a little bit of guh

I have over-saturated myself with the internet this past week or so, and not in a good way. No, just in that old way that seems to feed SLB, to nourish her beyond the point that everyday insecurity can. She’s loud and fit right now.

Also, she’s angry that I’m not going to let her have any orange words right now.

I haven’t picked up a pencil in a few days, and I’m just over that. I’ve had enough of her.

I’m reassembling my doodle spot, and then I’m shutting off this computer for a while. I really need to teach myself some moderation in this thing.

moving on...

Moving past the last three weeks of sinus problems and television brain jelly. Sometimes I wonder if my attention span disappears like this every year at this time.

I can't remember.

But I did pick up the pencil again. It's a start.

okay, seriously...

Dear Universe,

Remember all those times last winter when I randomly begged you for warm weather? I'd just like to let you know that you have gone above and beyond. Please feel free to stop now. Maybe just pull back about thirty degrees...

Thanks,
kitty

We've had a bit of an air conditioning blow up this week, so I've had to keep my art journal at a friend's house to prevent the pages from melting together. It feels so odd, not having it there all of the time...

I have been drawing in the beater sketch book, and the stuff from there will eventually be added to the journal. Sort of obsessed with rounded, cartoon-y eyes and whimsical faces right now.

I think the heat is just making me want to meld some sort of candy aspect into everything. I like that.

See, I said something positive about the motherfucking heat.

I just can’t seem to find my blue sky today. Feeling dulled down, and like I can’t even work up a tear for it. I have hope, though, that this is just one of my days. I have a few excuses that might even be reasons, but they’re just too tired to tell.

Hope comes from knowing how often I absorb inspiration without even realizing it. I hope my brain and my heart are just taking a little sponge break.

Sick of drawing your little orange slice flowers, are you?

At times, but I find myself drawing them by the dozen. Sick of you too, SLB. Don’t even try to get me worked up today because it ain’t even happening.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve completed three 8x10 canvas panels, three small wood pieces, and three journal pages. This is incredibly productive for me.

I am currently trying to ignore SLB. She has a bucket of anxiety and wants to use it to shut me down. Sitting here writing this is taking more energy than I have.

I have a blank 16x20 stretched canvas propped up on the chair beside me, waiting for me to face my fear that I can’t make enough to cover large surfaces anymore. The fact that I am going to cover the shit out of that big white surface just made me grin a little bit.

I should run. Orange slice flowers refuse to draw themselves.

influences and inspirations...

I’ve been thinking about my influences lately. Seems like the more art I make, the more obvious they become. It isn’t deliberate. I’ve been working intuitively lately, and I don’t usually notice it until I’m done with the page. I also don’t think my work looks a lot like the stuff I’m filtering.

Why are you having so much trouble with the words? Feeling a bit unoriginal?

Well, “original” is a pretty ridiculous concept when it comes to… pretty much anything.

I’ve just been sort of having this boom of stuff lately. I see my sister’s influence in it quite a lot. I love the sinuous quality of the lines in her work, and how provocative and strong it is. Her women are vibrant with energy and emotion. I want that, and though I don’t think my stuff will ever have that same sizzle, I feel that studying what she has done has pushed me to use color and longer, more expressive lines in my own way.

You mean you’ve tried to express something other than apathy or isolation?

You know, those are things that I deal with all of the time, and they’re going to be there whether I like it or not. I think what I’m figuring out is that they are not the only slices on the pie chart.

There’s a link to Elaina’s art blog in the sidebar. Just look for the beautiful painting of a woman in overalls… This be the button. Go and look. Scroll back. You will not regret it. Also, just to make it easier here are links to her art blog and her poetry blog.

I’ve been drawing, doodling, painting (mark making) for as long as I can remember. I have no formal training, and there are years long gaps where I didn’t even pick up a pencil for anything more elaborate than a shopping list, but I always come back to it. And I miss myself when I don’t do it.

Art therapy is an amazing thing.

A few years ago I started seeing artists on youtube. This has been very cathartic for me as well. How can anyone resist being inspired by folks like Tamara Laporte or Suzi Blu? They show up at the party. They are fabulous and talented and generous, as are women like Samantha Kira Harding and Effy Wild, just to name a couple.

So, how long is it going to take you to figure out how to link their pages? We both know how hopeless you are with that stuff.

I’ll figure it out.

Let’s hope so. You’re already late to your own self imposed blabfest here.

Anyway, I did take a couple of Suzi Blu’s online classes a couple of years ago when I had the means to do so. I also took Tamara Laporte’s free Art, Heart and Healing class. I found all of these helpful and inspiring and would recommend them to anyone.

But you’re really too flighty to be a very good class participant, aren’t you?

