Some of my paintings are a wrestling match, I sneak up on the idea and have to pounce before it scampers away, and then it's a tussle to get it onto the paper. I'm wrestling with a face on a picture right now. I spent all of last Saturday trying to get an expression just right -- trying things, painting them out and trying again. It's the sort of struggle that makes you question whether the entire thing wants to even be a painting or not, whether you pounced on it when it was on its way to someone else, to become a sculpture or a song. But there's something about the idea, it just works so well for this picture, if only you could just get that face right.



This painting though, this one on the easel, came to me all at once when I read the passage. It was fuzzy and vague, but all complete. It was as though I'd peaked behind a curtain and there it was. I sketched out what I thought it might be, and whoa there it was. And then I blocked it out on paper and yes, it's still there, just as I hoped it would be.

Because it looks so good to me now I hesitate to add too much too it -- I don't want to over work this one. I don't want to rush past the finish line and start laboring over something that was supposed to be finished before I added this or that unnecessary thing. Less can be more sometimes. But that's a fine line, and it's rare that I am alerted to the approach of that line so early on. (I tend to barrel through things in cases like this, carried on by the frothy insouciance of youth.) It takes a lot of effort for me right now to take a step back and asses. This painting is very generous, and has been screaming NOT YET! WAIT! MAKE SURE FIRST! It's demanding my full and undivided attention, and because of all the other things going on in my life right now, it's also very patient with me. I talk to it every day that I don't work on it, asking it to wait, and thanking it for waiting.

It was a combination of Other Things To Plan For and a solid week of temperatures over ninety degrees fahrenheit that drove me out of the apartment -- and out of the city -- last weekend. It was supposed to be my last full day to work on pictures before things get truly crazy. Big car trip, that friend of mine's wedding, and something else I'll tell you about here in a few days. But it was hot and I had a really good painting that wanted me to wait and think about it, to wait until I wasn't so distracted any more. So I took my distracted brain for a drive.



I joined up with some friends camping on the coast, near a tiny little functional town. Two members of our group were listened and experienced clam diggers and oyster-finderes. I didn't witness this but I did enjoy the results of their labors, eating my first raw oyster fresh from the bay. It was magical. I walked along the bay for a long time in the early morning, marveling at the blackberry / morning glory / other-things thicket, watching innumerable tiny fish jumping, spotting kingfishers, herons and cormorants. Just the thing for a distracted brain.

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OCF: scaffolding

Fair. What can I say? It’s magic. And everybody says that. So what can I say that other people haven’t?



Well, as a picture maker I can say this: it was a sweet, blessed relief to be in a world that understands the need for whimsy. From the admission gates made to look like the heads of dragons to the simple shapes set up near the bank of the Long Tom River, aesthetic playfulness was there at every turn.



It was good to see playfulness. To see giant stars made of kite material lit up at night and in the early morning by Christmas lights. To see a bench surrounded by a wicker creature. To see people walking around in tree costumes. It seemed no visual field was left unadorned. Even the recycling kiosks were all distinct and interesting. There's a kind of acknowledgement of the spiritual there -- and I don’t mean just the knee-jerk hippie woo-woo kind of spiritual. I just mean that hunger for colors and shapes that we recognize in children. Grown-ups have that hunger too -- and probably need it even more than children do, in the face of their busy, messy lives. But rarely does one see it in quite the way one saw it at Fair, and it was lovely to behold.



I know a lot of people see Fair as a throw-back to Woodstock, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I don’t think it would have endured this long if it was just about a lot of burnt out hippies. All the pieces fit too neatly together. The dust gets bad, so there is a water crew that keeps the road sprayed down. There are barrels of water around for the vendors to attend to their own paths. There is a fanatical commitment to using every resource and not over consuming, so there is a truck that picks up wood -- old timbers, usable sticks -- and takes it to what is essentially a giant filing cabinet near the compost barn to sort them out. There are shelves for every kind of thing they find. So when the construction crew needs to build a new vendor-space, or fence, or recycling kiosk, the wood is ready and waiting. When de-construction pulls the extra things back at the end of the week, (the traffic control chairs, the extra fences, the sign posts) the wood goes back to the filing cabinet. Ready and waiting for next year.



