Friday night me and Sarah went to an intuitive painting workshop. There was a DJ, people brought snack food, we brought a bottle of wine, and the girl who ran it provided big sheets of paper and big bottles of tempera paint. And then you just kind of went at it. The only rule was that you weren't allowed to say anything, good or bad, about anyone else's work. The idea was to paint for the process, to enjoy the act of painting, and not worry about the finished product. I always worry about the finished product, so it was hard to turn that off, but I really enjoyed playing with goopy tempera on big sheets of paper.
Oil painting is so high-commitment, in that canvas is expensive, paint is expensive, and set up and clean up take a while. If I don't have several hours to devote to painting, I don't do it at all. Which means I haven't painted anything since I made a couple paintings for Christmas gifts this past December. It was really, really good to put colors on a sheet of paper and just enjoy how they looked.
The girl running it would come around and offer suggestions like, "Okay, now if there is one color that you're really feeling pulled by, where you're really feeling that energy draw you in, which one would it be? What would you do with that color?" And things like that. It was awesome.
We had a great time painting, and I was actually really happy with how mine turned out! I'd been wanting something more colorful than my "Girl with the Pearl Earring" print to hang in my living room, and I got it! I might just go out and buy myself some tempera, and leave the oils for the nice Christmas gift paintings. Hooah!
The shoes I made for my sister were much admired by her friends at college. I was happy just to get the compliments, but a friend of hers asked if I could paint shoes for him, too. Given that I'm also happy to make a couple bucks where I can, I agreed. He wanted me to paint characters from some video game called Portal. I don't play video games, and had never heard of Portal, but evidently one of the characters from this game, the Weighted Companion Cube, is very popular. I googled it to find reference photos, and discovered crocheted versions, costume versions, cakes made to look like it, plush toys, one made out of chain mail, and so on. (I didn't see any shoes though....!) The other character is some kind of robotic guide with a British accent named Wheatley. I don't know. It was all very confusing. But...it doesn't matter if I understand the appeal of this Portal game or not. I just had to put the pictures on the shoes. I'm very happy with how they turned out. And given my incredible ability to procrastinate any artistic endeavor that might take longer than twenty minutes, it was good to have the accountability of someone paying me for them. Plus, it's always fun to start from nothing and wind up with something that looks cool. Anyone want some shoes?
Between Mother's Day and three people's birthdays, I found myself making cards last week. I was happy with how they turned out, so I thought I'd share the results:
One of the vague New Years quasi-resolutions I made this year was to force myself to spend more time making art. I spent three days before Christmas making a couple paintings for my family as gifts, but other than that I haven't really painted anything since I left Chicago. This is in large part simply because at my old Chicago job, I got off at 5 every day, was home by 5:15, and didn't have to think about/do work until the next morning at 8:30. And my weekends were entirely mine, not cluttered up with grading, and planning. But, no excuses. I want to spend some more time painting. And I want to get good at painting people.
So, I was skimming through the Charlotte Observer's online mugshot collection yesterday, looking for my student (who showed me his picture in the hardcopy version), and I found myself scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of faces. Arrests from the whole week, I guess, or whatever they have up the their website. But they were the most fascinating, scary, sad, beautiful, interesting faces. I suppose when you photograph someone right after they've been arrested, there's going to be a whole range of emotions expressed on their faces, and they're not going to look all done up and pretty. But it occurred to me that I could draw them, and maybe paint some of them. It'd be good practice drawing a whole bunch of very different looking people with very different facial expressions. This is Maddie Ruth Grigley, charged with 'communicating threats.'
I feel a little weird drawing someone's portrait without their knowledge, like it's an invasion of privacy in some way. Their photographs, names, height, weight and criminal charges are all online for anyone to see, and I'm not making money off of them, but it still feels odd in some way. Although you wouldn't know it was a mugshot from the drawing, necessarily. It's just a portrait of an old woman. Which I guess is the point - regardless of what she's done, she's a woman just like I am, a human being just like anybody else.
I painted these as a Christmas gift for my aunt. I bought a real pomegranate and everything. They are probably the most absurdly over-the-top ridiculous piece of produce I've ever seen. If you've never cut one up I recommend you try it. The seeds actually are pretty tasty, but their quantity is kind of unbelievable. It's like a clown car. They just keep coming.
And I painted this from a photo I took in Ireland. Gift for my Nana.
