American Football

I realize that most of the world does not care about American football, but our country just finished the 44th year of the National Football League’s Super Bowl match up, and lots of people in this country care a LOT!  Millions of dollars’ worth of  television advertisements are sold, and peripherals such as beer, TV’s, food, airline tickets, hotel rooms, sports fan paraphernalia, and who knows what-all are big business.  I have never gotten too excited about football at any level- high school, college, or professional- but, sometimes I attend or watch the game on TV with friends because it is the sociable thing to do.  I know there are other people who care nothing about the Super Bowl because (big coincidence here) game time is when there are big sales at stores that sell craft supplies.  Anyway, we have neighbors across the street whom we adore and with whom we watch movies on a regular basis.  They invited us over to watch the Super Bowl in their quarters, so we went.  Seeing big guys crashing into each other trying to possess a funny-looking ball does not stimulate my reptilian brain.  Nor does the deliberation and assessment which follows each play.  But, the balletic grace that sometimes happens when the big, crashing guys are trying to escape with the ball, or when other big, crashing guys are trying to take possession of the ball is breath-taking.  So, I decided to be sociable with the neighbors and endure a televised football game in my own way.  I enjoyed spending game time seated in a cushy chair in a darkened room with sketch pad and pack of pens in my lap, doing gesture drawings of the commotion on the screen.  Since I could not see my paper, only the screen, I was not aware until later that many of my marks did not register because my pen strokes were moving faster than my ink was flowing.  But, the point of gesture drawings is not the finished product.  Rather, the value of these drawings is in the mind’s increased ability to pick up detail and notice visual relationships in the blink of an eye.  I actually become a more acute observer when my eyes and hand and brain are dancing together.  By the way, I was extremely happy that the New Orleans Saints won.  Anyone who has seen much of the city any time since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 would understand the feelings behind rooting for the underdog, and the joy in seeing a devastated city coming back from its distress in yet another way.

Here is one page from my sketch book.  Drawings over drawings, results of my perception of complex movements that were happening faster than my eye could see them.

Football Gesture Drawings

Community

North Fork of the Guadalupe at "The Bath Tubs"

This is a small painting of a place in the Hill Country of central Texas that brings joyful memories to many people.  The place is Mo Ranch, which has been a camp and retreat center for the Presbyterian Church since the 1940’s.  A fellow Presbyterian  asked me to paint one of my greeting cards for her and she specified that the subject be MoRanch.  What a joy to paint a place that not only represents the fast-disappearing natural beauty of the Hill Country, but the most spiritually satisfying experiences of many people’s lives.  Every year our whole congregation is welcome to go on retreat together, old and young.  We worship together and eat together and play together and study God’s purposes and work .  There is a clear, cold river in which to swim or to canoe; there are hills to climb; birds and wildlife to observe; and for kids at camp in the summer, a physical challenge course and horses to ride.  Up-river is a wide, shallow area where the limestone river bottom has gradually been worn into “bath tubs” and sluices.  The buildings on the property are constructed of native stone, and the oldest buildings are set with Mexican picture tile, flooring of tree-trunk cross-sections, and lots of windows.

The MoRanch experience re-kindles a sense of community and wonderful shared experience that carries our church family through a year of weddings, funerals, worship, arrivals, departures, work, study, socializing, and everything else that happens in family life.  The other day I was talking with one of my Jewish friends about her synagogue.  We agree that there is no replacement for the community created by worship together.  We can laugh, be comfortable, be challenged, be tired, disagree, share, have a meltdown, be comforted, and laugh ’til we ache in a real community.

Night Lights

Night Lights

Our friends who were in Haiti to try to re-open the hospital in Leogane told the story of coming to the United States for a couple of weeks at Christmas to visit friends and family, and buying a large supply of LED flashlights to take back to the hospital in Haiti as presents for the workers there.  The flashlights were bagged with Christmas candy and other goodies, labeled with recipients’ names, and stacked on the table in our friends’ apartment.  When there are presents to be had, word travels fast, and the day of our friend’s return at the beginning of January was filled with knocks on the door from people asking for their gifts.

