Post 43 of 92...yeah, I know

Well, I'm writing again.  Joined a local writers group and have 'assignments' using writing prompts.  So a story is forming.  Very loose and already full of loose ends which will have to be tied up but must admit it is good to be writing again.  It won't be like before when I would sit down first thing in the morning with a cuppa and punch out 1000 words.  Life just doesn't work like that anymore, other commitments, different schedule - but I am starting to carry a small notebook and a pen on our afternoon walks as that's when the best ideas come. 

It's fun.

No pressure.

Like the guitar.  Have started over.  Somewhere I read that one should use a mirror to help with placement of the left hand.  That however has turned out rather awkwardly as I became dependent upon it and couldn't find the notes without it.  So have put the mirror away and am retraining without it.  It's muscle memory.  Finding the exact positioning of the fingers near the frets; too far away and the note buzzes, too close and it's dead.  Really difficult.  Odd too as a song came on and I grabbed my air guitar and I STILL hold it the opposite way to the way a guitar is to be played.  Thought as I had no bad habits to break I may as well learn to play with the left hand fretting and the right strumming.  But my air guitar is exactly the opposite; right hand fretting and left plucking.  Oh well.

Still drawing too.  Have one I rather like up on the easel and another on the floor waiting for the final touches.  Two people keep insisting I apply to have a show at Art Post Uki.  Thought no no no, as I don't do Opening Nights - get quite anxious and claustrophobic at other people's opening nights.  It's such a small space and it's always packed.  How would I cope if it was mine and I couldn't run away as I usually do?  That is if my work was accepted in the first place.  One makes an application which goes away to be independently evaluated by artists not associated with APU.

Actually got on their website to have a look for an entry form.   I could have an opening night where I wasn't there - but it all seems so childish and precious - and a bit pretentious - to not attend my own opening night. 

The idea of showing my work?  No worries!  Either people like it, don't like it, or don't care either way.  That's fine.  Because as conceited as it sounds, most of my work I like.  Sure I recognize the failings of them but they speak from and to me so I'm fond of them. 

Time to walk Mikaela.

My birthday yesterday and my birthday wish was to take Mikaela to the beach.  A grand day.  She is such a good and funny dog.  She runs and grins and leaps and bounces, crashes into me or cuts me off while running.  But whatever she does she doesn't run away and comes when she's called.  That's with no dogs on the beach.  Not sure she would be so amenable if there was a white fluffy within chase distance.  Hopefully we'll never find out.  Find if we go on a weekday there are hardly any dogs!
Anyway, 63 years old and life is god.

For weeks I worked on a large drawing, used up a couple of coloured pencils, kept trying to find a way to make it work but it was just throwing good time after bad.  There comes a point when I just had to say it's crap and it's always going to be crap.  So I burned it.

What a relief!  As soon as the paper charred and smoke curled up the chimney a weight lifted.  Sometimes I think the credo to reduce reuse and recycle weighs too heavily so that any art work attempted has to be worthy.  Sometimes frankly, it is not.  Just have to let it go and let go of the demands on myself for *perfection*. 

Art is an exploration, my exploration of my world and myself.  It isn't good or bad, it just is.  I'm not making it for some art buying public, it's not going to a gallery, or even a show (although I have shown).  Of course I'd be lying if I said I didn't care about it not pleasing others.  It's wonderful when someone likes my work.  One highlight of that horrible night when R fainted and the ambulance was called was the enthusiasm of one of the paramedics for  my work.  Such a strange sensation to be chuffed on the one hand and worried on the other.

So I burned that last work and have started on another, shown below.  This photo, taken from our new phone, is a practice run.  Trying to learn how to take photos with the phone and also how to save them onto the computer.  So it's not a great photo but it gets the idea across.  The drawing is coming along.  Hope to upload a finished version - made more difficult because we don't have phone reception here so must take the photo then go elsewhere to send it to myself. 

 

But I do like this drawing.  Unlike the previous one.  If I don't muck it up.

Overcast and cool.  A male fig bird, pale and insipid without his scarlet  breeding season eye patch, plucks green caterpillars from the poinciana tree outside the window.  The fig birds are working hard.   Newly fledged youngsters shimmy shake and squawk for food.  Continuously.  Must be hard to be a bird parent. 

