art(ifacts) of our memories

sabin started painting lessons yesterday with a professional artist (who is also a good friend). it's a marvelous opportunity offered by the local paint shop (she's got both wall paints and art supplies) and we snapped up one of the five spots as soon as we heard about it. at the end of the first hour and a half, sabin had painted this apple. i realize a mother is not unbiased, but i think the kid's got talent! and best of all, she was inspired. so this evening, instead of watching t.v., she said, "let's paint."

she's in her fruit phase, as she produced this pear. she had the most beautiful rosy blush in the middle (just like on the real pear that was her model) and then her father gave her some advice that messed it all up. she may work with it a bit more tomorrow when it's dry.

i had to include one more shot where you could see her face. after this, she painted a banana as well. definitely in her fruit phase. i think they'll be awesome in the new kitchen.

while she painted in broad strokes on canvas with slippery paint, i turned to an old book, my ink and watercolors. first a little longing for spring materialized on the page. probably because i bought a fritillaria earlier today and it was on the table in front of me (right next to those new candle holders).

then some nyhavn-style houses marched across the page.

and begged to be filled in with colors.

it was such a good way to spend the evening. the t.v. was off. i sat across from my near-teenager and all of the earlier frustrations of the day (which are many when you have an almost teenager in the house) melted away. the stacks of dirty dishes and orange peels and my martyrdom at constantly serving as her maid no longer mattered. nor did the scowls and grumpy comebacks. paint and brushes and art and candlelight and quality time together melted it all away.

these are the things we will remember. and happily, we have the art(ifacts) to prove it.

i want a hippopotamus

we're a regular craft production line this weekend..we're making a christmas banner and have painted nearly a dozen canvases of assorted sizes (7 by sabin alone!). i unfortunately cannot show any of this to you because someone has hidden my card reader and i can't get the pix off the camera at the moment. while we're working, we're listening to a christmas playlist that my sis made last year when she was here. one of the best ones that on that list is this:



i know it's a boring video, but the others i found on you tube were very distracting and i thought you should listen to 10-year-old gayla peevey's voice, rather than being distracted by cute and/or ugly/disturbing pictures of hippos.

i'll continue the search for my card reader....

painting time is thinking time

i continue to paint the big drawer thingie (købmandsdisk--danish just has a better word for it!) in the kitchen and the slow, methodical work lends itself to thinking and flights of fancy. i think i'll be a bit sad when it's finished (which is soon) because i actually feel that the repetitive, not particularly creative act of brushing creamy white paint on wood has awakened inspiration within me at last. 

so many ideas are coming to me--writing ideas (something fun on great restaurants in out-of-the way places for scanorama), ideas for starting a creative "support group," so i have people to do creative stuff with (this means you, janni!), home decor (i'm thinking petroglyphs) and some ideas for more gocco notebooks (also thinking petroglyphs), new earrings, and yes, even scrapping! i printed a whole lot of pictures last night and made what i can only characterize as a breakthrough scrap page. (not because it was particularly good, but mostly because it's the first one i've made in months, despite continuing to buy supplies like there's no tomorrow.)

and although the desk looks a mess, it's just the kind of mess that i've been longing for...

ideas i had ages ago are returning to me...stamping cavafy's ithaca on the stairs is one of them. i'm also getting new ideas...a treasure map painting on a wall in the garden. small colorful tea-light holders hung all over the garden. bright print fabric pillows and cushions and tablecloths. 

all these months of gathering bits of inspiration and tacking them to the board beside my desk, seeking inspiration online and in magazine and books is finally paying off. i just had to give myself time to let the ideas gel.

if only a great name for my etsy shop would come to me, that's currently the obstacle that's stopping me on that front. perhaps it will tomorrow when i finish up the painting.

or perhaps it's all just paint fumes...

incremental steps

at my painting class today i made great progress and here it is!! it's not finished by any means, as i haven't actually PAINTED on it yet. but, with shaking hands and a pounding heart, i ripped my beloved pretty papers. i think it was good for me, even tho' it felt strange at first. after my heart stopped pounding, it was quite fun to lay them all out and move them around on the large canvas until they seemed right. then i glued them down.

i began thinking that i wanted there to be a bunch of writing in between the pieces of paper. private journal-style writing. but when i started to think about what to write, quotes came out. some favorites that are simply in my head, but then a bunch of those i've been collecting in my little black books for ages. at first, i had intended to paint completely over the writing so that it can't be read, but as i began to scatter the quotes, it seems like now i want them to show, at least to an extent. i'm not finished yet, writing on it. and i've only thought about the painting. what i want to do is extend the pattern again with paint--sort of make the ripped paper whole again using paint. i think that i can learn something about mixing colors and also get to the bottom of what pleases me so much in these papers--what it is that gives me that feeling of molecular alignment .

