So guess what? As it turns out, I’ve actually been painting embryos this whole time and not fetuses. Well, sort of. I looked it up this morning and what I paint are humans that are about 10-12 weeks old from the date of the mother’s last menstrual period, so 8-10 weeks gestation. Technically this places them between the embryonic and fetal stages.

I thought this pic was pretty neat, it’s an 8 week old embryo taken from an ectopic pregnancy. I found it on Wikipedia:

I thought that was pretty cool. I’ve been collecting pictures of embryos for years and pasting them in my sketchbooks (thinking they were fetuses, d’oh) but I think the one above is my favourite. I wish my printer was better so it would have printed clearly but I gots what I gots. I don’t know why I like embryos so much, I just do. I think they’re super cute with their giant foreheads and big bellies. I also like how they symbolize different things – vastly different things – for different people.

Last night I finished reading How To Get Ideas by Jack Foster and I wanted to share two parts with you because I thought they were pretty good.

“George Ade was a prolific writer in the early part of this century. I once read an interview of his mother by a man who was not an admirer of her son’s work, and he was indelicate enough to ask her about George’s alleged capricious style and wobbly structure and shallow characterizations.

Finally Mrs/ Ade had enough/ “Oh I know that many people can write better than George does,” she said. “But George does.”

“George does.”

It’s one of the finest things anybody’s ever said.

In two words it crystallizes what happens with so many people (me included), namely: They get an idea, they tell some people about it, the people all say, “Wow, that’s great!” and then they go on to something else and never do anything about the idea they told people about.

I think the reason is: “Wow, that’s great!” is reward enough. It gives you that nice warm glow that comes from knowing you got a really good idea, that everybody thinks you’re a whiz.

But if nothing else happens with your idea, if it doesn’t help someone, if it doesn’t save or fix or create something, if it doesn’t make something better or solve some problem, what good is it really?“

And then he goes on to say that you shouldn’t tell people your ideas or you shouldn’t let “Wow, that’s great!” be enough, which I think is really fucking smart. I am absolutely horrible for this. I blog about my ideas all the time and then it’s like once I talk about them, the magic is gone and then all I’m left with is *work*. I hate work! Everyone hates work! (If you believe that “work” is anything that isn’t fun.) If I don’t tell you guys my idea and I just do it, the whole time I’m making something, I think “wait till they see this! They’re going to love it!” and that fuels my creation of the whatever it is. (And then when no one comments, I feel like shit, but that’s a whole other thing.) The key though, is not to tell and I am a terrible secret keeper if it’s my own secret. I want to tell everyone everything and I’m pretty sure, as Jack Foster believes, that hurts me in the long run.

So I’m not going to blog about my ideas anymore (in full) or my paintings until they’re finished as much as that’s going to pain me.

Here’s another thing in the book:

“More often than not,” Bud said, “people don’t fail; they stop trying.“

That’s me too. Lately I’ve been kinda bitching and moaning in real life about how “everything’s been done” but then at the same time saying “everything hasn’t been done, everyone says that and then someone does something new so why can’t that be me?” but then I don’t do the legwork. I don’t actively sit there and try to think up ideas. Then again, I never have. The book says you should do that but that’s just not my process. I’m getting off track though; the book says that people stop trying and this week I’ve stopped trying on so many counts it’s ridiculous.

First, until today, I didn’t do anything actively to throw myself into being an idea factory. The book says, and I agree because I’ve been doing it my whole life, that in order to get ideas you should pick a subject and immerse yourself in it, become an expert at it and then forget about it and do something else. The key though, is to DO SOMETHING ELSE. Don’t just sit there and do nothing. DO SOMETHING. And then the idea will just come to you while you’re doing something else. That’s how I get 99% of my ideas and it’s also a scientifically proven method, according to the book.

Second, on Monday I started painting the forget-me-nots on “Menopause” and then Blake wanted to go to Wal*Mart so  I had to stop and that broke my flow and I never got back to it. Then, to make matters worse, I blogged about “Menopause” prematurely (look, I’m doing it again!) and now I feel like all the magic is gone out of it and all I’m left with is the tedious task of all these goddamn forget-me-nots. I also posted pics of it on Camwhores on Tuesday or yesterday (I forget), so now that community’s already seen it and it won’t be a surprise when I post it.

