Grace and a Painting of a Cat on Violet

The oil painting "Cat in an Abandoned Interior," recently won a Best of Show award. It was the beginning of a week long run of fortuitous little painting and other victories that had much to do with the help of friends and family. I had always held that it is prudent not to expect more than what can be achieved by one’s own efforts alone. Anything more than that is an act of grace. But these past few weeks I have had a series of small successes that are in both small and large ways due to the efforts and kindness of others. There were first the five artworks that I had sent out to County, State and out-of-state exhibitions. All five won modest cash awards. Following that came the Arts-In-Education Booking conference, at which I finally won back clients and hopefully have booked teaching jobs through next year - no small feat in the present economy. Because none of this would have happened without helpful interventions I’ve decided to dedicate the next few blogs to those who made opportunities possible.
It begins with "Cat in an Abandoned Interior." The painting is oil on canvas and is unusual in that I began with a violet ground. I typically paint on color grounds but I generally use blues, greens and earth tones. The colors in "Cat..." were painted on in a series of thin washes of colors using a medium similar to that of the painter Titian. In areas where the upper layers of paint are thinner or pulled out with a rag, the violet glows out from underneath. I had painted the face of the cat multiple times, never getting the eyes right, until I finally partially erased them so that they became violet shadows. The image of the cat is a Japanese Bobtail with a tail added..
The night before the county fair I was visited by a friend from Georgia who had always admired the painting and was the impetus behind getting it back from its temporary location in a local establishment. She got it back just in time for me to put it up at the local fair where I was surprised that it was awarded a cash prize along with a second place for a painting of dancers. So this blog is dedicated to Gwen, who took action just in the nick of time.

Another Election Year Haiku

Folks vote their money
Percentage polls reflect them
Joe Plumber rises

Autumn Haiku

November is near
Elections draw close to us
Acorns fall

Poverty and the Plight of the Working Poor

Poverty is something that has always commanded my attention and something that I have wanted to write about. It is a complex subject because it means different things to different people and may manifest itself in various forms dependent upon geography and culture. One thing that everyone can agree on, however, is that poverty is a form of misery. And it is an insidious form of suffering that leads to social erosion and war.
Before my husband and I moved to the People’s Republic of China a few decades ago, we were considered poor. We lived in the tiniest of two-rooms at the top of a narrow staircase in an old house in Princeton, New Jersey. I was a minimum-wage clerical worker at the local library and my husband had sporadic work as an adjunct professor - paid by the course instead of a salary.
It was miserable. Add to that the medical debt that hovered over our situation and things felt pretty hopeless. These conditions were what made it necessary for us to leave the country when the opportunity presented itself for full time work elsewhere, ironically reversing the course that our immigrant ancestors took.
The truth is, our situation improved considerably by moving to a communist country. We had free medical care, subsidized housing that had adequate space and we had full time remunerative work. We spent the entire Reagan era outside of the United States.
Initially, our stay in a communist country lifted huge burdens. The uncertainties of being the working poor miraculously evaporated. But as guests, our hosts gave us special privileges that the ordinary Chinese citizens could not have. And although our own circumstances were tolerable albeit at times spartan, we would sometimes hear about and occasionally witness what truly abject poverty was. These were times when the curtain of secrecy was temporarily open and I came to know what was happening in the impoverished areas of the countryside. There were still leper communities. There were people so malnourished that their hair would turn white while they were still in their twenties. And parasitic diseases endemic to the third world were rampant. I will not relate some of the horrors that I witnessed at this time. I will expound upon those in my book-in-progress. But the misery of what I saw confirmed for me how necessary it is for a society to have economic safety nets so that whole segments of that society don’t fall into desperation.
By a fortuitous turn of events, my husband and I were able to return to the United States and improve our circumstances. We are middle class. But my previous experiences are never far from my consciousness. And when I see skyrocketing medical costs with large segments of our society uninsured it sickens me. When I see that our country’s leaders do not attend to the problems of the working poor it outrages me. Unfortunately both of these problems are even worse now than at the time they caused me to leave this country two decades ago.
One book that reveals first hand the plight of the working poor in this country is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. I almost could not read this book because I did not want to be reminded of the past or to be fearful of the future. But read it I did and would recommend it highly to anyone who should understand the need for social reform - especially with regard to the minimum wage. For as the author points out through her social experiment as a working class woman, most jobs for the working class do not pay a living wage. As a consequence, survival depends upon acquiring two or more jobs. What this means is that socially as a country, we have moved back to the nineteenth century. We have effectively recreated the circumstances of the industrial revolution - where factory employees worked sixteen hour days six days a week. The difference is that now the work takes place at two to three different locations. We now live in a new gilded age where haves and have nots are even further apart than ever before.
Poverty is a huge subject. One could write volumes on it. I hope that this blog action day on the topic brings attention to the issues and promotes ideas for change. For my small contribution, I made a small painting and a poem to match that was inspired by reading Nickel and Dimed.