I’m not ready to be back in civilization. It took me a few days to really click into the rhythm of the place -- it’s so different from regular life. Now that I’m there it’s hard for me to click back out. I sort of hope I don’t, actually. I’ve not felt so calm and wonderful in a long time. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, it’s just what happens when you are around a group of people that assume the best of everyone.

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I've had a bottle of frisket -- a masking liquid especially designed for us water-based painters -- for probably six months now, but today was the first time I'd ever used it. I'd used frisket back in high school and bought this bottle when I saw it on sale somewhere. Just in case. You're supposed to be able to place it down, paint all around it, and then rub it off leaving clever white space. Considering my deep pulsing love of white space you'd think I'd use it all the time, but the kind of detail I need is a little more dexterous than my goopy frisket can manage. I could thin it a bit with water I guess. Frisket also ruins brushes so I'd have to sacrifice one of my nimble thin ones, and I go through those quickly enough without all that. So I usually just eyeball the white space, connecting the invisible lines where I need them to be. A bit more brain-strain and sweating, but that does mean I have a bit more flexibility with my white space.



I don't use pencil lines when I paint. I've never been able to satisfactorily erase pencil out from under yellow or other lighter colors without smudging or making them completely gone. I don't even sketch with pencil actually. I tend to draw with a pen -- a particular kind of pen that I really ought to start buying in bulk or looking for refills online. And then I just take a blank sheet of heavy paper and just go for it.



This is a fairly brash way to go about things, and when I first started doing things this way I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out how. But at this point it's just the way I work and seems natural.



Which is a good thing, since I've a table full waiting to be finished.

Before my sketchbook project sketchbook went to SXSW, it lived in the Brooklyn Art Library for a few weeks.

Based on the photo on the Art Library's website I figured a similar set-up would be in place on the tour. Quiet shelves filled with a myriad of books from a myriad of people from a myriad of countries. And a long table with identical chairs on either side of it, where one could casually pick up a book and flip through it and look for another. I imagined browsing.

As it turns out the operations is a lot more controlled than that. Think restaurant rather than buffet. And it's probably better that way, as I believe there are well over 23,000 books in the project. You arrive, make a library card, and request a specific notebook and then get to spend some real quality time with it.

The only snag of course is that I have to work harder to get people to go see it at all when it's out in the world.

The next stop is: March 30-April 2, 2011

Portland, ME
SPACE Gallery
538 Congress Street

Portland, ME 04101

My sketchbook isn't particularly exhilarating because there's a LOT of unfinished pages in it. But it's mine, which may be reason enough for some people. It also has some prototypes of pictures I have painted for the cyborg book, which might be interesting. (The grocery store line in particular is a key sequence in the sketchbook.)

Also, if you go and see it in Portland I will know that you did because I will get a little email about it, and if you also send me a note telling me your address I will send you a postcard thanking you. And that would be neat. Portland to Portland, with love.

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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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My quick vacation to Colorado in pictures

Mom and I went to the Cheyenne Mountain zoo, where of course we saw giraffes.





Also other creatures, and their creature-shapes.







On a different day I went with a friend to an Ethiopian restaurant in Old Colorado City.



We told stories.



Then in Denver we saw Matt and his daughter at a coffee shop just before naptime.



I went to a Christmas party with a lot of old friends.



Finally at the airport we played spot-the-Portlander.



And I mused at the weird things out the window before take-off.

Closing in

As you can imagine, I've been kind of busy lately. Some of these images may be replaced later with paintings or clear-er drawings -- if you want or need to be updated about that you can follow me on twitter.



So my primary function in this Opera is to walk (very) slowly and smoothly. I am to follow a route, move props around, and wear a silly costume, but the most important thing is to keep things slow and smooth. Although my initial route is a long way up-stage (thus I receive less walking notes than those brave souls down-stage, who are right there in front of the choreographer and audience) I think it's fair to say that I took to this fairly easily. I credit both my lengthy stint as an alter sever as well as, weirdly enough, knee surgery.

