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Falling Back

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Why is it so easy to develop bad habits as opposed to good? What is it about us as humans that makes us do things that we are smart enough to know not to do? And when we do face reality and decide to change ourselves, why is it so difficult? I read somewhere that when someone exercises regularly for six weeks it becomes part of their life and they crave it. Do you want to know what I think? I think someone made that up. I exercise because I have to, I never do it because I want to. More than six months into this project and I’m still fighting my bad habits. I will admit there are nights when I just don’t want to do this. I move along great for a couple of days, feel like I’m really making progress and then like last night’s clock I’m falling back again. My dear friend Theresa is teaching little Emily that every day is a new day, a new chance to start fresh. Good advice, advice I should take and act on immediately, and because tomorrow is Monday, and you know the traditional, “I’ll start Monday” promise we have all made at least once in our lives. I think I need to write a schedule for myself, a schedule for art. Maybe if I actually officially make it part of my day things will fall into to place, if not there’s always next Monday.

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on an art project today. Jessica’s birthday is tomorrow and as is the tradition with birthdays around here, I made whatever she wanted to eat. Originally I suggested an Iron Chef kind of meal and she picked butternut squash, but I realized we wouldn’t have enough time to eat as many dishes as I came up with. I made butternut squash soup with curry, and a butternut squash lasagna, and a chicken dish. She had also requested a peanut butter pie. Overachiever that I am I thought the pie wasn’t “birthday” enough and baked a chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting. In the end, and after I woke from my food coma, I did a small watercolor for Jessica. Bleeding Hearts, her favorite flower. Tomorrow I will have to talk about the story of the soup. It’s entertaining, I promise.

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It’s Just Overkill

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There’s a song by the Australian band Men At Work named “Overkill”. There is also a really terrific acoustic version by Colin Hays the lead singer who wrote the song. Dan says that the song reminds him of me, particularly this stanza:

Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be alright
Perhaps it’s just imagination

It is true that I worry entirely too much. I think some of it is motherhood, but most of it comes naturally to me. I remember laying in bed at night as a kid and fretting over the next day. I was so shy, and also a very easy target for some nasty kids, so school was something I dreaded. It’s funny how music entwines itself into your psyche. Sunday nights CBS aired Mission Impossible (the television show not the Tom Cruise stuff), I hate the theme music. It was the last thing I heard before going to sleep to start another school week. I’ve had trouble sleeping my entire life. I will often toss and turn trying to sleep but my brain just wont shut off, or I wake in the middle of the night worried over something I forgot to do.  For years I kept a pad of paper and pen next to the bed so that when I thought of something I needed to remember I could write it down. I couldn’t turn the light on because I shared a room with my sister, so of course I spent ten minutes the following morning trying to decipher what I wrote in the dark. The upside is that I have an amazing memory, the down side for my family is that I NEVER forget anything. I worry over the big things and the very little details. My daughter is newly married and very happy so I shouldn’t worry right? She works late, drives home alone, and walks to her apartment, all of which equals…you guessed it…worry! My son is twenty-three and still figuring out his way in the world…big worry. He is an extremely intelligent young man, funny, personable, and I don’t mind saying quite handsome, but still I worry. I want him to be happy. When you are a mom you want to do so much for your kids, happy is the one thing they really have to do for themselves. So could someone please tell me how to close off the maternal part of my brain? That’s not all, of course not. I worry about my husband, my dad, my sisters and their families, my friends, my cats, my, my, my, everything! For myself? That is an easy one. My art. I worry that I won’t get it right. That the damned perspective is off once again. That the painting looks flat. That the portrait doesn’t look like the subject. I could continue but I’m sure you get the idea. Tonight I was worried about my son. That affected my painting. I couldn’t concentrate. Now I’m worried about the painting, the perspective, that the rose doesn’t look enough like a rose…blah, blah, blah. I really wish I had a way to tell my brain that Brian will be fine, that the painting isn’t that bad, that tomorrow is another day, but I don’t. So tonight,

“I can’t get to sleep
I think about the implications
Of diving in too deep
And possibly the complications

Especially at night
I worry over situations
I know will be alright
Perhaps it’s just imagination

You can look up the rest, or download the single. It’s a really great song, and its way better than the theme to Mission Impossible.