A couple of weeks later, about an hour after the violent earthquake, darkness came, and who appeared in the yard of the hospital, ready to aid in the rescue of our friend from the rubble, but people with flashlights?  John, too, trapped in a small space in the collapsed apartment, found his flashlight and was able to signal his presence to his rescuers.  What serendipity to give the gift of light and then to have the light illuminate one’s own rescue!

study for "Night Lights"

For those of you interested in the inside of a brain “on art”, here is how I made the drawing:

I was so intrigued by the flashlight story that I wanted to capture it visually.  Using very heavily textured paper with wide hills and broad valleys, I made marks on it with soft pastel sticks.  The pastel stuck to the hills, but did not make it down into the valleys, therefore, the picture took on the characteristics of the paper’s surface.  I started with pastels in the tones of things seen at dusk.  I made broad, short, firm lines to signify stress.  I used pulses, like waves, in some strokes to indicate vibrations and aftershocks.  I made some lines trembly and wandering to indicate uncertainty.  Using cool shades of colors, I covered every part of the page.  Next, I took a broad, cement-colored pastel stick and made several shapes of giant slabs, working directly over my previous work.  This had the effect of blending all the colors, although lines that had been made very firmly to begin with remained visible under the mush.  I took about three different extremely dark-to-black pastels and made broad strokes over the other work in places, blending some more and some less.  I also took a pan of black cake-pastel and a brush, and I rubbed over some of my previous work.  I used three different dull colors of pastel (including caput mortuum*) to make new squiggly lines coming in from edges of the paper and pointing to the area from which John would be rescued under the collapsed building.  I’m sure that after these lines, I mushed around some more on the surface with my fingers before finishing the drawing with the flashlight colors of very light, creamy yellow, and pure white.  I mushed some pastel onto the surface of the paper, then came back in with a sharp edge of pastel to make lightning-like lines in the flash-light.  Done!  Now that I had gone through the thought process of the story and the setting, I was ready to make the mosaic.  I approach my mosaic-making just as I approach my drawings, thinking about style of line, broadness of stroke, texture, coolness or warmness of color selections, and shading.  After I cut my tesserae (little pieces of hard things), make a general compositional plan, and mix my cement, it takes me about the same amount of time to make a mosaic in this style as it takes me to do a pastel drawing.

*Since my art student days long ago, caput mortuum has been one of my favorite pastel colors.  It is a dull, medium-to-dark reddish-purple and is oh-so-useful on many occasions.  If you know Latin, you know that ‘caput mortuum’ means ‘dead head’.  I take perverse pleasure in thinking briefly of a 12-hour-old corpse before I pick up my pastel stick.  A little-known-and-best-hidden fact about my brain.  For more on the subject of perversity, see my blog by the same name from October 20, 2009.

Blue Romance

Blue Heart

This isn’t exactly a traditional valentine, is it?  Real valentines don’t come in blue, but this one does.  The blue ceramic heart came from my mom and I could not imagine how I would use it at first.  But then I contemplated  just how many romances and “true loves” go awry.  Maybe the blue (read “sad”) heart is a bigger reality than the red, pulsing one, I don’t know.

I have been married to my husband for 33 years and counting, so I would seem to have the perspective of a survivor.  The first set of friends we had who divorced was in about our fifth year of marriage.  We had seen them through the latter part of their courtship (now that’s an old-fashioned term!) and their wedding, and we helped them move across the country to start graduate school together, and then we moved to the next state adjacent to them, and we visited each other monthly, and then one day they called and said that they could not come that weekend because they were getting a divorce.  It felt like someone had died.

Since then, we have had several friends who have divorced each other while we were friends, but more often, we are friends with those who have divorced in the past, before we knew them.  I could not even count how many friends have been romantically involved with another, but have not taken the step of declaring an intention to each other and to their community to make the relationship permanent , who have broken off the relationship because of disappointment or anger or boredom.  There are so many hurt people in the world!

I wonder if we, as a group, expect both too much and too little of our closest ties?  To think that having the romantic love of another person will solve all our problems is laughably wrong, yet people often hope that, “just this once”, the usual reality will be suspended and romance will save their dreams.  At the same time, people who have been married 50, 60, or even 70 years, talk about the ups and downs of their closest relationship as being a common thread that weaves two people into a rich tapestry of history and of life; a new fabric woven partly of habit, but not undone by pettiness or anger or competition.  Is this the thing that most of us do not trust- that, if we choose another person who has this same dream of fidelity and dedication, and the flexibility to meet us in the middle, that we, too, can “hang in there” until the cloth is complete?  Until all this is sorted out, here is a blue valentine in memory of all romantic love which has evaporated or exploded, leaving unhappy people searching for the next great hope.  Clearly, we have a common desire that life is better than this.

Retirement

Sketch of John and Suzi in easier times.

