Aubergine

Good Things

1. I started a new painting yesterday.  I'm excited about it.
2. A same-sex marriage law passed the House of Commons in Canada yesterday (expected to be law by July).
3. Spain legalized gay marriage today.
4. I'm really enjoying knitting recently (that sounds so small compared to the last two!).
5. My wife rocks.  Just in general.

seeking: a lightness of being

I've been having tough week this week.  Tuesday was a pretty black day.  I was feeling very bleak about myself as an artist, what I'm doing, where I'm going, how much I've accomplished recently.  I wrote a long and depressing entry about it on Tuesday afternoon (lucky for you, I was offline at the time).  I've since thought better of most of it, changed my mindset, changed my mind.  But I'm still off.  Off with my art.  I'm not making enough of it.  I'm saying I don't have time, but that's really not it.  I'm just not making the time.  This is what I do when I'm avoiding something, but I really don't know what is triggering this reaction right now. 

I've had an epiphany about myself as an artist recently.  Over the last few years, I've been holding on to a eventually, some day sort of dream of being a full time artist.   Supporting myself with my creative output.  Maybe while I'm a mom at the same time, or maybe while working part-time at some low-impact job, but somehow, making art the central focus of my life.  But recently I have accepted that I'm just not prolific.  It is going to be hard to make a living at it when I only finish a painting a month, or maybe even one every two months.  I look around at the successful artists I know and I see them turning out a large number of pieces on a regular basis.  Ok, so working at it full time is different than a few hours a week in the wee morning hours, I realize, but there's also a subject matter issue.  I'm totally unfulfilled by the "light" paintings I have done over the past couple of years.  The things that are pretty, even skilled, but not really the things I need to say.  The ones that speak to me, the ones I'm driven to paint, are huge.  Not literally (recently 12x12"), but emotionally.  They are about love, death, religion, faith, beliefs, who we are as women and humans in this world, and what happens before us and after us.  Big stuff I'm grappling with.  And they are slow.  Slow to reveal themselves, slow to come together.  Sometimes they come in series.  I'm working on a series now that began early last winter.  I did three, fast.  One more slow, still not quite finished.  Another has been on my mind for about a month, but not yet gelled.  And then I don't know what next.

Some artists (Robert Genn) might say this is due to a lack of routine, of dilligence.  And perhaps that's true.  I do find it hard to keep to stick to a routine when trying to balance work, relationship, commute, exercise, friends, keeping the house in some sort of shape, not to mention rest, sleep, relaxation.  I just get tired.  I try to be easy on myself, work on the art when it speaks to me, but sometimes I hit this wall where I'm disappointed, frustrated, angry that I can't/don't focus and I'm not progressing.  On those days (Tuesday)  I want to throw in the towel, empty my studio, take up underwater basketweaving.  I know it is a practice, like yoga, like playing an instrument.  I have to keep at it, even when it is hard, especially when it is hard.  But some days I'm not sure why, or if I still want to.  I don't remember what I'm getting out of it, what the payoff is.  I know there is one, and I know I'm unhappy if I'm not creating, but maybe I'm pushing too hard? 

I'm trying to be easy on myself.  Keep my hand in the flow of being creative by doing art journals, knitting, scrapbooking, taking pictures.  But then I wonder if that's all just a distraction from what I need to, should be doing.  But who says I should?  And why should I?  I'm successful at my job, very much so.  Is that enough?  Is it enough to be a part-time artist?  Why am I always driving myself to put my work out there, when just creating it is hard enough?  Am I setting myself up with impossible goals, just so I'll fail and be re-assured that I'm not really "good enough" after all, so I'm safe putting my energy into the somewhat emotionally rewarding tech career, and not commiting myself to the very emotionally rewarding but FREAKING TERRIFYING art career?

Maybe that's all it is.  Fear and my struggle to overcome it.  I think I have some books on that topic, if only I had time to read them.

"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter', then by all means paint...and that voice will be silenced." -Vincent Van Gogh (snagged from Superhero Journal)

Edgar Degas on painting:
"Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things
"One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different."

Good Things from Ashland

 

• Solo road trip.  I haven't done that in a while.  It was great.

• Gorgeous sunsets, especially the one reflecting off an impending thunderstorm just north of Mt. Shasta. 

• Plenty of time to stop and take pictures of the sky and birds along the way.  I probably took 20 pictures of those seagulls before I got the one I was trying for.

