Learning to Finish

I have said often in the last few years that I'm a starter, not a finisher. To wit, I had 2 murals, a dozen paintings, and a quilt started, along with various other sewing and other types of projects I was intending to get to. I think I had just accepted this as the way I function, and had ceased even to try to catch up.

Here lately, I've been attempting to remedy that. I finished my daughter's quilt, made significant progress on a bathroom mural, made my younger daughter's baptismal gown, and completed a computer bag for myself. I still have a quilt to make for my son, the mural in the bathroom and a mural in the stairway to complete, and several paintings for which I've never been quite sure how to bring about resolution. But I'm on my way.

In the interest of keeping myself accountable: I intend to finish the bathroom mural next, hopefully within a week. Pictures will be posted on Facebook. Stay tuned...

Recovering Gifts

A Piece of Her
5 June 2010

I bought a chinois just like Grandmother's--
Ebay has its uses. She never called it that--
it was just a colander with a wooden pestle,
and she couldn't have told you where or when she got it.
She was always so elusive about the recipe--some flour,
a bit of baking powder, a pinch of salt (I'm fairly certain
it was Bisquick), and the dewberries, of course,
which I always thought were just blackberries.
Turns out I was wrong--and right.
Dewberries and blackberries are related,
and the name is legitimate. That makes me smile
as I press pestle against colander, juicing the blackberries;
coming one step closer to the mind of Bernice.
She's been gone for years now,
and I thought her cobbler was gone with her,
but I've found a piece of it, by trial and error--
a piece of her.

It wasn't perfect, but it was very close. It's definitely close enough to satisfy my memory. The taste of it brought tears to my eyes. I think I'll try it again this weekend. Although The Boy wants me to make a strawberry one. That feels like blasphemy. :-) But I guess I can alter tradition a bit here and there for the sake of my children's preferences. But the *norm* will be blackberry--and I'll probably call them dewberries. I'm going to try to find someone who sells berry bushes and plant them in the back yard. I'm very excited about the prospect of having the berries in the backyard like grandmother did.

It's always such a joy to find some small gift that has been passed on to me from my family members. Mother's quilting, Grandmother's cobbler, Vovo's chorizo & eggs (eaten in moderation--whew!). None of these gifts was ever handed down directly--I'm learning them now by consulting the poignant memories I have of the smells, the sights and the sounds associated with watching these women create beautiful things. And now I create beautiful things, both theirs and my own. I feel more whole every time I recover one of these treasures in myself.

Today, I should quilt. Of course, when I say that to myself, and especially when I say it out loud to someone else, I always pay for it later. The Boy wants to go to Gamestop, The Gril wants me to fix her hair, or I find housekeeping tasks that need to be done, and I feel badly sitting down to something "non-necessary" until those things are done. The trouble is there will always be a household task to complete. If I don't *make* the time for these small but very important creative tasks, I will always find reasons why it's not a good time to get to them now. I'm learning as I recover well-hidden gifts inside myself, though, that it's important to pull those to the surface, and to give them to my children.

Deep Magic at 27 Weeks

Today, I am 27 weeks pregnant.

Yesterday, I picked up a paintbrush for the first time since I found out I was pregnant.

I don't think these two realities are coincidental. I've been on pins and needles throughout this pregnancy, waiting for the fateful 27 weeks to pass. Not that it's a magic number; I know it's not. Or maybe it is--"Deep Magic", as a friend of mine at church quoth (very C.S. Lewis of her...) the other day when the incessant back pain I'd been having for 5 months suddenly vanished in the middle of the Holy Unction service of Holy Week. Not magic--but God's hand, God's grace, God's peace--and the little girl in my abdomen finally choosing a more comfy position for what I hope will be the duration of the pregnancy.

I think most people would be surprised to hear me talk like that. The years between 2000 and 2005 beat a lot of things out of me, including the ability to speak in platitudes. But it has struck me constantly, in the midst of those years; in the midst of the Blessing Years that have followed, that God's grace and love and peace are not platitudes. And they are certainly not to be hidden away, but they are very precious, wonderful, mysterious, unfathomable realities that work even when we can't see them. Even when we are so reduced by our circumstances that we wonder if He's even there.

So--27 weeks. Not a magic number. But definitely a point of new vision, and hopefully a point of rebirth of creativity. Deep Magic.

Untitled Pastel

Playing with pastels. I like this medium, though I certainly have not mastered it. May never. But it's fun, and it makes for beautiful shading.

Sketching

Fiddling around with colored pencils. Not my best work, but I'm really stuck on the image.