We have good friends who, after they “retired”, moved on to the really challenging projects, like spending 2003 building a nursing school in Leogane, Haiti.  They were called back again in 2009 to help in the effort to re-open a hospital that had died for lack of vision and attention and money, so in August they said ‘farewell’ to the generation older and the generation younger here in the U.S., and headed back to Haiti.  Which is where they were when the earth shook.  And shook.  And shook some more.  We had bits of communication from Suzi.  They found a computer in the rubble and hooked it up to a generator out in the hospital yard, under a tree.  She told of how John was trapped for four hours after the floor above fell.  She told of using righteous indignation and a little pushing to run 20 looters out of the hospital guesthouse, which was now open to the street.  She said she would gladly sell her soul for a bar of soap.  And, she would have happily sold John’s for him to have a razor.

They spent their nights sleeping out in the hospital yard with several hundred other people.  Suzi says that never before had she understood joy in the midst of suffering, but now she does.  The people in the yard have lost family members to the quake and may be injured themselves, but they sing hymns until midnight, and wake up to a worship service with more singing and praying.  In their own business-like style, John and Suzi have been shining God’s light of the world into dark corners.

Mental Block

I made this mosaic yesterday as an escape from a mosaic that I could not seem to accomplish.   The way I explained it to someone who inquired about its meaning on my Flikr photos is this:  the idea presented itself when I was using similar materials to design a different piece, one that was emotional and dear to my heart. I just could not seem to get that piece put together like I wanted, so I was feeling ‘blocked’, as if I could not reach my destination. This piece, with its prison-like bars, forbidding gate, and lots of raw material leaking out seemed to be containing the original idea pieces and not allowing them the freedom to be fully revealed. Those ideas are pressing over the top to escape. THAT is what mental or emotional or creative block, whatever you want to call that effect, feels like.

I hope and expect to be able to complete the original idea in some form, but I might need emotional distance and time before I become rational enough about the subject to accomplish my original goal.

The Mental Block

Taste and See

The other day my family was discussing with a friend how our brains perceive information coming in from our senses.  The senses of sight, sound, and touch seem to be newer products of evolution than the senses of taste and smell, which are linked.  Only a few types of receptors are necessary to tell us a huge array of information about the world ‘out there’ for sight, taste, sound, and touch.  This is as true for an animal brain as it is for a human brain.  Sight is mapped in the neurons of our brains in the same spatial configuration as the outside world at which we are looking.  Sound is mapped sequentially in our neurons in the same order as pitches.  And, touch is mapped in spatial sequence according to the sequence perceived on our skin by our touch receptors.  So far, it is supposed that we perceive only four tastes, but our sense of taste is so dependent on our sense of smell that we perceive taste and smell almost together.  Brains use an older system to tell us what we are smelling.  It is a system of a vast number of receptors, one for each chemical.  The number of separate smells we perceive is numbered at least in the thousands and there is no way to map these in the neurons in any sequential order that corresponds to an outside order.    We would laugh at the question, “Does the taste of broccoli come before or after the taste of doughnuts?”  Or, “Is egg to the left or right of spaghetti?” 

It is almost impossible to accurately describe a smell to a person who has never smelled that particular smell before- anything we say is nonsensical or, at least, inadequate as soon as we say it.  That must be why it has become a running joke when describing the flavor of an unfamiliar meat, “It tastes like chicken.”  We know it doesn’t- not really- but, what else are we going to say? 

Isn’t it interesting that the Hebrew psalmist from so long ago invites us to “taste and see that the Lord is good”?  (Psalm 34, verse 8)  We are invited to perceive with nothing more than our senses a spirit which is in this world, but not of this world .  This leads me to more thought about linking one sense with another for a cross-reference approach to understanding what we are taking in and perceiving about the world, and even out-of-this-world.

Working on the principle that the best I might be able to do is to describe what I detect with one of my senses through the medium of a different sense, I chose as a subject food with a sharp taste, but with other complex flavors under the sharpness- arugula- to try to describe visually.  Here is the result; herbal, earthy, and sharp.  The last time I used pins in a mosaic, I used them as a reference to ‘waiting on pins and needles’ in my piece “The Gradual Unfolding of Time”.  In this latest mosaic I use pins to refer to the bitterness of the herb.  I also intentially did not provide a hanger on the back of the mosaic so that it can rest on a tabletop easel in any orientation the viewer would like.  There is no up or down, just as there is no up or down to a smell!

