Connections

Okay kids. Wow. I think I got it.

You remember my recent breakthrough with the easel and the drawing board. Since then I have with a few exceptions begun my mornings with a quick crayon session. Even a couple unrelated scribbles helped me get out of that weighty am I really good enough nonsense you sometimes encounter as you approach your desk, and instead you are transported into that magical observant place where you can just notice the shape of things. And all you want out of life is to copy them down.

This inevitably led to my bringing crayons and the drawing board with me to the Oregon Country Fair, and resulted in those big crayon studies of what I saw. The result was not necessarily better than my attempts to capture journeys in the past -- things were not nearly as detailed as they needed to be to really be accurate -- but it was a LOT more satisfying. What I was seeing and feeling was BIG STUFF. So it was nice to record things in a big way.

I have gone to some really amazing places in the last couple years. Ireland with my Mother in 2008, a two-week camping holiday in Canada a year later, San Diego a year after that. Travel has always been a deep love of mine, and all the while I have secretly hoped someone might pay me money to go places and experience them and then report my findings to whoever would be interested in the sort of things I notice. So whenever I've gone somewhere I always feel that anxiety -- perhaps even more than you do -- to capture the experience.

I say perhaps more than you do only because I illustrate things. In a way that's really my job all the time. I capture experiences, feelings, emotions. All those things cameras do not capture.

Furthermore during the trip to Ireland I learned something -- cameras are not fast enough. My mother and I both had cameras with many memory cards, but we often lamented that the thing we'd wanted to take pictures of was usually just after we got it in our head to press the button. We had internet available at every place we stayed and adequate downtime every evening set aside for emailing loved ones back home to give them a day-by-day account of events. This morning we caught the bus outside the pub in Cork, changed buses in Tralee. Ate dinner at this place outside Bunratty Castle. All true but it somehow doesn't capture what the three-to-five hours on the bus was like. Rushing past rolling hills and stone walls straight out of a storybook. The alarming skinniness of the roads. The thrill of seeing bilingual road signs, placed in places that made no sense to our American brains. The tiny towns passed through, with tiny shop fronts and Easter egg colored houses. Buildings crowded around the road. A man in a check cap and patched trousers walking with an ancient terrier. And these things were addressed in the occasional prosey email, but there was still so much missing. The color of the stone walls and how it matched the man's jacket. The sound of people muttering to each other. How can you capture it all?

The next adventure was Canada, and I tried doggedly to document everything. Snapshots of anything that seemed promising, sketches, painting on the fly. I even had a gluestick and collage paper with me, and I faithfully kept every single piece of paper we were given or came across. It was a mess -- way too ambitious for the timeline we were on. And of course in the end the car window was smashed in and I wound up mostly only talking about that, and it's a shame because that was one of the most beautiful trips I have ever been on.

After that trip it was clear that I needed to simplify my capture approach. In San Diego I only brought my pen and notebook. And with the exception of the Museum of Man, which I badly wanted to sit in front of and paint for a few days, I actually did really well. But I ran into a new problem.



My simple pen studies had a satisfying feel to them all on their own. But whenever I tried to iron them out, or add color, or turn them into a more polished painting, I was somehow never able to capture the charm of the original drawing. I've had this problem a long time actually, in several other facets of my drawing-life. Different stages along the way. It was something I wanted to confront, but something I never got around to. Other things kept demanding attention.

Since then when I go on journeys I take nothing more than a pen and that at least solves the anxious burden of Capturing Everything. It helps you let go when your supplies are limited. It also helped me hone in on Which Details Are Important and get a grip on how I saw things, so that eventually I was able to do things like paint that picture of the Tillamook Cheese Factory without taking any pictures or any written notes at all.



So at this point I have these stories I want to tell, these pictures I want to make, about these bigger travels. They are all backlogged in my brain and keep getting pushed behind other things. Added to this we are constantly going on little weekend excursions. Constantly. Remember, Anthony lived in Eugene for two years before he moved in this summer, so there were many, many weekends spent on the road. The baby cooler is in constant use, the roadmap is marked up with highlighters and tattered from the number of times it gets stuffed down between the passenger seat and the gear shifter. Now that Anthony lives up here we are able to explore east and west more often. We go on more walks into the hills and take little mini-vacations to the rural countryside. Make our own minor discoveries. This is a beautiful state and I am pretty strict about not working on weekends, preferring instead to go out and explore.

