This morning

was rainy and dreary.  But my son, with gusto in his heart and determination in his stride, walked up those school bus steps.  I promptly started to cry as the bus pulled away, but really I cannot be happier inside.   He has taken to this world with excitement and confidence in who he is.  He heads out with curiosity and a delight in the prospect of learning to read (as then he can "take books everywhere" he tells me, while I nod in complete understanding at that wonder upon wonders).  He knows to say thank you and please and he knows to help those who might be a little sad today.  I am so proud to be his mother.

New studio phase

It's been about a year since I first cleaned up the unused garage just off our house so it might become my studio.  The space has really good bones--solid, wood paneled walls, a built in work table and rafters that will be perfect for an eventual lighting update.  But first we needed to get rid of the garage door and cover the main working walls with drywall.  This all happened in the last month and what a difference!  I am thrilled with all of the new light streaming in through the big glass door, and I am so happy to have good tackable wall space again.  Now I can get some new collages going with a lot more ease. 

Melting

An older drawing on paper--from Fall 2009.  I am seeing it anew of late though.  Of the pile of images made at that time this one has risen to the top.

I am back to writing syllabi (two down, one to go) and I'm hoping desperately to grab a few moments in the studio before the semester begins next week.  Maybe, just maybe.  Though realistically this notion will not happen.  As Alex is no longer in his summer program, Chris and I are back to balancing our work day with a lovely, energetic five year old who has just one week left until he begins kindergarten.  We go about our days normally, with an eye toward preparing for the start of all our schools.  But in some way we are all also waiting/dreading that moment when Alexander will disappear onto that school bus...which will then drive on down the road while I stand still, watching, no doubt feeling just about ready to implode.   

I am not sure how the above image turned into a post about me imploding.  But then if this blog is anything it is an attempt to see what happens when an ostensibly formal abstract image is placed right next to these lived (visual) moments of a life/our lives--a pile of orange carrots, a yellow school bus with black stripes, my son's red hair.

Before and after

It's been a lot of days since I've posted.

Not a lot of studio work has happened because the studio has been under renovation.  Principally, the garage door was taken out and a glass door with screen was installed.  In addition two major walls were covered in drywall.  I suppose one has to be be a painter or an artist keenly interested in tackable walls to appreciate how wonderful these changes are to my studio.  I finally got everything back to working order today!!!!! (Just in time for classes to resume next Tuesday.....)

A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I go through phases of reading--phases where nonfiction seems more real to me and more necessary, and so I just read nonfiction.  I was in a nonfiction phase in graduate school and in the five years (roughly)  following that time.  When my son was born I found it hard to get much reading done at all as I went to the studio while he slept during the day, and at night my head was too tired to do much more than watch old episodes of Lost or The Wire with the help of netflix.

Of late I have been in a fiction reading phase.  For now memoir or actually-happened fact does not call me.  Invention and story are the draw, as I want to settle my painter's imagination in my own work or in the worlds created by writers.  I don't leave my own space when I travel to a work of fiction that holds me, but instead step along an ancillary path that gives me more of the information I crave.  Last night I finished reading Lorrie Moore's A Gate At The Stairs, a book narrated by one of the most captivating, resonant, humorous and smart female characters in recent fiction.  Why are there not more of these in contemporary fiction?  Or maybe I just need to read more.  Here's an excerpt from the book that reminded me of many a late night with book in hand in an old home without air conditioning:

Every night I lay in my bed, staying up past ten, reading.  The light from my lamp attracted insects through the holes in one of the screens, and by eleven I would look up at the ceiling and it would be crawling with bugs, small, medium, and large, light and dark, all collecting up there in omincous flocks as if awaiting Tippi Hedren.  Once, a leggy winged albino think landed on my book, and its oddness fascinated me, though I soon slammed it between the pages.  Once I awoke in the middle of the night and could see that through the crack in the door and the badly settled frame there was a long sliver of light from the hallway, and fireflies could enter the room; they sparkled in and out like fairies, as if the door were nothing at all, as if there were no separating this room from any other space.  They were like visions, really, but ones I'd not had as a child, when I'd slept through the night with a depth and stillness that was no longer possible.   
p. 290 from A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore 

I've been away from home in the last week and will be gone this coming week too, so I will not be posting much, if at all, until the start of August.  I am very fortunate to be heading to a retreat centered on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

Pure summer

Orange diagonals surrounded by a radial white grid

(We have about a million carrots in the garden right now.)

Dear Ross,

Just completed a picture (Picture?)--the last stages of doing it was a 24 hour bout--so many images and structures painted out--They do not satisfy now.  Something is happening to me and I do not know what it is.--As I look at it now, after some sleep, it feels so compressed--ordained and remote.  Yet it is so simple to look at.  No--it is not simple to look at all.  It is as if now for all the mind--whose thoughts are pinned--riveted down--but it moves the mind--IN A NARROW RANGE--moves, not roams.  The least--almost nothing for the eye--just enough--one even doesn't need to "look"--too unnerving.  When I am away from it, my thoughts revolve around the image.  Where has it been before, masked & hidden.  I think I have known this image all my life but did not make it visible before. 

-Philip Guston in a letter to Ross Feld from Guston in Time by Ross Feld

When I read Guston's wrangling with words I feel relieved.  Often I struggle to put words to what I do in the studio and feel like all I can do is cobble together a bunch of phrases and dashes.  There is a strange sort of verbal inarticulateness that characterizes the attempt to write out a visual process, and I wrestle against that inarticulateness--I desire verbal equivalents, or at least clarity!  But here the inability to say what is felt when making a painting is utterly beautiful.  And all I can think at the end of reading is that yes, he nailed it, that is exactly what making is like.

I am thinking about my friend Melissa too, as I write this out--as I believe she will know what I am trying to say.

OF

Window (fifth notable image from the last week)

My mother is able to find the neatest things for children--of late she brought us these window decals, and Alexander was quick to turn our panes into see-through abstract paintings.  Another collision!  Here I am intrigued by the melding of home life/domesticity with a formalist abstract language redolent of Kandinsky.