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Showing posts from 2014

Ending - and beginning again - with the alphabet

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Time is stretching its paws, and trying to decide if it's motivated enough to get up off that couch... No, wait, that's me. Motivation is my middle name. Currently, my first name is Lacking... The opening of my Bestiary show, Where Are We Going? was a lot of fun, with kids and crayons and friends and finger food. I was grateful to Neal and Caroline, and everyone who showed up, dropping my jaw when some friends I'd believed to be in Honduras (where they live) walked through the door. I even sold a painting or two. Or a few more. Already, I am nostalgic for the structure of the alphabet. Every day another letter, another agonizing decision (“Wombat? Warthog? Weasel? Wolverine?”), finishing the Vervet monkey painting the night before the opening. And the pressure of painting on the walls, getting it right. I really had a good time, in spite of the stress. I am trying to get back to writing, but I am also planning to keep up the alphabet. The fox

The alphabet is not getting shorter...

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An animal alphabet seemed like a great idea, with built in structure, lots of varied critters... But then I realized, after five letters or so, that there are twenty-six. Yes, I don't always think things through. Hmm. The first question everyone has: What animal are you using for X ? So, here's the African ground squirrel, Xerus! The show is up at AS220 Project Space, at 93 Mathewson Street, for the month of December. Kid oriented, as you might have noticed - tots are welcome!

Masters' in Priorities

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I am more than half way finished with my third class, Theories and Principles of Language Teaching with Dr. Lily Compton, in the Umass Boston online version of their Applied Linguistics Program .  The student caliber is high, the median age I would guess to be mid thirties (with plenty above and below that age) and from all over the world – Greece, France, Japan, Philippines, and the U.S. The weekly work requirements involve about 12 hours of reading and writing, with possibly a bit more for a perfect record of responding thoughtfully and with academic weight to the comments of fellow students. The reading is interesting, particularly Vivian Cook's  SecondLanguage Learning and Language Teaching: Fourth Edition .  (Dry title, dry humor.) In spite of all that, I am taking next semester off. Cancer snapped me into a new set of priorities, and I'm not sure getting a(nother) masters' is how I want to spend whatever time I have here in this crazy and lush world of

Walking my way to a brain

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People say that chemo affects the brain - chemo brain , it's called, though we aren't sure chemo is the source of the befuddlement following chemotherapy. Could be trauma, somewhere on the PTSD scale , right? Or low vitamin B12 ? Anyway, something is slower than usual in my brain, and I'm in the middle of course three in my master's program in applied linguistics, so I am trying out the blood flow idea. Walk while reading means telling the body that the brain is a worthy recipient of its efforts. Maybe. Oh, I hope so. Here is my answer to post-chemo brain: Magnetic treadmill, so no power source required, and (thanks to Laurent, whose brain appears to be still functioning well, for the problem solving) an orchestra music stand turned around.

My right side is sad, my left side is angry, and the whole misses a part of itself

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Yep, I am finally starting to feel like an amputee. Poor little body, having to say goodbye like that to family. Poor little breasts, who never did no harm to no one. It's good to have a good cry over that. After a tumor in the right lymph nodes, and a double mastectomy and oopherectomy, the two sides of my body are like siblings. The left side is hurt and angry - "I didn't do anything, why do I have to pay? And why does the other side get all the attention, when I do all the work?" And the right side is just sad and scared. ******************** I just crossed the ford of 40. I got a diagnosis at 38, and wasn't sure that I would make it this far, being a bit of a pessimist by nature. No, not pessimism: knowing we will all die and not liking suspense. But here I am. Hello! Nice to see you all again! Nice to breathe big breaths into the tender place where there were once breasts! I'm happy, as well as sad and angry. And very happy to be all of those.

Doodles and dribbles and astrocartography

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It is raining in the Alps. Cold rain in the Alps is not fun. Yes, the clouds are pretty, but... Man, it's cold out there - 48 degrees Fahrenheit. These photos were taken on the last day before the rains began. Yes, I'm complaining about being in les Arcs. In Haute-Savoie. I know. Speaking of locations, I have been paling around with astrocartography maps, trying to decide if it's Boise, Idaho, or Omaha, Nebraska, that is the ideal place for me - according to these maps, at least! I think it all comes down to daylight saving time... Nixon signed the daylight saving law into being the year I was born. So, circuitously, if I moved to the wrong city based on an hour's difference, Nixon could be responsible for my personal astrological disaster. How fun is that? And, once again, I tinker with animations:

Pretty is what we can fantasize about - imagining having known about my brca1 before cancer struck

I'm reading Jessica Queller's Pretty Is What Changes , chronicling how she discovered that she was brca1 positive and the medical decisions she made therewith.  The bad: tediously name-droppy.  The good: Queller really lets us in on what it feels like to consider cutting off a part of your body because it might save your life. And probably save you from a serious and grizzly illness. And whether or not that is too much of a decision for us all. I find it strangely comforting to read about someone who had a prophylactic double mastectomy in response to learning about her cancer gene. It isn't that I want to share the misery – I really really desperately don't – but that I can fantasize that avoiding cancer is possible. Dramatic, traumatic, but possible. This is a genetic disease. This means I was born with the code that would lead to this, sort of. So, it feels silly to me to think of changing who I was born to be, – “Oh, what if I didn't have this gene?”

50k and miles to go... NaNoWriMo and the unfinished novel

This year's project for National Novel Writing Month did not - and I know no one is shocked by this - get sewn up within the wee month of November, the last half of which was spent driving up to Dana Farber and back. Besides, for the first half of that time I preferred landscape painting while the days were still fine. When radiation treatments ended, I finally went back to writing, and started to try feeling around for what I really cared about in the project. The novel became the story of an adolescent who learns she has the breast cancer gene. At 16, what would you have done? How would it have changed your life, if at all? Not a small question. And tangle that up with a few French fairies (cause I can't resist) the Norman countryside, some fellow confused adolescents, and you have - A 50k mess. But 50k! Yay! It was a goal, significant or not, and it has been crossed today. Now I just have to write another 80k so I can throw away 60...

Strong. Scoff.

I find the following oft repeated declaration difficult to tolerate: “You are/were so strong to deal with all this! I know you, of all people, will pull through. Because you are so strong.” ... Uh... Being told you are strong when you are just dealing with life as it comes. Unhappy face. This  praise is a completely well intentioned copout. Maybe the following statements can illustrate why I find this irritating: “You woke up in the morning, when the car alarm started just outside your bedroom window! Boy are you ever strong.” “You are breathing, in spite of the fact that there is pollution in the air, and breathing requires muscles, and oxygen contributes to cell fatigue. That takes serious strength.” “You fed your kids breakfast, and it wasn't even sugary cereal! You are so strong. I don't know if I could do that.” “You did not stay up until 3 in the morning watching My Mad Fat Diary. Wow. You are strong.” (Oh. Wait. I really mean that one...)

Frog spring

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My reaction to spring appears to involve a lot of frogs. And some craziness involving not doing sitting meditation, but that's all taken care of now. (Simple equation: not sitting = more crazy x not taking good enough care of myself.) So, frog one and two, first one litoria caerulea , second one plastica plastic . Oh, and third one papier imaginica .

Following drawing advice

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I followed Maggie Stiefvater's drawing advice . More or less. Only with some slight distortion for the final project - who needs values, after all? The 20 second value sketch took me 3 minutes, and the line drawing 5. The painting took me hours, not sure how many. More than two, less than five? And yes, I tried to find a raven to honor her writing, but morguefile (thank you mothdevil !) fed me crows instead, and called them ravens...

Painting three models makes me fauvist

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This weekend I got to join my friends Amy Wynne Derry and Margaret Owen in a painting marathon at Amy's studio. At the end I felt very much like I had spent the entire day running. We had fun, the artists painting these three models. The models, on the other hand, worked very hard. They maintained the same pose for much of a five hour period, and we all got to play. Many of the artists chose to work on just one model at a time, but not all. (One of Margaret Owen's paintings from the session, below)

Awakening the senses - meditation and painting

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I just came back from a weekend in New York with Sokuzan Robert Brown . We spent most of the time talking about sense perceptions, and he led us in a series of exercises to awaken the awareness of the senses. "Let the senses lead," he kept saying, and backed it up with various methods of noticing where the awareness goes when focusing on certain things - what happens to sight perception of the room when one has just put a bit of salt on the tongue, for example. Then he instructed us on ways of seeing paintings, letting the awareness travel to assigned ideas (dark, triangular, red, top left, etc) without ever moving your eyes from the center. The result of this last was a kind of amped up version of many Josef Albers exercises, or the measuring, drawing and weighing sketches I have always done of paintings I liked in museums. I came back uncertain of what I was going to paint, so I just went over old ground. Different than the last one...

