Painting

You may remember that I don’t have an office any more, so today when I was reading my cousin’s blog on one of the library internet computers, it was a little difficult to disguise my sniffling.

Listening to my cousins talking about saying goodbye kind of struck me. I didn’t say goodbye. I just visited with her about our trip and the birds we had seen lately. I just wanted to be with her. Her eyes were so bright and she was smiling so big. I thought she looked so beautiful.

Now I have these two paintings sitting in my studio. They are a couple of Granny’s paintings that she didn’t finish. I told two of my cousins I would finish them. I thought I was going to go straight to work on them when I got home, and I almost did. But then I was walking through my living room one morning, and I looked out the window and saw a hummingbird at the feeder on the porch. John got me a porch swing for my birthday, and I have a bunch of my favorite plants out there, and I put up some pinecone bird feeders. I’ve begun to enjoy my little porch the way Granny enjoyed hers. So I stopped there and set up my easel in the living room and started painting my porch as it looks from the living room.

Now that I’ve hesitated I’m not sure when I’ll start on Granny’s paintings. (But I promise I will do them.) But, after a painting dry spell, I am glad that I am finding beauty in things, even if it is bittersweet. I don’t want to be so distracted by my expectations of what a good artist should be that I quit enjoying painting. I guess, living is kind of that way too. I think living a good life is probably a lot simpler than I make it out to be. I want to live a good life too.

Sam

Our sweet, perfect dog Sam, died last Tuesday. John and I feel very lonely at the house without her. She lived at our house longer than any of the previous owner's, so we felt like it was more her house than ours. We're really missing her.

Make a non-toxic home cleaning kit

I decided to accept Josh's poo poo attitude as a challenge to do more.

While I dislike the attitude we've developed of constantly buying things and then throwing them away, I accept that giving up some disposable products may not be the only way, or the best way, to reduce waste (though I do contend it's a good start).

I found this interesting site produced by the Minnesota office of Environmental Assistance which offers suggestions on reducing waste in your home. They also have a page for reducing waste at the office, school, during the holidays, etc.

As Josh pointed out, one way I haven't begun to consider waste is the chemicals I use. Though John and I do enjoy some Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day products (which are eco-friendly and smell good too) that we received as a wedding gift, for the most part we just use what's on sale.

So Minnesota is offering suggestions for a non-toxic home cleaning kit, involving products seen here: Baking soda , Vinegar , Plant-based detergents , Vegetable oil with lemon juice. I would also like to add that they suggest using cloth rags rather than disposable "bleached" towels.

They also suggest, specifically for laundry:
"Instead of more complicated detergents, try using a combination of washing soda and borax in your machine. These are usually as effective as more complex formulas and are also usually cheaper."

Before and After

When looking at the pictures, I realized the "after" looks more junky than the "before". But it's not. Really.

Before: there was a great deal of clutter on the floor, paintings, gesso, typing paper stacked and shoved here and there. I had two mismatched rubbermaid drawers and a tiny wooden table with my palette jutting out and papers sliding off.

After: Paintings are carefully stored in the horizontal storage. The rubber maid drawers support a table top for books, sewing, planning, cutting etc, and under the table a little more storage space for those odd shaped things. The top of the map table is big enough for a much larger painting palette, and the top drawer stores all my paints and mediums. Where the vertical shelf use to be, there is now a skinny vertical space for my easel, ironing board and tripod. My previously inaccessible printer/scanner is now accessible.

Obviously, this is a very multipurpose space - So I feel like I've done this best I can with what I've got.

Eventually I'd like to exchange my cardboard boxes with colored tissue paper for pretty baskets - but the rest - I like.

*UPDATE - okay I lost the before and after image in the blog out of '07, but here's a picture of what it looked like while set up this way.

Flowers

John came home with these wild flowers and a handful of chocolates on Friday. Isn't he the best?

I'm trying to get organized.

A month or so ago, my sister Tara bought me this map table at a yard sale. I've been needing something like this since high school. It is a tall 4x4 table with lots of skinny shelves for storing all my large flat things, like paper, unfinished paintings, watercolors. The top is large and flat, perfect for a nice large glass pallette.

I have so many different kinds of things: oil paints, watercolors, fabric and sewing machine, yarn, books, old paintings I don't know what to do with. So with this new table, I decided to organize my studio, and get everything in better order. The result is very exciting. My space is really small - as is our house - and doubles as the pantry, so organization is a necessity. I forgot to take a picture, but I'm very pleased. So I'll post a before and after next week.

I'm also trying to keep all these craft ideas I'm reading online, in a more organized form. Now that I'll be working less (I'm only teaching one class in the fall), I should be painting/sewing/knitting more.