When they go inside to find out how you came apart, you have to learn how to go back together again. Everything you assumed you can do isn't so easy when there's stitches and crutches and swelling and staircases in your way. Two dozen years on this earth and I had to learn to walk all over again, asking other people to go up and down the stairs so I could watch them and try and figure out why I couldn't do with effort something they could do without thinking. It was a minor procedure from the doctor's point of view, but for a dreamy wanderer who could thoughtlessly walk to the ocean if given the chance, it was life changing. Surgery gave me a knee and a fuller understanding of what it means to move a body around, and in this case it means that if you tell me to walk slowly and smoothly, it turns out I can.

So I know my movement had something to do with it, but more likely it was my boldness and my smallness that inspired the director and choreographer to pull me aside after a week or to into the rehearsal schedule. They had a special job that needed doing. A job requiring smallness.



In Act III, a cake on a tongue has to glide up the center of the stage to eventually pop through a hole in a curtain. The cake-on-a-tongue lives on top of a little black box, with a pushing bar and wheels, and someone who is small yet wiry has to kneel in there and push it across the nubby floor of the stage.



When they were telling me this I began to glow with excitement. "You want me to be a cake pusher!!"

The director (who is impeccably British) paused and said, "I like to think of it as the cake-trolley driver."

Since then "driving the cake" is what people have referred to it as in the production, and when the rest of the supers are dismissed over the intercom our minder usually says something like "...except Maggie, who needs to stay here to drive the cake." This has led those uninvolved to assume incorrectly that there is a lot more to the job than there is.



I get a lot of imaginative questions about it, and I think I'm going to stop setting the record straight about how low-tech it actually is and just start encouraging the whimsy. Why not. Or maybe they think it's motorized because I'm just that good at moving smoothly, and that's no bad thing either.

Aside from being a delightful spectacle, this means that I get to spend a long time waiting to do my thing, and some of that time is spent surreptitiously gawking backstage.



It is a glorious jungle. All ropes and curtains and false walls and scaffolding. There is a rolling shelf covered in enormous wrenches on pegs. I saw baskets filled with the gingerbread children. There are television monitors at every wall and every corner showing a live image of the conductor in black and white, and one of these hangs quite artistically from the ceiling near a spindly staircase that winds so tightly on itself that it's difficult to imagine how one could actually ascend.



Walking backstage is like walking into the back of a huge clock, with all the wheels and springs turning over to make something happen. It is dark and impossible to know how many people are back there, pulling ropes and sliding levers and carrying pieces of set around. They are quietly talking into their radios, they are dressed invisibly in blacks, and they are quick to return a smile but also hurry you out of the way if you don't have a job to do back there. All utility, all functionality. They have a job to do, and one aspect of that job is to make your life much, much easier.

Now, instead of a director explaining to us what will be there, it is there. Now when we get off stage there are people waiting with towels so that we can wipe the raspberries off our stage-shoes. Someone from the dressing rooms will have already brought our walking-around shoes downstairs for us in a big rolling bin, so that we can leave our stage-shoes with the poor souls who must ream ground-in raspberries from the treads. One night someone fainted from the heat inside the costumes, and the next day we were all provided little handkerchiefs with cooling gel inside (that had to be labeled with our names, soaked in water, and drip-dried well ahead of our call). There are people who tell us where to stand, when to move, and how to leave, and who hold up flashlights so we don't have any trouble getting there.

So much in life depends on the unseen superheroes that quietly move heaven and earth to make a thing happen, and I am in constant awe of them and the machine they create with their collective efforts.

I was reminded that I'm a part of this machine when I overheard some of the rope people talking to each other, saying "your cue is the tongue passing."

I then had a brief yet vivid expansion of circumstance, a gestalt shift where I saw the thing for what it was: not as a clock run by unseen magic forces, but as a Rube-Goldberg machine. Because the tongue's cue (my cue) is the door opening, the door's cue is Carla with her binder and headset, whose cue is the sheet music in front of her lit by the little blue LED, the music itself, and (I assume) the notes from the director/choreographer.