I started making a process video of the making of “Menopause” but due to the feedback I got on my self portrait one, I’m worried that since “Menopause” is such a huge piece that’s taken weeks to create that the video will be too long and people will find most of its making too tedious. I think I should make it anyway and if people don’t want to watch it theyh have that option, but it’s not really a huge motivator to continue.

Then today…ugh, today…we’re supposed to go to a gallery opening tonight and I really don’t want to go. I would rather stay home and paint. But, this specific gallery, which I’ll get into in more detail after the opening I’m sure, could be a place for me to show my work in the future so I kinda feel like if I want to go that route with my work, this is my only chance to get my foot in the door somewhere. Also, if the curators are sincere in their naming of the gallery and what the gallery’s supposedly all about, then it IS the right place for my work, if they want it. I have to see what they’re hanging tonight to know for sure, so that means washing my face and hair and putting on actual clothes that don’t have elastic waistbands and leaving the house which I am absolutely loathe to do. It helps that I’m going to know 2 or 3 other people who are going, but not a whole lot. I’m also worried about drinking because they seem really unorganized and they said there will be beer and wine for sale but I don’t drink either and would really like a bottle of water or a diet Coke. I don’t know if that’ll be an option (it should be, but like I said, they seem really disorganized). I also don’t know if there’s going to be food there so should we eat beforehand? I’m also afraid of looking like shit. And what to wear. And what bag to bring. And all that shit that goes along with being me and being agoraphobic etc etc etc. I don’t want to go, but I have to go.

This is me not trying. This is me giving up. And I need to snap the fuck out of it before I make myself insane. I need to stop writing this post, absorb everything I learned about embryos today and paint some goddamn forget-me-nots until it’s time to get ready.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll probably be on Twitter for most of the day if anyone cares and also I’ve been using my Facebook page a lot more lately so hit me up there too, if you want!

Hi.

I’m posting THIS so I don’t lose the link. It’s a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman and it was written in 1892. It’s considered an important piece of feminist literature but never having read any feminist literature, I’ve never read it. Blake’s told me the concept of it a million times though and I plan on referencing it in an upcoming painting, so I suppose it’s about time I read it.

Speaking of reading, this article on the Goatse phenomenon is fantastic and I must thank Joey for posting it on Facebook because I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a long read but, I think, definitely worth the effort. I will not never in my life forget the name “Kirk Johnson” and I’m glad to know that he is not, in fact, deceased. (Stile is quoted a lot in the article and they talk about E/N a tiny bit too, if those are selling points for you.)

I’m listening to Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers right now and it’s very distracting because I keep singing instead of typing. “Swing the Mood” is probably in my top 5 favourite albums of all time. I just went on Amazon to see if they had any other albums and they really didn’t do anything beyond this album it seems, probably because they couldn’t get the commercial rights to all of the songs they mixed. Even on this album, all of the Elvis parts are sung by an impersonator for that reason. Actually a lot of the stuff is redone for that reason it seems. Interesting.

Anyway, there were/are great and I love this album like no other. I know the entire thing by heart. A little known fact about me is that I know the words to an impressive (for my age) amount of music from the 50s and 60s because growing up all my mom listened to in her store was an oldies station (1050 CHUM AM I’ll have you know) and then when I lived with my ex’s family as a teenager, there was a radio station that did Saturday night oldies (in fact, they still might – I should look into that because that was great) and all summer we’d sit on the back deck and drink until the oldies were over at about 3am. I would actually much rather listen to music of that era than anything created in present day because with an oldies station, I’ll probably like 90% of what they play but with anything modern, I’ll probably only like 20%.

When the Jive Bunny album came out, our library had the album so I took it out for a week and took it over to my grama’s house because she had a tapedeck with two decks so you could record one tape onto another and she was the only person I knew who had a stereo that could do that. Well, she loved the album too because this was all the music of her youth of course and I remember her trying to teach me how to swing dance in her kitchen. I think I would have been about 11. (She wasn’t always evil.)

