Heirloom Wednesday, Sep 2 2009

I’m a big fan of the Declaration of Independence. Not the text, specifically, but the document itself. Have you ever seen a copy? It’s written by hand, in tiny crabbed cursive, with misspelled words and a bunch of underlinings and corrections – a sheet of paper that gives the impression of a lot of angry men in one small room, shouting about ‘death, desolation and tyranny, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages’.

 

When I was little, I thought we had the real Declaration of Independence hanging by our back door. My family’s been American for a while, and we have a lot of old junk lying around, so I guess it was pretty natural to assume that the Declaration we had was the real one. I never looked at it closely (had I bothered, I would have read FACSIMILE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE printed across the top; but what eight-year-old knows what ‘facsimile’ means?) because it always seemed a little shameful that such a noteworthy document had been glued crookedly onto a piece of cardboard and left unmounted in a large square frame that was much too big, and then hung by a back door, providing shelter to generations of barn spiders. I mean, what would the founding fathers think? Or poor crazy George III?

 

A couple months ago, I took it down and leaned it against the wall so I could move some furniture around; whereupon Cleo, always looking for stuff to stomp on, gave the glass a good kick with her steel-toed toddler shoes, and it cracked into three pieces. Luckily, the glass stayed intact enough to protect the Declaration, but when I went to take the backing off so the glass could be disposed of properly, I ran into a problem. Someone had used twelve one-inch brads to hold the picture in, and they were the kind of brads that looked like they might have been waiting for years to give someone tetanus. So I took it to the frame shop.

 

Here is where the surprising part happens: when they took the frame apart, they found that the Declaration (glued to cardboard, you recall) was covering a giant (12×14) photograph that had been professionally tipped onto a white matboard. Once the Declaration was out of the way, it was easy to see that the frame had been made for the photograph.

 

The picture itself is unspectacular: about a hundred dour-looking people, dressed in frock coats and top hats or hoopskirts and bonnets, gathered outside a giant building that must have been white, because it barely shows against the sky. There are bare, glum trees clustered around – there must have been a wind when the exposure was taken, because a few branches are blurry – and the assembly looks cold and melancholy. It’s an awful composition, too, with the people jammed against the left side and an expanse of empty bleachers to the right. Underneath, there is a caption:

 

DELEGATES TO THE BAPTIST CONVENTION, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, MAY 1867

 

This is a very mysterious and exciting thing to find, because not only is my family not Baptist, we aren’t really even very religious. Maybe once in a generation, someone will turn up who likes to go to church, but we’re remarkably free of the kind of fervor that would inspire someone to buy and frame a photograph of Baptist delegates. Or so I, innocent child, thought.

 

My father, never at a loss for family gossip, immediately told me a story about his grandfather, who was devoutly religious, yet married a saloon-keeper’s daughter. Apparently he had some disagreements with his in-laws, which culminated in their donation of a silver Communion set to his church, upon which he turned his back upon the church and lived out his days as a Freethinker. “You notice,” my father pointed out, “that he covered up the Baptists with a centennial print of the Declaration of Independence.” At which I began to laugh, because, you know, ‘death, desolation and tyranny’ is pretty funny in that context.

 

As for the Declaration, it’s getting a proper frame, with conservation glass and a hanger that won’t let barn spiders in. It’s going to be hung in the dining room, opposite a Vermeer print. Thomas Jefferson would be pleased, but I don’t know what the Freethinking ex-Baptist great-grandfather would think.

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On the low end of a big tall learning curve Wednesday, Aug 26 2009

My goal for this summer, when I started painting, was to find my style. Very Zen, don’t you think? Style is how you tell one artist or illustrator (or chef, or photographer, or racecar driver) from another – it is the “I am me!” in a person’s work and since I’d never really sat and tried to pin down what I’m good at doing, I thought it would be an interesting thing to experiment with. It is! Also, incredibly frustrating.