I guess what gets me is: I am really good at going on adventures. My last trip to Colorado was a 72 hour affair in two different cities with three different groups of people and it was as slick a little operation you could ever hope for. I just wish that my digestion of my adventures was as solid.

So. With all this bubbling around my head, in the far and distant background. This next thing happened.

I have a new cleaning-client who has a house situated near a wooded hill. When you look out one of the upstairs windows, you essentially see what I drew as a crayon study the other morning:



I drew it because it's a beautiful view and I can't stop thinking about it. In fact I actually cheated a little and worked on this crayon-doodle for two mornings. The second morning -- yesterday morning -- I mostly just darkened some things, and colored in that orangey square in the foreground.

In that inexplicable way these things happen, that orangey color got my attention. I thought about it all morning. It pulsed urgently in my soul. I thought about that canvas that I'd played around with a few months ago when I'd thought again about big-scale painting. I thought about those vague scaffolding studies I'd done after visiting the fairgrounds. I thought, I know what I'm doing what I get home..



Thus it was.

And as I was wrapping up I began thinking...what else can I do?




What about that great image of the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport?




Yeah, I thought. Let's try that.



So that's what I did today. It kind of feels unreal.

This of course does not capture the detail that the little gouache paintings do. So there's more work to do. (Happily, there's always more work to do.)

The jury is still out about all those complicated things I was worried about yet failed to articulate about abstract art, fine art, etc. There's so much baggage there. But what gives me hope is that for the first time in a long time I'm not too worried about all that rubbish. What's important to me is that I have finally figured out how to make big things on canvas again. To make with the big colors. And I've connected those little expressive drawings to a way to make them as big and colorful as I want them to be. The static drawings can be lifted out of the notebook and rocketed up to a realm way, way beyond where they started.

It's so satisfying to arrive here. To make that connection. Now I feel like I COULD paint the Museum of Man building. Tomorrow. With nothing but my memory of the place and my feeble attempts to sketch it.

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What I did with my Friday

God that felt good.

Interdependance, or, one good turn diserves another

For Easter I treated myself to an old sweater I'd found on etsy. It was one I had been eyeing for a LONG time, for the color and for the fact that it was not a strange shape that would be difficult to wear a jacket over, but seemed to be something a librarian would wear. If a bit frumpy. In a good way. I labored for a long time over this. I’m trying to learn to make sweaters after all, but something about this one called to me. When the shop owner marked down everything for a “moving sale” it seemed like fate.



The sweater is indeed frumpy, almost exceedingly so, but it is also beautiful and very well made. My learning-to-knit brain loves the different textures, the different types of stitches all running down, and the fact that there are smaller stitches around the cuffs so I can scoot the sleeves back gently and they stay put. It is made from a what is probably chiefly wool, though pre-blocking it feels a bit like that pink house insulation. However I only say this in comparison to my standby cardigan, which is made of almost...silky yarn and machine-made, therefore no real comparison at all.

The two biggest problems with the sweater were the lame buttons, which is a problem easily fixed.



Goodbye generic plastic buttons, hello beloved pearly buttons. I've found a home for you at last.

The other problem is this sweater has no pockets. And a heavy cardigan with no pockets is a drawback indeed if you constantly want a handkerchief at the ready, as I do. But! Now I can knit! So this means I can make pockets for the sweater! Knowledge is power!

Even without pockets I already get a lot of mileage out of this sweater despite the warming weather. Mornings are still a fairly chilly time, and I've been spending a lot of time next to the open window during my new morning activity: Stand At The Easel And Draw!



This easel is a cornerstone fixture in my making-things life, standing proudly at the window. When I found out I was moving into this particular apartment I set about building my art-making space from scratch. I was happy to see that the easel could at once benefit from the natural light of the window and the lamp light attached to the desk.



I used to do a lot more painting on canvas than I do now, so for the last couple years the easel has mostly just taken up prime real estate next to the window. Most of that time it's displayed a single painting/collage that I keep meaning to work on. We also used the easel last year during the philosophy class for Research Club, when we walked down to the river and Anthony essentially performed a famous lecture by Friedrich Nietzsche whilst I painted a portrait of him. (Of Neitzsche that is, not Anthony). Mostly though the easel just sits and waits. It has been niggling at me because I hate having something I don’t use, particularly something so big.