maybe painting will be the thing that helps me through after all...

making it mine

my head was feeling heavy, but then strangely, everything began to seem clear. all of the struggle i've been having with the "creativity issue." i speed-wrote 4 pages in my journal about it. about my frustrations. about my love of pretty paper. and yarn. but of my inability to actually really DO anything with either one. there is something appealing simply about the acquisition, but that's not really what's been blocking the creativity. i think i've been blocking it myself...(imagine that).

what i failed to recognize (or admit) is that there is some part of me that craves order. although i am currently living in a torn-apart house (building project) and many of my belongings are in boxes, i don't really like chaos. i make lists, for god's sake, of course i like order, why didn't i see this before? (husband said i wasn't ready.) i actually really like having a frame within which i work..and create, as it turns out. which i suppose is why knitting is appealing--that's VERY organized--i just need some help from an experienced knitter (or two) to get rolling on that and it will come.

but, my painting class has been a bit of a source of frustration to me, since i feel i can't adequately let go when i'm there. it was worst the first week. i've done a bit better since then. but last week, one of the other people in the course told me that i just needed to "slip hestene løs." basically, i just need to let go of whatever it is i'm clinging to...and that seems to be the frames. those blank canvases stretch before me in a WAY too wide-open, intimidating manner. the possibilities are limitless and some core part of me wants limits. i would like someone to say, today, we paint fish. and then i could contentedly paint fish like crazy. fantasy fish. colorful fish. fish that don't exist in nature. fish like you've never seen. but to stand there and say, "hey, self, what do you fancy painting today?" that's totally paralyzing.

same with the scrapping. i adore the supplies. the pretty paper makes my heart sing and my molecules align. but to imagine cutting it, or worse yet...ripping it! no, don't make me do that. it's because it's not mine--metaphorically speaking, it's mine, i've paid for it (tho' most of it was on massive sale or bought with the very low dollar--and i can show you the money i saved, husband, don't worry).

what i've been good at, creatively-speaking, is taking someone else's idea and making it mine. like when i painted the wooden stools for our little bitty apartment on elmelundevej. i took the shapes from the matisse paper cut-out poster hanging in the living room. i chose my own colors, i made custom stencils and i painted colorful, wonderful stools. it was a creative act, but not a wholly original act. and that was OK!!!

or when i painted 63 little viking ships around our dining room on baldersgade. they were lovely. and they were an adaptation of a little ship from my big world of art coffee table book. again, an original twist on something that i didn't originate. but totally creative. and wholly mine in the end.

so, what i need to do is find MY interpretation of scrapbooking. what attracts me are the supplies (have i mentioned that i love those pretty papers?), the notion of preserving memories (that whole nature of memory thing has been a preoccupation of mine for years...it's there in the choices of what i read and i would have written my dissertation on it had i gotten around to writing one), and actually, the camaraderie that seems to surround it (even if it's only in cyberspace). but why it's been so hard is that it hasn't felt like MINE. i'm trying to do someone else's thing. i need to stop that and do MY thing.

same with the painting. tho', i've made a modicum of progress there. i've at least been experimenting with color and brush strokes and not trying paint a picture per se. what i need to do there is take the prettiest of my pretty papers, glue them to the damn canvas (preferably after having the heart to rip them a bit) and then paint off of them. try to dig into what it is that makes my molecules align and hum in perfect pitch (which i swear happens with the best of those pretty papers--basic grey biology, i mean you) and try to create it MYSELF on the canvas. combine the things that have been preoccupying me and make them mine.

i can do this. all it took was recognizing what it was i needed to do and letting go of all the angst. excuse me while i go make a list now of the things i need to bring to painting class tomorrow...

more evidence of creativity

i did it!! this week i:

1. made a very nice pair of earrings



2. learned something about painting



3. and finally made a scrapbook page

yeah me!!

i think i'll give the earrings to moneek

what i learned about painting was something about colors and the difference between treating the canvas with linseed oil before beginning and not doing so (can be seen in the attached picture--the one on the right was treated, on the left, not so much). when you use plenty of linseed oil, the paint becomes more transparent and glides onto the canvas. for me, it almost sings beneath the brush. but there's something about the vibrancy of the colors when you DON'T use it that's also intriguing. i used these blues and greens because in my synaesthetic moments (which i'm working on expanding), these are the colors i usually see.

