Will Scar for Art

Carol Dupre's seminar "Potential Space and the Found" has ended.  I will miss being confounded weekly.  She promises us the Brothers Grimm and their deeply twisted fairy tales next semester.  I learned much this time, though I would be hard put to explain it.  Best to adopt a nod and a knowing smile.
Our "found" project is still in the works.  I chose to do an ontology (look it up, I had to).
Apparently, paintings of scars are big in the art world just now.  I don't mean to brag, but I have many scars. (The only better news for me would be if Ruben-esque women were to be declared the avatar of healthy womanhood.)  So my canvas is a grid of nine squares.  It will be titled, "A Sum of my Parts".  The center grid will depict of woman with a migraine (they were central to my life for many decades).
 For scars there's my knee replacement gone bad, my double back surgery, my hysterectomy, my ectopic pregnancy, my twisted colon, my skin cancer...
When this piece is done, the art world will be my oyster. (And should the knife  slip while opening said oyster, I'll have a series.)

Passing Addictions

   This much I know to be true: Peanut Butter is my gateway drug.  Not just any PB, certainly not smooth, or natural (with its enticing pond of natural oils sitting on top).  JIF Crunchy is my Waterloo.  It's my go-to drug.  I have a long history with peanut butter.  As a teen I took long baths. My family speculated that I was doing something intimate.  I was: eating spoonfuls of peanut butter.  I can judge my adherence to a diet by how much I crave my JIF.  When off the wagon and eating late at night in front of the tv, I have found myself eating JIF.  I fall asleep, jerk awake, and eat more. 
    This being Thanksgiving week, food looms large. Even discounting peanut butter, I am a serial food addict.  Something catches my fancy and I eat it all the time, for about six months and then I'm done, never want to eat it again.  I've done this with Dove ice cream bars, bagels, Trader Joe meringues, lime yogurt with almonds, peppermint candy, those styrofoam wheat pops, caesar salads, fresh tomatoes, baked potatoes,peanut butter/banana/chocolate chip sandwiches, and buttercream icing.  Something triggers in me and it won't let go for months.  I can not have ice cream in the house or home baked goods.
   My current constant is McCann's oatmeal with sunflower seed butter and dried sour cherries.  Every morning for seven months.  I'm beginning to tire of it, which means another obsession is around the corner.
    The good news is I haven't had JIF in 8 months. My acupuncturist said peanuts were toxic to my  system. These days I am drinking Aloe Juice and curcumin pills to heal.  What fun!

The wheels keep on grinding...

   Once, many years ago, I got stoned.  I liked  the mellow and the munchies of the sixties.  This was the nineties and pot had intensified.  I felt like the inside of my body was rotating in one direction, while the outside of my body was rotating in another.
   I bring this up because I am having a similar reaction but without the grass.  Stasis on the outside, turmoil on the inside.  I'm not painting at home, or stretching canvases or in any fashion, productive.  My mind is whirling with ideas but there is a short-circuit.  I am taking a seminar with Carol Dupre, "Potential Space and the Found".  I knew I was in trouble when I didn't understand the class description. ( Do you know what a vulgate is?)  Carol is a brilliant painter and she has spurred many an artist to make the leap.  I wasn't in the mood to leap, but I figured it couldn't hurt to look over the edge.
    Apparently, it has disconnected my intent from my action.  It is supposed to be a painting class, but so far we haven't touched paint.  I don't even bother bringing paint to class.  We've made clay heads, looked at death masks, read "By Night in Chile" by Roberto Bolano.  (Excellent book about Pinochet's reign, but it is one paragraph, 118 pages long.)  We've seen and dissected the movie, "Perfume: the history of a murderer."  Lovely, twisted images to fire the synapses.  "Pan's Labyrinth" is next.  Last week we read about paradigm shifts in science.  I love what I have learned from this, but it seems to have immobilized me.

Ask me no questions...

