Posts tagged ‘art’
And just like that, it’s summer time! Summer vacation at least. For the last couple weeks my daughter has been bringing home all kinds of stuff from her year in fourth grade. One worksheet particularly caught my eye; a little poem she wrote about the weather. It’s hard to describe but it is the exact personality of my daughter. I hear her voice and see her beauty in the poem.
Sunshine
You are so bright and yellow
How do you make a rainbow?
If I were you I’d make rainbows more often.
Yesterday, the first of May, I went for a walk with the dog and was in total visual euphoria because it has finally become “peak spring” with flowers and leaves on the trees, dandelions, bright lemon-green patches in the grass, a temperature that is actually pleasant and un-sweaty. It was glorious, a literal breath of fresh air.
Today, the second of May, mother nature has shown her bi-polar side giving us gray cold winter like monotony which we have been having for the last 6 months or so. I know summer will win out and life will go on, but I can’t feeling ripped off by the lack of pretty-comfortable-pleasant-ness spring usually brings.
Maybe that’s why my last two large paintings have been giant odes to spring-like imagery. Maybe I just like flowers. I resolved to keep fresh flowers in my work table the last few weeks. It’s part of my new ambition to care for myself in radical ways that I have not afforded or believed I needed in the past.
I need flowers.
In case you are wondering. I do have some favorites. Lilac, first of all because it smells so amazing and I grew up with lilacs all around my house. Luckily, my neighbors now are kind enough to share theirs. I think roses are intensely beautiful, especially the pink ones. And recently I discovered little white chamomile flowers, like miniature daisies that wobble as I type.
plus
plus
equals
I have always heard you should carry a notebook around to write down things that inspire you. That probably works well for writers. I try to keep a camera handy for colors and compositions that excite me. Without a doubt the long cold winter that FINALLY seems to have ended also inspired this new painting and its color-palooza. I’m ready for the sun to warm things up and bring life back to the world around me.
Finally. My perfect watercolor paper arrived in the mail and within minutes I began to work on a new painting. This one came to be faster than any other. I was anxious.
Birds have always been in my brain when it comes to painting subject matter. I love them, I hate them, I can’t get away from them, I wish I knew more about them, they live around me, they have threatened me, and overall I’m pretty sure they will take over the planet like that Hitchcock movie suggests.
When I was younger I had two pet parakeets that terrified me! They were escape artists and we had to use twist ties to close their food doors shut. When I forgot I would come home from school to find them flying around my bedroom free “as a bird.” I hated that! i felt my life was threatened. My mother, the warrior queen she is, would catch them in her hands and put them back in their cage. I could never do that.
Could I?
Regardless I present to you another (although this time extremely larger) painting of birds. I wonder if people look at my paintings and think that I am horrible and use watercolors in the complete wrong way.
I’m okay with that. As the child in me says, “But that’s how I want it to look!”
It’s day seven million and forty six of not having decent painting paper in the house. So I have been playing writer trying to figure out my life and solve all the world’s problems. So far I have a stupid drawing of myself and a coffee ring on my notepad. If that doesn’t make me a “real” writer than I don’t know what will.
Before I go can I just say THANK GOD it’s February? I have good memories of February because it’s the wintery link to spring. It’s the end of a horrible awful freezing dead story read every year. I know, I live in the Midwest where it will likely snow in April BUT still, there’s a difference…things come back to life, you can smell the world turning greener. It’s great.
Here’s to turning the page.
I had been dying to paint all week. I started a writing class and it inspired me. I began a great big painting but realized I had purchased naughty bad cheapo paper and would have to throw it out. I started several smaller ones and I’m fairly certain this is the only one that will survive my over-excited need to over-paint the paper.
The other day I woke up feeling like I was on death’s door. Every part of my body ached, especially my eyelids. I wanted to sleep. I went into the spare bedroom in my house and buried myself in a fuzzy blanket. I cut myself off from the world and rested.
I wouldn’t say I woke up fresh as a daisy (I was disgusting) but there is definitely something to be said for the “get some rest” prescription people so often hand out.
This little painting is titled Francine, because although I was initially cartoonizing myself, in the end I think this girl looks like one of my first dolls I had as a kid who I treated like hell. She was used and abused, soft to begin with and softened by my early childhood games.
Although my sudden illness took me by surprise it is not especially odd that I would get sick with my tendency to over-work. My grandfather, who is very ill at this time, once cautioned me about burning the candle at both ends.