I think it might have been Chalibear who sent me this album on CD a long long time ago from my wishlist but it’s been so long now that I forget. Either way, it’s one that sits on a shelf on my desk as opposed to being buried in my bedroom closet.

Here’s the video for “Swing the Mood”. I just rewatched it and the album version is a LOT different, using the actual vocals for most of the songs and just better mixed in general:

Another facet of my early exposure to early top 40 was that my step-dad was obsessed with The Everly Brothers. I probably know every word to every song they ever did as a result and I actually think that he liked them so much, now that I’ve kinda peeked through what they were really about and watched some videos, because it was probably one of the only kinds of SUPER HARDCORE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL he was allowed to listen to as a kid because his parents were super strict and super assholes who ruled all 6 kids with an iron fist.

I’m getting way off topic though…not that I actually had a topic.

So Blake and I stayed up late last night in bed talking about art well past our bedtimes. I can sleep during the day after my shift so I was okay but he was up late the night before with little sleep because he was on call and his work had “the biggest release of the year” over the long weekend and of course things broke, so he was exhausted but I’ve come to learn that it’s best to get him when he’s exhausted because that’s when he has the best ideas. (He’s going to murder me for saying that but to be fair, it’s not like I do it on purpose, it just ends up that way.)

We hammered out a lot of ideas and I think I have found my direction for the next painting. I can’t see beyond that one and I still have my last one to finish (and one I’m making for myself) but we basically decided that I don’t add enough detail. The metaphor (?) he gave me was the cow jumping over the moon. If you just draw a picture of a cow, there’s no story, there’s nowhere for the viewer to go, but if you draw the picture of the cow over the moon, even if you only change that one little detail, the scene and therefore the story, changes.

With “Me, two.“, there’s a story but I didn’t put in enough detail for the average viewer to really understand everything I meant. When I posted it my friend Jeck said that there was too much negative space and my response to that at the time was that was what was intended and that’s true, but the viewer is left to their own devices as far as understanding why I did that and they’re probably not going to come to the correct conclusion. (That painting is supposed to be a natural miscarriage and something that “just happens”, hence the plain blue sky background.)

Even with “Menarche“, my background is less than apparent. A little more is going on but still not a story, not a communication. I don’t think that needs to have a story or anything like that but I think maybe I leave too much to interpretation when I’m perfectly capable of doing so much more and there’s really no excuse not to except that I get excited and want to share before the idea is fully finished.

I’ll let the cat out of the bag (not that it was some kind of big surprise or anything) that the painting I’m working on that goes along with “Menarche” is “Menopause” and while “Menarche”‘s background is pure, white daisies, “Menopause”‘s (how the hell do I make that punctuation work, technically?) is forget-me-nots, using the exact same method, just changing the colours. That’s what I like best about them, I think.

I’m not really happy with “Menopause” and I can’t figure out how to fix it. I used the crackle paste for the myometrium and it’s white, so when I did a wash of “Terra Cotta Coral”, which is my default myometrium colour, it looks really coral or salmon instead of pink and if I paint it with straight paint, I’ll lose the crackle effect. I did a wash of “brown iron oxide” over top of it to tone down the orange tones but it didn’t do much to help. I may do another wash of that before I call it finished just to see what happens. I think I can only get away with one more before I’ll lose the crackle effect. Honestly, I just can’t wait for that painting to be done already. I had the idea to do it before “Menarche” so I feel like I’ve been working on it for months when it’s really only been about a week and a half. Really all I have to do is finish the forget-me-nots, which I’ll probably do today, do the final wash, varnish it and call it a day.

Doing about a million tiny dot flowers on a 30 x 30 inch piece of work is not my idea of fun anymore. My arms are killing me because you have to hover right above the panel to do them while holding your palette in your other hand and it takes every single muscle you have to do it properly, there’s nothing to lean on or you’ll fuck up your flowers because they’re fresh blobs of paint and you have to go at it with military precision or you’ll paint yourself into a very uncomfortable corner.

The painting I’m going to be doing after “Menopause” is also going to have dot flowers, but not as many of them.

