Two posts in one day?!?

I've been thinking a lot about my friends today. I don't have many, which is funny given that I'm such a social beast. But I choose my friends wisely, which is why the very few close friends I have are so fabulous.

I've known "Curly" since I was about eleven years old. We met when we lived in the Philippines at the same time, both of our father's in the Air Force (my dad was enlisted and quite the rough type; her father was an officer - the subject of a spat or two in our younger days). We have such an incredibly close kinship. As we have grown older, we have become such incredibly different people. I think we love each other so much for the things that are different in each other, for the things we've shared as "sisters," and for which we will always remain the most dearest and special of friends.

Delia is wit incarnate. There is no better description. Good grief, we've seen some wild times with her life (mine is so incredibly vanilla by comparison). She is brilliant, passionate for things that REALLY matter (midwifery, parenting, human spirit...) and full of life in a manner that words can not adequately describe. We don't talk to each other often enough. When we do, it is the most lengthy and delightful blabberfest. We can't have a conversation that lasts less than an hour.

Deb, my beloved partner in stand up comedy. Good heavens, we can share anything. She epitomizes support, goodness and laughter. If I am ever, truly ever in a miserable mood, I know I can call Deb and be laughing in about one minute. That laughter carries me through any rough patch. Did I say she was funny? :-) Who else would let me set their bangs on fire? Or keep my children so I could flee the state for a few days? Or take me for my first trip to a spa and feel comfortable just sitting with me (and a number of indecent ladies!) in an over sized tub, or tolerate my houseful of cats with a nose full of allergies?

Harold. Does the husband count? My heart aches at the thought of my life without him. Thirty years later I'd do it all over again. OK, now I'm getting misty eyed.

This is the short list. I appreciate all of my friends, near and far, and wish everyone had a Curly, Delia, Deb and Harold in their lives.

Enjoying the little things in life

I love sitting in my living room and watching birds dance in the seeds I put out for them in a makeshift bird feeder (aka terra cotta dish on a PVC table meant for use poolside). If I am still, they hang out in large numbers for quite a while. I'm such a cheap date.

For the past two days I've observed a porker of a bird in the bowl of finch food. When the pigeons plop themselves down (and their cabooses fill the entire bowl), I have to go out and scold them for pigging out and shoo them away, but this guy is really pretty and has a beautiful song. It's quite extraordinary for us city slickers here in Southern California. I did a little digging this morning and identified it as a black-headed grosbeak. Apparently, they are referred en masse as "a gross of grosbeaks." Who makes up this stuff? Anyway, it's a pleasant departure from the zillions of crows that fly overhead every afternoon (I swear they circle the globe daily as I only see them flying northeast) or the flock of screaming, and I do mean screaming, wild parrots that call this neck of the woods home.

Who knows. Maybe the blue heron that flew in like a pterodactyl and scared the bajeebers out of me a while back will make a return visit to the wild kingdom that is my back yard. That's entertainment!

Big talent in modest packaging at www.fecher-gramstad.com

In 2005 I discovered the work of an amazing artist, Debbie Fecher-Gramstad, in (of all places) a shop in Downtown Disney. Watching me drool in delirium, my husband was none too subtle asking which piece I liked most, the favorite of which I received as a Christmas gift that year. To my dismay, I found the shop gone the next time I was on the hunt for another piece of her work. I found her website and sent an email inquiring about where else I might find her work. She replied with two lengthy emails filled with information, and thus began a long distance friendship with the most wonderful creative spirit and mentor. I can say this now because I asked her permission to post info regarding her site and she said yes, but that she wanted to be able to read this. :-)

There should be more Debbie Fecher-Gramstads in the world. I sit here truly at a loss for words to describe what it has meant to me personally to have someone like her in my life, particularly because we've never had the pleasure of a face-to-face meeting. I have three years (!!!!) of emails filled with evidence of her incredibly generous heart, words of encouragement like none I've ever received before, that have made me smile from ear to ear and cry with tears of gratitude at the same time.