Tonight a watercolor. My amazing husband bought me flowers when we were in Paris. I even managed to sneak a few dried petals back with me, and of course the bag.

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My New Year

I’m not a New Year resolution kind of girl.  The whole new year to start over by making promises that I and the rest of the world won’t keep, just doesn’t work for me. I was never a person that went along with what everyone else was doing. Peer pressure? I don’t get it. Even as a teenager I got angry when someone else tried to tell me what to do. I have always liked being an individual. I decided today that I will make my new year from birthday to birthday. I feel like I’m well on my way to making change and progress in my life. I’m six months into my 365 project, and at over two hundred posts and art projects, I think I’m finally fulfilling a lifetime of empty promises. My resolutions for this next year? To see this project through. That’s an easy one. The other is to open our business. That is a huge project. We are under no delusions about the amount of work ahead of us, but we are both in the mind-set that we need to move ahead. Yesterday’s stolen iPhone was just the cherry on top of six plus months of not great luck. Dan and I are quite talented together and I think it’s time to begin making our own luck. That and there’s nothing I love more than a new space to decorate, I’m itching to get my hands on our shop. We have some small pieces ready to go, and some roughly halfway there. This is the first week of getting our act together. I’m excited about this next year, and hope to make this next twelve months the best of our lives.

Today I saw a photo in The New York Times that really appealed to me, but since I have vowed to only use my own photos for my work, I instead asked my always supportive husband to pose for me. The photo in the paper was a woman, I have instead painted a man. There was an anguish in the body language that spoke to me, as I said we haven’t had great luck lately. Maybe I should have painted a picture of me hunting down the thief that stole the phone, or of Dan and I sitting in our business. ( You know, for visualization purposes) Funny thing is I’m not even angry anymore, I’m ready to move past it. As I said yesterday I’m trying to let stuff go. There’s always something else to focus on, like being happy. And on that note, in my woe is me I had a crappy birthday post, I failed to mention that Dan cooked an incredible Greek dinner for me, and that he and the kids gave me lovely gifts, but what’s more important, they wrote very supportive words of love and encouragement for my art. There’s always a silver lining.10 27

 

The Reality Of Making A Plan

A few definitions courtesy of Google.

Plan

1. A detailed proposal for doing or achieving something.

2. An intention or decision about what one is going to do.

Reality

The world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.

This is my life. There are plans, and then there is reality. Today is Wednesday. It is the day that I set as a deadline to work on my portrait of Jessica. It was a plan. The reality is that I have too many projects occurring at the same time. This does not matter to Jessica (the portrait, the real Jessica is lovely and patient), I feel the portrait of Jessica giving me the evil eye. I made a silent promise to it today that I will visit soon, and before Halloween when this whole thing would be just too creepy.

My Grandfather clock/bookcase. Another plan. The reality is that I need Dan to help me with it. Dan has hurt his back. (Just a little for those of you who care) The reality is that I should not be allowed anywhere near power tools that may remove appendages from my body. I actually like my fingers. I am a smart capable woman, I am also a complete klutz. Any project that requires a saw shall remain undone until my partner is feeling better.

Plan B

A watercolor of some Hollyhocks.

Reality

Boring. Been done, no need to repeat.