Onto other things…

So what the fuck is going on in Wisconsin, eh? Ain’t that some sexist bullshit? Here are some quotes that SHOULD  piss you right off and turn you into an insta-feminist if you don’t already identify as one:

“Whatever gaps exist, he insists, stem from women’s decision to prioritize childrearing over their careers. “Take a hypothetical husband and wife who are both lawyers,” he says. “But the husband is working 50 or 60 hours a week, going all out, making 200 grand a year. The woman takes time off, raises kids, is not go go go. Now they’re 50 years old. The husband is making 200 grand a year, the woman is making 40 grand a year. It wasn’t discrimination. There was a different sense of urgency in each person.””

“Nor, he argued, does its conclusion take into account other factors, like “goals in life. You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious. To attribute everything to a so-called bias in the workplace is just not true.””

I want to light this fucking asshole on fire. This is another thing Blake and I talked about in depth last night because I never really understood wage discrimination or wage parity or whatever it’s actually called. He said that it’s fucked up because (well, partly because) say a man and a woman start at the same job at the same place making the same amount of money. The woman after a year, goes on maternity leave. In Canada, that’s for a whole year (or you can split it up between husband and wife 6 months/6 months because we’re awesome like that). So in that year, say the dude gets a $5,000 raise. The woman doesn’t get the same raise because she’s not there and when she starts back after maternity leave, it’s kinda like she’s starting back at square one. Say she goes on maternity leave again, that’s two setbacks while her male counterpart is still in the field getting promotions and raises. Another thing is that cpmpanies may not want to hire women of childbearing age *because* it’s assumed they’re going to go on mat leave which costs the company money. I don’t know what the solution to that is. I don’t think women deserve raises and promotions when they’re not there, but there shouldn’t be this crazy wage gap either.

Another thing Blake said was that when women go in for a job interview, they often lowball themselves because they have low self-worth whereas men are often full of themselves so they highball. A company is probably going to hire the woman who will work just as hard and do the same job for $10k less than the man. That causes wage disparity.

That one we can fix. We can raise girls to have high self-esteem and self-worth and hopefully close that part of the gap within the next generation or two, but we can’t work on closing that aspect while creating fucking LAWS that widen the gap in other areas like we see happening in the US right now.

There’s this author that I like named Cathrynne M. Valente who wrote these two books called The Orphan’s Tales Volume I and Volume II. They’re these award-winning fairy tales that all flow into one another and they are fucking fantastic. I loved them. In fact, that reminds me, Madison would probably like them. I highly recommend them.

Anyway, she also wrote this post on Live Journal yesterday about the War on Women happening in the US (THAT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HAPPENING DON’T EVEN DENY IT) that’s also well worth reading. If I could make that link flash and blink and appear 10 feet tall, I would, because you have to read it. I cannot stand it when I hear women say things like “I’m not a feminist, but…” or “I don’t call myself a feminist because it’s such a dirty word”. It drives me up the fucking wall. (Hey I wonder if that phrase comes from The Yellow Wallpaper…) The word “feminist” is something that you, as a person, define in your day to day life. It is the RADICAL NOTION that women are people too. I argue this constantly. It’s nothing more, nothing less. Yes, it encompasses other issues, like gender issues or race issues, a lot of the time, but that’s as it should be. Women, gay people, people of colour, people with mental illness, people with physical handicaps etc etc etc, we are all minorities and if we don’t stand up for each other and become a vocal MAJORITY nothing would ever get done and we’d still be stuck in the fucking dark ages.

Blake told me last night that something truly disturbing came out of Madison’s mouth a little while back that is really getting under my skin today as a result of Cathrynne’s post and the fact that, AS A FEMINIST USHERING IN ANOTHER GENERATION OF WOMAN I should be vigilant about things like this, but I guess Blake and Madison were talking about politics or something and Blake asked her what she would do if she were called to vote on a law that was good for the majority of people, but bad or discriminatory for a small amount of people, like gay people. Wanna know her answer? “Well I just wouldn’t vote.” OMG HOLY SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CHILD AND HOW DO I CHANGE IT BEFORE SHE IS OF VOTING AGE? YES I AM YELLING I AM ANGRY. I feel like we’re parenting failures because she said this vile thing. Blake has been talking to her about women’s issues and gender issues and gay rights since she was 4 years old, why is she so…I dunno what the word is, wishy washy maybe? She has opinions but she’s too afraid to voice them. She has strong feelings about right and wrong but she doesn’t assert herself. She has low self-worth. She’s a people-pleaser. I don’t get it. Where have we gone wrong and like I said, how do we fix it?