Separate to this I am having incredible difficulty staying seated and getting work done lately. I think it must have something to do with the gorgeous weather we are (finally) having. Once I am warmed up it is fine, but it’s that initial getting-focused part I struggle with. Particularly with this project, since so many things involve looking things up online. What does an old gas pump look like? Can I have a telephone wire with just one wire coming out? If I illustrate that concept this way, am I still basically on topic? How did she word that again?

Let’s solve the puzzle. I need to do a lot of drawing. I have:

a.) drawing-boards I take with me on outings

b.) an un-used easel by the window, and

c.) way too much energy for sitting.

Let’s see, how might we solve this problem?

Why, we could put a drawing board up on the easel of course!



Why this has not occurred to me before last week is anyone’s guess. The important thing is that it HAS occurred to me, and every morning since this connect-the-dots game I get up, make a thermos of coffee and stand at the easel and do warm-up doodles. Usually with crayons, which adds to the giddiness, and also helps me feel a lot less pent-up about letting go. No pressure -- you're not making Great Art here, you're just playing with crayons. It has made me feel ten times more productive, somehow. Because doing this opens up the drawing-things part of my brain and without meaning to my mind wanders into the puzzles I had worked on the previous day. And I wonder about them. And I get them out and put those up on the easel. And then I look at that color I'd been doodling with and wonder if that could work for that ziggurat. And just like that I'm working without realizing it.

To have a crayon in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, next to an open window listening to the birdsong, feeling the cool spring air, and watching for the sunrise is (for me) about as close to nirvana as one could hope to get. And as luck would have it I've found a way to get there each and every morning, just by rearranging a few things.

And the only threat to this bliss was the bite of the morning air, but that was solved with that NEW SWEATER. Life is uncanny sometimes. I'm glad I get to be part of it.

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Continuous as the stars that shine

I was off to Eugene for the weekend, a quick getaway from the GO! GO! GO! rhythm I've had for a while now. It was exactly what I needed.

It's always a good drive, but this time of year it's especially rewarding. There's all kinds of WEATHER blowing around us here in the Northwest, and it's fun to drive through the various phases and leave them behind. It's also lamb season, so the stretch of I-5 past Albany was filled with the usual woolly blobs accompanied by much smaller woolly blobs -- some so tiny it seemed as though they could hardly reach mama's milk.



I also noticed (to my delight!) that daffodils speckled the roadside for almost the entire journey. I can't remember if I've seen them there like that in previous springs. Last spring I wasn't doing much driving, and I suppose the year before I was too busy with my new job to notice? But how could you not notice row after row of happy waving faces like that? Who planted them? I like thinking of some troupe of farmers taking it upon themselves to pretty up the corridor. Or did the flowers get there all by themselves? How do daffodils spread their bulbs? They come from bulbs after all, not seeds. Or do they? I will have to look into this.

Dorothy wrote in her journal: "When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing." (From The Writer's Almanac, 4/15/10.)

Eugene was healing for all the usual reasons, but this time we also took a quick rainy stroll through the woods to look at this downed tree Anthony had been talking about, and from there we sat on a wet log over some rushing water.



This is but a gesture, a thumbnail sketch. If I had the time to show you, I would paint it as it truly was; each individual leaf dancing and crisply clear under the dripping canopy of that enchanted wood. But the little flowers were there, part of some other nearby blooming tree. We saw them from the ground and got to climb up through them, almost worth the journey all on its own. There was moss all over the log, which was slick to walk on and squishy to sit on. But also wonderful.



We were quickly soaked through to the skin but we didn't let that worry us. Rainy Saturday adventures are not the time to stay warm and dry. It was too beautiful be worried about such trivialities. We stopped picking daintily over puddles and boggy grass almost as soon as we stepped off the sidewalk. We just squished along and felt all the better for it.

This is my submission for "famous machine."
Though I think for me it's going to be a bit broader than that.

The waters are unusually choppy for a lot of people I know right now. For all kinds of reasons. It's hard to know what to do for people when they are struggling, particularly when you are far away from them -- geographically or mentally.

I often wish for a machine like this, not to make fame but to make happiness. Contentment.

Alas, you cannot find happiness for someone else. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow: the psychology of Optimal Experience: "...to do so would be impossible ...since a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe."

(Also: I would love to find out how to pronounce that guy's name.)