Richard returns today.  Have missed him but have also enjoyed the solitude.  Do know that I sleep better alone.  He snores and talks and often crowds onto my side of the bed.  It seems I am always asking him to turn or move over.  Loving couples should be loving couples in bed too but I am beginning to understand, even desire, the restful oasis of twin beds.  But I'll never ask him.  Some things you just have to put up with and interrupted sleep is one of them.

Another thing which erupts here without Richard is singing and dancing.  Just leapt up to Placido Domingo's Granada and earlier swayed around the living room to The Girl from Impanema.   Have always sung, always danced as an expression of irrepressible joy not because I'm any good at either of them.  But for that degree of freedom of expression to flow, no audience allowed.  Or even the prospect of a surprise audience.

Have been scratching away at a drawing but am not inspired.  If it works it will be a miracle.  No plan at all, just a line here a bit of shading there.  Love how graphite builds mass.  Without the distraction of colour, graphite defines form in a way that I find very satisfying.  It has bulk, it has mood, it has a dark energy that is independent of the illusionary life created by the vibrancy of colour.  Graphite is meaty.  And this from a vegan.

Post Parting Regression

It would take at least a week of solitude to fall into myself again.  But I only have until Monday.  Today is Saturday. 

When did I lose the ability to think, to follow a thought thread to a conclusion or at least an opinion?  I think in thought bytes.  Nothing more substantial than a quick acknowledgement of 'Oh, that might be important!' before moving on to the next ephemera.  I'm one of those multi-taskers that multi-task themselves right out of the ability to stop and think.  I equate busyness with meaning when busyness is keeping idle hands and idle minds occupied so I don't have to confront the emptiness and fear and shame which knocks at my idle mind. 

And I'm so damned hard on myself.  I'm going on 60 and I'm still flogging myself daily for not having a perfect body.  Isn't that nuts?  When will I let all that crap go?  I exercise 2 hours a day (1 hour yoga, 1 hour walking) and enjoy the benefits of health and flexibility yet what I really want is physical perfection. 

It is breathtakingly sad.

Yesterday I dug out my huge art book in which I've stored all my loose drawings, paintings and sketches that aren't framed and hanging on the walls (the grandkids counted 51 pictures on the wall, most of which is my stuff).   Anyway, I was surprised and pleased by the amount and variety and yes, talent displayed in these works.  Not all were good, some were, many more weren't, but they were mine, they were individual and creative.  And numerous!  I have a serious body of work developing.  Won't matter one whit after I'm gone.  I'm no Grandma Moses, discovered and made famous in her dotage.  (But I'm vain enough to want to be).  The importance is in the doing.  I've always said that.  But do I believe it?

Or is my real worth to be measured in my ability to be unselfish and care for Richard?  I blame him for part of my inability to settle.  I listen now.  Since he fainted all those months ago and was carted off to hospital in an ambulance, I listen.  Part of me has become a sentinel, watching for the Enemy.  Of course it's not his fault and he doesn't know that part of me is always at attention. 

So while he is away for a few days I try and discover myself again.  Try and quit flicking between windows (just read about Clementine Hunter, a poor cotton picking black woman from Louisiana who taught herself to paint), try and be a bit more forgiving of myself for my imperfections. 

And try and start another painting before he gets home.  Drawing is more calming than meditation.  I find like repetitive detail, something to lose myself in.  Something to fall into while I'm alone.
 

Sketchbook Dreaming

I love the look of some of the sketchbooks I've stumbled across.  Artistic doodles or doodle art.  Making art often freezes me.  The older I get the more easily I get stuck because I want perfection and making a mark risks imperfection.  Looking at the looseness and spontaneity of the work is contagious.  It doesn't matter if it's not perfect.  Life is imperfect; messy, nonlinear, confusing, misinterpreted, too loud, too quiet.  Looked at another way, however, and life's very refusal to be contained is perfection.  Is creation.

Journals, canvases, sketchbooks all have borders.  The idea, the creation is necessarily constrained within the confines of the border, the edge.  That is an unavoidable stricture.  Adding more by being too rigid in that impossible chase after pefection just compounds the problem.

Easy to state the problem, less easy to stop it.  Came across a blog, which I'll try and find again, which listed every day things to draw every day .  What a way to improve one's skill and at the same time instill looseness. 