Don’t get me wrong, I love my daughter and for the most part I love who she is becoming but I wish she was more like me and my mother and even my grandmother who were/are all feminists just by being. It’s like, we have all these strong, mostly independent women generation after generation and then there’s Madison who’s like, the weakest link in this respect. We went backwards. Why? Is it because sexism in her life is not overt? Hell, it’s not even really overt in MY life so it’s not like she sees me having any great feminist battles like my mom and grama had.

For those new to the group, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) has owned a furniture store for most of her life. Not even most of her adult life, she started working in her father’s furniture store when she was a kid and then opened her own when she got married. Back then, women didn’t do this. But you don’t tell a Crittenden woman that she can’t do something (unless she’s Madison).

My mother had me when she was 15 years old. She had to fight to get her high school diploma because in 1979 the school wouldn’t allow her to be pregnant and attend. She had to write her exams in a janitor’s closet. But she still graduated, with the help of a tutor she’s still friends with to this day, and teachers who worked with her, despite the school’s rules and she’s been an independent business-owner since day 1, first with her wallpaper store and now with her art business. She is the most goddamn stubborn, opinionated woman I have ever met and I’m glad I grew up with that.

Feminism was never a topic of discussion in my life growing up, it was just a fact of life. Crittenden men don’t last long. They die, they get divorced, Blake was brave in taking my last name, let me tell ya. It’s the women who are the trunk of our family tree.

So with Madison is her lack of WHATEVER just because she’s been talked at instead of shown by example? Like, for example, the books she reads, we deconstruct those in this house like crazy and point out how the main characters are or aren’t good role models or good feminists. Most of the time they are though so I’m thinking that maybe there’s less sexism in her life so it just doesn’t register with her? And I think that’s a problem. That makes people lazy. That’s how bullshit like what’s happening in Wisconsin happens! How do I convince my daughter that her voice matters and is important?

I am going to be on her after school like a fly on shit now that I know she said what she said because to me that is absolutely unacceptable. I don’t know what I’m going to say but I’m going to be showing her Cathrynne’s post and going from there.

It kinda bugs me that Oprah has never really used her voice and influence to come out and say that, “yes, I am a feminist” and put a newer face on it. And if she did, I must have missed that episode.

Speaking of Oprah, my mom and I go to see her next Monday. My mom posted on Facebook on Sunday (I think) that she watched the Oprah’s Lifeclass Tour that morning when they were doing it from Radio City Music Hall and that by the end of it she was bawling. To be honest, I don’t really like Oprah’s Lifeclass because I find all that so-called inspirational stuff to be really boring and after watching a bit of the St. Louis Lifeclass Tour last night I’m wondering what the hell I signed on for. I like Oprah, I may even love Oprah (how can you not love Oprah? the woman’s a saint), but the rest of them like that Bishop guy and Deepak Chopra (especially Deepak Chopra) are just going to drive me nuts, I’m pretty sure. I am no longer a spiritual person. There is nothing guiding my life except me. I don’t care to hear otherwise. Science saved my life, not prayers (but thanks for them all the same, I mean, while I don’t believe in that stuff I don’t think it can hurt).

The other thing I’m worried about is that it’s going to be a lot like going to the Leafs game and I’m really worried that I won’t be able to do it and I know my mom won’t want to go alone. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to know beforehand if I can handle the crowd or not, I won’t know until we’re there. And my mom’s hardly sympathetic to my situation either, she’s of the “ull yourself up by the bootstraps” kind of person so if I’m having trouble being there, she’s probably not going to be of much help. I really should have gotten 3 tickets so Blake could have come and I’m wondering if maybe there are scalpers there we could pick up a third ticket so he could come. I know he doesn’t want to come with us, he doesn’t want to touch this thing with a 10 foot pole, but I really want to be there and I’m scared I won’t be able to do it without him.