 

See, I have these visions – Rapunzel, say, combing her hair while the witch hovers behind her chair in a shadow, her face full of worry and greed, one hand curled possessively above Rapunzel’s head, the whole thing in shades of brownish blues and grays except for the figure of poor daydreaming Rapunzel, who is all gold and pink, sitting in the light from her window – but although I can see this very clearly in my head, the process of putting it all down in paint is, for me, very much one-step-ahead-two-steps-back. Something almost always goes spectacularly wrong at some point: I put varnish down over wet paint and it smears, or I try to cover up a mistake with the wrong color, or I wait a minute too long to blend something and end up with lumps….a troop of gnats lands and drowns on the wet varnish…one of the children purloins a loaded paintbrush, then uses it to stab houseplants…it’s a humbling process, and so far my vision of Rapunzel is still just so much ether.

 

I keep painting, though, an hour or two per day, and I think I’m starting to make some tiny little cognitive jumps, thanks mostly to reading books and looking at other peoples’ paintings. Like that book on Maxfield Parrish – he talks about separating each color in its own layer of varnish, that’s how he got those intense blues and golds – so I whipped out some scraps of illustration board and tried making a green out of cobalt over varnish over cadmium yellow pale, and it was not spectacular but there was a lot of potential, and it got me thinking: how far can you push a color before it becomes non-representational? Like a sky – how intense can the blue be before it becomes unbelievable? How many colors, or layers of colors, can you get away with in a forest, or a stone wall?  There are other books, too, that lead to jumps: a massive book on portraits, a catalog of Andrew Wyeth’s drybrush paintings, even the picture books one naturally accumulates as a result of having children in the house.

 

I know I’m on the right track, because whenever I sit down and paint something, I get the feeling that I am exactly where I need to be, doing what I need to be doing. Painting is frustrating, but the struggle feels creative, like I’m learning – although this has to be the most complicated and difficult thing I’ve ever tried to learn, it also feels graspable. The last couple pieces I’ve worked on, although I would never list them under successes, were stabs at a style all my own – intense, glossy colors, exaggerated vertical compositions, figures that twist out of the frame. Slowly and painfully, I’m learning what colors work for me (the pthalos, burnt sienna, crimson, ultramarine, permanent rose) and which ones get left in the drawer (raw umber, alizarine – it’s too tomatoey – cobalt, most of the cadmiums). I have a favorite brush and a varnish I like very much.  I feel like I’m very close to producing something worth looking at. It’s a nice thing, that feeling.

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Eighteen interesting things I learned on a book binge Friday, Aug 21 2009

1. Real pirates had no teeth. (Peter Benchley, The Island)

 2. Many of my favorite writers had drug and/or ulcer and/or suicide problems. (David Cross, Dead Ends)

3. There is a little town in Connecticut which was abandoned after a man poisoned his neighbors with bad mussels. (Daytrips, Vacations and Getaways in New England)

4. National Book Award finalists are never my favorite novels. Why are they all so gloomy? (Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House)

5. The literary Bridget Jones is five times smarter and twenty-five times funnier than her movie counterpart. (Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’ Diary)

6. It is endlessly amusing to refer to your body as your Earth Suit. Try it: “No thanks on the ice cream, I don’t want my Earth Suit to get fat!” Ha ha ha. (Gary Zukov, Soul Search)

7. Computers used to be really, really large. (Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine)

8. All advertising is fake. Before reading this book, I thought it was mostly fake, but I was wrong. (Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise)

9. The difference between Cactus and Succulent is: All cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. (The Wonderful World of Cactus and Succulants)

10. Never marry a man who eyes chambermaids. (Rumer Godden, China Court)

11. The best highwaymen in English fiction live in Doone Valley. (RD Blackmore, Lorna Doone)

12. Alarm clocks are evil.(Carl Honore, In Praise of Slowness) (But I was pretty sure about that before I read this)

13. Kay Gibson, Arthur Rackham, and Edmund Dulac made some killer fairy-tale illustrations. (Dover, Once Upon a Time…)

14. Maxfield Parrish had a solid reputation as a family man, AND a secret passage from his bedroom to the babysitter’s. (Maxfield Parrish: The Masterworks)