Unfortunately many of us feel that it is necessary to work as hard as possible, and the results can be mixed. Living takes its toll.
I recently finished another large painting to add to the growing pile of artwork I have no idea what to do with because I can’t afford to frame them and they are too personal to sell (well, too personal to sell for next to nothing, my going rate for art).
This one is especially impossible to do anything with because it’s a portrait of my family. I don’t think anyone wants a portrait of my family, except my family, and there’s no way the kid can afford it on her allowance.
But I like to think of these large paintings as future gold mines for my kid or her kids or her kids’ kids. If she decides to have kids…which I assume she will (please god, let that not be in the next 15 years).
I was feeling all depressed and sad about my lack of enthusiasm for selling artwork and the feeling of being broke that comes with it.
So I turned to Twitter, where in less than 140 characters one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott wrote that “creating art is a debt of honor.”
So there ya go, Lauren, appreciate the fact that you actually made something. OK?
Ok.
(Acquiescence is a term used generally to describe a permission given by silence or passiveness)
I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out the story of my latest painting. What inspired it? What was going on in my life? It’s almost too much to try to squeeze into a snappy blog post.
The short story is that it was created start to finish in a month of big personal change. About a year ago I realized that I wished I had not changed my last name at the time of my marriage. This year I decided to do something about it. 
On a Friday afternoon I went to the county courthouse and filed all the paperwork. Three Fridays later I went before a judge who asked “What is the reason for your name change?” 
I simply and shyly (not the brave warrior of independence I wish I were) said, “My decision is based on an understanding I have now that I did not have at the time of my marriage.”
I realize that leaves things wide open for assumptions. But the fact remains that this was a personal decision I made because it felt like the right thing to do. It’s about having the courage of my convictions. It’s about being a reasonable person. It’s a beginning of a direction I want the rest of my life to go in.
And so is this painting!
Nothing is more annoying than when people post on facebook, twitter, or their blog about how AMAZING the weather is. It’s annoying for a couple reasons.
1. Weather is boring. True fact; it’s exactly what you talk about when you don’t know what else to talk about. It’s right up there with what you ate for lunch. Snooze.
2. Sharing your weather related experiences is really just a cover for your will to tell people that you got out into the world and experienced something that everyone else didn’t. Bragger.
Now that I got that out of my system….Have you been outside lately? Oh…my….goodness is October the best month ever or what? There’s the changing leaves, the cooler temps…the sunny gorgeous days like walking through a scene from a Hallmark movie…only to be followed by the gray gloomy wind gusting days out of a Time Burton movie. Both equally worth sharing about.
Earlier this week I took a walk and I felt like I was in a snow globe of perfect-ville-mc-gloriousness with all the huge walnut trees turning a sunny yellow and blowing around like a ticker-tape parade.
The next day it was dreary. The wind died, the sun hid, the temperature took a nose dive…It was perfect for staying in and finishing a book and a painting. If that’s not the best week ever I don’t know what is.
What did people do before cell phone cameras? Or digital cameras for that matter. I mean, did we wander the world noticing beautiful things and simply commit them to memory? Stupid little things like a leaf on a wind shield… the shadow of your dog…a really great home made pizza…how did we record such non-events?
In a book about writing I remember one suggestion for finding and recording inspiration was carry note cards and a pencil to take notes on good ideas or observations that appear at inopportune times. The book was written before the term “smart phone” was invented.
I think the note card system is sound advice. As a painter I think my camera phone is my note card and pencil. It’s with me all the time. It’s so handy for just about anything that piques my interest…good or bad.
Several weeks ago I forgot to bring my lunch to work and bought the “chef” salad from my cafeteria. The lettuce was brown and soggy. Very slimy. I took a picture, but I’ll spare you.
Later I had a work-related meeting at an art college. You have to see the bathroom doors:
In case you don’t have eagle vision that’s a sign on the ladies room door about not putting paint down the drain. What…..so….. is it cool if they dump the paint down the men’s room drains?
An-ee-way I just thought it interesting to come to the conclusion that I am using my 21st century skill (carrying an electronic device in my pocket that governs my life) to find creative inspiration for things I may want to paint some day.
For now, I shy away from painting gross salads and stupid bathroom signs. Back to that leaf on the wind shield …I was on to something with that…
*If you want to know what book about writing I am talking about don’t think just buy this.