No plan. I begin to wander the house looking at the messy piles of art supplies that are now in every room. No plan. I make my way into the garden, sneaking by portrait of Jessica and hope she doesn’t see me. (I believe I’m developing a phobia) There are supplies in the garden too. They are neatly arranged, because Dan neatly arranges them. I see a piece of wood. It is a cast off. Too small for a shelf or much else. I have an idea, something that has been on my mind for several days. I think I know what I want to do, but then I begin to use watercolor on the wood. I wasn’t even sure it would work, but it does, beautifully. My intention was to paint the wood to look bruised, it doesn’t look bruised, it is soft, it flows gently into the grain. The wood has plans of its own. There is a knot in the wood. The plot thickens, my project changes. I have made it known that I am just a little intense about trash and recycling. It occurs to me as I watch this scrap of wood begin to change, that it might have ended up in our trash. It was too small for anything, well anything except art. I use a lot of paper. I recycle all of it. Would I throw away this much paper? No, that would be a crime in my house. The knot in the wood appears to me as an eye. A living thing. This piece of wood was a living thing. The evolution of a piece of art. No plan, just the reality of all that we, that I, waste. This simple piece of wood that began its life as part of a beautiful tree. Reborn. Making a statement. Sometimes I don’t have the words, and then I look to those who are wiser than I. Thank you Mahatma Gandhi.IMG_1848

 

Ghosts Of Projects Past

I had another one if those inexplicable moments of inspiration today. My mother in law gave my husband copies of some old family photos, one of which was her mother as a child. I love it. Alice, an adorable little girl in a Victorian era dress, but for me it was the her expression in the photo. There is a petulance and stubbornness in her face that I love. I haven’t quite captured it yet, the photo is a copy, and isn’t as clear as I’d like. I more than likely won’t get back to it tomorrow because we will be traveling home, but Alice deserves to be finished.

No sooner did I type that Alice deserved to be finished, I heard the essence of the portrait of Jessica calling from my dining room back home. I started Jessica’s portrait in May? I think? I think I started it in a moment of bravado. Feeling empowered by how well things were moving along with this blog I started that portrait, and in my defense returned to it once, but we all know what is going on here. That portrait is my Christmas Carol. It screams of my “not good enough” past. I have been doing so well in my “present”, working daily on my art, feeling confident, and hopeful. There is also a “future” in the works. I am currently planning to attempt my first show. No ghosts in those closets, but as for that portrait I’m feeling those old ghosts. I feel uncertain in my approach, it is after all my first attempt at a full portrait. There is the…dare I say it?….possibility of failure. But what is failure in art? Perhaps my imperfect perspective? When you think about it I guess the only failure in a portrait might be that the subject looks nothing like the finished work, but I will say that so far it does look like Jessica, so what is my problem? Me as always. This new-found artistic confidence is still on somewhat uncertain ground. There are still far too many issues I skirt around. So here is where I once again make the “I have to do this because I said I would because I’m Catholic and I’ll suffer eternal damnation, and endless guilt if I don’t do what I said I would do” promise. Got that? A vow here and now to revisit Jessica by Wednesday of next week. Did you notice I gave myself some time to play with?  So Wednesday it is, at least as a deadline. I think I can hear Jessica say she would like to appear much sooner that that.image

One Last Move

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A small watercolor tonight of the “auld sod”, otherwise known as Ireland. My Dad left Ireland in July of 1956, my Mother followed that October, after accepting my Dad’s invitation to move to Canada and marry him. Fifty seven years later Mom is gone, and my Dad is ready to move from the home they had together. It was a difficult decision for him, leaving the last place that he lived with her, but it is time for him to move somewhere more manageable. Fifty seven years later my Dad still sounds like he just arrived from Dublin last week. We grew up in Chicago, but I often joke that we might as well have grown up in Ireland, all of our parents friends were from there, any events we attended were with Irish people, music in our home was Irish…you get the idea. Dad has found a place to move to, there is a large Irish contingent living in this particular retirement home. He seems happy which is what is important, but he said something to me a few months ago that really stuck with me. He said that when he moved out his house he would be leaving his last home. The finality of that statement made me sad. I thought about what it must feel like to choose the last place you will live. In his heart he never left Ireland, and I am sure that there is a part of him that would love to move back there now, but the bigger part of his heart belongs to my Mom, and her grave is near his new place. He is certain about this move except for leaving her house, and in some way leaving her behind. We are all doing our part to reassure him that he is making the right decision. My contribution to that will be a painting for his new apartment. The painting tonight is the beautiful Irish coast, I will give him this one, but once I am back at home it will have to be an oil of Dublin. It will be hard on all of us to sell their home. Just as I am on this journey of discovery for myself, Dad will be starting the last leg of his own journey, and I want him to be happy.