Some feminist role model I am. I can’t even leave my fucking house.

Anyway, so my mom said on Sunday that the Lifeclass Tour, which is what we’re going to, had her in tears so last night we went to Wal*Mart so I could buy waterproof eyeliner and a smaller purse because they aren’t allowing big bags into the event and I currently use a laptop bag to haul my crap around. The purse I got is okay, I guess. It’s pretty…old person bag…but I didn’t really have a whole lot to choose from. It’s plain black faux leather with two pockets at the front that do up with silver buckles and then on the inside there’s a main part and a little zip up pocket for tampons and lipstick. It has visible white stitching. It’s the pursiest purse I’ve ever owned, I think and it’s definitely NOT me at all AND it cost me thirty goddamn dollars. At Wal*Mart! I wanted to get a new wallet too because mine sucks but that’ll have to wait for another paycheque because those were like, $30 too. Highway robbery.

The waterproof eyeliner I got is by Hard Candy, which is a brand I’m not familiar with but they had some pretty neat stuff. Like glitter pencil eyeliner in a million different colours (I got pinky purple, turquoise and silver, mostly for Madison to use next year when she’s in high school) and this neat face illuminator stuff that I didn’t get because I was on a pretty tight budget. I did get a new thing of mascara because I haven’t had a new one in a year and I think you’re supposed to replace that stuff every 6 months or something. HOWEVER, when I got home and opened the package, I realized that I got non-waterproof stuff so I’m going to save the one I had before for Oprah-like ocassions and use the non-waterproof one for every day use. I got Maybelline’s The Falsies mascara in case anyone cares because I really like it and it’s only like, $6 at Wal*Mart. I also got a tube of Maybelline’s new 10 Hour Super Stay Stain Gloss because it looked pretty cool and it really is. The stuff is totally a gloss but it does not budge. I put some on last night when I got home and slept with it on and here it is the next day and it still looks more or less the way it did when I put it on, just faded. Highly recommended if you like a gloss look with the staying power of a lipstick. I think next paycheque I’m going to try their new 24 Hour Lipstick since the gloss stuff is so good.

Hard Candy doesn’t test on animals according to their packaging but I don’t know about Maybelline. I know for a fact that L’Oreal tests on animals and while I really like their products, I’m trying to find alternatives for that reason.

I also got ponytail holders because mine all get lost. I usually use itty bitty ones because my hair’s so thin, like ones that slip on my fingers, but they didn’t have those so I had to get bigger ones. Oddly, Wal*Mart had a really small selection of hairbands which is another thing I went in for because I only own one of those and it’s leopard print and it looks pretty stupid.

In other news, I gained 3 lbs according to Wii Fat last night and I’m not buying that crap about body fluctuations because  I have a stomach flu (again) and I just took the mother of all shits right before I weighed myself so if anything i should have been DOWN some weight, but no, I gained  lbs.  This really sucks because as a family we’ve been tracking calories with MyFitnessPal and it says I’m only supposed to be eating about 1200 calories a day. Then at the end of the day when you’re finished logging, it says “if every day were like today, you’d weigh blah blah blah in 5 weeks” and the majority of the time I’m right at or just a little above the 1200 calorie mark so it’s been saying that I should be 128 lbs or so instead of the 135 I am. I’m supposed to be losing weight with this thing, not gaining. BUT as Blake pointed out, counting calories has slowed my weight gain considerably so that’s a good thing. I’m okay with being 135 lbs, I don’t mind being a healthy weight or even a little bit overweight but I can’t go over that without having a serious hit to my self-esteem and my surgeon really doesn’t want me to gain any more. I guess we’ll see how things go. I’m going to give it another month of calorie counting alone and trying to do better with coming under my 1200 (or at least not going over) and if I gain any more weight aft6er that then I guess I’ll be forced to use the dreadmill. It’s just such a goddamn waste of time, I can’t even stand it. I do not, in the slightest, take even an ounce of pleasure from physical activity. I was probably a sloth in my past life. I liked yoga though, but that’s not really an option for me right now and I never lost any weight doing it.