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The Importance of Being Earnest

Occasionally as I'm working I'll pull up a recent painting, just to set the tone. Today it's been this one, which is the latest thing I've finished for the Cyborg Project. I am up to my elbows in notes, reading things about Flow and Interaction Design (.pdf), watching my favorite TED talk that mention synesthesia, and trying to figure out what a jet pack should look like. Heavy stuff, sort of.

In the background I'm still thinking about knitting, starting the painting that I'm going to sneak into that last entry, thinking about Why People Ought To Do Things. Mostly it always boils down to: people can. We get kind of tripped up in adolescence and start thinking we can't do things.

I'm not talking about big things, just little things. People say things like, "I can't draw," people with fingers and hands and arms and adequate access to paper and pens. It's strictly untrue.

Of course they can. They're just self conscious and won't. But I wish they would. I don't think it's good for a person to limit themselves, and I also think that things like drawing, singing, messing around with dough or clay, jumping...all those things we did in preschool or as children are really valuable still. It contributes to How To Live Fully.

I was thinking about all this when I received an email from a friend. I'd told her earlier that she'd been in my dream last night, wearing a skirt made of that poly-fill stuff (that cottony mess that comes in a plastic bag at the fabric store), and that we'd talked about weird-shaped dogs.

She sent me this in response:




So now THIS is up on my monitor, becuase it makes me unbelievably happy. Pictures help. Everybody should draw pictures.

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"And then you see it going through the blackness of space, the utter void of space, and every astronaut and cosmonaut has the same reaction when they first get up there. It's you want to put your arms around this little planet that we all live on and protect it. And it's - everybody has that same feeling."

Capt. Mike Coats, director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston said this on the radio this morning.

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On being utterly ensconced

I am so deep in this book project right now that I've scarcely time to do anything else.

That's good, mind you. I really enjoy it. I get really into a project as stimulating as this one and don't have much trouble focusing. I am able to budget once a week off of the cleaning time. Today was one of those. My art-only days. They are usually 10-12 hour days solid painting -- the bulk of the work gets done then. The composing and sketching and blocking. Nothing but audiobooks, radio, podcasts, music, tea (LOTS of tea) and painting, with occasional breaks for a quick bite here and there.

The rest of the working week it's paint for 1.5-2 hours, clean houses for 3-6 hours, then back home for about 3-5 hours of painting time. Those days finishing or beginning is what gets done, as well as a lot of the other things that slip by on the full painting days. (Like washing the dishes or cooking batches of rice.) On these days I bring little slips of paper around with me in the car that say things like: Think about: what machine wants? and I have my sketches and the drawing board, in case I think of anything.

This is really more or less what I usually do anyway. The difference here is I'm in full-on Production Mode all the time, and not the usual ebb and flow that working on your own has. Right now I'm chasing after ideas with a butterfly net, rather than sitting under a tree waiting for ideas to come to me.



The consequences are subtle. The butterfly net method uses a lot more energy than the tree-sitting method, so I also am trying hard to keep rigidly to my schedule of up-at-five-thirty-to-bed-with-a-book-no-later-than-nine. This estranges one from one's peers. Especially since I work pretty much ALL the rest of the time, with the notable exception of weekends. I still try and have weekends free of project work, though I end up getting other projects done then: making bread, organizing stuff, culling things to Make Room For Anthony, writing emails to people explaining why I haven't been talking to them.

I suspect this is how people get a reputation for being "reclusive," though in my case it's not so much eschewing people and their good company, but it's more like having an inner clock set to a different time zone, and burning passionately for all the wonderful things there are to do. Lately I've been looking up hikes I want to go on once the weather clears. Garden time is looming there in the horizon and soon I'll have even more to do.

It's all good stuff and I enjoy it immensely. I find solitude incredibly productive.

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One of my favorite things about this project is that I'm meant to just follow the little garden paths of my mind as I brainstorm for these pictures. Sometimes I am stumped and ask the author to talk more about something, but I haven't really yet asked her to clarify anything specific. I like existing with a puzzle and seeing what comes of that.

It's good to have incomplete knowledge of something. It means you have to connect the mysteries yourself. I think the most imaginative things live in those spaces between the mysteries.

Another great thing about this project is I get to follow little garden paths online as well. Which is how the other day I learned about the Journal of Mundane Behavior, horseboating, and llama trekking.

My mother may know of a place in Colorado that one can go llama trekking. And oh, I hope she finds out more. I would go llama trekking in a heartbeat.

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