The Cuckoo Bee

I finished the first go over of the ball.  I don’t feel interested in doing more with it at the moment, since my palette has now dried up and I don’t have the teacher here prodding me to make it better.  It could use smoothing, but it’s okay.

On to self-portrait, I have moved the eyes around three times now and they are still too high, I think, and too close together.  This is also a rough draft.  Fortunately I can’t paint on it right now because it needs to dry so I can take it to class.  That’s good because I’m tired, reader, I’m very tired today–the springtime is making me tired.

We went over to my husband’s boss’s house for dinner last night.  It was in the Bronx, where I have never been before nor know anything about aside from the Ogden Nash poem, whose aptness I can’t comment upon.  I’m not sure we all understood each other, but that is usually the way I feel when I first meet people and I’m not completely wasted.  Next time will have to try that and I’ll let you know if it works out.

By the way, reader, there are so many things I miss about you.  Other things I don’t miss, of course.  You already knew that.

So we are going to skip all those amazing drawings I was lying about last time and move directly to painting.  In class we use Winsor-Newton water-soluble oil paints.  According to our teacher, they are no different from regular oil paint, except they have an emulsifier that allows them to be mixed with water, thus avoiding the use of toxic and brain-damaging turpentine or turpenoid, whatever that is.  We have been painting for three sessions now and we use two colors:  raw umber and titanium white.  Then we mix the color scale so we have seven tones.  That’s our palette.

At first it was quite unhandy to have paint flopping all over the place, but I had a nice time with it all during the last class so now I am painting at home.  The teacher gave me his ball to paint.  I think we all know I like that.

This is the first go-over that I did this morning.  The paint takes a while to dry, although apparently this brown dries faster than other colors; anyway I don’t really need to wait for it to dry to go over it again, it’s just that I am tired of it and all that.  So having most of the paint in my palette left over I went ahead and launched into a painting self-portrait.  This is just to block in some of the light and shade and try to get the shapes in the right place.

Moving on to me, occasionally lately I have had very vivid memories, usually when I am falling asleep or waking up.  This morning it was of a time when I was driving down Wilson Lane in Bethesda, Maryland, going toward River Road on the way to school on a hot spring morning.  Everything was humid and green and those thousands of birds and bugs and whatever were going like crazy, and I had the windows open on the old green Chevy station wagon, and all that soft air was blowing in.  This must have been senior year, because I had that feeling of excitement and jolly fun that pervaded that time; anyway in the memory I went driving by the dentist’s house with the white sign out front, and around the bend down to the little turn-on leading into River Road, and looked over my shoulder at traffic, and went on to school, with all the green trees and the big hill ahead on River Road rising up in the distance, and turned into school with everyone else and parked down in Senior parking, I think that was gravel, wasn’t it? and went up to school to meet my friends and roister around in Assembly and all the rest of the day, because we didn’t care about anything anymore, and were just having a good time.  Well, now I am going to forget all about that except insofar as it is still being lived in the cells of my body–reader, do you get the feeling I am getting weirder all the time?

Reader, do you know what it’s like to be constantly losing things? I lost my camera cord, one of a hundred such gizmos whose absence brings all my activity here to a halt, and now I have  a backlog of pictures that would make an actual backlog look like a pile of logs.  But before we get to that, here is the dear baby bok choy:

In totally unrelated news, my husband informed me the other day, as I heard it, that I am not really bad, but only like to pretend I am bad.  This chafed because you may know I love to be a badass–although it is true that I like the idea of whores and drugs, but probably not the reality; anyway badass is a state of mind, don’t you know.  Then he continued that I think I like to be bad, but really I only like to feel free.  That makes a little sense, and illustrates the general habit we have of my interpreting whatever he says in a completely divergent direction from what he’s getting at.  We don’t have the same left brain, or maybe it is also that he does not speak English.

Then I was thinking about Johnny Cash, and whether Johnny Cash is really a badass, and I was like well, no, because there is no good or bad but just the ability to do whatever you want and not care.  Am I right?

On to self-portraits and the use of vine charcoal.  I just started using vine charcoal and I like it very much.  I don’t know yet how to incorporate details without it looking too detaily, but I have only been using the medium for three days, so just give me a minute all right?  or as my son loves to say now, switch to decaf, mommy.  My art teacher says that I should not be using vine charcoal, but I don’t care.

Here is my husband sick in bed.  This is pencil, not charcoal.

Another one:

Whenever I meet someone and I happen to be totally drunk, or any other time too, I take out my or their ipod and show them my blog.  The last time this happened the only thing that loaded was the oil pastel picture of the banana, and they were not very impressed, but I am going to do some more color pieces soon.  Moving along,

That’s charcoal.

Here’s the other thing, which I have not yet gotten to the real meaning of, but still remains one of those cryptic Sphinx-like things my husband constantly lets drop:

Me:  You know there’s an artist who said, “I feel like the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.” [I was thinking of Robert Rauschenberg]

Husband:  What? What the fuck does that mean.

Me: [blank stare]

Husband:  I mean, I could say, I feel like the world is a hot girl opening her legs.  You could say anything.