White Cigarette Rising over a Ruby Glass

Two companions inhabit a late night room
Tobacco rolled in opaque white paper
and red wine in a translucent glass
sustenance for a second and third shift
and the blessed means of sleep
in an impromptu space called home
Home. A place to temporarily close one’s eyes
shutting out the diaphanous glaze
of a hastily hung drape
street lights peering inquisitively
through the spaces between weakly woven threads
making a shadow puppet of the soul that dwells within
The late late late show, short hours before the dawn
features a puff on a cigarette
and swallows from the red elixir of blinking and nodding
as the little room rattles from passing trucks
and a police siren splits the night air
A belligerents voice howls out
the screech owl of the urban forest;
"AAAAAAAAAAAh!"
"Who you lookin at!"
I said "Who you lookin at!"
Sounds of the city, its cries are muffled by alcohol
like a wad of cotton blunting a knife blade
In subdued increments of drowsy exhaustion
her heavy lids meet in the middle of the road
that stops at the smallest fragment of the day.
Fourth shift. Sleep

The Return of the Palindrome Pig

In my earlier blog, Sarah Palindrome, an irreverent take on the vice-presidential candidate, I illustrated the text with a naive-looking painting of a pig with a head on both sides of its body. Because I wanted to have a visual representation of a palindrome, I needed to make something with bilateral symmetry. In order to do this I made a stencil by drawing half of a pig onto a piece of paper, folding the other side of the paper in half and cutting out. Since I had a stencil of this strange little form I made several other paintings to try different colors and cut out shapes. Some of them looked like Chinese folk paper cuts so I incised an ancient form of a Chinese character on one - the word for "flying."
I became interested in making quick multiples of the same shape after viewing the Andy Warhol exhibition now on display at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. My original interest at the Mint Museum was their extraordinary collection of Pre-Columbian art but the Warhol exhibit was a pleasant surprise. His large square paintings and silkscreens of Hibiscus Flowers revealed brilliant color harmonies that I had previously not fully appreciated as an aspect of Warhol’s art. So with these impressions fresh to the senses, I made use of that most primitive of printing - the stencil - for an unexpected Palindrome Pig series.
Usually, when making art, my original intentions are supplanted by something else. Maybe this something else this time was a visual manifestation of worries bubbling up from the subconcious after watching so much anxiety-ridden news about the economy. This didn’t become clear to me until an artist colleague of mine said that the two-headed pig reminded her of the current state of the U.S. economy. She may have discovered an unintended truth here in this illustration of a beast that consumes on both sides of its body, produces nothing and has no clear exits!

