As ever, stay hungry and curious.
I over did the whole arm, wrist, fingers thing again. Painting like a demon for the past three days, I overexerted myself. Someone suggested ground work for me to gain fundamental understanding of media and method and bridge into new projects. The assignment is to work 1,700 geometrics in 2" x 2" squares all in water media. I may be early in racking up numbers, but I can already see that many an intelligence is gained by act. Bottom line? Do the work. As for my shoulders to finger tips, I'm shifting back to the written word for a couple of weeks until I feel solid about rest and repair. Meanwhile, I was asked to post what I have been hiding in the sketchbook. Look sees are below.
As ever, stay hungry and curious. Hubris #2 July 2018
The neighbor said that my biggest fix in resolving this journey through ancestry, gardening, and painting is a presumption that everything is eternal. Musing in the lows of the words, he reminded me everything dies. A three year old rose in my throat. I started to fume. I bitched. I moaned. In the slow realization, I held back the tears. Funny how I go into severe psychosis when my hands prove otherwise to my neighbor's joking and family advising. My hands in the garden, tend to the long stretch of summer. Come autumn I can let some things seek shelter in the refuge of the house. Still, that is not everything in pots or the dirt. I also argue against my neighbor's instruction by refusing to be wrong by not touting the plant's long winter's sleep. Damn you! Everything does not die! Damn you to hell! Yeah! Yeah! Next time I will bring the cookies. Secretly I can whisper in guilt that every autumn it is the same grief. I continue to water despite the growing patches of brown on every leaf. Even after being ever confident the green will return in a few days, my psyche cracks when the first frost claims every late blooming flower and frond. Late summer watering comes with a process of surprises that I commit to every year. Come every blistering day of heat in August, I ignore the call of death and dehydration. Nothing dies, you hear me! Nothing dies. I refuse to become banal and gloss over the death of the summer bounty. I grieve in confusion especially when I stand at the foot of the kale and collard plants mother planted over four years ago. They come back every year. Why should I not presume the rest will as well. My eternal is the mint bushes as well. Still they need more room to grow. Their roots crowd the growing stems to the edge of the planters. As for that lesson I relate that family eventually leaves to start over. We get pushed out of the nest by our past. I wonder how many memories does a house hold before an Amityville Horror like expulsion rejects every human? How many years then until the heart of the house dies? Again, my problem, why can I not consider the house eternal? In the least, why does the garden not survive me physically? I may be arguing from the wrong angle. The only ideas that sit at my head are human soul is eternal and I still mourn my grandmother. Considering that, why is not the artifact and efforts of my experience eternal as well? Right now, I do not see the point of looking death straight on. I can not bear a viewing. I can live in metaphors, dreams, and images. I can grieve quietly in my vehicle after watching my symbolic attachments parade the avenue as if they knew anything of me. As for Hubris and mourning, it reflects all my pomposity and most of my expectations of death. If I live in symbols, running away from a natural end is averted. Maybe the real problem to acknowledging mortality is that I just can not seem to grasp change over time. For eternal to be ever mine, maybe I found a way home. Maybe they dammed the river upstream and I can cross in the same place twice. What happened to yesterday, today, and tomorrow? Can't give me an answer can you? Everything is eternal - so there. As for the garden and the gouache paintings, I faithfully watered and pruned for that many years to become desperate enough to see my work move someone, something, somewhere. Pride turned conceit tells me that maybe I need to let go of attachments. If I did, then it all would be for nothing. Releasing all coveted memory would result in forgetting why I took brush and paint to paper the month she died. The point of art maybe to sell, but where I am is no less far from maintaining sanity. The like are those pieces that survived Van Gogh. My eternity in Hubris is no less than Ars gratia artis and beauty born of strife. No matter if they reside in the trash dump or the safe of a museum, I can not give up. I am harbored and healed by these misconception s of mortality. One day my ignorance may cripple me. To be coddled then, until then. About four in the afternoon I went to water the foundation. Afterwards, I could not help but harvest carrots, Chinese cabbage, and celery seed as well. The seed was the only disappointment. Spiders wove well