• I found the same hotel I stayed in with my sister a couple of years ago, where I felt safe and well cared for, but still paid a modest fare, dispite the fact that I didn't write down the name of the place in my journal.  Yay for reasonably good memory and smart keyword web listings on their part.  If you ever need a modest, safe place to stay in Ashland, I recommend the Knight's Inn at Exit 10.  It isn't fancy, but  they are good people, and I feel very comfortable there.

• Fun class with Ali Edwards. She's sweet and funny, and I liked her a lot.  I hope I get to just hang out with her sometime, outside of a classroom.  We bonded over our nearly-identical, though unusual, wallets.  I loved the class projects, despite the fact that following precise directions is usually excruciating for me, and worked on them for hours more in the hotel that night.  I'm very excited about how they are coming out. 

• Window shopping in downtown Ashland, which mostly consisted of me taking more pictures, though I did enjoy Bloomsbury Books, as usual.  I poked around a shop called Maizey's for quite a while, but since I couldn't buy one of everything, I bought nothing.  It amuses me how few companies there maintain websites, as compared to here, where everyone has one.

• Solo dinner at a fantastic Italian restaurant.  It used to freak me out to eat alone, and I avoided it as much as I could.  This meal, however, was very nice.  I sketched in my journal, people-watched, lingered over my wine, and it didn't bother me at all that I was alone.  I don't know who this newly independent, confident and comfortable person is that I'm turning into, but sure do like her.  The food was amazing.  Crab and white truffle ravioli, in a light wild mushroom cream sauce.  Bruchetta to die for.  A glass of Chianti Classico, of course.  The waiter who brought my food made sure to check what I was drawing before disturbing my table tableau by setting down my dish.  What a guy.

• "Reading" a whole book, beginning to end.  Well, I listened to it anyway.  Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure, by Sara MacDonald.  I highly recommend it.  I've been thinking about religions a lot recently, and this book fit that mood well.

• Sunday morning in Lithia Park I came across this little 3-legged fawn that was trapped in the park.  Momma deer was gently trying to lead it back to safety, but it was scared of the steep creek embankment.  I hope it was OK, eventually.  I love my telephoto lens.

chocolate love

When this little baby came to us, she was just about a year old.  Her name was Pandora.

We got her from a woman who was moving out of state and was begging for a new home for her cat.  What she didn't tell us was that the real reason she was moving without the cat was because the cat had a serious peeing problem.  As in she was totally indiscriminate about where she went.

By the time we figured this out, whithin a couple of days, it was too late.  We were already in love.  After about a year of grief and vast quanities of enzyme cleaner, she's now on a daily anti-anxiety medication that is making a huge difference in her behavior.  Yes, our cat is on prozac.  Don't laugh- it is better than having a house that stinks of cat pee!

We changed her name, too.  Pandora just seemed too serious, and she's kind of a goofy little cat.  She's actually a fairly normal-sized cat, but our other cat is so huge (17+ pounds of long-haired boy kitty) that in comparison she's dimunitive.  Practially out of thin air, we picked the name Widget.  It just fit.  Later on, out of curiousity, I looked up the definition of the word.  "A small and useless application," it means.  A software-industry technical term, probably homegrown right here in the Silicon Valley.  Lisa teases her about her name often.  "Widget, you are a small and useless application."  Imagine that crooned and punctuated with kissy noises.  I have to say that since getting used to Tiger on my Mac, I think that Widgets are small and terribly useful applications, but whatever.

In regular light, Widget is all black, with just a few white hairs on her chest and tummy.  But in the sunlight, she's a rich, dark chocolate.  Ganache, we could have named her.  Our little chocolate kitty.  She has a squeeky meow that we didn't hear for a long time.  It took almost a year for her to start talking to us, but now she talks often.  She makes the most pitiful little noise when there's less than a 1/4 cup of kibble in her bowl, like she's sure we are trying to starve her to death.  She's also quite cross-eyed, though she's an excellent hunter of bugs.  She's ruthless to mouse toys, and has shredded several of them.  She chases her tail in the bathtub, and will back up to you, tail straight up, when she's asking for pets.  She isn't interested in kitty treats, and can't figure out why Riley (the other cat) likes that chicken stuff he's always begging for.  She gets cold often, and seeks out sunbeams and laps as often as possible.  When we have a fire going she can often be found on the hearth, directly in front of it, whiskers practically sizzling in the heat.  She loves to sleep on a stool in front of the fireplace, too, and will meow when she is too warm and needs to be rotated.  And we do it, too!  She lets us know when it is time to go to bed, and won't settle until both of us are in the room.  If one of us tarries in the bathroom, she'll come and herd us into the bedroom.  She sleeps at our feet all night long, riding the waves of our sleeping movement.