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Art On The Road

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Not a lot of time for art today. Driving to see family through the desert, and then dinner out. We did stop along the way for a break and lunch at a rest stop. I was enthralled by one particular tree. My favorite color is green. The Palo Verde is a beautiful monochromatic green, standing out amongst the pale hues of the desert. I made a quick pencil sketch, and tonight a small watercolor from my sketch. Don’t ask me why I didn’t take a moment to photograph the tree, but I intend to on our return trip. I’d love to do an oil painting of it. Early in this blog I had complained about the desert, later retracting my complaints because of some incredible photos I took. I really took the time today to study the colors and textures as we drove. Of course when you are driving by at eighty miles an hour things tend to blur, but when you really take the time to look the desert is rich in color. Like a perfect dance of soft hues blending one into the next. As the sun moves across the sky the mountains change from subtle color to rich brilliance, absolutely stunning.

The Second Half

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I announced the halfway point in my blog on Friday, had the wedding yesterday, so today is the official start of the second half of my year of dealing with my artistic procrastination. I went out today and purchased a few things to enhance my oil painting. (I know, the idea is to use up the supplies, not buy more), but I’ve decided that for this second half of this journey maybe its time to actually try reading and studying about the art I want to create. Flying by the seat of my pants has done pretty well by me thus far, but all those experts can’t be wrong. Its time to wave the flag of the surrender of my stubbornness. (A note to those close to me, the surrender applies to artistic endeavors only, sorry to burst your bubble.) I took the time this weekend to print out wallet sizes of most of the art I have produced in the last six months. The only comparison I can make is maternal. I obviously remember the birth of my children, I also remember much of their lives, but sometimes it seems as though I just turned my head for a second and they were grown. It’s similar to what I felt when I held those photos in my hand. It feels as though I just started this project. When I held that stack of photos in my hands I was surprised at the amount and scope of work I have produced, and dare I say it? I’m proud of myself for sticking with it, and pretty impressed with some of my work.  I do have to admit that I wish there were more of the pieces that I really love, but maybe as I glance through those photos of the finished work I’ll inspire myself to do more. It might seem strange that I printed them all out when I have almost all of the originals here, but to print them all out in the same manageable size makes it easier for me to see what I have done so far. There is so much I didn’t think about or plan for as I headed into this, there have been some really frustrating days when it seemed as though nothing would work, but I’m feeling really good about this.

For tonight I finished the sketch for watercolor that I started last night. It is inspired by a photograph I took in Giverny. As I looked at the piece it a little like a children’s book illustration. I decided to go with that, and let the work lead me where it wanted. In the end I also added some fine line pen. I may just have to write a little story to go with it.10 13

 