around each seed cluster. I did not need to mix its efforts with my desires for home grown seasonings. If I had, surely it would be a problem for the doctor to solve. As for the carrots, they might be my eternal as well. I cut the tops off outside because of ants in the foliage. Memory nudged me to root them in water before taking the carrots inside for cooking. Flashbacks of Gram's apartment window with cut carrot tops and sweet potato slips nesting in water are beginning to etch in a transparent layer over my eyes. Plants change rooms. Plants change people. Plants change passages. Funny how in my memory I am expecting the plants in her window to grow. Over five years have passed since I was there. I just looked in my mind's eye. The sweet potato slip is cascading over the air conditioning unit. The carrot tops are crowding the mouth of the Mason jar. My eternal may be about following shapes in memory. Architecture first, Color the mood second. I refuse my practice to be a misconception of mortality. Argued from the side of the living, maybe. Yet, those with eyes to see have the occasion to peer the immortal. No doubt, as I have time, it is all I the brush for me, at least for now. No coddling this time, resolve definite. ~As ever, stay hungry and curious. We all know who the hardest critic is when it comes to viewing the work. It is the eyes, the gut, and the pivot turn that tears into the rug which makes that critic archetype inherent in every artist. I can not say that I am any different. Though I wonder if it is all a matter of selfishness that motivates tearing that hole in the rug any wider versus being attentive to what the art object has become.
If you could not guess, my conundrum is over continuing the Hubris series. I spent the last three years photographing vegetables, weeds, and herbs. I also spent time out in the heat drawing petals and noting insects in the crevices of my sketch book. Let us just say that I am invested in the process whether or not I can render notes in the July heat for another year or not. Today, I sat outside ruminating over how I had not spent time in the garden since the cool of April. I buried my chin in my chest to steady my emotional berating and thought of the “me”, who boasts of our minor green pathway on and off the computer. Then I remembered gratitude for faithful watering and pruning several times a week. I do work in the garden, just not the way I thought need count. Now there is talk that there will be no garden next year. Why? For several years we have not had a yield to feed substantially. Not to forget the garden pests. Every so many days they decimate a plant by eating leaves, fruit, flower, and stems. They leave nothing to grow. Most of the time, instead of pulling the plant, we wait until the plant recovers. I said I'd render in my book come the cycle of rains and dehydration. Now I need best myself by drawing the damage. Will I have enough energy by a late sun's hour? I do not know. I just do not want to give up. The living green aids my mind as well as fascination. I can not give up. Then there is my lemon balm. I grew it in a pot for a year. This year I transplanted it into the ground along with young parsley shoots. The parsley took. The balm is shriveling and drying up like an old woman. Crone has its lessons. This year the plant took on blossoms even as it was drying. I was wondering about fruit. I am still hoping for recovery and herbal blended tea over ice. I may be out of luck and I am frustrated dear over it. I am frustrated almost to tears. The whole matter is not that things die. This matter is that I am doing the best I can to nurture and water the plant and it is still withering away. I am having flash backs to caring for my ailing grandfather when I was a teenager. I held on to self-imposed blame for years thinking if only I had done ____, he would still be alive. From that trigger, I can say with confidence that this is a breakthrough in the work. This is an excellent sign of what I was hoping to accomplish with Hubris initially. It is the whole premise of exploring mourning through the garden to use as a source of impetus for the paintings. This is the work that goes on behind the gouache and brush on paper that calls out color and line intricate and divine. I still have notes to write in a garden journal. They are all mile markers in healing. Right now I may be quilting, but I still day dreaming about painting. I daydream until I hit that memory of taking two years off from painting. Though I best be about getting my thoughts in order if I push toward script in the body of the painting, an element of retablo if you will. For one thing, the “Blackbird” series will need words in the collage or quilting end of it all. Continuity for me may perhaps exist after all. As ever, stay hungry and curious. Hubris #2