Well, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t get anything from them.

After I did this page I could see Tamara Laporte’s influence in it.

You might want to borrow a lasso to rope in that wandering eye before it escapes.

Maybe, but I like the way the color turned out.

Also, after I did this little painting I could see Suzi Blu’s influence in it.

What makes me happy about noticing the influences in my stuff is that I can see them, sure, but the work still feels like mine when it comes down to it.

You know, this post is getting a little wordy…

But I didn’t even mention any of the artists I’ve loved forever like Alphonse Mucha or Patrick Nagel or Frida Kahlo or Frank Frazetta or…

Yeah, too many to list. It’s good, though, having so much beauty to take in.

Not to mention music, books, and the flowers on the side of the road.

Erm, you just mentioned them.

Can it, SLB. I’m having a moment.

swim or fly?

Swim or fly? Why not both, right?

That’s a bit trite, don’t you think?

Just fuck you right now, SLB.

Niiiice.

Just you wait; pretty soon I’m going to gumption up and start talking about love. Yeah, you heard me right. Love. Just not this very minute.

*snicker*

I always seem to get hung up on mermaids, even though my experience with the ocean is very minimal. I think my subconscious is trying to push me away from the typical mermaid image. Perhaps one day I will do a bit of research and a lake mermaid will fall out of me. Who knows, right? Maybe I’ll just continue to make shit up, which is pretty much fine by me as well.

It seems like it has been a long time since I drew a winged person, though I went through a phase of this several years ago. This page feels much removed from those old drawings, though. Reminiscent, maybe, but I also feel vaguely reminiscent of the person who was doing the drawing. Does that make sense to anyone but me?

You seriously just wrote that? What are you, nine?

Okay, for starters I am just trying to be honest and real. All of these words are just a condensed version of where I am right now. Just as the old art journal is my image safe place, this is my exposed words safe place. I wonder if it will ever happen that I get so sick of your orangey ass that you just cease to be.

Also, what’s wrong with being nine? I’m not nine, having been born forty, but I see no reason to have a problem with anyone who is nine.

Anyway, wings or fins. In some way I have them. 

the bit that I actually wrote yesterday...

So, the universe said, “How about a little reminder that most of your complaints are pretty trivial?”

To which I replied, “Um, no thanks, I’m full.”

“No really, I insist. I’d really like for you to try this one on. I’m calling it carbonated stomach virus.”

Erm.

Seriously? You share too much.

Yes, I do.

So, yeah, more grumbling and groaning than art-ing this week. Add to that crazy, non productive insomnia.

Oh, waaah.

I know, I know.

Anyway, it’s a bit better today, if not completely gone. My body is still hesitant to even look at food that might be considered in the least bit interesting. Yesterday my rebel brain  talked it into a cola Icee and a Hershey’s Air Delight bar. They’re still not on speaking terms, but at least they’re not shouting about it right this minute.

The taste buds, see, are siding with the brain. They yearn to be entertained.

So, I did start a journal page last night. Feeling a bit uncertain of it, as of probably the halfway mark, but not so much that I feel the urge to abandon it. I’m trying to talk myself into posting an “in progress” shot. I don’t think I’ve done that before, and it is a bit daunting to me.

It feels a bit like serving up cake batter for dessert.

What’s with all the sweets, fatty?

You honestly think that “fatty” is going to derail me for long at this point in my life? Wrinkles in the rug, SLB.  Getting flatter with every step.

So, yes, I’ll probably have a progress shot up either today or tomorrow. I’ll do it as soon as I can get to my bff’s house to scan it.

But what if you finish it before you can get over there?

It might end up being a completed page. Still, the seed has been planted and progress shots will come when they will come.

I tend to get lost in the journey on these pages I’ve been doing lately, so I’m interested in seeing a little record of it myself.

where are we, exactly?

Very scattered this week. More so than usual. I haven’t made a mark on a page since last Sunday. I know that things have happened since then, but my mind only wants to make a few hours out of them. How do a few hours make a week? Have I spent so much time sleeping or trying to sleep?

I’m trying pretty hard not to get paranoid about my mind, my screwy memory.

But you probably should be paranoid about that shit. Folks have always known what a flaky mess you are, but it’s getting to the point where even you can’t miss it, right?

I’ve always known. What’s the use of paranoia?

Anyway, I have a couple of backgrounds done, waiting for me to turn off the computer and hide from the tv. This might be a good day for a bout of free writing. Something is pulling at me, and this feels like the closest I can guess as to what it might be.

It’s stormy out. I like it, but I’m a little unsettled by it.

This is the last art journal page I finished. I loved being in the lines while it was happening.