Thus I cue the ropes.
Which cues Maureen and Sandy to move.
Which cues me to keep moving.
Which cues the first curtain.
Which cues someone to gallop from behind me all the way to the curtain and open the opening.
Which cues me to push through.
Which cues the black curtain just behind me.
Which cues the magicians to transform a German Expressionist forest into a gritty, cluttered witch's kitchen.
Sandy and Maureen take cake and sing a key line.
Which cues me to withdraw.
Which cues the curtain.
Then another.
I exit, stage left.
Carla says "Maggie's clear"
Which cues the last few walls of the kitchen.
Which cues the real curtain.
And the next scene begins.



Everyone plays a part, and if one little component is missing the thing cannot happen. Therefore during rehearsals I wait a long time to be dismissed, because while my part is relatively minor in the scene change it is essential, and if we need to run the scene again I have to be there. So doing my special job during rehearsals means a good deal of waiting through the third act. I cannot be reached via intercom in the house, so most of my off time is spent loitering near the stage entrance, or in the green room on a couch, listening for my dismissal announcement and to the music and singing which also is transmitted over the intercom. I watch snippets of the Simpsons from the locker room television. I read the State of Oregon safety regulations posted on the crew cork-board. At one point the other night I sat upstairs with our two dressers, eating candy and talking them through the various plot points of Act III as we listened, giving them a context to the goofier sounds.

They weren't familiar with the story...because nobody bothered to tell them? Or because they haven't bothered looked it up? Probably both. A lot of things happen at the Keller, every night, and we are just a just another thing. There's no need for the magic of any given production. There's just the practical aspects -- what needs to be where, at what time, in order for everything to work smoothly. And that means they can produce the raw materials for the magic without letting the plot points stand in their way.



It seems like the magic is gone in a different way for one of the soloists, who spends a certain amount of the waiting time in the green room griping about things. That's sort of a cliche, and having not been around big deal people in a while I'd sort of forgotten people do that. Most of the soloists don't, I hasten to add. There are crabbier moments, and I imagine this was just one of those. I was surprised by it though. I hope they love what they do, it certainly seems that way to me on stage when I see them at work, or even when I hear them over the intercom. Every job has its pitfalls, I just forget that for these guys it is not an amazing new adventure with so much new stuff to take in, it's just another gig, just another stage in just another town.

The magic is NOT gone for me, and because my tasks are fairly menial (and because I have a host of helpers to take care of the details) I am free to marvel at the Rube-Goldberg machine uninhibited. The trade off is that at the end of the night as I gather up my things and walk to the parking garage I have to refocus on all of the details back into one head, because I am not an international star and no one will take care of those things for me in life.

Walk the darkened streets without a flashlight-escort.
Find my car, drive home.
I reset my own props, placing things for tomorrow in my bag.
And I put the bag in the place it goes.
I put the coffee grounds where they go.
I put my sandals by the bed, lay out clothes for tomorrow.
I get myself in the head space for the next scene -- a dream sequence?
I change costumes from "somewhat tidy artist" to "pajamas".
I get my book and wait for my cue.

Taking it all in all, if the trade off for keeping the magic is having to work hard and take care of every department yourself, I'll take the magic.

LAST TIDBITS

1. You can see video previews of our production here.

2. You can download the most adorable study guide.

3. Learn more about Going to the Opera.

Unsorted moments from last week's rehearsals

Saturday was funny because by the time we arrived everyone was sick and tired of everything.

As times goes on we have been adding more and more elements of the finished show to the rehearsal. Saturday it was time to integrate the children's choir at last. I had seen them milling around the hallways, but I hadn't actually heard them at work, and they are enchanting.



Their voices are like sunlight shining through immaculate cut glass, a gorgeous merry lark of crystal clear wind. They were feeding off the creative energy of the leads and were absolutely bursting with life.

In fact by the look of sullen, weary faces behind the table it looked as though they had been for some time. By the end of their session -- a hour and a half later than it was meant to be -- the stern barks of "children!" were becoming more and more frequent from behind the big tables.

The next day the soloists, the chefs, the trees, the fish, the children AND the director began with expansive yoga-like stretches after the choreographer's example. Let's begin afresh seemed to be the idea. Since then (as far as we the supers are concerned) the show is run through in rehearsals, rather than focusing on particular scenes. We have graduated into the Real Thing.