I started receiving a French-word-of-the-day email yesterday, and the first word was "truc".   It means "thing" or "thingamajig".  That would have been a great name for her, too.  I love this little girl, and I'm so glad we opened our lives and hearts to her.

summertime...

On the longest day of the year, I feel sad that the days will begin to shorten again. I love this part of the summer, before it is too hot, but when the evenings are long and slow. We have been fooled by the long days recently, working outside in the yard after work until the evening, not realizing dinner is late until we come in to wash up and realize it is 8pm. Last night Lisa planted the last of the lobelia along the front edge of the flower garden to replace the plants eaten by the now-departed gopher, and I put in the strawberries, beans and sweetpeas that we purchased on Sunday. We have the longest growing season here. If we'd been on top of it, we could be harvesting our first batch of beans already, and just planting for the second harvest. But no, we just put in the plants now, in June. We're still lagging on getting the drip watering system in place, so hopefully we'll be able to keep everything watered well enough until that's finally done.

We spent a lot of time in the garden this weekend. Weeding, watering, placing plants to replace those that didn't make it or got eaten. We were having a war with a gopher until recently. Or rather, we were providing him with excellent eating, and he was pissing us off. Every few days one of us would realize we were missing a plant. Or two. No mounds or holes where they used to be, just gone. Two beautiful shell-pink nemesia. One of the black pansies. 2 healthy lobelia plants, then another two a few days later. The last straw was when I found the top 4 inches of one of the casablanca lilies sticking out of a hole one morning when I went out to water. I must have interrupted the feast, as Sir Gopher was usually more sneaky than to leave leftovers laying around. That night Lisa stopped by the hardware store on the way home and got the kit for gassing gophers.

We both had totally mixed feelings about killing the gopher. This gopher was inspiring rage and frustration, eating our garden that we were working so hard at - and eating our favorite plants no less. Why wouldn't he eat the weed starts instead? We looked at a few different options, talked to the gals at the garden store. We considered some of the deterrent products, but the several we tried last year had had no effect. We decided this was the most humane method, if the goal was erradication. You attach a hose to your tailpipe, run it down the gopher hole and let the car run for 20 minutes. It worked. We've been gopher free for two weeks. Lisa assuaged her guilt by talking compusively about it for a few days. She said it was the strangest thing - she'd just start talking about it, even changing the subject to do so. After a few days the compulsion passed, though she still mentions it to me now and then. We both believe in living lightly on this earth. We don't use any poisons in the house or the garden for pest or weed control. But ants and gophers are where we draw the line. I think we both feel guilty that there is a line at all, but there is. Does that make us bad humans?

On Sunday, we took a morning bike ride along the cliffs to the lighthouse and back, then stopped in for breakfast at Kelly's Bakery. I just love this place. The pasteries are great, of course, but the little patio in the center of the shops is the best part. It reminds me so much of the piazzas in Italy. The place where locals go to visit with their neighbors, drink their coffee, let their children play. It has such a neighborhood, relaxed feel to it. Besides Kelly's, there is also a French soap shop, a couple of artistic-home boutiques, and new this week, a small, hip yarn shop. After breakfast we stopped in at the garden shop to pick up our veggie plants - yea for bike baskets! We waited until the cooler afternoon to plant them, and I felt very old south as we were out there with our cocktails, drinking them with our gardening gloves on. Lisa crafted the wire cages for the lettuce boxes, to keep the neighbor's cats out, and I built trellises for the climbing plants using branches trimmed from the apricot trees earlier this year. P. Allen Smith would be so proud. Now, the wait for everything to fill in.