Friday July 14, 2017 10:31 p.m. Today Mom joked that she forgot that she was getting old. “I can’t garden out in the heat for several hours after a full day of work like I did when I was your age,” she mused. “These days, all I want to do after work is to lie down.” I smiled. She laughed. I returned to washing dishes and my whole day became disjointed. If she’s getting old, then I am getting old too. I did not want to admit, but I enjoy the heat of the day sometimes. Even when my pulse is rapid, I stand there and brace in stagnant air until I can think through the next section of weeds to pull. I have this thing with my elders. I am severely attached to them much like I was with my mother’s parents. Now my mother has become that age of elder in my inner child’s consciousness and I am warily attached. This is just like my relatively recently deceased paternal grandmother. Despite my emotional attachment to her, I did not see her much. We lived on opposite sides of the continent. Still, my attachment to her came with experiencing the weekly signs of aging. As I bore though her maturation unconsciously, I paced my grieving over decay with every phone call that spoke of the loss of another faculty. “Getting old” claimed Granma before I could know her as a functioning being. Who am I kidding? In the anger of grief, her body did not matter. Her presence had already become an elusive memory. I grieve still though for hugs. The blessed part is that I got to know her mind and heart before she passed. That is the inheritance that lasts beyond the death of body, value of objects, and temporary loss of genetic memory. For all of that I have Dad’s words to survive and overcome the petty irritations of selfishness. Note: What I need is to commit to making a spirit house. The photos I have access to coupled with words may be something for my brother’s families to hold on to – at least until I have children. I remember one fine Sunday evening in mid-autumn. Granma and I were talking shop about plants. We both made sure to talk about what each other were growing in the dirt or window sill every week. “How’s that carrot top in the window,” I would ask presuming it had died in the chill of Pittsburgh cross winds. “It’s got some green comin’,” is what I would like to remember her saying. It was either a carrot or a sweet potato slip that kept a smile in her speech through the winter. Months ago I sketched pepper plants in blue plastic cups. They ring with the same precious beaconing for the sun. I started organic oregano in the window at the beginning of this week. One would think that would ease the ache in my spirit’s heart. It does not. I want a carrot. I want a carrot perched in a mason jar full of water. I want it right now. Now. Now. Now. Meanwhile the sweet potato vine is taking over the wind chimes hang off the back fence. Mom says we may have a bumper crop this year. Last year yielded a handful of fingerlings. Maybe making meaning this year involves a sweet potato pie evolved purely from the garden. I’ll wait. The more I wonder about Monet at Giverny and a backyard of lotus blossoms to eat, the more this understanding of the garden is not so clinical and pristine. Concentrating on beauty and death would be a cop out. I would have learned nothing from this year’s growing season. Hmm. I still have time. I must remember that it is not just the Chinese vase full of flowers on the desk I paint or the blue and white ware chine lay out with deep fried tilapia and shredded jicama with oranges that I conquer in gouache on a late in the Thursday summer evening light. It’s the dirt work. It is the heaving sigh over seed that do not germinate. It is the last frost that takes out a bevy of hearty tomato plants uncovered too early to the sun. It is the little black flies that bite and breed in over watered soil. It is discovering the roses you used in the butter cookie recipe last year were from a diseased bush. You live through it, but were you paying attention. So, it is the not so pretty work that happens before and after excruciating ephemeral beauty is where I am at. This year I am in the garden and for the first time taking it seriously. I’m not banking on the beautiful moments and the magical moments like previous years. In catching with memory and Hubris, I have been looking at the decay and disease and wondering where to start. One evening thoughts of tears blended with a stream of water falling out of the hose. I am here at the beginning of every evening and heat catches me like I caught my Grandmother falling asleep cooking in front of the hot stove. I did not recognize it at first. When clarity revealed the need for action I took to it. So in the garden I stop. I breathe. I swat the mosquitoes. I return to my task. I noticed that there is a delay in the collard greens yellowing then soon spotting. How could I catch her from nodding? Dad warned me about it. How do I know what to remove to return the plant to health? It is only a plant, though. Say some. I am caught in conversation with the basil and Brussel Sprouts every day. They matter- at least to me. Honest to tell? I’ll be devastated after first frost this fall. I depend on them as much as they depend on me. I have not picked up the sketch book in a while. I’ve decided to fill the empty pages in old sketchbooks with collages. I’ll wander into an art supply store soon enough for a new book to fill for the rest of this year. The personal challenge drove me to finish one book. Now I am hankering to continue. Besides, the garden is lush and tempting. Following this urge seems safe enough. ~As ever stay hungry and curious. Hubris July 2017 #1