Am working on a drawing.  It started out as a sketch, hardened into a drawing, lay dormant for weeks because of having no idea which way to go, and now has metamorphosed into a pencil sketch overlaid with coloured pencil.  Which surprisingly I quite like the look of.  It's a teenage boy's sketch; surreal monsters, hands with finger trees, doors into other dimensions - all the result of just trying not to be too anal about things but to draw for the sake of drawing.

Which is a compelling argument for drawing every day things every day in a sketchbook.

Hung Up in a Dream

I got hung last night.  Just after seeing my friend hung.  Knew after watching her die that I would be terrified and in agony for only a short time.  It didn't make the prospect any easier.  Then I woke up.  With a terrible headache, like a hangover headache except I wasn't hung over.  My heart was thudding, in my head and in my chest.  I was dead scared.  Pretty foul nightmare.

So what does it mean, being hung?  Being hung up?  Being trussed and unable to move (forward) or at all.  Do feel that actually.   Being stuck, however, isn't terrifying.  I couldn't watch her die.  I did turn away at the last minute, coward that I was.  I was so full of my impending death I had very little emotion left for her.  Have no idea who she was.  An aspect of me I suppose.  She was about 20 feet away and something, a bookcase? table? blocked the view of her lower body  I could only see her head and shoulders. 

I got up and drank a glass of water.  When I woke in the morning my headache was no more.  Feel that it wasn't a menopausal headache, which I do get sometimes, blasted things strike in the middle of the night, but was related to the nightmare.

So I haven't worked on my drawing for days.  Have no idea what to do with it.  I haven't sketched.  I have finished an Elizabeth George book instead of doing anything creative myself.   Don't like  when I coast along, going through the motions and don't make anything. 

Ran into a ex-neighbour last week.  She separated from her husband and moved away.  She was visiting some friends at the end of the road.  She's getting a book published, she told me.  She's working on 8 books, the first one should be out by August.  She has a publisher and an editor.  She's had the manuscript read by a few friends and it makes them cry and laugh just where she wants them to cry and laugh. 

I was dumbfounded.  This woman is the last person I would think of as being a writer.   Shows my arrogance I guess.  What is it about writing that makes it an elitist activity?  If she has something to say, she doesn't need an Oxford Dictionary vocabulary to say it. 

She's using a nom de plume, she said.  So how will I know which book to buy and read?  She said she'd let me know and took my email address.  Part of me, the suspicious part, remembers the stories she told about the stallion she used to have.  This magnificent warmblood stallion  would set the show world on fire.  And that's all I heard about him, what she said.  Is this book the same?  She said the book takes place in reality and in fantasy and it bore some resemblance to 50 Shades of Grey except not so slutty.  Had I read 50 Shades?  No, I hadn't.  So I'll wait and see. 

I want it to be true.  I'm not a writer but I've written a book (bad) and a half (worse) so it can be done.  Another part of me, the green envious part, screams how is it SHE can write, is about to be published, and I can't?  Huh?

I can draw, however.  If I have a talent and a strength, that's where it is, if I'd just get out of my own way and do it.  For that's the problem.  I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing that I do nothing.  Silly, huh?

More Art and a Dying Moth

Fickle creature. Am on to the next Big Thing. At least I am eternally optimistic that my next attempt at drawing will be better than the last. Finished the Parrot Looming Over Woman Dreaming in Red Armchair painting/drawing (is it a painting if paint is not used? This last is a combination of oil/chalk pastel, coloured and graphite pencil). Dropped the finished work into the somewhat bulging art folder along with all the other rejected unframed projects. Have given up on getting anything framed. Buy all these cheap frames with glass at the op shops then leap into a new drawing without measuring first to fit (in case it turns out okay). When I am at my most egotistical (and my most delirious) I have a vision that I'll be *discovered* after my death. Like a modern age Grandma Moses...yet I allow none of the grandkids to call me grandma (whole other post on this, by naming we define, by naming we make real. I will not be named Grandma. Vain, yes. Do I care? No).

So this next drawing was just an exercise to get down an idea I had for a larger piece. But I liked it so much that I've kept going. It's different enough from what I hope to do as a larger work that I won't feel I'm repeating myself. Have much admiration for artists who will do the same painting half a dozen times in an effort to get it right. Admiration that falls short of emulation. Just had a thought tho - stemming from yoga practice. I do the same routine (takes about an hour and 20 minutes) every day. Why does it not bore me? Because each time I am in the moment which is eternal and eternally different. It must follow that if I drew, for example, a brass vase every day for a year, those 365 drawings would be different because I would be different. And perhaps if I did draw that vase 365 times I would discover that it was not boring. One of those great many questions I'll never have an answer to.