15. It is possible to marbleize Easter eggs. (Martha Stewart Living, March 2005 issue)

16. I still get bored at the chapter where Beth dies, and it still makes me feel guilty. (Louisa May Alcott, Little Women)

17. That part where Eleanor holds Theodora’s hand while they’re being terrorized by the demon of Hill House, and then the demon leaves, and Theodora wakes up not knowing why Eleanor is screaming, and Eleanor realizes she’s been holding someone else’s hand the whole time even though they’re alone in the room – that scene right there is the reason why I’ll never volunteer to spend the night in a haunted house. Ever. (Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House)

18. Even really good writers have occasional fits of boringness. (Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea)

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Vampire schlock – the key to successful family relationships Friday, Jul 31 2009

My sister-in-law and I are reading the Twilight books together. Since I was overseas while they were busy being bestsellers, I completely missed the series, but it’s a set of four books about vampires and werewolves; there is also a movie, featuring brooding teenage actors and much rainfall. So far I have seen the movie twice and read the first three books. Sis is ahead, because my ILL request hasn’t come in yet. “You need to read Breaking Dawn,” she said the last time we talked. “I have so much to discuss about that book.”

            Whenever we get together, we spend a gross amount of conversation discussing Twilight. You have to understand, the books are full of crazy things (vampire baseball? Really?) and people acting in bizarre and illogical ways. There’s just so much to mull over: like, do you think Bella will ever develop interests other than Edward? Will Edward actually talk her into getting married? How can Charlie not know his best friend is a werewolf? How can Jacob still be holding out hope that Bella will dump Edward? Will Bella dump Edward? Will the creepy old Italian vampires show up for evil purposes? What on earth is the deal with Bella’s superpowers?

            The rest of the family just roll their eyes and disappear, usually, when Sis or I starts up with, “That reminds me – did you notice that, in Book 2, Bella is more mad at Edward outing her motorcycle to Charlie than his dumping her? Is she ever going to start acting like a real person?” but the other night we got on our usual discussion topic, which is: who is the better boyfriend, Jacob or Edward?

            Sis maintains that Jacob is way more appropriate than Edward. Jacob is mortal, as well as handsome and toasty-warm (werewolves maintain an average body temperature of 110 F, we learn in Book 3), which would be nice in the wintertime. Sure, he turns into a giant wolf when he gets mad, and he comes with a pack instead of a family, but hey, handsome guys who know how to fix a truck are hard to find these days.

            I think Edward is the superior boyfriend. He’s sophisticated, and glitters in the sunlight (vampires glitter, we learn in Book 1) and good at rescuing Bella. Plus, he can read minds, which is pretty entertaining, and he can play the piano, and doesn’t automatically transform into a big dog when trouble comes a knockin’.

            We were having this argument over dinner when my father put his fork down and addressed us both. “You know, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” he said, “Seth Green was involved with a werewolf, and that was a pretty stable relationship. Whereas Buffy dated that vampire for a while, and we all saw how that worked out.”

            Absolute silence. I think my mouth might have been hanging open. Here is what I was thinking:

            MY FATHER WATCHES BUFFY?

            And:

            WHAT ELSE IS THERE ABOUT THIS FAMILY I DON’T KNOW?

            And:

            DID HE JUST SAY HE WATCHES BUFFY?

            And:

            IS THAT THE SAME BUFFY I’M THINKING OF?

            So, obviously, I am not the only person at the table with an appetite for vampire schlock, which is comforting, but I am just not sure how far this thing will spread; is my daughter going to go right from Hop on Pop to ‘Salem’s Lot? Is my boy going to ask for a Dracula costume with matching fangs? Will my mother start brooding around the house in black lace, eating nothing but very rare steak? Because if Dad is watching Buffy, anything is possible.

