Tree painting

The gallery is having a theme show about trees next week. I remembered having painted this scene at Gleason's Cove a few years ago. I did it in acrylic then, and this one is watercolor. I finally got a little bigger--16x20. I soaked some watercolor paper and stapled it to some stretcher strips left from the old paintings I rolled up the other day. It had to dry overnight because of the humidity, but it was really fun to paint on. For the most part I managed to keep it clean and simple.

I'm going to have to hang it in the show just as it is because I have no glass to put over it, much less a frame. It's a rather unconventional way to do watercolor anyway, so why not

Good Old Days

This is an etching I did in school about 10 years ago. I found it as I was trying to clean up my studio and was glad to see it because I thought I had lost it. The printmaking class was making a portfolio with one image from each student. We were supposed to come up with a modern icon. I chose the individual as an icon. I felt, and still do, that we had come to worship ourselves as individuals so much that we had lost track of the human race as a whole. I used the brass Buddha face that I had often used in paintings to symbolize myself because the thing reflects like a mirror. My own image as I look at it looks back at me, but the image is distorted. In the self-image I am putting my hand out to block what I see. It is also reflected in a number of ways, with emphasis on different features of myself.

If you didn't get the point, which I doubt if many did, I supported the idea with a Narcissus bloom. Narcissus' vanity is pretty widely known. Still, it didn't much matter if the point was lost on most of the viewers. The image is interesting on its own (or so I think in my narcissistic way).

I spent the afternoon going through all the old paintings I have dragged around for so long........huge canvases full of symbols and allegories. I cut the canvases off their stretchers, rolled them up, labeled them, and put them in a duffle bag. My history as a student came back to me and I felt melancholy about it. Never have I experienced approval and encouragement the way I did then. I was almost a celebrity in the art department because of my bold, irreverent paintings and my technical skills. Scholarships rolled in predictably every semester. I became a member of Phi Beta Kappa. I hung my accumulation of ribbons on my wall until there were so many they became meaningless. Then I threw them away. Professors loved me, fellow students admired me. I was wonderful.

I was also detested more than ever before. I was going through a divorce, my mother was suing me for $130,000 (or thereabouts...I can't remember), I had no money, my car was repossessed and my house went to foreclosure. My husband and mother were both furious with me. I was being accused of elder abuse, medicare fraud, and God knows what else. My mother's friends hated me for what I had allegedly done to her (neglected her and stolen her money), as well as her caretakers and the legal system. I was despicable.

These two extremes kept me in a heightened state of anxiety, disbelief, and despair. My intensity produced that artwork. Without doubt, they are the best things I have ever done.

That story, in case you are curious, ended a little over a year later when I was exonerated. I ran up a 30,000 dollar tab with the legal office of Rudman-Winchell, LLC, I owe my life to my lawyer, a wonderful woman who was both my defender, my support, and my counselor. We were in touch almost every day. She supported me and smoothed my way through the experience. When it was over, it was she who talked the law firm's board into accepting my paintings as full payment.

It's hard to know how to think about that time.

The Chick Report

All the chickens are growing fast. This picture doesn't really show how big the girls in the background are since the little ones are in the front. Their personalities are all different, and I'm beginning to identify individual characteristics in the newest ones now. I just have to remember which characteristics go consistently with which birds and I will be able to sort out the names. Right now I assign their names rather randomly. I certainly don't want to give them an identity crisis. Lily, Lupine, and Lilac are still distinguishable, even though Lilac is now just as big as the others and can't be identified by her size anymore. Raising them is fascinating, and I can see why people enjoy breeding animals. Somehow they are able to give the babies up, though. If I got caught up in raising baby chicks, it wouldn't be long before I'd need all the property on Water Street to accommodate them.

Poem

As I was going through more of the memorabilia I unpacked, I came across this poem I wrote a few years ago:

Nature, you overstated metaphor,
You present your garrish self with such arrogance,
Smug and confident in your ability to please your audience.
Humanity gasps at your theatrics.

Your puffy clouds in a blue, blue sky,
Fog lifting off a river,
Ooh! Ahh!
Add a shaft of light and we think we see God.

Blurt out your gawdy Autumn statement.
Fill our vision with razzle-dazzle.
Show us red, orange, and yellow.
Watch us feel small and thrill to that smallness.

Throw your water on a beach, smash it agasinst your rocks.
Plant a flower in the desert, blow a breeze across the plains.
We are so easily delighted.
Terrorize us with your storms and watch us cringe in awe of you.

Spit on us with your snow and see us turn our faces upward.
Put sun on that same snow,
Cast your shadows, you blatant clown,
And watch us leap and cavort with pleasure.

Twinkle your stars, eclipse your moon.
See us dance to the sight of it.
Make us marvel at a colored bird,
Move us to tears with your sunsets.

We bite the apple every time we look at you,
Grabbing the nearest fig leaf to cover our shame.
We apologize for our own existence,
Scurry to cover our tracks, bury our waste.

Nature, you miserable, sadistic puppet-master,
You deny us the ignorance of self-consciousness.
You separate us from the rest, or so we believe,
And we provide the comic relief.