Okay I think that’s all I’ve got for today (as if that’s not enough) and I think I need to go have breakfast because I’m sick and haven’t eaten yet today and then finish this goddamn painting.

THE END.

“O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.“

Not one single ant on my desk today. GREAT SUCCESS! I WON THE WAR! In your FACE Nature!

Now that that’s out  of the way, I bring you (finally) “Menarche”.

Menarche (pronounced “men-ar-kee”, like “men-o-paws”) is a girl’s first menstrual period, which occurs usually around age 13 (that’s the global average).  This painting was inspired by Madison’s menarche experience and not my own. Mine was very negative because it happened very early (age 9) and I didn’t know what was going on, my Aunt Heather had to tell me and since I didn’t want to tell my parents, she provided the pads (I also used my mom’s o.b. tampons sometimes when I was about 11).  Like many girls who started young, I thought there was something very wrong with me when I noticed the spots of bright red blood in my underbums. And that’s the thing with menarche, usually the blood is bright red as opposed to the brownish blood you get as you age.

Yes, that’s glitter.

With Madison’s menarche, I was ready for it having had such a negative experience with my own. I started telling her about periods when she was about 4 years old and the dialogue continues to this day. When Madison came to me one day last year (luckily it was *before* I went into the hospital, I believe it was April) and told me that she thought she was having her first period, I asked her to come into the bathroom and show me her underwear. Lo and behold, there was bright red blood in the crotch of her panties, so I gave her some disposable pads to use and called Blake to pick up more on his way home from work.

That day, I think I made a friends-only or filtered Live Journal post about the event because somehow my friend Deanna knew about it and she contacted me to ask if she could go halves on a Lunapads teen kit for Madison, which I accepted and which Madison has been using ever since. Lunapads are reusable menstrual pads and I think they’re amazing. Since switching to Lunapads myself, I haven’t had any yeast infections which I used to get all the time.

I love my Lunapads and (not that I’m getting periods these days because of medication/being sick) would never give them up, but Madison came to me last night and asked if she could switch to either disposable pads or tampons and while I didn’t tell her this, I was really disappointed in her decision because I thought with starting her off with Lunapads to begin with, I was starting her off “right” and that she would always be period positive and she IS period positive, she just sees it as a fact of life and deals with it but she finds the Lunapads bulky and she thinks disposable pads would be less bulky. She’s absolutely wrong of course, and I told her that, so that’s when she asked about tampons.

I have less of a problem with disposable tampons than I do with disposable pads because tampons, as long as they don’t have an applicator, are nowhere near as bad for the environment as pads are with their plastic liners. Tampons, essentially, are just cotton. They still take a really long time to break down in the environment, but not nearly as long as a disposable pad. My issue with tampons though, is that they cause irritation and for me, they caused bladder and yeast infections roughly every 3 months, not to mention the fact that they made the pain from endometriosis that much worse.

Madison doesn’t have bad cramps or endometriosis so that’s less of an issue, but I did tell her that if she wanted to use tampons, I would be okay with her using o.b. tampons without an applicator as long as she promised to never flush them down the toilet, that they were disposed of properly and that she promised me that she would be very careful about leaving them in too long. The only caveat was that she would have to buy them herself with her own allowance because we already bought her perfectly good Lunapads, disposable tampons are not a necessity they are a luxury.

Having said that, I did offer her another solution: we would buy her a DivaCup. A DivaCup, being an insertable, has all the benefits of a tampon but none of the risks and none of the environmental impact. It is a cup that you put deep inside your vagina which collects the menstrual blood and then when it’s time to change it, you carefully pull it out, empty the blood in the toilet or sink, rinse it and re-insert it. As an added benefit, the DivaCup has no risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome, or yeast infections and you only have to empty it every 12 hours so she wouldn’t have to empty it at school, whereas with tampons they should be changed every 4 hours. The DivaCup is also only $34.99 whereas a box of tampons is like, $9 or $10 with tax and you may need more than one box per period. I believe the DivaCup is supposed to last 10 years so compare 3 or 4 DivaCups per lifetime vs a lifetime of tampons and financially the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Healthwise the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Environmentally the DivaCup is the obvious winner. Conveniencewise the DivaCup is the obviously winner. Obviously, she chose the DivaCup option and one will be purchased for her soon.