Me: [blank stare coupled by feeling of loneliness]

Also charcoal.

Here I want to insert something else random, which is that I love the Zen idea of forgetting all your ideas so that everything can be born anew moment by moment, but I do tend to go overboard and forget absolutely everything and then just kind of sit around looking at the air.  I feel that this will work itself out eventually, or rather I prefer not to think about it, since that is more Zen.  Finally one more charcoal portrait:

This is last week’s stuff.  This week’s stuff is infinitely better, reader! I will wait to post it though until I have something else that I can’t post, and then I will never run out of goodness and infinity.  Right? Right? Right?

Occasionally something will happen that reminds me how different things are now from what they used to be twenty years ago, for me I mean.  Today I was walking through the park on the way home and looking up at the opaque sky through some wintry trees gave me a sudden excited feeling like I used to have in high school when it was gray out.  Usually I am aware that this feeling used to exist but I don’t actually have it, and then when I do get it once every five years I’m like, Oh, that’s how I used to feel about things.

It’s the same thing as that short story assignment we had where we were instructed to overhear someone’s conversation and then write a paragraph of a story about it.  The two statements I heard, from two different people, were “I just got out of Rikers and I don’t have any money” and “I’m going down the drain anyway.”  Then in class we did not discuss the paragraphs we had written (which was fine because I never did it) but rather why we chose what we chose.   That’s the same feeling again.

The other feeling I had recently that I have not had for a long, long time, since before I was married, was what it is like to have fun with people, like the feeling that you are making new friends.  That’s swell.

Two more important things, also unrelated to the pictures I am posting:  First, I had, for the third time now, that thing where I wake up because I am laughing in my sleep, or rather this time my husband shook me awake going “What’s going on. What’s going on,” like he thought the house was going to explode because I was laughing.  This time the source of humor was a comment (in the dream) about eating raw liver at the dinner table.  Hm.

The other thing is that this morning while dropping off the younger son at school I totally lost it when the older boy started banging into the aquarium and throwing things at the babies and parents who were trying to get by us as we sat arguing in the entryway, because the younger son had insisted on flopping into the dirty snowbank outside the door and his socks were soaking wet, and he wouldn’t let me take them off.  So as older son came up and started taking off my hat and sticking something up the back of my coat,  I, as mentioned, lost it and started yelling like this:  “You’re in big trouble and I’m going to spank you! Dammit!”  Ahem.  We are not supposed to use swear words in school.  They were actually quite mad and I may be in more trouble later.  Unfortunately I cannot tell my husband about this because  he will also yell at me–it’s very much like when you get in trouble at school but are also afraid to tell your parents, so are kind of alone on that windy corner in west Philadelphia.  Maybe that’s what gave me the exciting feeling.

One more thing I just realized:  why would we ever follow the rules that other people give us?  Those rules are only for them, since they are the ones who made them.  It seems obvious, no?  Like swearing at day care.  On to ballpoint pen drawings.  They are very much like pencil in the way you shade, but of course one cannot erase.  Still much more forgiving than a pigma micron pen.

Lord.  There’s a lot today it seems. On to baby bok choy.  I saw this in the store the other day and I spent a week thinking about it, and then went back and bought one and drew some stuff.  Here are my three favorites:

This has become our new pet.  It sits in a bowl on the table in a puddle of water and looks pretty good.  It’s been there for maybe five days now and is still green.  The kids kiss it and are like “oh, it’s all right, baby bok choy.”  Sometimes to test me, one of them will ask, “Are you going to eat that baby bok choy?” and then I say, “No, I don’t eat babies.”  Really I could not think about eating it.  It’s a baby.  On the other hand, my son was growing basil sprouts in a little cup and before we left for Christmas vacation I ate one, since I thought they would all be dead when we got back, which they were.  It did feel very odd to eat a baby.  But it was very fresh and tasty.

This is getting mighty long so I am cutting down my selection here, reader.  You will have to come over to see everything.  A couple more.

rembrandt oil pencils and oil pastels

It’s  all right, baby bok choy.  I love you.

Drawing is funny.  I used to be obsessed with writing, and I would be dying all day to have the kids go to bed so I could write, and that was fun but it was never finished.  And it is satisfying to read over something you’ve written, but you can only read it a couple times before all the snap wears off and you lose your perspective on it.  Then in the end it’s phrases and sentences that you like that stay with you, and that’s nice too.  But drawing satisfies with a louder smack because it only takes a little while to finish a drawing, not weeks and years, so that even if I have five projects (painting and washes and whatnot) going on at the same time, there will be something getting done, and if I do a sketch it’s done just like that.  And then you can put it on the wall and get into it again any time you want, as many times as you like, and it is a continuing source of pleasure to look at what you somehow created out of your brain and eyes and hand, and whatever else you put in it.