As I read other "wanna be an artist" web sites, blogs or magazine articles, I know I'm not alone in my feelings of inadequacy. Art is so incredibly personal. Some people are compulsive about keeping a clean house, others about being the team-mom-of-everything-for-all-kids, or fastidious about entertaining like Martha Stewart. For me, my compulsion is creativity. Since leaving my office job last year, I've struggled with the response to the question, "So, what do you do?" when I am with my husband's gang from work. These people are former ambassadors, mountain climbers/college faculty, or published authors. How do I reply, "I am an artist?" I often feel like such a phony. I've received some odd comments about my work - people are so comfortable criticizing art! - and have not yet developed the requisite thick skin. I'm working on it!

Then there's Debbie. She has offered to have me come to her place in Washington to work with her as if we have known each other since childhood. She has encouraged me without being patronizing or condescending, and reminded me the importance of art to the spirit. She has actually (gasp!) asked my opinion about the topic for art classes for newbies like me. It is because of her that I put together my studio and have one of her pieces hanging right smack in front of my nose where I work to inspire me to move ahead, be bold and give it a whirl.

Debbie serves as a constant, "Pass it on!" messenger for me. Everyone should have someone in their lives to make them feel good about their passion. I am encouraging my son to take art classes with me this summer so that he remembers the joy of being creative and resists the urge to be self critical when it comes to his art. I will work with my niece this summer on art projects to encourage the same creative spirit in her.

Thank you, Debbie. You rock!

For anyone other than Debbie and I that may look at this, please check out her website and remember the amazing artist behind the work: http://www.fecher-gramstad.com

Was this blog supposed to be about art?

I find myself more exhausted being the mother of just one teen right now than I do find time for artwork. My son got on a plane this morning for Seattle with his middle school band & orchestra. I was fine for a while. Worry set in when I knew they landed an hour and half ago, but still no "We're here" message. I finally got that misspelled text message letting me know they were OK, and I was able to relax. Getting some housework done and knowing it would remain intact for three days is a glorious feeling. I don't know what made me look up in his bathroom when I went in to clean, but I did. And then I started laughing. What in heaven's name would cause a fourteen year old to even think of getting a single square of white toilet paper and sticking it to the ceiling over the tub? Just one. I don't even know how he reached. What a dork! It was good for a laugh, though.

I'll have a couple of days to work on some art. Yeah! Perhaps I'll have accomplished something by the time he gets home on Sunday. If nothing else, I will have been amused while scrubbing toilets.

Proud mom moments

I've been struggling with strep throat for a couple of days now, feeling like I swallowed a marshmallow laced with razorblades, and decided I needed to get at least 30 seconds of sun. So I gathered the junk mail and headed to the recycling basket outside. Motion out of the corner of my eye caused me to glance up; I was horrified to see a little creature, I thought perhaps a chipmunk or mole, floating in the pool. I ran to the pool and scooped it out, hoping I had caught it in time and might be able to save it's life, but it was much too late. This was the tiny bunny we had seen a few times in the back yard, probably trying to get a drink in this blazing heat wave. I couldn't bear to just throw him out. A matter of minutes later, my young teenage son came home from school. I asked him if he would be willing to go down into the gully just behind our house and dig a grave deep enough that the coyotes or cats wouldn't detect it and bury the bunny. He got the shovel and quietly dug a grave, gently placing the tiny bunny inside, then buried him. I looked out the back door and saw my son making an absolutely gigantic cross from fallen branches of the avocado tree, probably four feet tall and three feet wide, to mark the little bunny's grave. I watched him finish and just stand there for a bit, looking down at the grave, and then touch up his handiwork by reinforcing the cross with ties made of morning glory vines. While I tease him frequently about being the cause for my investment in L'Oreal hair colour and the reason God made chardonnay, moments like this make me so proud. My little man with a big, big heart.