There's a moth clinging to the screen in the loo. It's brown and tan, rather bland and nondescript, about the size of a 20 cent piece. I wouldn't have noticed it, as one ignores bland brown moths, except I was sitting there and it was clinging there. Then I saw its translucent wings were somewhat ratty with crenellated edges and of its six legs I could only count two. So this moth is on its way out. What goes on behind those dark unfathomable eyes? Is it aware that it's dying or does it only know great tiredness? Has it bred and therefore will live on in its descendants? Does it drink from the showy cactus flowers which bloom nightly and daily die? What adventures has it experienced under the black eternity of stars while we sit cocooned inside a wooden box mesmerized by a flickering blue glow? The wings have lost most of their *dust*. It has flown...miles? Following the pheronomes of a female or trailing scent like an insect Salome? Dodging predators, guided by what mysterious filaments of knowing that we, with our heavy corporeal intelligence, cannot even imagine. The Night is another dimension, another world. And this moth, holding with one leg to the dusty screen of a country house toilet, the day light shining through its dull brown wings, noticed by one small woman from a crowd of 7 billion, what of it. What of it, indeed?

Cushings Disease and Drawing Disasters

There are four horses outside the window. Occasionally one, usually Drifter, looks at the house. They know I'm up so why have I not come out to let them through to breakfast. The peach paddock has become the Jenny Craig paddock. They are all too fat but locking them into the yards, although denying them food for the night, is just a bit tough. Its hard ground isn't conducive to a good night's sleep and although horses sleep standing up, for a really good sleep, they like to lie down.

Suspect Drifter has Cushing's disease. Peter is going to give me some Chaste Berry which has helped horses with Cushings. Anecdotally at least. A study was done that says it made no difference while lay people have used it with success. Want to give it a try before going to drugs which can have side effects (especially to the liver). Should've known last year that Drifter had Cushings. He grew enough hair to pass for a buffalo and shed it in the same way, in great strips. This winter he again grew a long hairy coat and although most of it has come away, not all. Another sign was the sweating. In winter. But I passed it off as a result of the extra long coat. Plus he's been dull and rather lack lustre in his bearing. This sign was particularly difficult to notice as Drifter has always been an extremely laid back, shall I say, bone lazy, horse. But now, even without the drug tests, I am willing to wager he has it. He's the right age (21) and Cushings usually manifests around age 20.

Cushings is a disease which results from a benignn tumour growing on the pituitary gland. It prevents the pituitary gland from releasing cortisol (if I remember correctly). There is no cure. So again, we have a horse that we know is doomed and will one day have to make that difficult decision. Until then we can find something, whether it's chaste berry or traditional medicine, to help him spend his last years in comfort.

Strange how the animals one shares one's life with are like family. I know it's trite to say so as people talk about their furred or feathered family but when I think I've known Drifter for 19 years, that's a bloody long time. We've been through a lot together. He's taught me more about humility than anyone else. Because he forgave me. Always, all my mistakes, my pique, my temper, impatience, dumb arse ideas and misplaced enthusiams, were borne with equine equanimity. He is a wise old soul in a rough red coat.

I haven't written about the latest painting because it's a disaster! Most of it I like; like the concept, the look, the atmosphere, even the workmanship but the blasted woman sitting in the chair has been reworked and reworked and reworked to the point of possibly no return. The paper has held up well but there are just so many times that colour and material (pencil, chalk pastel) can be removed before it is no longer workable. The drawing is okay but it's the darned colour. Does she pick up the colour of the big red chair and if she does, how much? Is she in deep shadow (in dim light and with eyes half closed, it suits the mood of the painting best. Unfortunately, I have been unable to duplicate that look in bright light with eyes wide open). I'm gettingn to the point of putting it away and starting on something else. Perhaps a solution will come when it isn't before me every day. And I need to be working on something and this is just reworking with no reward.

The previous painting is a write-off too. Thought I could cut up portions of it to keep but with a second look it isn't worth saving. Thankfully, it will make good fire starter for next winter.