Class project

I'm going blog crazy this week, huh?

My son's class is doing a geography project involving butterflies. They made butterflies out of tissue paper, hung them up around the classroom, and then left for spring break. When they came back *gasp* the butterflies had flown away. The idea was to have friends and family send postcards from around the country and the world telling the kids where their butterflies had been spotted.

My son has been bugging me to write a postcard to his class. He's totally on to the game, and wants me to participate. So I did, and here it is:

Silent Reverie

The aforementioned sketch:

Caelum

Toying with names for the painting when I should be going to bed. I have no idea whether it's finished. I had originally intended ONE of these to be an acrylic rendering of an old pencil sketch I'd entitled Silent Reverie. However, I like them both so much, I'm afraid to mess with them.

Aaaaand another...

This one's a bit of a teaser, as I've only included the corner of the canvas. Actually, i guess it's just a little less than half of the canvas. I started this painting and left the last as it is because I liked the latter so much, and was afraid to mess it up. I am now falling in love with this one was well. *Sigh*. One of them will have to serve as fodder for a more complex painting. Dunno which it will be yet. Maybe both.

Back to painting...

Even for a woman of 33, with 2 kids, a fabulous husband, and a relatively stable, ridiculously happy and satisfying home life (it took long enough to get here); even having already weathered the storm of divorce in my own life, watching the marriage of one's progenitors dissolve is nothing less than harrowing.

I've had an image in my head for a while which expresses, for me, a portion of the chaos of it, and I started painting it today. I think for this one, I will dabble in mixed-media for the first time, because there are some things I simply cannot do in acrylics. We'll see how it turns out. Here's a peak at Stage 1. I apologize in advance for the quality of the photo. My husband is out of the country, and he accidentally left with our good point-and-shoot digital AND the digital SLR. So I have to work with what I have.

Untitled-- nude in acrylic

Newest painting

This one emerges out of some recent events--a little too personal to explain, but I think it's a cool painting anyway. I don't think it's quite finished. But it has a very fairy-ish, will-o'-the-wisp feeling to it.

Batik, a poem

3 December 2008

These days, my hands are dirty
often, alternately orange, raging red
or indigo, depending on which image
I’m liberating. I imagine there’s someone
within my spheres of influence
who would be ill-disposed to appear
in public with dark half-moons
of dye in the beds of her fingernails,
the intricate swirl-tracings
on each fingertip, these signs of what I do,
who I am. When they fade,
the time has come to find another
medium by which Reality may find
the light, Shadows may be put to flight.

Back at painting...

My work for today. I started this one last night, late, and finished this morning.


After I finished the one above, I sat for about 45 minutes *trying* to paint, and nothing happened. Well, three or four cruddy paintings happened, one on top of another on a single canvas. I finally set that aside and started fresh on a smaller, square canvas, and this is what I came up with. It's about 5 x 5 inches, so the face was quite a challenge.

Painting with My Parents

My parents came to visit last weekend, and we took them to a pottery painting place in town. We'd started painting tiles a few months ago with the kids which we are using to tile our kitchen, and we thought it would be fun to have visitors participate. I had no idea what artists my parents are. Below are the tiles we all painted while they were here. Sorry for the glare. I tried to photograph them without a flash, but the colors just weren't right.



Left to right-
Top row: Mom's, mine, Epona's
Bottom row: Dad's, Beloved's, The Boy's

Another Sculpture

I'm getting better at this, and I'm enjoying every moment. I cannot WAIT to get my hands on soapstone. Or ceramic clay. Or ... whatever.

Seeing Red

New project- painting in primary colors. I painted this image like a black and white, only I substituted red for black and yellow for white. I'm really happy with it.

Sometime soon, when I have more paints, I'll do a blue & yellow and a red & blue. I have some other combinations in mind as well, but thought I'd get through the primaries first.

Sculpting

My first attempt at sculpting a face. The medium is Sculpey Clay.

Windy Day- finis

I think I might be done painting now for a while. At any rate, I'm plum out of images right at the moment. I'm very happy with this one. There are still a couple of things to be done- the yellow paint is very transparent, and needs several coats to cover the sketch beneath it. Other than that, though, it's finished.

Windy Day

This one started in my mind years ago as a poem (senryu, I believe):

The tide is turning.
I stand on the cusp of life
awaiting rebirth.


I hadn't connected the two (the poem and the painting) until I sat down to paint this morning, but they definitely go together. The painting is not yet finished. I blocked in the color last night so our daughter would be able to see it before she leaves us for the next week. She was impressed.