Tuesday July 12, 2017 12:58 a.m. The package sits just to the right. Awkward unbalanced weight teeters back and forth wearing a trio of stripes across my shoulder. Some days I forget that it is there. Other days the strap, anchored to the bottom of the weight, pulls across my back searing into flesh from the heat of words from her tongue. These days not much is exchanged between me and the demon of my dark-sided moods. She has her moments wandering from the cave of ancestral memory that constantly reminds me that I am black, female, and poor. According to her, I had my opportunity to haunt a few places across the United States. Now I am saddled by obligations. Meeting them, means changing the way I hold my pen and don my autumn cap. Meeting them, means sacrificing old conventions and reinventing them new. Meeting them also means fighting urges to take risks versus proffering the tried and stationed with a straight face. The year since the first of June 2016 passed without me thinking. This year Dad called at the beginning of the second week of June. I overlooked the call until the following week. After exchanging “Hellos” across the national divide, no birthday wishes came of that call. I did not bug him about it. I never do. What I do remember is him being frantic and giving dramatic pauses. I could not figure out why we were not getting along during that call until now. The first of June is the anniversary of Gran’ma’s death. In my pride I was blind and forgetful to his pain. Right now I feel like shit for it. I will be seeking forgiveness tomorrow. I have not touched Hubris in about ten months. Putting my artistic process down must have stopped the grieving for most of this year. Yet, being June burgeoning July some triggers are starting to ring true to late night tears. Just to remember, Hubris was born as a series to deal with grieving my paternal Grandmother’s death. The core images revolve around the vegetable garden that my mother grows every year. The painting is in gouache accented by collaged papers and objects. Last night my mother gave me charge of the garden to both harvest and water. I tend to it every early evening taking even greater care after rainstorms and high temperatures. Today was freeing as I harvested the most I have in years. I never felt quite welcome to eat from the garden as it was her work that created the infrastructure and germinated most plants from seed. The words from her mouth made a difference. As I was working this afternoon in the yard, I thought of little but the resident rat that, among other things, feeds on the Brussel sprouts. After gathering the harvest inside, it was not until I rinsed and packaged the onions did a little voice remind me of Hubris. At that moment I was on the other side of the canvas tending to the minutiae of getting the subject to the table and into the photo frame. What followed were thoughts of personal obligations to medicinal and culinary studies. If I am to understand the medicinal herb, I need not only to know how to cultivate and harvest it, but to draft it and render emotionally as well. If I want to integrate the herb into my diet, I need to know how to cook it. Suddenly Hubris became a fundamental part of everything else I do. I do not expect the interlacing of research to leave ever. Lastly, In the darkness of the room last night I felt set free. Most things I research, practice, and design came to a head. From art to cooking, music, sewing and herbalism I may be writing a grimoire in slow time. The first obligation is to ancestry. No doubt if I publish, what comes to the public may be watered down. ~As ever, stay hungry and curious. All innocence aside, as well as all accolades and laurels from study. Let’s also toss out all rationality and any kudos from being cool as a result of affiliations and carousing. Let’s forget the museums and being trained to see. Let’s let go of familial associations, summer stock, and extra-curricular reading. Let’s pan and forget the days of waiting in line to see independent films at the only theatre that it could happen in the county. I stood there looking out the kitchen window watching the white paper Chinese lanterns sway back and forth in the wind. I had just finished an hour in the garden surmising a youthful pepper plant in pencils from graphite to green. Friend said, “You know you do not want to hear this.” “Try me,” I said, “and before you curse, I am not