another thing i learned from painting today was that the best canvas i made was actually the one i was using to dry off my brushes on. so, there's something to not trying too hard.

as for the scrap layout. it was so liberating to finally begin after days and days of looking for inspiration on blogs around the world. now i finally made one myself and the ideas for more are tumbling in my head. i have two kits on their way...label tulip and red velvet girls. i can't wait to dig into those materials, together with the 134 pictures i had developed today. yeah!!

hoorah for creativity!!! it feels like a real breakthrough. and now i'd better go knit! :-)

first painting

ok, i know this isn't the greatest picture in the world, as it's all flashed out, but i was anxious to get this up...this is the first painting that i made in my painting class. the one that stymied me initially and caused all that painting angst and frustration. it's a small piece of a kandinsky, so that's where the weird fish-like thing came from, so no worries, it's not some monster residing in my head.

what i learned from it...something of how the paint moves on the canvas and how colors blend together. and how it is in general to work with oil paints...quite different from acrylic, what with the long drying times. but i learned a bit about the magic of linseed oil (more about that in a minute) and how it makes the paint fairly glide across the canvas. that's a good thing. what i like about it is that in general, i got the colors right or could fix the ones that were wrong (there was white on some of those dots at one point and that really didn't work). i might still add a little bit of gold leaf, just to pep it up. what i'm also learning is that you never really HAVE to be done with the painting.

breakthrough!

i did it! today at my painting lesson, i painted!!! i covered a canvas in paint. it's the one i began at the first lesson...modeled loosely on the kandinsky, a sort of a fish-like creature. i surrounded it with shades of turquoise water today. i also gave it some purple-tones and got rid of some yellow that wasn't working. i felt a faint glimmer of the feeling real painters must have, when the whole canvas is moving with the linseed oil and the pigments. i was almost, but not quite in the zone. but i could SEE the zone from where i stood, even if i didn't quite get there. and it felt like a real breakthrough.

constricted freedom

i learned a number of lessons at the painting course:

1. it's impossible to immediately make the leap from denmark's most uptight environment to a painting studio on a collective. one will inevitably retain some of the uptightness.
2. the sort of concentration i've been doing over the past, at least 3 years, is a very different kind of concentration than one needs to paint.
3. a painting studio is not an outlook-run environment. this is a good thing, but it takes getting used to.
4. you cannot tell anything about anyone just by looking at them.
5. i must wear clothes that promote a sense of freedom.
6. the hazy ideas in my head are difficult to wrestle to the canvas.
7. the music that's playing while you paint is important.
8. need bigger canvases.

the other students were quite a collection of characters:

1. an older man, very quiet, very contained and a totally awesome painter.
2. a crazy, middle-aged chubby lady, also an awesome painter, but painting with her hands, very boldly and with awesome colors. paint all over her shirt and pants, hair all up rather crazily. clearly able to hear the music of the paint and move it around the canvas with a deliberation and freedom that i envy.
3. three old ladies who are clearly old friends, all 3 new to painting, but each very good in their own way.
4. a lovely woman from the faroe islands who is painstakingly painting the cliffs of the faroe islands in hues of purple and grey.
5. a 50-ish woman with an expensive haircut, painting with acrylics and a scraper on metal.

the teacher is, of course, a painter himself. dutch. been in denmark for 20 years. a charming character. very much a spirit of '68 type, with freedom to do whatever, there are no rules. he played pink floyd. that was cool.

next time, i will dress in clothes that can get paint on them and take a larger canvas. i will open up. of this i am sure. it will just take time.

imagining a painting

today i start a painting course. like with oil paints and turpentine and canvases. already, i am imagining what i will do. i said aloud yesterday that i was imagining a multi-media canvas. due to my known deep and abiding love for iPods, those who heard this immediately imagined that i would fix one or more iPods to a canvas, paint them bright pink and make sure there was a way to plug it all in. i hadn't really thought about that, but they may be onto something there...no, instead, i have hazy pictures in my head (they haven't jelled yet) of bits of driftwood, knitted or felt decoration and beads on the canvas together with vibrant, lively colors. there are textures and combinations of the natural and the manufactured. the painting somehow addresses the question of memory which so occupies me at the moment.

there's something so exciting and anticipatory about holding pictures in your brain of soon-to-be-born creative endeavors...i am almost loathe to try to wrestle them to the canvas, as then that feeling of anticipation will dissipate and i will undoubtedly on some level experience disappointment. for while it is still in imagination, anything is possible, and once it's there on the canvas, it's solidified. yet, at the same time, i can't wait to get started. i'm in the liminal space once again, on the threshhold of something and full of anticipation to see how it turns out...