This means that the chefs and trees and fish may leave after our bit is done, but I have twice now hung around so that I could watch the other parts of the show, albeit without full costumes.

MOMENTS

1. Maureen McKay (Gretel) and Elizabeth Byrne (Mother) trying to maintain composure in the face of a giggle-fit.



2. Darrelle*, off stage, quietly singing along to the finale with a big smile on her face.

3. Sandra and Maureen both (I think) singing the upcoming pieces in the bathroom during the break.

4. Elizabeth and Weston Hurt (Father) dancing off stage to the music as they waited for their cues.



5. Listening to the littlest boy in the break room lamenting that we have a rehearsal on Halloween. His already limpid eyes became even moreso -- almost tearful -- and managed to reason that at least we are not practicing during Christmas.

6. Seeing Weston cornered by a charming eggheady youth rattling on a lot of statistics about World War I



*I don't have a full name or a website for Darrelle, though she is special to my heart because she was the first soloist who introduced herself to me. We have since had brief but lovely talks about drawing, cooking, and a gloss on the strange gypsy life these performers must lead. She along with Sandra and Maureen are youngish, yet have done a good amount of work already which makes me a little dizzy. Each successive show on any given performer's website seems to be in a different city, far away from the previous city. Darrelle lives part time somewhere else, but will be in [y] city for [x] years, and I didn't really get a sense of where it is she actually calls home.

I'm in the middle of Midnight's Children, on audiobook, with a great reader. I have been listening to it as often as I can at work.

It's just wonderful having a jolly Englishman following me around and telling me the story.

San Diego: contextual information and general impressions

Hello! I'm back. Back from the land of painted toenails and stucco.

Despite budgetary concerns and timing follies we spent last week getting to San Diego and back. We initially picked San Diego simply because it was equidistant from our friends; it is about a twenty hour drive from either Portland or Denver, ignoring traffic, which you simply cannot ignore if you are traveling through Los Angeles. On the way Anthony and I made a brief stop in Berkeley to scope out a bookstore and eat ice cream. We stayed a long weekend in the city and then came back along the seaside.

Though I brought my paints with me I didn't actually break them out at any point during our journey. Because of the window-breaking incident in Vancouver I also didn't bring anything of substantial resale value, and instead relied on pen-and-ink note taking to capture the spirit of what I was seeing. I am fairly pleased with the results, though if I had it to do over I would block out a good three days to be left to my own devices in Balboa Park. With paints.



Sometimes when you travel in a place as wide and homogeneous as these United States, you experience the disorienting sense of never having traveled at all, because of the familiar scenery. The actual natural scenery is distinct, but the cities themselves tend to bleed together, particularly if you are from the center states. One Village Inn is every Village Inn, with only subtle variations in decor or layout. Not so with San Diego. Having been no further south than San Francisco for several years, San Diego -- while still filled with the familiar chains -- was still indisputably different. The houses stacked up on the hills were almost uniformly in a Mexican style with tiled roofs and stucco "adobe" walls making arches and other shapes that one can't do with wood and paint. On our second day we learned that San Diego was the home of the late Dr. Suess, and it isn't surprising. The odd house shapes, the odd tree shapes (all wavey lines with blots of leaves on the end) were things we were calling "Suess-y" before we even knew for sure.

It also wasn't the blistering heat of the far south I had been worried about. San Diego is far south, but it's also next to the ocean, which has been giving us an unseasonably cool late Spring up here in bridgetown, and it seems like everywhere along the coast is having their own dose of the same. Dani bemoaned how "cold" it was, but I was happy to get some sun at last. And quite a bit of sun. Despite the mild temperatures we managed to break out the sunscreen and peel off sweaters while doing some of our exploring. Almost all of us received a gorgeous tan on the bits we had exposed (except Anthony, whose incandescent paleness reflects sun rather than absorbs it).

Of course, we were still shamefully pale compared to the locals. I think the kind of sunlight you get that far south must be different than the kind we get up here, because I don't think I've received quite as deep and even a tan on my hands, arms and feet in YEARS.  I have been walking around in shorts, sandals and the same 3/4 sleeved sweater up here when it's been sunny out, and I turn the color of weak tea. Then I stand around the zoo for half a day in the same clothing and I am the color of caramel.