Blustery Day

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There’s an old song with a line that states, “It never rains in Southern California.” For the most part that’s true, but every now and then we have a day like today, a rainy, overcast, windy, and wet day, and I couldn’t be happier. That might sound strange to some, but for someone like me who grew up in Chicago, it’s a little taste of home. I’ve been in California long enough to be considered a Californian, but I’ll always be a Chicagoan at heart. I love the beautiful weather here in Temecula, but I really miss the change of seasons. There is something so magical about the first Spring day when it is warm enough to crack open a window. In Chicago that could be at forty degrees. Trust me, when it has been near freezing for months on end, forty is practically tropical. There is also that first day of Fall when the wind is just crisp enough to call for a sweater, or the quiet pristine beauty of freshly fallen Winter snow. I miss all of it. Yes, it is wonderful to not have to scrape the ice off my windshield, or to dig out a parking space, but there is something about the cycle of the seasons that appeals to me. Maybe because in a way we all live our lives in a cycle of seasons. I love the rebirth of Spring, and the maturity of Fall. There is an anticipation of the seasons that is lacking here. A few years ago when we were back visiting my parents, my kids were enthralled by a good old-fashioned thunder and lightning storm. I have memories from my childhood of standing in the garden during a Summer rain, when the air was warm and the rain water was cool on my skin. When I was a little girl there was a blizzard in Chicago, twenty-three inches of snow fell. I remember the snow over my head, and the games we played. My sisters and I built a house in the snow. We made a couch, a table, and I think even a television. I remember the thrill of running across the fence that had been covered by snow into the neighbor’s yard. Mrs. Hackel wasn’t very nice to us, and we thought we were so daring to run into that garden. Brian, my son, was devastated to discover upon moving to California that he was losing his “Snow Days”, bad weather free days built into the school calendar. Maybe it’s because I’ve been here in California for ten years that I can wax so poetic about those bad weather days. All I know is that when I have a day like today,  a day when you want to cuddle up inside with something warm to drink, and a good book or a movie, I feel nostalgic.

I had company tonight, and a rather busy day. As always looking through photos from something to paint, I came across a photo from my phone of one of my cats. I was trying to photograph Riley, and she became very curious. She put her face right up to the phone. Riley in watercolor and pencil. Riley is a Chicagoan too.IMG_1669

 

Blending Flavors

I failed to get back to my watercolor portrait today, but not without very good cause. I was very busy pursuing my other great passion, cooking. As an artist I enjoy using all kinds of medium, and for me cooking is another medium. Ingredients are like paint, blending together to create a work of art on a plate. I created a new recipe today. We were watching an episode of Anthony Bourdain in Spain the other night, and by the time it was over I was in a Spanish frame of mind. I love tapas, and unfortunately for us our favorite tapas restaurant in San Diego closed down. We loved going down to the Gaslamp Quarter and sitting at a sidewalk cafe, enjoying some small plates and a pitcher of Sangria while watching the world go by. Of course as most couples do, we would comment on the people walking past. (All in good fun, because we of course are perfect….back to the food…) I created a shrimp dish with Mexican chorizo for lunch. A lovely, rich, smokey sauce, and succulent shrimp dusted in smoked paprika, topped with a little fresh guacamole and chipotle mayo.  Dan gave me a lovely compliment, he said, ” When we watch Anthony Bourdain’s show and watch him eat in these great little restaurants, I always think, “I wish I could eat there.”, and today I did.” Brian loved the base of the dish, but isn’t terribly fond of shrimp. He suggested that he might like chicken instead. So off to the store with my friend Theresa, for a very fun afternoon of ingredient shopping. By four fifteen I was back at the stove and created a different version of the same recipe for dinner. This time a gumbo of sorts with chicken, Mexican chorizo and Spanish chorizo, with some chopped cilantro and green onion. My guys loved it, cleaned their plates and went back for seconds, actually Brian cleaned the pan as well. Now I just have to remember everything I put in there. I’ve made some great dinners over the years, telling my family to enjoy because they will never have it again. Some of the meals in this house are made from what’s in the fridge and a little kitchen wizardry. I get a great deal of personal satisfaction from painting, but cooking for the people I care about is good for the soul. There are honestly days when I think if I could go back in time and choose a career path to follow, I’m not sure if it would be cooking or art. I guess I’ll just have to continue doing both.

Lunch….

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Dinner….IMG_1582

Not the portrait for tonight, but a watercolor. Just something pretty to look at.

Art…

 

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