Kids, Cooties and Boo Boos

Last week during Spring Break, my son was gifted with taking along a friend for a drop-off day at an amusement park. Those weasels went non stop well into the evening. Unfortunately, he worked up a pretty wicked big blister on his big toe. It's been a week, and it looks awful and infected. Yuck. To add insult to injury, he also managed to catch a cold (I swear, they are created and bred at amusement parks and on grocery cart handles) and couldn't play with his band/orchestra at the Nixon Library this week. Between the cooties and the boo boo, he's a pretty miserable young man. We're particularly concerned because the school band is traveling to Seattle on Thursday, departing at (ugh!) 4 a.m., traveling in a suit and tie, sightseeing all day and not getting to their hotel room until approximately 10 p.m. Can you tell that the person planning four days like this doesn't have any children? Sigh. So last night we were watching Lost (gotta love Netflix - no commercials!) and I heard snuffling sounds in the dark, and wincing motion with his foot. I sat down next to him and asked if he was worried, trying to reassure him that we'd see the doctor today and get him all fixed up for Seattle. He looked at his toe and sniffled, "Does this mean I might be a diabetic like Dad?" The poor little guy. Dad got a blister when we were snorkeling in Hawaii last year and didn't pay attention to the developing infection. I noticed his foot and called the doctor immediately, resulting in antibiotics delivered both by needle and pills. I reassured Kevin that with our family history of diabetes, he has every opportunity to make good choices and head it off at the pass. No more emptying an Easter basket overnight, or downing one of those giant milk carton shaped boxes of fishy crackers in two days. So we're off to the doctor at noon, then we start packing for his trip. We'll talk about art projects while we're waiting to see the doctor to get his mind off of his worries.

This is when I feel like a good mom. With full military dependent medical coverage available to us, my own mother never took us to the doctor, not when we had blister-covered tonsils, or when my sister fell and her bottom teeth cut all the way through her lip, or when I was shocked when my hand slipped into the wires of the pool pump switch (for the year we lived in a house that didn't sit on wheels) when ordered to turn it off in the rain without shoes or a flashlight. Thanks, Dad. Good one. I'm happy to take care of my cootie bug.

Art in the family

When I was plowing through a pile of the most fabulous old family photos and trying to think about art projects in which I could use them (without the pointy hats, crowns and wings - can I say that frequently enough?!?), I started thinking about the artistic talents of my family.

My mother was always a bit on the whacko side. At family gatherings, she would regale us with stories about her life that were absolutely fiction, delivered as if she absolutely believed it all. I remember her talking about this class she took about ancient hieroglyphics, or the one she took about law or Chinese. In reality, she graduated from high school, got a job in a department store, got married within a year of that and took a class about office equipment when I was in elementary school (offered through her employer for all of the secretaries). The family, including her sister, agreed that she just wasn't happy with her real and very simple life, so she was just making one up that was much more interesting. My stinker of a husband would always make the same declaration in the car on the way home in a Monty Python voice, "...and then I had teaaaaa with the Queen...." to which we would cackle and figure whatever makes her happy is fine. The thing is, she really had some remarkable talent that she never shared with much of anyone, but for which she would have been recognized (as she clearly desperately wanted) as being very talented and gifted. She had a beautiful singing voice, and had remarkable talent with water colours. I remember finding a postcard-sized painting of a bird on the branch of a flowering tree, unsigned and unframed, tucked in a little nook of her desk at home. When I asked where she got it, she replied that she had painted it. I was floored. I was sixteen years old and had never seen her paint. Sadly, she passed away at age 63 just twelve years ago and my father donated everything he didn't need to survive in the home, so it's gone. There is nothing left - none of her artwork, no recording or home video with her singing, nothing. What a tragedy.

My younger sister was a remarkable sketch illustrator. I say "was" because right now, I understand she wanders between marriages and shelters, the victim of decades of alcohol abuse. She was a frequent runaway beginning at age 12. Unsuccessful in school, she ended up in one of those continuation schools for delinquents. She used to doodle the most fantastic drawings, complete with dragons, castles, waves crashing against cliffs, all in the most remarkable detail and with just plain paper and a #2 pencil. She illustrated the entire yearbook that final year she attended school, I believe her junior year. Then she quit it all and life was downhill like a rocket from there, with nothing to show for her talent. I tried and tried to help her, got her to take a class at the community college by taking it with her, and tried encouraging her to finish school and get a job using her talent. Booze called louder and won.