But it looks like something you would have drawn in high school.

Yes it does.

Be Free...

I never really got the hang of zentangles. I mean, I’m all for them. I just never really got the hang of them, and never like the way mine turn out. My attention span is short… I lose the thread and get bored about halfway through most of the time.

What I do like is art journaling using a circle as my base. I’ve done this for years. Picked it up in art therapy, and never felt the desire to shake it. If you’ve seen any of the journal pages I’ve posted, you’ll have noticed the circle. I love the circle. The circle pulls stuff out of me.

Earlier this week I was feeling a bit stuck. I made simple backgrounds in my journal. I drew my circles. I sat there thinking about zentangles, and the zentangles, as always, eluded me.

Then something happened. I made a mark. I followed the mark.

And she fell out.

She is not at all perfect, but I sort of love her because she just arrived unannounced out of… me. Following the lines. No plan.

I’ve come to think of her as C’thusan. She is angry and female.

Free drawing. Who knew?

Alice

Have you ever had a great idea, made a little plan for it in your mind, and then just chewed it all to hell?

Poor Alice… You’ll have to forgive the navel gazing here (again) but it’s time. It’s time to let go of Alice. Now if I can only figure out how to do that…

Alice came from a dream I had several months ago. She came to me whole, with a back story and an immediate situation. I could see her, and as it sometimes happens with dreams, I could see through her eyes. I was so woven into this dream that when I woke up I felt lost.

I felt loss. Without going much further into the specifics of the dream, I will say that Alice was waiting for the ending. She knew it was coming, and wore a smile for it. Inside, she kicked at it and raged.

For several days after the dream, Alice’s story grew in my head. Maybe a short story, but no, more than that. A series of paintings. A series of small portraits. Alice at the window in her nightgown. Michael. Their companions in the house.

In my head I painted and wrote. I assembled shadowboxes full of hairbrushes and wristwatches. I imagined the sky that haunted Alice’s artist friends. I could see Alice’s ink bottle, and the stains on her hands.

There is more, but… I’m struggling with it.

What came of all of this? Not a lot.

I made one small painting. I sat this painting aside, picked it up now and again. I added things to it. I washed it over. I scribbled at it and scratched it. Nothing made it what I needed it to be.

Just last week, I decided that it was time to stop picking at this poor, overworked scrap of wood. So it hit me… It hit me very hard that this silly little painting represents a lot of things I’ve held on to, if only in the back of my mind, for most of my life.

See, Alice and I both know that it’s time to let go. Neither of us wants to, otherwise she would have been covered with gesso months ago. We have lived together for a lifetime. We stand at the window and look at the sky and know that the end has to come. We rage and cry, sitting quietly with a little smile on top of everything.

My first thought was to burn her, but I haven’t. I pick her up and run my hands over the wood and still wonder how to let her go.

Funny, the marks we make.  

srsly...

Odd week around here. I don’t know. For the past couple of days I just haven’t felt quite right. Yes, yes… nothing incredibly new about that.

SLB: See, sometimes I don’t even have to say anything.

I did make a new painting, and even entered said painting into a contest. This is a new thing for me. I feel good for having done it. I also feel pretty anxious about it.

Sometimes I forget how shy I am. Sometimes my shyness and SLB have crazy parties while I’m trying to sleep. This is how I explain away the fact that I’ve been just plain grumpy for a couple of days. My bits do conspire against me, especially when I decide to poke my head out from under the bed.

Anyway, here is the painting for the contest. It will probably get a varnish coat, and quite possibly a bit of tea staining, but I wanted to get a pic before all of the shiny went into it.

Here’s the contest…

I’ll post the  vid for voting when Val puts it up.

Have you recovered from your rapture eve activities yet?

wood

I’ve been sitting here listening to Mumford and Sons and painting. See, I find that I love listening to Mumford and Sons… and I find that I must paint on wood when I listen to them. I remember how much I love painting on wood. See how that works?

Maybe it’s the banjo.

I haven’t been art journaling as much these past couple of weeks, but I am feeling a bit of an itch for it. The art journal, though, is not made of wood. Well, ok, technically it is… It’s just not as raw as I need wood to be right this minute.

Perhaps tomorrow.

SLB is just white noise today. Wood and paint will sometimes have that effect on her. There you go.

Thankful.

Mom

My mom is probably the strongest thread in the whole big ball of crazy that is my life. I just wish she liked herself a little more sometimes.

I could ramble about this all day, but I won’t. Nothing is easy or perfect. We are messy and pretty fucking colorful.

I appreciate her, though, and not only this weekend of the year.

She would probably hate that I dropped the f-bomb there.

But she would also get over it.

a day late...

SLB: You aren’t going to talk about the wart again, are you?