Something Fishy in Obama Campaign Finances

Just yesterday, I visited the website of an old friend from my New York and China days and was amused by a poem he wrote about an unusual place name. Lake Webster in Massachusetts, his website informs us, used to be known by its Algonquin name Lake
Chargoggaggmanchauggaggoggchaubunagungamaugg. I hope I got that right.
On first glance, one could easily mistake this for one of Obama’s sources of campaign funds. I refer here to the recent article in the New York Times submitted by Michael Luo and Griff Palmer concerning the Fictitious Donors in the Obama Finance Records.
My illustration for this is a drawing I did of Courbet’s painting of a freshwater trout. I imagine him feeding at the bottom of Lake Chargogaggmanchauggaggoggchaubunagungamaugg. Although the Obama contributor’s names were somewhat shorter, such as gggjtijtjtjtjtjr,AP, who ostensibly contributed $370.00, they are just as rich in consonants. Some of them are bizarre enough to rival Gogol’s Dead Souls. My favorite, however, is the contributor Jockim Alberton, who the article informs us listed his employer as Fdsa. Public records, we are told, cannot bring such an employer to life. So what is Fdsa? Perhaps it is the elusive Fraud Delivery Service Association.
With friends like these, who needs public financing?

Sarah Palin and the War on Terriers

Well ya know, Sarah Palin's recent revelation about Barack Obama’s friendship with an Airedale makes ya kinda wonder about his politics. And with schnauzers in his backyard and a Jack Russell for a neighbor, well, I don’t know about you but its pretty darned clear to me that he’s harboring terriers. With all his wire-haired terrier friends you would think that he hadn’t even heard that there’s a war on terriers goin on! Its just naive! Doesn’t he know that the folks who have endorsed him, like John Kerry, is in fact allied with the Kerry Blue terrier? And what about all those left-leaning New Yorkie terriers who have backed his campaign? But that isn’t all. So far we’ve only been talkin about Barack’s ties to domestic terriers. But his most recent alliances with Scottish Terriers, Tibetan Terriers and Australian Terriers that have come to light raises the really scary question about his willingness to negotiate with terriers abroad without preconditions. And what about his friendship with the Airedale? Some would say it was just a walk in the park with a man’s best friend but you can’t fool me. Gosh darnit, it looks just like another big old terrier. So why hasn’t he come clean about these associations? The public has a right to know. Straight up and face to face cause ya know, no one should ever Bull Terrier the American People. That’s why I’m highlighting these links to terriers and their terrierist organizations so the public can find out for themselves that these are indeed terriers.

Pig Lips and Potty Mouths

It has been a long while since I have added to this blog. My time has been taken up by exhibition preparations, finishing up my first book, and being suddenly called to serve as a temporary adjunct professor at the local university. Autumn is also the time of year that yard work becomes particularly time-consuming. All of these pursuits were rewarding but left little time for blogging. And even in those rare moments when I was free, it became hard to know exactly where to begin again with that thread of thoughts for the cyberworld.
Surely there is much to talk about, with our country on the verge of an economic disaster and the public about to make choices in what is the most interesting political race I’ve ever known. But what inspired me to sit and paint in my studio again was a strange little article by Matt Taibbi that a friend sent me a link to recently. Taibbi ‘s editorial, if one can even call it that, was about how the vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin reflects a certain segment of the American electorate. He raises some legitimate questions about her seeming lack of preparedness for public office. He is correct as well, I think, when he takes issue with Americans whose tendency it is to vote on the basis of what seems comfortingly familiar to them rather than with a mind towards who actually has the public’s best interest at heart and who has the experience to carry through sound decisions.
The problem I have with his article, however, is in his presentation. Assailing the meanness of what he purports to be the conservative, anti-intellectual right, he rolls out a veritable machine-gun blast of profanity. It strikes me as something of an oxymoron to rail against thoughtlessness by using the language of an inebriated thug. Yet this is not untypical in the world of popular writing - especially in the unregulated cyberworld of You Tube and blogs. And on-line writing is tending to be even more vitriolic as the passions of an election year fire up.
During a long but pleasant day in Charleston, after having caught up on paperwork, shipping, and other duties, I had a chance to reflect on the words and images that articles such as those written by Matt Taibbi conjure up. The phrase that came to mind was one coined by the nannies on those popular television shows "Super Nanny" and "Nanny 911." "Potty Mouth," I believe was their charming epithet for youngsters who could not control dirty language - most likely learned from their parents, perhaps some of whom write for Rolling Stone magazine.
In the course of my painting, I was also reflecting on how easily the popular media distracts our attention from crucial central issues by running us down rabbit holes of political gaffs and trivia. The question of what exactly the phrase "putting lipstick on a pig" meant and to whom it referred is just one instance. So my little painting, "Pig lips and Potty Mouths" sums up my sentiments on media diversions and lack of introspection in popular writing.
Perhaps we would all be served better at this time by reading Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope as well as John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers and Character is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know & Every Adult Should Remember, and relegate the Potty Mouths to the restroom sidelines.