            For now I am going to assume that Buffy is an abberation, and Sis and I are alone in our madness. And madness it certainly is: we are, for instance, planning our very own Twilight T-shirts. Mine is: TEAM EDWARD, COMPLETELY AND IRREVOCABLY, and hers will say: TEAM JACOB and on the back, VAMPIRES SUCK! I think she’s making an extra one for Dad.

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Two memes for the price of one! Monday, Jul 27 2009

In a burst of internet affection, I got tagged for two different memes by two different blogs. Thanks Mike! Thanks, Musings!) One wanted to know seven of my personality traits and the other one wanted to know seven of my favorite things. I don’t know, they seemed to go hand-in-hand, so here they are:

TRAIT: Laziness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: Sleep. I’m serious. I haven’t slept past six o’clock for ages – years, probably. When I imagine Heaven, it’s filled with fluffy percale-sheeted beds, quiet Saturday mornings, and a complete absence of alarm clocks. And all the babies sleep til noon, and wake up with empty diapers.

TRAIT: Curiousness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: Church sales. Church sales – also, yard sales, flea markets, and junk stores – are the best place in the world for a curious person, because you will find things and people there that are unusual and interesting. Of course there are bargains (books, fruit bowls, tractor parts) but the main reason I love a good church sale are the questions it raises: who would have owned that? Why? I bet they were deeply fearful, and hated bugs. Or was it a present to a person they hated? And what was that person thinking when they knitted that?

TRAIT: Distractibility. RELATED FAVORITE THING: Freshly polished glasses. I often have a hard time focusing on what people are saying to me; it’s not that I want to be rude, I just have the attention span of a fruit fly. I wander. Whenever I realize I’m wandering, and decide to pay attention, I stop and polish my glasses. I know, ridiculous, but it helps me focus. Having poor eyesight is probably the only thing keeping me from turning into one of those people who can’t tell you what day of the week it is.

TRAIT: Slowness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: Scrabble. I’m from a family full of very bright people. My brother’s a genius. My parents have enough college degrees to wallpaper a small room. Even my sister-in-law does math for fun; and both my kids show signs of having very very good problem-solving skills. Me, I’m not an idiot, but I’m definitely the dim bulb on the family chandelier. However, I am just good enough at Scrabble to make me feel better about this. It’s not like I win every game (one out of five, maybe, and usually after everyone’s had a couple glasses of wine), it’s that I do just well enough to impress myself. I may not be graduate-school material, but once I got the word “azaleas” on a triple-word score!

TRAIT: Neatness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: The closet. As anyone who’s ever had a small child for a roommate can tell you, kids have an amazing ability to generate mess. As a child-care professional, I am constantly mopping up vile spills, prying dead cereal off carpets, shoving toys in boxes, and dealing with the laundry. To provide an oasis from this madness, I keep my closet obsessively, neurotically neat: clothes organized, shoes lined up, odds and ends put away, carpet vaccumed.

TRAIT: Calmness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: Celery green. I am usually a very calm, quiet person, the kind of person who hardly ever gets mad, who will sulk for days instead of smashing a few plates or writing nasty Letters To The Editor. I have tried to become more assertive, but I don’t know, it takes a lot of energy and I only have so much to go around. Anyway. If you ever go to a hardware store and look at paint chips, there’s a certain pale mint green, a celery color; it isn’t an exciting shade but it has a nice cool depth to it. I like that color very much. When I have my own place, I will paint all the walls celery green, and it will be the calmest spot on the planet.