I painted shoes for my sister for Christmas. These started out as plain white Keds slip-ons, and I used Pebeo Setacolor fabric paint. It stays nice and flexible, and was really just like painting on a stretched canvas.
Home in Delaware...and I'm not stripping wallpaper this Christmas!! Last year my siblings and I spent about three straight days with a wallpaper steamer scraping 50-year-old paper off of plaster walls, and then another day or two with a tub of spackle and various buckets of paint, as we delivered on the promised Christmas gift of a redecorated dining room. Not this year! The dining room is blue and will remain blue for the foreseeable future, thank all that is holy. All very coordinated with a painting I made a while back, and our second Christmas tree.
Adorning our other Christmas tree is a new ornament this year, crafted by hand out of a Humira self-injector pen. My Dad thought the red plastic could have a new life, after faithfully serving its first purpose as a drug-delivery device. Rheumatoid arthritis does Christmas. (Sustainability! Reduce, reuse, recycle!!)
In other news, I got my new blood work back. Negative rheumatoid factor (again), and no auto-immune markers (again). Pretty much normal, except for some elevated liver enzymes, which just means I need to stop taking anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers. And something called C-reactive protein was also high. Apparently it becomes elevated with inflammation, but doesn't give you specific info about what's actually inflamed, so not terribly helpful best I can figure. My fingers got nice and chubby on Wednesday, but all points of articulation seem to be fully functional today. I've been reading lots of medical journal abstracts though, am becoming increasingly convinced that RA starts in your gut with antibodies to food, and am still grudgingly on for pears, trout and sweet potatoes in 2011. Hooray. john mansfield elimination diet rheumatoid arthritis alternative health joint pain arthralgia hypoallergenic diet young female autoimmune
The Cheerios I left out for the mice disappeared. I have some (as yet unobserved) new friends.
Time Warner Cable came, at long last, which means I can watch episodes of Mad Men without incessant buffering.
Consequently, when not planning for my classes, or going to training things, I have been watching episode after episode. After episode. It's not as bad as with Six Feet Under, or Battlestar Galactica, or Lost, because the website that hosts the Mad Men episodes only lets you watch 72 minutes of video at a time, and then forces you to wait 54 minutes before watching another 72 minutes. I have no idea how they arrived at those numbers, but as aggravating as it is to have the episode stop ten minutes from the end, it at least has forced me to get up and do things. For example, yesterday it got to be about 4:00 and after getting a hair cut and greeting the cable guy, I'd pretty much just made food and watched more Mad Men. So when my 72 minute limit kicked in, I decided to find a mountain to hike.
The actual mountains were farther away than I felt like driving at 4:00 in the afternoon, but Google Maps told me that Crowders Mountain was much closer, so I told Sack (my GPS) where to take me and she got me there in about 45 minutes. (It's about 25 miles west of Charlotte.) At 1,600-ish feet, the "mountain" itself not especially tall, but it's got its own state park and a bunch of hiking trails. I picked a trail at random and hiked maybe two miles and change. At the end of it (well, the middle really - I went one way then doubled back) was a steep, gravelly hill that led up to some high rocky bits, half of which were roped off with caution tape for some reason. I couldn't see beyond that. I had not planned terribly well for my little excusion, and so was lugging my purse over one shoulder (ridiculous, I know - I need one of those little, tiny backpacks that hikers always have) and was sweating to death and the water bottle that I SHOULD have lugged with me, I did not. But, in my experience, you rarely regret climbing to the top of something very tall, so I kept going up. I had to climb sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then suddenly, I looked up. And the rocks and the trees stopped and it all just dropped away. I didn't bring my camera, but I drew a picture: As I was trying to get the best view I could without pitching off the cliff, I heard a scratchy, scuttling sound off to one side, and in my peripheral vision I saw something moving across the trunk of a pine tree. I backed gingerly off the rocks I'd clambered up on, and moved towards the tree. It was a skink! Ha! The only wild lizards I've seen are those little anoles in Florida; and that skink totally made my afternoon. He disappeared before I could draw his picture, but here's about what he looked like (thanks, Google!) I was glad it was not a rattlesnake. There were warning signs instructing visitors that the local rattlesnake mothers would be giving birth to their live young in the near future, and to be careful of snakes around rocky crevices. Rattlesnakes! So cool! I mean, yeah, glad I didn't run into any, but seeing one from a distance would have been even more awesome than the skink. I miss my snake friends at the Nature Museum (like Connie here) that I got to play with.