                        "Canoodling" 22" x 40"

I was asked by the Art League's blogmaster to answer some questions about my blog.  Oddly, I haven't blogged since I responded to him.  So, in lieu of a blog,  here are my answers, the italized words refer to his questions)
    I began blogging because Dawn Benedetto insisted that a modern artist must go viral.  Apparently, websites are not enough.  I joined Facebook for the same reason.  I draw the line at Twitter, believing it to be an offense to language.  I don't text for the same reason.
   My blog is not a true artist blog.  I don't discuss techniques or analagous color schemes. If someone asks, I would be happy to tell them.  But no one has. The Blogger 'leave a comment' section is difficult to use.  Artist block comes up now and again, but I am more likely to grouse about tenants of our summer house or my son's dog.  I try to be droll.
   Do I like Blogger. No.   Blogger appropriates your images as their own, with the feeble warning 'Images may be subject to copyright.'  May?#?!?  It is open season for pirates.  (I say this as one whose images were hijacked and displayed the walls of a fish restaurant in Singapore.  A woman from Hong Kong recognized my work from International Artist Magazine and sent me cellphone images.)
   I have never sold a painting from my blog.  I don't know who reads it, though apparently I am big in Russia, Pakistan and Malawi.  The few members of my family who read it,  do so sporadically.
   The benefits of blogging are purely selfish.  I used to write novels and food books.  When I discovered pastels, I stopped writing immediately.  (That and the lack of  hue and cry from the publishing world.)  Later when I had to write about my painting I found it incredibly difficult.  Writing is a different 'muscle' than painting.  After 20 years of apparent ease, I had to work at it.  So blogging helps  keep the muscle toned.  I enjoy the process.
   I try to blog at least twice a month.  I am up to 101 posts.  During my solo art league show, Erica Fortwengler, the publicity director, insisted that I blog everyday. It was a nightmare.

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig

It has been two years since I started this blog from this very couch.  It's a beach day, gorgeous, crisp and sunny, but I thought I should mark the anniversary with a post.  The island has changed more than I have.  Wasque Beach, where I had sunrise breakfasts with my mother, made out as a teenager, and built sandcastles with my kids, is no more.  Two years of vicious storms have reclaimed the dunes and a good chunk of wooded land.  People say it will grow back, like a salamander's tail, but probably not in my lifetime.
It is so quiet here, almost contemplative.  Except for the falling bricks.  One of the chimneys loosed a spate of bricks inside the fireplace last week.  It is always something with this house.  For most the year it is a troublesome geriatric patient, causing all manner of bother. But as soon as I get here and sit on the porch, I am home and content.

Operator? Operator!

The last of the tenants have gone home.  It was a financially bruising season.  I understand that Islanders on the Vineyard have to make all of their money during the summer months.  Gouging the summer folk is, if not a sport,  the norm.  They have reason to be bitter, the place shuts down after January first with few bars and nary a chichi store to be found.  Unemployment rises.  I have been there in February, walking the wind-whipped shores, and  I took to drink.
If I lived there year round, I would be right pissed about all these people in their Range Rovers trampling on my island.  So yes, there is justification.  But still....
A continually sparking pilot light prompted one tenant to call the gas company for an emergency visit.  I understand the tenant's concern.  The pilot light is electrically generated.  Unplug the stove for 30 seconds. Problem solved. We should have left a note to that effect. (There is nothing more inviting to a tenant than a house whose appliances are festooned with such notes.)  The gas company allegedly spent two and a half hours resolving the problem for $452.  (Last year a different company charged us $300 for travel time.) I called the gas company for an explanation.  The accountant couldn't find the work sheet.  She left a message the next day reducing the bill by $200 with no explanation of her generosity.   Then the phone bill arrived with a charge of $49 dollars for a 12 minute call to a 264 country  area code.  Namibia.  The tenants swore they did not call Africa.  No one else was in the house.  (Several years ago a member of cleaning crew had a lengthy chat to Brazil and billed me for the time as well.)
I called Verizon and waited 42 minutes to talk to a human.  When I explained the problem the operator said 'the call came from your house.'  Computers don't lie.  The best he could do was to call the number in Namibia and see if they could identify the caller. A long wait ended with the news that the call was to Cape Air in Hyannis, Massachusetts.  A stone throw from the Vineyard.  He didn't understand the mistake, Hyannis is a 508 area code but the computer listed it as 264-- Namibia.  (Perhaps with all the outsourcing the call was routed through Namibia.)  You would think I felt victorious, but I was just exhausted.
There are worse stories I could tell but my family won't let me.

Piggy Addendum

In my rush to appear 'prepared' and not 'piggy' in my last blog, I neglected to include  my most troublesome need for plenitude.  Future paintings. I need a back stock of three or four good ideas or I get prickly.  This happens to me rather more often than I would like. The last time, I wandered around  taking photos of detergent bottles, spiderwebs and truck wheels, anything really, hoping for a jump start.  (There is a folder on my computer labeled "Desperate Still Lifes".)

I am now officially prickly.  I have run out of gas in the middle of the ocean.  No land in sight.