Me: Maybe in a minute. Oh, ok, now. You know, this wart is just a thing… something to focus on when everything else looms too large.  Anyway, it is much smaller now.

I think I suffocated it.

The thing about self deprecation is that… I sometimes find it appealing in people. Not when it gets to the point that these people are folding themselves into a bundle of painfully smiling self loathing or anything, but… you know?

Makes me wonder about myself and my own motivations.

tv

Wart report? Still shiny.

Maybe a wee bit flatter?

Maybe this is just my life… but does it always seem like there’s a television blaring in the background? Not trying to shun tv completely here, but I’m pretty sick of it. Sometimes I feel like I need to hide from it.

And then there’s Glee, right? And then there’s Supernatural, right?

Seriously, that thing should only be on for two hours a week. But then, sharing a bubble isn’t supposed to be easy.

SLB says: It always has to be about you, doesn’t it?

Me: Well, it is my blog.

SLB: Wherein you give a weekly wart report.

Me: If I feel like it. Sure. I think of it as follow through.

try not to think

Someone told me that clear nail polish is going to cure me of this bump on my right index finger. I guess it’s a wart. It has been there for a while, small but obvious to me. Now it is glossy. I’m trying the clear polish thing. Maybe it will work, if I remember to keep trying. Maybe I’ll just have a shiny wart. Who knows? I’ve never had a wart before.

Sort of makes me want to paint myself green and cackle, but I think that would get old after the first couple of minutes.

Sometimes it’s difficult to obsess over unimportant things. You have to work at slapping back the big juicy reality things that want to ooze all over the frivolity. Occasionally, it helps to make a list.

1. Polish toenails. It’s spring already, and you already dug out the polish for your wart.
2. Read that book over there. You’ve already established that it doesn’t really speak to you. Maybe if you read it you’ll have a better understanding of what you do not like.
3. Call up someone and bitch about the rain.
4. Gesso something. That way it’ll be ready.
5. Tidy the stack of things already covered in gesso. Inventory.
6. Smoke, while thinking about whether or not it’s time to stop smoking. Pick a date and time to stop smoking.
7. Consider that it might be easier to polish your toenails if you lost a few pounds. You haven’t picked a color yet, anyway.
8. If you gesso over the pages of that book, it might make a good art journal. Why are you so appalled by the notion of gesso-ing over someone else’s words?
9. Blow your nose again. You’re breathing too loud.
10. Stare at your shiny wart.

What do you do when you can’t fix a tragedy?

Rambleday...

Rambleday… Yes.

I’ve been thinking lately about my reading habits. I never really thought about this at all until I started writing down what I was reading.

Sure, I have always been a reader, but for the first half and a bit of last year I was reading everything, anything. A lot. Good stuff, bad stuff. I challenged myself to make it through books that I never would have picked up before. I wanted to try everything.

Then August came, and something happened. Well, I should actually say that nothing happened. I tried to read, had plenty of things to read… and yet I couldn’t get past thirty pages of anything. I spent the last four months of the year failing to read. Much.

Honestly, though, I don’t even think I would have noticed that I wasn’t reading if I hadn’t spent the first half (and a bit) of the year obsessively keeping track of what I was trying to cram into my brain. I say this because when I try to look back on my habits before I started writing it all down, I find some pretty big gaps.

Is this failure?

I’ve decided that it isn’t, even though the little ball of self loathing that resides within me would argue. 

Self Loathing Ball: You have no follow through.

Me: Sometimes.

SLB: How can you say you love books so much when you often ignore them? There are books right over there. Why haven’t you read them yet?

Me: I tried. They just didn’t… (Fighting the urge to run here.)

SLB: Didn’t what? You might have learned something from those books by now. Stop doodling. That shit’s not getting you anywhere.

Me: (Closing art journal.) Honestly, if I really had any interest in reading those books over there I could make time for reading them. And for doodling. And for meaningful things. Good lord. I do suck.

SLB: At one point in time, you were actually trying to write, yeah? I mean, not that you were great or anything, but didn’t you do that for years or something? What happened to that?

Me: I hate you, aspect of me.

SLB: WINNING. Anyway, back to those books you haven’t read. Haven’t you been sitting there for about a week wishing you had something to read? VIOLA.

Me: Seems as though I need to fall in love with the first thirty pages of a book for reading to happen these days.

SLB: So that’s why you read, let’s see… twelve books from that not so great series about a month ago?

Me: I broke up with that series!

SLB: Twelve books in?

Me: I don’t want to deal with you right now… (Doodling.)

So, yes, I went to youtube and spent a good little while watching Human Centipede – The Musical this morning. That pretty much solved everything.