My favorite craft site Whip Up (because everyone else contributes to it) is proposing a "Finish What You Have" month. So I'm going to give it a shot. Last summer I started a small cathedral window quilt, that has been jammed in a Big Star bag for a year. I'm going to try to finish it - or at least make it into a whole square!

Depth

1. (While it doesn't appear that I will actually be teaching landscape painting this summer since no one has signed up - I have been preparing my class notes for it today. So... ) I was thinking about Cezanne, who developed a way of creating atmospheric depth purely by color relationships rather than gradually fading the chiaroscuro and detail (which is visually how we perceive depth).

2. Also, I was part of a really good student's senior critique this week, and she had a bunch of abstract work with some representational elements mixed in. she was playing with formal elements creating some interesting spatial relationships.

3. And I recently read again, for class, Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting," which argues, modernly, that optical space, rather than illusionary space, is the only space appropriate for painting.

All of these converging ideas have lead me to think, purely for fun formal play, not philosophical reasons...

It would be fun to do landscapes with the flat patterning of Japanese art, also using Cezanne's color theory - so that a fun optical depth is created, though not an illusionary spacial depth. The result would probably be a cool patteren that played tricks on your eyes.

Painting

I know I've quit updating on my paintings - but I haven't quit painting. I just decided I didn't need to follow this dutch seven-layer technique. I don't really have the same pigments they used anyway. I am still glazing and layering - just reworking when I need to and only letting it dry until it feels dry. And yes, it's tedious. But it's also kind of new to me, so I'm enjoying figuring it out.

I have three pretty far along. I decided that I didn't like one that I started earlier, so I'm thinking of using that canvas for something else (it's the sideways one you see on the floor behind the easel). I also started a new one yesterday, and I'm feeling pretty good about it. And this is a pic of the original one I mentioned forever ago. The others I feel too nervous about to show as yet. I'm building up the colors and values, so the parts that really jump out at you (like parts of the tree), have been recently painted over and have to be built up again. Also, some of the colors will change. But anyway - here it is so far.

What's so great about Northern Exposure, you ask?

John and I have been buying the DVD's as they are released, and we've recently just gotten Season Four. Before season four arrived, when we had watched all the others, I began to feel a little homesick for Northern Exposure. Not that I need a tv-fix everday, John and I try not to watch too much tv.

But the characters in the town of Cicely, AK are very endearing. The whole show is about Joel's growth from a neurotic, modern, scholastic, New York doctor to a man in tune with irrational possibilities and the natives' sensibilities towards nature. On the episode John and I watched last night, titled "Revelations," Joel faces a slow couple of weeks at the office and is unable to deal with the quiet. As Bernard puts it, Joel isn't dealing with his existential angst, and needs to be willing to embrace the big nothing.

Joel asks Marilyn how she is able to just sit in the office for hours, "What do you think about?" he asks incredulously. In her calm, self-assured way she answers,"paper clips."
"Paper clips? You think about paper clips all day?!"
"Not all the time. Sometimes I think about colors. blue mostly. and beige."

I cancelled my class today (it's Makin Music week... don't get me started), so I am sitting in my office all day, with no specific time schedule - trying to be productive.

We modern westerners think efficiency is one of the highest values - so that we might fill our time with as much high quality output we can.

I wonder how different my life would be if I were able to just sit.

Back to Work

Well, spring break was a little bit of a disappointment, but we tried to make the best of it. The weather was cold all week, getting into the 20's every night, so we didn't get to go hiking or camping. Later in the week, John heroically tilled the garden and I planted a few more strawberries. But otherwise, I didn't spend much time outside, as hoped. I did get some work done on my paintings and three new canvases stretched, and I worked a little on a quilt I cut out a while ago.

However, we instituted "FunDay" on Thursday, to make up for our lack of intended fun in the earlier part of the week. So, on funday, we went rollerskating, yes, rollerskating! We went during the little kid time, so we were the only people over twelve who weren't chaperones, which was probably appropriate since we were both a little rusty. After rollerskating, we went to Cici's for all-you-can-eat pizza, which is also fun. And then we went shopping at the mall - something we rarely ever do. Fun day was supposed to extend late into the evening: we were going to go here Jeremy play some of his new music some place in Jackson. Unfortunately, we hadn't anticipated how exhausting funday would be - so we ended up crashing by nine.

My sisters and neice came to town for the weekend, which was exciting, until I got food poisoning from El Ranchito's and spent the weekend in bed.

But, now we are back at work, ready to wrap up the semester. (Yes, I realize we still have six weeks left).

In other news, the fourth season of Northern Exposure is released on DVD, and John and I are anxiously awaiting ours in the mail.