in the studio. Though I spend entire days in my studio (doubles as a yoga spot. I move the furniture every day), I can’t seem to concentrate for long and flit from forgetful thing to garden work to cleaning house. Sweeping my front porch, something I have never done on the regular. I feel lethargic, tired, dry on ideas and asking, what can I make (besides masks and face shields - been doing that), what might be of any interest or importance to anyone, what might help get us, or just little me, through a disaster like this Spring of 2020? After 10 weeks in quarantine, a trickle of picture making returned. It is the Guardian Angel series, now called, Guardians and Guides; the figures that populate, that seep out of the air and onto the paper.

I have been disturbed for a few years now by the pen and ink process I use to draw/paint. Because the process is reductive, the space around the figure becomes defined, shaping the figure. I guess it’s the classic figure/field tussle. In any case, the figures end up clean paper, that is, white as the paper. Does this make them all white people? Is it possible for the black and white media to transcend literalness? I am sure that can be/has been done, but I am also sure that I am not that good an artist. The possibility of my figures being read as white makes me shudder and keeps me from sharing the images. Use colored paper, people say. Generally, I can’t stand colored paper. Plus the paper white is the brightness I need for the vibrancy of lines and to shine through the ink.

A couple days ago I started painting the figures in an array of brown to blacks. I’m working on those pieces now. Yes, I am afraid I may offend someone. I am doing the only thing I know to do.