Lisa is forever telling me I'm planting things too close together. I love to crowd, probably a result of my English (cottage garden) heritage. I'm most drawn to gardens where plants are falling all over each other, almost wild. Veggies mingling with flowers and herbs. Sweetpeas climbing the roses for support. I love French potager gardens. Lisa loves the order of old European formal gardens. Long lines of hedges and foundation plants. Symmetry. We will either eventually find a happy medium, some day, or will give up and each own different parts of the garden. Only time will tell. For now, the veggie garden looks bare to me, and I want to plant more strawberries and lettuce around the bottoms of the plants that I know will get tall. Lisa forbids it. At least I got her to agree to let me plant one six pack of lettuces in the front flower garden, as a border. I'll show her. It will be so pretty!

martini memories

The current drawing challenge on the Every Day Matters email list is to draw something you've made.  Arguably, there are hundreds of things around this house that I've made, but I was inspired by this entry from another list member. 

I realize this journal page from last year only very loosely qualifies, and completely overlooks the point of the challenge, which is to get out and draw now.  After all, I drew this more than a year ago.  But I really like this page, and well, it was already scanned.   

While Mr. Slimbolala would probably argue that this drink can only be considered a martini by virtue of being served in a martini glass, it is still one of my favorite drinks.  It is so beautiful and pink, even prettier when served with a twist of lime or a few pomegranate seeds in the bottom of the glass.  And it packs quite a punch - be careful drinking these as they don't taste much like alcohol, but are still  mostly booze.  Exhibit A, there, drawn below the martini and vodka bottle, is my friend V., the morning after consuming a couple too many of these.

Truly, I have to attribute this recipe to my friend M., but I've made it enough times now that I've evolved into my own version.  That is, one part Pom juice, one part vodka, a splash of each of the other ingredients.  I like them not too sweet, but strong.  Yum.

loosed

I have lost my watch.  Last week it was just misplaced, but now I've made a concerted effort to find it with no success.  I have a vague memory of setting it down and thinking, "That isn't a really good spot to put this," but apparently I did it anyway.  I'm still managing to get to meetings on time and I didn't even miss my vanpool home last night.  Of course, I'm constantly surrounded by electronic devices that have clocks so it isn't like I don't know what time it is, but without having the current time on my body I feel somewhat untethered.  Loose in time.  I'm unsure if I want to replace the watch or not.  I didn't wear a watch for years and years before I bought this one, and I liked it. 

Speaking of time, I didn't get enough art time this weekend.  It is constantly a surprise to me how much I need my creative time.  I crave it, like I crave sleep.  If I don't get enough, I'm off.  Scattered and cranky.  And once I get to this point, it is hard to get back into it.  It is like getting an over-tired toddler to settle down to rest.  I resist it, fight relaxing back into the groove.  I walk up to my work table and feel my whole body tense up.  I have to fight the resistance to get back to the work.  Showing up.  That's what this is.  Just showing up for the work.  Even when I don't want to.  But I won't be back in balance again until I break through this spot.  Too late for it this morning, as now it is time to get ready for work.  Maybe tonight I'll just lock myself in the studio and putter.  Puttering seems to help.  Cleaning the studio seems to trick my brain into thinking I'm not really working, until I find that I am, and I don't know how I got there. 

Balance.  I find I am forever seeking it.  I should work on appreciating it more when I have it.

learning from ants

Last night I came home to discover that ants had invaded.  They were coming in through a crack between the wall and floor in the living room and traveling all the way across the carpet to the kitchen, branching off one way to the garbage can and another to travel further across the dining room to some unidentifiable location in the next room.  There were thousands of them.  I cleaned up as best as I could - took the trash can outside and washed it off, vacuumed the trail of ants up until I could find no more.  I called Lisa to pick up some spray of some kind on her way home, and by the time I got off the phone they were back. 

I hate ants.  I hate when they get in my house, and I hate trying to get rid of them.  But I have to admire their single-minded pursuit of their goal.  If you disrupt their column, they will find a new path - over, around.  Even if they get disoriented, they will eventually find their way back to the same, unerring path.  I know the science of it, how they lay a scent trail and follow it, but watching them do it is amazing.

This weekend I was looking for something I knew I had written down in one of my journals, but I wasn't sure which one.  I've been keeping a "book" steadily since January 1, 2002.  The first one could easily be called a journal.  It has lines, hundreds of pages.  I carried it everywhere with me, and wrote and wrote.  I was getting over a long and painful relationship and had much to exorcize.  Tiny cramped writing about my pain, my deepest thoughts, my angst and dreams.  Much of it in fountain pen.  There are gaps of weeks between some of the entries.  About 3/4 of the way through that one, I was approaching the date of my wedding in the spring of 2003 and my stress level was such that I was having trouble stringing together coherent thoughts.  About that time I started pasting things in - quotes printed from the computer, magazine images of ideas for the event, some notated and others left to stand on their own.  In the days after the wedding, the pages are filled with sketches, plans, ideas, as my stress level abated and my creativity started flowing back in.