Arugula

Arugula- side view

Gifts

Visitors to the Babe circa 2009

Here is my Christmas card to you- a paper collage.  For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh that, in Matthew’s story, the scholars from the East brought to Jesus after they realized that a new king had been born near Jerusalem.  Some say that the gold is fit for a king, therefore the symbolism of this gift is obvious.  The next gift, the frankincense, was useful in physical and mental healing, and people burned the resin to carry their prayers to heaven.  Therefore, the frankincense would show that Jesus was born to be our priest.  The myrrh, also a resin, was used all over northern Africa, the Middle East, and Far East as an antiseptic and anti-inflammatory, and by the Egyptians in their embalming process.  The gift of myrrh to the baby Jesus would symbolize that he was born to die for our sake.  I think it is just as likely that the gifts as mentioned by the writer, Matthew, were not necessarily symbolic, except in retrospect, but were the most expensive and finest gifts that the scholars could bring to this strange and wonderful baby.  They are all naturally-occurring substances and were hard to come by. 

So, what would be our modern-day Western equivalents of gold, frankincense, and myrrh?  We are surrounded by and we, as a group, covet expensive manufactured goods which also carry our status with them.  So, perhaps today, if we were going to bring gifts to an important person, we would think of electronics, cars, and jewelry!

Sense of Place

Without realizing it, as a child running barefoot, going for Sunday afternoon drives in the car, and trying to be a wild animal as much as possible, I internalized the shape of my area- the way the limestone cliffs look when they weather, the shapes the hills take on over millenia, the growth habits and odors of the native plants, the sound of the native animals.  I live in a unique ecosystem which is quickly being destroyed by pavement, expensive neighborhoods, and the infrastructure which accompanies fast economic growth.  When I paint a landscape, I want to choose the critical details that will reveal the character of the place.  I have had the most practice with my native central Texas landscapes.

Clients who had seen my logo “The Glen Cliff” on my front wall wanted me to make them a mosaic for their home.  This style is done in vitreous tile and is physically flat, needing to be grouted when the design is finished.  They gave me a snapshot of a place in California which featured a Monterrey Cypress on a cliff overlooking an ocean bay.  The clients specified the size they wanted for the finished piece.  Because the client is a tree expert, I really wanted the characteristics of the tree to be evident, and this was an extra challenge for me, since I’m not used to interpreting the California coast.  I love the way the mature Monterrey Cypress has a twining trunk which becomes limbs jutting out in various directions, supporting openwork foliage.  The trees often have orange lichens growing on one side, so I added this feature to my mosaic interpretation to bring out the limb shapes against the blue sky.  I hope this mosaic tells something about the character of the tree- its life suspended between resistence to the constant wind and capitulation to this relentless force.  Strong, yet flexible- shall I take my lesson from the tree?

The Monterrey Cypress

Time

Where I live, we have come to expect that time is a commodity in short supply.  “I’m busy; I don’t have enough time.”  “Hurry up!”  “You need to learn to be faster.”  “We have a deadline!”  “I’m gonna hafta pull an all-nighter in order to get this finished on time.”  “I have 25 hours’ worth of things I have to get done in the next 24 hours.”  These are commonly heard and thought.  To a certain extent, each is true- if we don’t meet the deadline, we miss out on funding for the project, miss out on selling the product, miss out on getting to take a vacation by having to finish the work instead, miss out on graduating with our class.  In the short term, not getting everything finished leads to painful consequences.  In the larger scheme, we all know that constant hurry is painful, leading to stress, missed opportunities for relationship and community, and even physical illness.  I work best if I have a deadline- my creative thoughts flow faster and more freely, but not if the deadline is too tight.  In that case, my mind freezes up and I am forced to do the job in a less-than-satisfactory way in order to finish on time. Creativity is lost.

A quick digression:  I have asked my mom to make a lot of ceramic pieces for me to put into mosaics- a collaborative effort.  I have already incorporated a couple of her ceramic frames into mosaics- “The Song of the Canyon Wren” and “Still Pink”.  She wanted specific instructions on what to make, but I refused to give her any direction or advice.  I wanted whatever came out of her mind.  She delivered the first load yesterday, and what a pile of treasure I have sitting on my kitchen counter!  All the pieces appear geological to me.  So, I immediately started pairing ‘inclusions’ with frames to see what would happen.  Here is the first result, a mosaic study of time:

The Gradual Unfolding of Time

I was trying to recall what slow time looked like, and I think this is it.  I expect the dressmaker pins to rust slowly in their bed of cement.  (Time to relax now.)