Don't piss off the fairies

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Here is the color saturated painting of the study photo: I love it when painting is such fun. It helps to have Noel McLoughlin, PJ Harvey, and Tom Waits singing in the background.

Dancing with the fairies

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This is a study photo I put together for a painting I've been wanting to do for a while. Today I'm really feeling the middle land between life and death, which has a particularly verdant feeling because of being still relatively young. It feels very Shakespearian, like running through stone halls made green with moss, arm in arm with others, not brushing my teeth... Does that make any sense?

Emile the gnome

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Some days I have an urgent need to paint something, and then I just wander around for the rest of the week wondering: Hunh?

When being a virgo... drawing studies for a painting

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Once in a while I become, shall we say, obsessively detail oriented. Maybe it is a lack of confidence, or maybe not taking deep enough breaths. Or maybe some details just need attending to. The small owl that I'm painting on linen has become, in my mind, a mural, something large, maybe a frieze on the side of the Mall of America. In other words, it has become disproportionately daunting. Partly because this bird has serious character, and I don't want to miss that. Nor the beauty. Also, I'm painting it for my sister, who has higher standards than there are devices for measuring such things. Many, many owls have been drawn by me over the last weeks. Or rather, the same owl many times over. I remember being told the story of the zen painter (or maybe it was a chinese master?) who was commissioned to paint a rooster. After a few months (years) the customer became impatient, and demanded to be given his painting. "Well, if you are in such a hurr

Tarasque, TARDIS, loneliness

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I get these daily messages from the Enneagram Institute, and this is what barely kept me from rewatching old Doctor Who: The Direction of Growth for Nines is Three. When healthy Nines go to Three, they become self-assured and interested in developing themselves and their talents to the fullest extent possible. How can you more fully develop yourself today? (The Enneagram Institute, Personality Types, p369) Grumble. Still what with snow and children and weekends and such, I am asserting my rebelliousness by not meditating. I think perhaps that I recognize that last bit of identity assertion as being lame. I painted a wee little monster instead of watching a traveling time-lord. May I introduce to you the Tarasque? (hmm. sounds like TARDIS, and similar blue color...) The Tarasque was a monster on a rampage in Nerluc, of Provence, France. According to one story it had a head like a lion, legs like a bear's (but six of them), the body of an ox wearing a turtl

On such a winter day...

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It is beautiful outside, with last night's new fallen snow. We went for a walk in the woods, Lucy and Emile in the wooden sled behind us. Behind Laurent, more accurately, as I did none of the pulling. Then, perversely, I came home and painted this sunny spring abstractish landscapeish painting. Emile and Laurent are back out in the snow, at Roger Williams Park, sledding.

Frogs and reducing media intake

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In an effort to build my anti-sloth muscles, I am trying to cut down on reading, radio, and Dr. Who. I feel happier. I think. Here's a remix of an earlier frog, commissioned by a friend:

Progression of a portrait painting in acrylic

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Nine figures. If you include the jellyfish. Which I do. I thought you might be curious what the process looked like. sketches from photos:  monochromatic acrylic wash sketch on paper: create composite photo: draw on prepared canvas with yellow pastel: go over pastel using cadmium deep orange and a paint brush: correct errors with color paint: go whole hog: Now I think I'll put some matte gel on it to finish. Or maybe some other varnish... I'll have to research this. ETA: the only varnish I found which is non-toxic is the high gloss from Liquitex . I'm not keen on high gloss. So I think I'll skip the varnishing thing.

Snow

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flowers and owls

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Still noodling along... drawing owls, experimenting with pastels vs. acrylic. I think I like the pastel version better. That probably means I like less precision more than it's opposite. Which means paint flowers with less of a precious eye, perhaps. Thank you, Aunt Crystal, for the subject matter! Also, here is a marvelous article on dealing with the uncertainties of life expectancy after cancer.  In a way, though, the certainty of death was easier than this uncertain life. Didn’t those in purgatory prefer to go to hell, and just be done with it? Was I supposed to be making funeral arrangements? Devoting myself to my wife, my parents, my brothers, my friends, my adorable niece? Writing the book I had always wanted to write? Or was I supposed to go back to negotiating my multiyear job offers? - Paul Kalanithi, New York Times , Jan 24 2014

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