About 20 pages before I reached the end of that book, I rebelled against the rigidity of the lines and I abandoned it.  The new book I chose was square, a little larger, and had heavier-weight unlined pages.  This one starts out with images and drawings.  A few pages are even painted (this image, for example).  During the time I was filling this book, I was really starting to think about what I wanted to do with my life, my future.  No longer constrained with lines, my writing got bigger and spills across pages.  I wrote out my goals, my dreams, more angst, but more specific about what I wanted to change or claim in my life.  I went through this book much faster - not quite a year.  Now I'm in the third book, started in November of last year.  I just passed the half-way mark in this one, and this book puffs open with all I have stuffed in there.  Most of the pages are painted.  Now I write in marker with varied hands, fancy titles and writing every which way.  I paste in pictures - some from magazines, some my photographs or scans of my art -  and draw or write over them.  I fill pages to the brim, often going back and adding to empty spaces later.  The entries are only loosely chronological, though almost all are dated.  Everything goes in my book now.  I still take it everywhere with me and rarely more than a couple of days go by between entries, though I'm most prolific at the turning of the month.  I'm in a good mental place now, so the angst is only occasional, but I still write out goals, hopes, questions.  Ideas for future projects, working out the problems in current ones.  Phone numbers, dates, things to remember.  Bits of articles I'm reading, leaves, flowers, scraps collected throughout my days.

It was fascinating to go back and look at my old books.  Amazing to see how much I have changed, while believing I am standing still.  Twice I found notations about wanting to be less negative, less cynical.  I am happy to say I've let that go - I now have a comfortably positive outlook.  I wrote pages and pages about how I feel that I jump around in my art, I don't have a focus, I don't know what I'm doing.  While I can find these words in my current journal, too, I  look at the work I produce now and know that I'm much more focused and skilled than I was two years ago.  Although I don't feel like I've changed, when I hold up my self of three years ago, I can see how far I've come.  I know now what I want, where I'm going.  The journey is now in the getting there, not the finding it.  And now I appreciate the journey more.

I think that looking through my old journals once in a while is a good thing for me to do.  Living day by day, it is hard to see change, even when I'm striving for it.  I need something to measure against to see my progress.  Also, I just need a reminder to keep going, keep trying, that eventually I will persevere, if I have a clear goal and keep working toward it.  Like those ants, I can find a new way to the goal when life throws something in my path.  I can learn a lot from the ants.

I love Bend

I just called to purchase Ani DiFranco tickets to a show in Bend, OR in August.  We'll be travelling up to visit our good friends who moved up there a couple of years ago and I offered to treat us all to this show.  So  I've been looking for information on how to purchase these tickets for a couple of days.  Ani D's site links to an event planning organization for the central Oregon area, but the tickets aren't listed as available for sale, although they should have gone on sale yesterday.  I can't see a way to purchase tickets through the web site, which is how I've gotten accustomed to buying tickets in the last couple of years.   There are a couple of places listed as where you can go to buy tickets, but none of them say if they'll sell over the phone.  So this morning I called one of them and asked.  The phone rang several times, and I was starting to think they weren't open, or the number was wrong.  Finally a friendly sounding guy answers.  When I asked if he'd sell me tickets over the phone, he says, "Depends on which show.  Do you live in Bend?" 
"No," I say, "I'm in California."
"Oh, yeah, no problem then."
"Cool.  I need 4 general admission tickets.  How much are they?"
"$22 each.  I have to charge you a dollar for postage, though."  No service fee.  No whatever-else-TicketMaster-feels-like-charging-for fees.  No $10 "shipping fee," even though duh, if you buy them on the internet, of course they need to be shipped, so they should just include that cost in the standard processing fee.  Since our friends have a 2-year-old, I also asked if the venue allows kids and if they need their own ticket.  He says he's not sure, but he'll call the venue and ask, and call me back later today.  Gotta love  small town service.  And wow, I can't remember the last time I only paid $22 for a good-sized venue general admission.

I always love visiting Bend.  It is a small town.  Slow, friendly.  Everyone smiles at you.  People say hi, even if they don't know you.  They make small talk while you stand in line.  If we ever leave here, Bend is definitely high on the list of places we might settle.