How will Clinton Supporters Vote in November?

“If you’re not for Barack, then get off my back.” I recently saw this emblazoned on a sweatshirt. A drawing I made of an ivory plaquette from the Bargello Museum of Sculpture in Florence brought this to mind again. But the drawing of a man with a spear vanquishing a female enemy that he is treading underfoot reminds me of something else in recent American events. It reminds me of the American media’s reaction to the Hillary Clinton presidential primary campaign. The appalling sexism that surfaced during the Democratic primaries was something that I had wished to comment upon as it was occurring but my lack of research hours made me think otherwise. Although the media was largely silent on the sexism issue, there were occasionally some bold journalists and academicians who came forward, such as Amanda Fortini and Kent Gibbons.Although this would seem like old news, especially for those eager to make the first woman who had a serious shot at the presidency disappear from the public consciousness, the ramifications of that time have yet to play out with November looming before us. For the many Clinton supporters who saw their candidate treated with a negative bias and have yet to commit their new allegiance this autumn, the misogyny that reared its ugly visage from both liberal and conservative camps puts them into something of a quandary. It is an uneasy choice; to vote with those who chip away at women’s rights, or to vote with those who pretend it isn’t happening.

“A critic at my house sees some paintings. Greatly perturbed, he asks for my drawings. My drawings! Never! They are my letters, my secrets.” - Paul Gaugin
I am perusing my sketch books, winnowing out drawings I don’t want, and excising others for matting, shrink-wrapping and framing. In doing so, they do lose their context as a visual travel log to places both pedestrian (subways) and elevated (the museums of Europe). Gone as well are the rough stages of mental processes behind the designs for sculpture and paintings - the letters and secrets that Paul Gaugin referred to. So it is with some trepidation that I effect changes in the historicity of my work Making new artwork from compilations of notes from the past brings the old drawings to a present context divorced from the work of the past that it influenced. In other words, an historian would be confused as to why a painting from a preparatory sketch predates the sketch. Yet when the sketch is altered to become essentially a “new” work it has to be dated as such. Perhaps I’ll use a date range.
In any case, there are some reasons why letting go of secret sketches in binders doesn’t bother me as much as perhaps it should. For one thing, it is highly debatable that there will be historians interested in analyzing my creative thought processes. Also, my sketch books are not terribly organized, but rather are amalgams of ideas, complete and incomplete drawings, and are not in any chronological order anyway. As for the destruction of some work that is not satisfying, I think of the painter Georges Rouault, who shoveled buckets of what he considered his weaker works on paper into a wood-burning stove. So winnowing out is not necessarily a bad thing.
Ever the pragmatist, I am using the frames I got from the Artist’s Round Table warehouse event to preserve the drawings that don’t end up in the equivalent of Rouault’s stove. Taking a break from the gallery and arts festival scene, I’m exhibiting these in my studio for a small group of friends and mentors. In going through these old drawings I see that I’ve come full circle in the year that I’ve started blogging - August 7 will be one year exactly. The revising of drawings was exactly what I was doing in August 2007. Drawing was a nice place to start and always a sound place to return to.