This morning I drew six self-portraits, which got worse and worse, and I was in a tizzy.  All the self-portraits were less of a likeness than the very first one I drew before I had any ideas about triangles connecting the outside of the eyes and nose, or the eye-chin ratio, and all that, and I spent a great deal of time this morning drawing vertical and horizontal axes for the face and then measuring with my pencil against the mirror as well as making sure there was symmetry and that the eyes were one eye-distance apart etc.  Despite all that none of them looked anything like me.  It was quite frustrating and I had to finally stop myself from drawing until I dropped dead, because I just did not understand why something so simple was coming out so wrong, and I was starting to dislike drawing and having to be thinking of all the rules I read about drawing faces.  Thinking is not what I like about drawing at all, so I stopped and remembered what I like, which is the simple contour or the simple shaded shape–like the melody line in Jimmy Brown the Newsboy as Earl Scruggs plays it, sweet and beautiful even in that tune that a child probably wrote.

So then this afternoon I managed to tear myself away from the mirror and went to sit with my son as he was playing Wall-E on the Wii, and drew the following sketch in five minutes, just like the first time I ever drew, which was that hat and spoon.  It was the same kind of quiet, exciting fun to see it suddenly done.  It’s mysterious how that happens.  I do like it.

So it’s funny.  I like drawing.  I don’t really like studying drawing though.

Here we see the detritus of snow day.

Continuing down the hallway, we move gradually from physical detritus (snowy garments) to mental detritus (craziness induced by snow requires threshing of possessions).

It’s hard to fit it all in one picture.  Here we are in the boys’ room.  That is the drawers they have overturned and the black and white lamp is visible on the floor.

I am too distressed to put away the milk, juice, or dishes.

The world is reeling! How can two small children make this kind of mess!

Now I have begun to hallucinate.

Fortunately I can go back to working on this drawing and just forget about all that other stuff.

I have been trying to resist using my “oil painting for dummies” kit I got on extreme sale at Dick Blick until we get to the oil painting part of my class, however this afternoon while the small boy was sleeping I found myself getting it all out and making a medium size mess.  I didn’t use anything beside linseed oil either to thin or to clean the brushes–I have to say the brushes in the kit were very poor quality and left bristles all over the painting.  I painted on a canvas board or whatever they’re called–they’re sort of cheap, at least I think that’s the point of them.

The last time I did an oil painting I was fourteen and I remember enjoying the medium.  That was around the time I decided I never wanted to do art again–I have no idea why.  Mr. Higgins used to beg and plead and nag at me to take Art Minor until it became something that the entire softball team would bother me about, but I was firm in resisting and have never taken another art class until right now.  Isn’t that strange?  I wanted to take color theory in college but I was afraid.  Today I order a book called Interaction of Color by Josef Albers.  I got the new edition with all the color prints and exercises, because what is the point otherwise?  It was expensive but less expensive than taking a color theory course at an art school.  Is this boring for you? It’s one of the few topics I can actually think about.  It’s kind of surprising that I am interested in it, actually.  I didn’t even realize how boring it all must be.  That’s quite satisfying since I am habitually bored by listening to other people talk about their interests which I rarely share.  I can talk about Hello Kitty or Adam Lambert.  I don’t think there’s much else because either I have too many opinions and don’t want to share them or hear other people’s, or else I don’t care what they’re talking about.  Present company excluded, reader, because every morsel that drops from your lips is pure manna.

Anyway the oil has to dry for a day or so.  I don’t know if this is underpainting or just background painting, or both.  I am just experimenting.  I put it in the second bathroom with the fan on to dry.

Do you know, reader, there were 1500 visits to this blog yesterday. That seems high, doesn’t it? Far be it from me to diminish the amazing content of these virtual pages, of course. Ahem.

1. Drawing of bunny

2. another quick one

3.  little one sleeping

4.  me

5.  Bones

I wrote my manifesto this morning.  Just in case, you know.  It’s the kind of manifesto that you don’t read after you write it–that’s how inflammatory it is.  I think it’s done but I’m not sure because I also had to erase my memory after I wrote it.  This is all sounding very mysterious to me.  Maybe I will take a look after all.

The Strawberry Mountains are close to the metropolis of Play Doh and scenically located next to the Watercolor Lakes.

My mother did not realize this was art and cleaned it all up.

Being an expert now that I have attended two drawing classes, I am going to discuss.  Since I, like you, reader, can just draw all by myself, that is not what you go to art school for.  I don’t know what you go to art school for but I went to check out the drawing scene and learn some words and techniques and meet people who draw and see what they do.  So I guess that is what you do at art school.  On the other hand, it is super-expensive to sit there and draw something for three hours that you could just as well draw at home.  So basically you pay for a few tips and things that you would definitely also find on the internet, but mostly for contact with people.  That’s valuable.  Also feedback on your art.  That’s nice, especially when your instructor is nice.  Maybe it’s not nice if your instructor is an asshole.  I don’t know.  Anyway, the whole thing is no different at all from law school or whatever else you attend.  It’s not like you need someone to go over the law with you.  You could learn everything at home, but it’s the discussion and crap that makes you into a lawyer.  Does the discussion and crap make you into an artist? No, but it can make you very annoying and use a lot of art-speak; on the other hand, art-speak has a purpose; on the other hand, artists are annoying.  I think I am getting off track here.  I guess you can pay for it, and go, or else not pay for it, and if you do go it’s like your vacation on tripadvisor where some people think it’s a fairy-land and others think it’s a scorpion farm.  Did this inform at all?