posting any more drawings until Friday”. “Not fair,” he said. “Go ahead, tell me what you were going to say.” “You’re a classicist.” “Go to fucking hell.” After friend’s teases and explanation, I had to give in. Just before he opened up, I spoke of everything in the house and yard looking like a painting. He told me about mother saying being in the garden is good for me. She concluded that she will have her time as well to rest in the lush and I will be babushka tied almond skinned woman with both hands in the dirt. On those days she’ll sit quietly as I paint her in the afternoon sun and dappled shade of the Red Oak. Hell, I knew it before friend spoke a single word. The first thought to mind was Gustave Klimt coming out of the farm house and walking into the garden. He was dressed in a linen night gown and braced past the sunflowers and ivy in the front yard. The photograph is etched in my mind as well as the painting of the sunflowers. Today, tradition found me before I could wail “foul”. That struggle in college and graduate school to find my voice in images was painful. (If I find my pain in writing from then, I will post it.) The sound to be singular and tantamount to the fin de siècle was deafening. It took me a while. One day I found my edge in collage and assemblage and never looked back. I am in my second week of two worked sketches a day. I am finally getting comfortable finding my old rhythm from being in the garden years ago. I owe a credit to young and old in the neighborhood who are confident in my skills. If it were not for their consistent encouragement my eyes never would have changed and focused to understand my environment so well. So now I am daydreaming about small canvases and gouache on paper. Possibilities seem endless in this little corner of trial and I do not want to leave this realization. For some reason I know that working this way will get me through the darkest of nights and blazing hot Texas afternoons. I thought joining the Sunday Afternoon Painters Club would not come until after seventy years on the planet. I will no doubt petition for entry despite the lack of experience. Right now I am daydreaming about selling paintings at the state fair. Something of the human condition is welling in my pen and washing my pages. Discovery and execution must be next. As ever, stay hungry and curious. Where you at dog?
I have two plastic boxes full of them. One is nestled in the crisper of the refrigerator. The other rests in a back corner of the freezer. The recipe never seems to get old to my palate. With every bite of sweetened oatmeal comes spiced pumpkin cream. One each night before bed rest and the swelling hackles on the back of my neck flatten. The itch relaxes though red remains. Long ago my creative bent drove me in to the kitchen with a mind that kept dreaming possibilities. Over these last few months I bake on the turn of cold weather. I stock up on freezing sweet oven fresh bites as the urge to cook wanes with every drop of cold rain. This month, what tempers my eyes with deep seeded hunger is drawing outside in the garden. Sketching the sources of what is cooked in our household is building a strong respect for nature and farmers. The need for study burgeons behind my sternum. Today was day four. Instead of penning the cilantro shoots I moved back towards the raised beds to focus on the largest collard green plant. In the pots, cabbage loopers (larvae and moth) have devastated what my mother planted weeks ago. Last week I helped her pull larvae off stems and drop them in insecticide. Between my thumb and index finger stretched something that fed on in one night about as much as I would over three days. I have a study of an arched cabbage looper in another sketch book. Should I remember I will post the drawing. I got encouragement to continue drawing for the past two weeks. Seems many people know I have not been to the park in years to draw the ducks and geese. Going back to the garden feels the wise move as well as not forcing realism. My abstract sense reflects in the cropping. After the first half hour, even I do not know what I am drawing. Old lessons in shade and light reverberate as the sun descends the horizon and the casting light dims. At first penning I did not realize that I had no direct light source. It was just gradations of shade that shifted every few minutes. The clouds above ruled the long moments as I continued drawing under threat of rain and wind. I push, for more time, way too often. Last month, as I finally closed my book and hauled pen under the awning, I caught the second front of a storm forming behind the house about a block away. By the time I shut and locked the door behind me, I clued in to the neighbor’s talk. Apparently, I caught the edge of a tornado. The real skinny for me and the garden has been listening to my mother regale her battle with a rodent that has been helping itself to Brussel sprouts, peppers, and seedlings over the past five months. As