There is also something different about the quality of the light at that latitude. It's hard to describe to regular people, and I didn't really try that hard other than to mention it to Anthony a few times. I don't think it is mere sun-beaching that had the colors looking washed out and desaturated. Even the overcast mornings didn't give the pigments a break, something was missing and it failed to lift the colors out of the landscape a bit. We saw more white, yellow and orange, a lot less of everything else. Perhaps it's simply vitamin D floating around in the air clouding the outlines. In any case it heightened the sense of Elsewhere for me, and it made the powerful home-pallet that much more vibrant when we crossed the state line a week later.

I may have only noticed this because I was really trying to look. Part of the reason I avoided taking pictures was because I didn't have my good camera. But it was also to do with my concern that taking pictures -- for me -- tends to make me lazily glance over something that really deserves to be paid attention to. As I try and coax a style out of the scribbles I think the most vital thing is to always work on it. What better way than to try and capture the essence of a new thing I am seeing?

I will share some of these images with you, as I share some of the stories or interesting things we saw.

Doodles from the other night

a reminder

Outtakes from this weekend

I keep looking at this thing. I want to be working on it. Perhaps this weekend. Last weekend we went to Seattle to watch the Oscars and help Peter prepare a 10-course dinner-party.



It's always an adventure to go up to Seattle and be with our friends, imagining their bigger lives in the bigger city, but this time it was even more of an adventure because of this knee stuff. Shampoo, deodorant and cough drops were pulled out of the overnight bag and replaced with rubbing alcohol, wound-tape, painkillers and arnica cream. Instead of paints I brought the physical therapy checklist.

I navigate my own space pretty well at this point. I have learned how to make do with what I can't yet do in the places I can't do them. But Seattle is very steep, and has agendas much bigger than connective tissue. It felt a bit like going back in time as far as recovery goes. A new wave of people to tell about the procedure, a new wave of problem places and a new wave of problem pains.

There's nothing to do but re-learn how to be patient. You can't hurry a knee like this, even when you want to.



It was also a magical weekend of feeling curious and alive. We'd been asked to run by a farm outside Tacoma to pick up raw milk on our way. And there is something pretty amazing about turning onto a gravel road in the farmland in the golden late-afternoon light, passing the chickens, ducks, are sumpy cows, stopping by the sign that says FARM STORE with an arrow, and literally walking into a sort of shed with a few fridges and printed instructions about where the cash-can is. Inside the fridges there are big gallon jars of milk. A label printed on a home computer. MILK. There is a tiny pillow-dog that follows you cheerfully everywhere you go. The farmer sees you on the way back to your car, makes sure you found everything you wanted, thanks you and waves. He calls the little pillow-dog Pippin (!)

Support the local farmers. Support your friend's chef aspirations. Support your knee.

Postcards

Wow, how is it that I haven't put the meat animal postcards up on my etsy shop? They've been sitting in my "paper goods" shop-shelf, but they haven't been mooing, bleating, oinking or clucking loud enough for me I guess. There were some that went to a shop in Singapore, there are some at Reading Frenzy here in town, but now you can get them directly from my etsy store.



I have some really ambitious projects I want to get going, but lately instead of coming home and sitting at my desk for several hours, I come home and go right to bed. My body needs to catch up with my mind. And my mind certainly has the unfair advantage of being untouched from surgery and not being rigorously tested during work. (Housecleaning is very zen for me, but it's also pretty active -- a great workout at the best of times, a little tricky for knee recovery at the worst.) To ease back into the world of images I've been playing with my inks again.



I did about 15 but I'm really happy with how three of them turned out, and while I was backstage at etsy I went ahead and threw them up too. Why not. In the meantime I'm probably going to frame them and put them up in the kitchen.



I hope you're doing okay if you live in the snowy part of the Union. We in the Pacific northwest have been enjoying blissful sunny weather. Everyone in Portland has spring fever. I'm hoping to get out to my garden plot before the rain comes back.