the scent of water

Amen to that.

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

~ Marilyn Robinson, Paris Review's The Art of Fiction

I was going to hang the washing out but now the dark clouds have returned.

If you saw the pile of dirty laundry on my kitchen floor, you would understand my pain. It's been there so long I am thinking of painting a layer of shellac over it and calling it an art installation.

What the hell. I'm going to hang it out on the line anyway. Because sometimes in order to get anything done you have to believe  that those dark clouds are just passing through.

Morning

In between the heavy rain, a bright sun. Winter is like that here, unsure of itself, ambivalent. I pull out a sketch book and practice my drawing. I have three paintings that I would like to try but my childish scribbling leaves me frustrated. I stop before I collapse in on myself. I have to believe I can improve.

I want to put the bird painting in the fire, rub out any evidence I have that I ever tried. I tell Warren that I'm embarrassed, that it's all very silly.  I don't think so, he replies. I think it's the stuff of life.

Where angels live.

Thank you. Your overwhelming support of my little painting was so encouraging. The kind of pictures I have in my head I am not yet skilled enough to execute, but all that means is the sooner I get practising, the sooner I will be able to execute them.  More likely, I will never be able to execute exactly what is in my head - who can? - but that doesn't matter either. 

Art is so many different things to different people, but what I feel when I paint, when I take pictures, is a shift towards my better self. If we all have our metaphorical demons, then perhaps there are also places where our angels live. I don't know where that place is for you,  but I hope you visit there as often as you are able. Oftener. Me, being able to define what is beautiful for my own self and then doing what I can to make that visible to others, that's when I hear the hallelujahs.

In their book, Art & Fear (from which I unashamedly stole the angel metaphor), authors David Bayles and Ted Orland say this:

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have.

I'm a little old to be learning it, but putting your faith in that voice changes everything.

Painting

The family brought me a small set containing some brushes, a half dozen acrylic paints and a canvas board for Mother's Day. I have a few books from the library that have been inspiring me to just pick up a brush and start painting*, and as daunting as it was, that is what I did. I've never painted before, at least not since kindergarten.

It was a lot harder work than I was expecting. I kind of felt sick most of the way through with the fear I would be awful. Somehow it really mattered.  It's not the world's most amazing painting, I know, and heavily derivative, but there is something about that bird (of indeterminate species) that makes me think I could maybe be good at this if I keep going. Good enough, at least.

And I do plan to keep going. As anxious as I was about the outcome, and as hard work as I found it, I was also fully engaged in the process. My bills, my health, my chores, my family, my study; for a few hours my mind was absorbed enough to let it all go. It was a satisfying place to be.

 

*Art Saves, Jenny Doh; Art at the Speed of Life, Pam Carriker; and my favourite, Unfurling, Misty Mawn.

 

Happy Mother's Day

To those who celebrate it today. xx

The woodpile

This is my woodpile.  I took a photo of it.  I think the woodpile is kind of pretty.

Not as pretty as the fake peony sitting on top of my television,

but prettier than these crazy peeps.  Whoever they may be.

Work in Progress

I wanted to wait until I had finished this blanket before I showed you, but apparently not enough to actually wait. This is another cot sized blanket for a wee girl named Gracie. Next time (and despite my protesting tendons there will be a next time), I'm doing a ripple.  I'm only a few years behind the trend. One shouldn't rush one's crocheting decisions.

Daydream believer

For a few short months I have time to daydream. I got sick, again, and this time a course of antibiotics and a week in bed wasn't enough to fix anything. Months later, and an hour spent in the grocery store is a big accomplishment for my day.  Three hours in a museum is like running a marathon.  It's okay. Things are getting better. It's kind of a gift, actually.

A gift because out of these daydreams has come the desire to draw (I am up to drawing a parrot - you start with a circle for the eye), the interest in trying new things for no other reason than to try them, a long lost affinity for the ridiculous that I half believed I would never see again. It's given me time to look at the underbelly of doubt I have been hiding about what I am doing and why I am doing it. 

In a couple of months I return to my Master's degree, if I don't run off to art school before then. It's a temptation. But if I do go back, I go back as someone who will take what she is doing very seriously, and not seriously at all.  I don't know how to explain it better than that.  I hope to keep my capacity for daydreaming and, rather than see it as an indulgence, to see it as as a source of the imagination, a place (to paraphrase John Updike) for the spirit to rest. Life's hard enough without willfully leaving out the best parts.

To put all that another way: I have enough. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. - Maira Kalman

Reason #47 why I should have paid attention in Maths class.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. ~ John McCarthy

Somebody has a new labeller, not enough to do, and a rather vocal inner 8 year old. 

After I went through all non-human items in my house (do you know how difficult it is to label a blow-fly?), I tried labelling my children, but they were against it. Teenagers. Pfft.