TRAIT: Forgetfulness. RELATED FAVORITE THING: My diary. Okay, so I forget almost everything; I misplace shoes, keys, wallets; the amount of information I’ve retained after seventeen years of schooling could fit in a thimble. The only way I stay on top of important things, like getting the boy back and forth from school, is by reminding myself out loud every ten minutes. The upside is that I’m very good at keeping secrets (because I forget them right away) and I can’t hold a grudge. The downside is that sometimes I get the feeling that I’m slipping through my life without getting a grip on anything.

A couple years ago, this started to really bother me, so I started keeping a diary, where I write down the stuff that happens to me every day. It’s such a comfort to have things written down – whenever I flip to today’s date and write down something profound like, “Today it rained. I bought an artichoke and tried to cook it, but it was a disaster. C had diaper rash and H ate a piece of orange peel but seems OK. Read some more Sayers. Liking it very much. Thinking about buying new sneakers.” I lose that slipping-away feeling. Which I guess is the same reason why people write blogs, isn’t it? And answer memes?

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A speed bump on the Road to Awesomeness Friday, Jul 17 2009

The things I love painting the most are portraits. I don’t mind doing other stuff for practice, but something about making a flat piece of panel look like a person has a tremendous appeal to me, and whenever I sit down to practice drawing I always end up sketching lips and noses and fingers.

            I had this idea, a few weeks ago, that if I dedicated my work time to portraiture, I would be awesome at it in no time. With this as my mission, I took a photo of my mother; a very staid head-and-shoulder pose, with a three-quarter face and soft lighting. I did a beautiful sketch of this photo. Then I sat down to paint it.

            Something happened between the sketch and the painting, and I’m still not sure exactly when things really started heading south, but it had something to do with her nose; my mom and my brother both have short, cute, straight noses that are almost impossible to be accurate about. (Impossible for me, I mean, because I’m not awesome yet.)

            Anyway, soon after I started slapping down the flesh tones, he portrait began to look so wrong – you could tell it was my mother, but it slipped off into a bizarre caricature after a couple days’ work, which was much worse than being unrecognizable – that I started working on it at secret, while she was at work or late at night. Every time I picked it up to work on, I worried that she would cry when she saw it. I began to feel like a rotten daughter. I gave serious thought to gessoing over the stupid thing and going back to the sketch.

            One night when I was almost done, she padded downstairs in the dead of night and caught me painting. I tried to pretend that I was not aware the piece was a failure, and braced for the recriminations and/or being kicked out onto the street.

            Instead, she sat down and began to laugh. But she couldn’t stop laughing, and every time she tried to compose herself she’d catch sight of the painting and go off into another gale of laughter. Finally, she wheezed out, “That looks…exactly like…a paint-by-number Jesus.”

 

            I don’t know. Maybe I’m not supposed to be doing portraits, or maybe I just have a lot to learn. But I can’t help thinking that what I need to be awesome is a good muse. Right? All the best painters had regular muses – look at Reubens and his plump rosy Aphrodites, or Maxfield Parrish’s nude girls, or even Dali’s endless portraits of Gala. Muses are helpful because they are happy to pose, and they are also good to talk to, and always coming up with helpful suggestions.

            My mom will probably never let me paint her again, and although my brother and sister-in-law are happy to dress up and pose for fairy-tale illustrations, they balk at posing for formal portraits. My kids are unposable – every photo I have of the girl comes out with blurry edges – and my father, when I asked if I could borrow his face for a few minutes, said, “Maybe when you get better.”

            So for the moment I am my own muse, which has a respectable history: Rembrandt, for instance, painted over fifty self-portraits, and van Eyck was always sticking himself on the corners of pictures. My new series, after I finish up a few still-life and drapery studies, is the self-portrait: profiles, three-quarters, and full. If they come out well, I am going to get serious about portraiture, and start hunting for someone willing to work as a part-time muse. I think the classifieds will be easiest, and have already started thinking about an ad: Wanted, model. Must be reliable, interesting-looking, with experience in sitting still. Must be able to talk about books and/or art and/or celebrity gossip. Resemblance to Jesus a plus.

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