Today's my last day of freedom before it's back to TFA-land and the Marriott. I decided to pull out one of my p90x DVDs (for the first time in over two years) and spent an hour doing Kenpo with Tony Horton. I was pleasantly surprised to not be keeling over by the end - credit I'm going to give to LA Boxing back in Chicago. Made some ham and eggs, and a cup of tea, ate some nutella, and got to work on a painting I've been doing to go over my bed. It's going to be half of a diptych, because I want the whole piece to be as wide as my mattress. But I figure it'll have the green, blue and brown that I currently have going on in my mismatched bedroom, and it'll give me something to put behind my bed without my having to go buy a headboard. Or a bedframe. The photo I'm working from is from an issue of my favorite magazine Orion and is part of a series of "landscapes" taken underwater in ponds and streams. It's the biggest watercolor I've ever tried, and it's taking me a lot longer than I thought it would, but it's nice, meditative work and I'm happy with how it's looking so far. It's been too long since I made anything pretty.
Otherwise, I've been listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash (thanks to a hefty donation from my Dad's iTunes), chatting with faraway friends of the Biber and Ex types, and enjoying one hell of a thunderstorm from my cozy screen porch. I have no porch furniture at the moment, but since I also have no dining room/kitchen table, I've at least got a spare chair.
I took the Amtrak up to New York on Thursday morning to spend a couple days with some friends (Guts and Alyssa!!) I hadn’t seen in way too long. I got into Manhattan in the morning with a whole day to wander around before meeting up with Alyssa. I got into Penn Station and started walking North in the general direction of the Whitney. Before I made it to the museum though, I was waylaid by a thrift sale in a church basement in an absurdly rich-looking neighborhood off Madison Avenue. Figuring that the clothes absurdly rich people donate to thrift sales are probably still pretty nice clothes, I paid five bucks to get in and managed to make off with two cute BCBG skirts, an classy gray wool Armani skirt I can wear to work, and a white DKNY trench-style raincoat. All for the price of their Target-sales-rack equivalents! Ha! I had to fend off flying elbows and plastic laundry baskets overflowing with people’s purchases, but I made it out alive and feeling quite successful. Plus it was for some good cause or other, so I can feel doubly good about myself.
Then I went to the Whitney Biennial exhibit. Contemporary art is often very cool. It is often very prone to bullshit. Studying art as a major helped me get to know the work of some very cool contemporary artists that I might otherwise have put in the bullshit category. Wolfgang Laib, for instance, who makes art out of pollen he collects by hand in the meadows around his house in Germany.
Or Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art out of materials he finds in nature, like colored leaves, with no glue, no paper, no paint. He arranges them, and then photographs them, and then nature does its thing and the art disappears.
I saw a lot of art at the Whitney that I really liked. There were some poignant series of photographs of people. And some imaginative semi-figurative sculptures, and really beautiful abstract paintings. And a very cool tapestry by some Norwegian or Danish guy, all woven out of sisal and jute and things with fun textures and layers and a big hole meant to look like a sun. There were even one or two video installations I kind of liked.
However. There was also a healthy dose of art that makes you go “Seriously?”, which was made even more fun by the fact that I took one of those audio tour things with the head phones, so I got to hear the artists themselves explain their work, which made it all the more wonderfully silly.
My two finalists in the “Seriously?” category are…
A couch that the artist had covered with newspaper clippings about Barack Obama. Sitting on the couch were a couple big lumpy ceramic pieces, vaguely shaped like vases, but really awkward and non-functional. The artist’s audio tour explanation talked about how the couch was from her childhood home, and represented comfort, or security, or something. And how the meaning of the piece had maybe changed over the last year from a “couch of hope and promise” or something, to what might be seen as a couch of disappointment and broken expectations. I forget what the ceramics had to do with anything. Something about domesticity maybe? My verdict: kind of dumb and very boring.
My second favorite in the silly-bullshit category was an installation for which the artist had built a small room out of plywood in the middle of the gallery space. You go inside the dark room, and there is a pane of glass suspended from the ceiling, on which is projected a pale-green image of JFK’s head, floating disembodiedly. Under Kennedy’s head was an LP spinning around and around. There was another, larger projection making its way around the walls of the room that, as its own piece of abstract art, might have actually been pretty neat – it was some smeary, swirly paint or liquid photographed on a pane of glass. There might have been low music playing too. And that was it. JFK’s head floating above a vinyl record, looking like the big wizard head in the Wizard of Oz before Toto pulls back the curtain. Apparently the piece had something to do with the 1960s and the race to the moon. And jazz. There were some words and scientific-looking diagrams on the outside walls of the room too, that I’m sure tied into something, but that I could make neither heads nor tails of.