she talks I cannot help but visualize the character Basil who runs a hotel in a British sitcom. Quietly I laugh, but the amount of work she has put in over the past two years is an amazing transformation of the back yard. I feel the need to document something of the occasion, much like when I wrote “Jelly”. That was about a bird that fell out of the nest on a farm I worked at. No doubt that needs to be found, typed, and edited again. As for other artistic endeavors, I am still working the quilt for 2018 little by little. Concerning previous quilts documented on this website, I am opening everything up for sale. Quilting a dowry will have to wait. It might be better that way. Besides, when the time comes, my skills will be more refined than ever. As ever, stay hungry and curious. The time is late and my body feels the pain and the acid reflux. Eating simple these days does not seem to get me back on track to where I think I should be. The list of to-dos amounts to everything that can be done to alleviate insomnia. I worry at the desk sewing and outside working the stick pile. Worry lingers into late nights. Lately I've been too jittery to work. So I fall back on the business of art hoping to accomplish something on my behalf that will advance my skill and execution. My notations and additions are completed on my C.V. The studio is almost completely overhauled and I am being called Debbie Mumm. Bashful and quiet I am as I think through my imagery, both plain and simple, others hidden in the art journals and sketchbooks. I talk it over with friend and we both chime into the confession that I need approach these images as tarot cards as well. I do not complaint at the thought. I cannot. The notion makes that much sense. It feels good to know all the emotional suffering in the studio plays out one way or another no matter what age I am.
Let me break that thought with these notions: I just pulled my head up out of the laptop and looked out over the bed. I see three quilts laid out for me to lose my limbs in. I turned over all my store bought comforters at friend's behest. "Throw 'em away," he yelled, "Don't you have enough blankets without the store bought?" I was totally chagrined. The image I was giving off was I do not have faith in my work. I rarely used them he noted. I heard in his voice a question of artistic integrity on my part. Why should I not lay under them? I was treating my work like fine art. On the contrary it is fine craft and itchin' to be used. All three on the bed are my works. As the seasons change I will rotate them out with summer kanthas and thick for winter batting. I changed out my two dimension work as well. The room feels different on multiple fronts, as it should, I assume. Courage everyday to work is waning. Meanwhile, the opportunities that arise at the temperature change are refreshing to the soul. Working outside is helping my malaise and hands get the rhythm of a different task. Using muscles in different ways is what I am looking to do before sitting down to weightlift again. The days are not gloomy and venturing out into the garden once a day helps to refill the well. This seasonal transition leads me to believe I have intense work coming. Using hands with both the creative and logical minds tends to mean focus and intent. My conclusion is not too ill founded. In high school on nights papers where due, I could not work until my bedroom was spotless. I was afraid anything and everything out of place would distract me to no end. These days I clean up and something and/or someone always arrives. I mind thinking you cannot receive with a closed fist or a full studio. How can you not end up being a conduit when you have so much? It will always get passed on. Right now, I do not need another thing. I'll enjoy the breathing room for now and the sunlight. I pulled about eight oak shoots with acorn from the ground. I rescued about ten others. They are sitting in a old relish jar filled with water. Officially I feel like the beginning of a witches hoard again. The accumulation begins, hopefully not. I want to photograph the shoots as part of starting herbalist studies again. My best skill has been to investigate what we use in the kitchen and the plants on the property. I feel the need to add in insects as well. At first it will be small, but I expect growth to yield a thick worthy log. I just remembered I wrote about this long ago. I am glad it came back up. The other joy is to revisit old strategies to committing to memory. Taking it a little at a time will yield many sign posts to anchor. On another note, I have got to find my jar of wishes. The dandelions around here do not spread seeds my houses way too often. I need check storage again. This must be important! I need to reread posts one day. Being brief can be difficult when you have much to say. As ever, stay hungry and curious. |
N.A. JonesPicking up where I left off. Archives
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