My older sister is a wonderfully warm and creative woman with a lot of familial challenges - big family, not everyone on track - but she works with it and is a great mom and grandmother. She has the most remarkable artistic skill as a painter, and sculpting (including making jewelry) with polymer clay. When I was about 12, I commented that I loved the sets of posters advertised in the back of comics. I saw one of a lion with a little kitten that I thought was cute. For my birthday, she painted it. Just like that! She looked at the tiny picture in the comic, and painted an exact copy. She is an amazing oil painter, but spends her time these days with polymer clay projects, some sewing still (I think), and other crafts. I believe she could become financially comfortable making a career in custom tromp l'oeil work, but she is content with what she is doing which I think is great. I love the passion with which she talks about her current projects and ideas. I wish I could paint like her. She rocks.

So I'm feeling pretty darned blessed about life today. I used to worry that one day I'd be gone, and there would be nothing left behind to say that I'd been here. Looking at all these old family photos, there are so many people who have left us and for which there is no sign that they were ever here but for the photos in a box in my house. On the other hand, I have the school primer that was my grandmother's at age 12 in 1903, complete with a story that she wrote on loose paper and attached with a single straight pin to the inside back cover. What a fabulous gift to have that reminder of her, and the reminder to leave art in the family, for the family.

Recovery from the sagging mood!

I don't know what was wrong with me yesterday. Good grief, but I was a whiner! One of my best friends (and the funniest woman I know) called me on her way home from work yesterday. That's all it took to kick me in the fanny, get me laughing and alter my mood. We talked about the challenges with leaving a great job with non-stop interaction with a LOT of people, to quiet days home alone with the TV on in the background for company. This was followed by afternoons with an argumentative teen, and I finally just hit a wall. When Deb and I tell each other the stories of the day about our kids and spouses, we can laugh (and make fun of them to crack ourselves up), and put life back in perspective. I always told my husband that working at a hospital for eight years put life in perspective, and I had lost track of that for a while. Thank God for girlfriends!

Then my wonderful husband came home after yet another thirteen hour day of million mile an hour hard work, poured me a glass of wine, and sat down to encourage me to become more confident in my art, to take classes so that I could meet more of "my peoples" and spend time with others with passion for creativity, and to stop feeling so compelled to keep a spotless house when there was an empty studio. How many people have that luxury these days? My husband encouraged me for months to be OK with leaving my office job so that I could enjoy exploring creativity. There are no words to express my gratitude for his generosity of spirit and his support. I am a very lucky woman.

So today I am making some art-driven decisions:

1) Establish studio time every day;
2) Play with art materials every day without adding the pressure to create a masterpiece;
3) Continue to refuse to incorporate any pointy hats, crowns, wings or bird-in-a-cage images in my artwork (no offense to those who do, but I just can't add myself to the list!);
4) Blog without whining. I can have emotions other than perky, but I can't just whine.

I think that's a good start.

Sagging mood

I am so depressed these days that I can't manage to get up the muster to be very productive. I am overwhelmed by a sense of failure in nearly every area of my life. My self criticism is the loudest thought in my head. There has got to be some way to get back on track. With so much to be thankful for in my life, I am finding myself wallowing in everything that isn't right. I see the Facebook comments of my friends, all of whom seem so normal and happy. Why not me?

Signing up for art classes at an upcoming quilt show (not quilting classes!) was surprisingly hard for me. It meant going public about taking art seriously, for which I continue to feel a bit of a fraud. Sheesh, will I ever get past this??? There will certainly be others with little to no previous instruction, and it certainly wasn't unreasonable to sign up for a class described as appropriate for all experience levels. Yesterday the confirmation for my spot in these two classes arrived, along with my name tag and directions on finding the class. Reality strikes. I've always told my kids when they were at that awkward self-conscious stage that they aren't so interesting as to command the attention of every passerby. I should be taking my own advice. The instructor is published, making the whole experience a bit more intimidating, but exciting. I will finally be able to acquire advice and direction that will let me take my own art a step further. Yeah!

With my studio finished, I find myself just stuck. I feel the way I recall reading that kids with ADD and ADHD feel- there are a million thoughts and ideas swirling simultaneously in my head, but instead of being inspired to act on any one of those thoughts or ideas, I feel more like a deer in headlights. Time to work on that too. One of my art books included a suggestion to just do one little project a day, trying techniques as opposed to trying to create a masterpiece. It couldn't hurt.