Sadly, no cameras were allowed in the exhibit (stole the couch photo from their website), so you all will have to go and pay your $12. You can actually scroll through a number of the pieces here: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial
This past week, all five Andersens piled into my Dad’s Camry and we did a two-day civil war battlefields trip: Gettysburg and Antietam. We stayed with family in Maryland, and my cousin Zoe, who just turned six, drew my portrait.
The battlefields themselves were similar in a lot of ways. Both involved a visitor center, with a dramatically-narrated movie (James Earl Jones for one, Morgan Freeman for the other) with lots of reenactors and some museum-type exhibits.
The main attraction at both battlefields was the self-guided driving tour through the farmland and woods where the fighting took place. The fields at Gettysburg, and Antietam to a lesser extent, were lined with memorials erected over the years by veterans groups to various regiments: the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry, the 1st Maryland Cavalry, the Massachusetts Sharpshooters, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of stone markers, obelisks, bronze soldiers, men on horseback, crosses, slabs – over acres and acres of battlefields.
You drive along, and get out to look at some of them. The map tells you where to stop to see where this charge happened, or where this skirmish took place, or where the cannons were lined up. Military history per se has never really done it for me – battlefield strategy, maneuvering, who had what guns and what numbers – just not my thing. So honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened at either Gettysburg or Antietam. I know that Robert E. Lee tried to move North, and failed each time. The thing that hit me though, was the sheer number of people who died at each battle. Something like 8,000 men, all Americans, killed each other at Gettysburg. At Antietam, 4,000 people killed each other in a DAY. And in the whole Civil War, over 600,000 people died altogether. More than half a MILLION. I just can’t wrap my head around a number that big, period, much less when that number represents actual people. There was a quote from the period typed up in one of the visitor center museums: “Every name is a lightning stroke to some heart and it breaks like thunder over some home, and it falls a long black shadow upon some hearthstone." The other thing too is that there were so many photographs from the Civil War. So you see these mens’ faces, and their funny hats, and bad haircuts. I don’t know. Just unbelievably sad, I guess.
And you like to think we’re moving forward. We don’t line people up in fields and charge at each other with rifles and bayonets anymore. Soldiers don’t die from infection right and left, or have limbs sawed off in tents. But now, instead of slaughtering each other in cornfields, we can kill people half-way around the world with remote-control drone planes operated from some air-conditioned military base safely in the U.S. Which makes war much less terrible for us, of course. But there was another quote I remember from one of the museums, that Lee said at some point during the war: “It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.”
A less-somber side note. Gettysburg was swarming with groups of high school students. Hordes of teenagers, punching each other, singing songs and, mysteriously, pretending to be galloping horses running around the museum. Of course, in fairness, I remember field trips being basically fun times to hang out with your friends and act ridiculous. But man, I hope I am ready for the youth of America.
The real reason I got a blog? Because my previous procrastination method of watching Lost on Hulu ended when I finished Season 5. (Okay, it didn’t really end completely, but the episodes on itunes cost $2.99 so I don’t watch eight per day anymore .) Basically this is a way to put off packing. I’m getting there. The pile of boxes is growing and smaller piles are sprouting up in other places. The big hurdle comes tomorrow. Every time I walk out back to throw stuff in the trash I take a second to visualize myself somehow backing a U-Haul truck from the alley into a parking space. And then I think, What if there isn’t an empty space tomorrow?!?!! And I get a little panicky. Never fear. If I have to make a 17-point turn I will get that truck in a spot. Unless there is no spot. In which case I will knock on every door in my building until I find someone I can bribe into moving their car. Fingers crossed.
Got a lot of packing done, so I took a break to work on a painting I’m trying to finish up before I head out. A little Matisyahu, brush in one hand, drink in the other. Should anyone be curious, Captain Morgan makes a passable substitute for vodka in a white Russian (Beige Russian?). In other news, tomorrow I will be heading to some building on Clark in the Loop and paying $9 to get my fingerprints taken so I can send them to the FBI.