While initially I was disappointed in her wanting to use disposables from now on, I’m proud of her for not being squicked out about a few tablespoons of period blood and choosing the DivaCup instead of disposable anythings. This shows me that I did start her off in the right direction, even if it were a direction I hadn’t really anticipated. (I didn’t think she’d be comfortable with insertables for quite a while. She’s turning 14 in May.)

So that was last night’s period conversation with Madison. She didn’t want me to name this painting “Madison’s Menarche” but she said I could post all that I just did just to explain why I painted it the way I did. I just wanted it to be bright and shiny and sparkly and happy and “new” feeling, like the beginning of a brand new woman should be.

“Menarche” will be available for sale on my site soon.

Like I’m pretty sure I mentioned earlier in the making of this painting, it’s actually one in a pair but I haven’t even started working on the other one yet so there won’t be pics of it for quite a while. As I also think I said before, it’s going to involve crackle paste though, which I’ve never used before and I’m kind of geeked about.

In other art news, yesterday I edited video I took of me drawing a few weeks ago but I don’t really like how it turned out. The angle is all wrong. The reason I bothered editing it is to show that taping myself drawing or painting “right side up” is pretty much impossible because with that angle, you can’t see what I’m doing because I’m right handed. The only way I could show you how I draw or paint from the left side is if I had the camera around my neck because I work sideways or at a sideways angle all the time and to work straight up and down would feel completely unnatural to me and I doubt I could do it. Anyway, here’s the video:

I kinda think I like making process videos. It’s interesting for me to watch myself because I don’t even really think about what I do, I just do it. I also think, maybe, that a person might be more likely to buy a painting if they can see the process by which it was made. Do you think that might be true too? That’s another reason why I was taking pictures of myself holding finished paintings (which I forgot to do with “Menarche”, oops), it’s like…proof that I made it or something, like a signature. Especially since 1/4 of the time I make something, I forget to sign my name before varnishing and then it’s too late.

I was really good at advertising and marketing when I was in college, probably at the top, or pretty damn close to the top of my class. The guy who thought he was at the top had like, this fucked up rivalry with me that always annoyed me because I’m not really a competitive person, my philosophy is that we’re all in this together and the more we get together, together, together, the more we get together the happier we’ll be. Anyway, he took me out for breakfast this one time and was like “how come you can never come to class yet be so damn good?” and the only answer I had was – well first, that I actually wasn’t that good – that it might just be instinct. The problem though, is that I have extremely low self-esteem with most things, my own work in particular, and I find it incredibly difficult to market myself.  And then I think, because I have such low self-esteem probably, that since I’m unable to market myself well, maybe I wasn’t so great in college either. But then I think of that breakfast and think that no, I’m just crazy and have low self-esteem. I’m also on a lot of drugs and haven’t flexed my advertising muscle in well over a decade so I’m just not the shark I once was. In fact, I can’t remember a single thing from college because I just stopped caring about advertising all together. I know good when I see it and I can make good when I want to, but don’t ask me what the tenets of marketing are because all you’d get from me is a blank stare because that shit’s boring. Instinct is where it’s at.

Anyway…

Today was a dressing change day and I took a pic of my wound for you guys since I haven’t done that since February:

As you can see, there are only 3 little areas left to heal, the two smaller ones are about the size of dimes and the middle part is about the size of a toonie. After those spots are healed, I’m still probably going to have to have a covering over the scar tissue because it’s brand new tissue and as a result it’s very very fragile. Even having it brushing against my clothing would likely reopen the wound.

And I think that’s really all I had to say in this update. Madison got her grad dress today and it is absolutely gorgeous but she’s forbidden me from showing you pictures of it and the only other thing I wanted to share was this article about Madonna’s Truth or Dare, which is out on Blu Ray as of yesterday I believe and which also happens to be on my wishlist if any generous third parties were interested in buying it for me. :o)

That’s all the poop that’s fit to scoop, enjoy the video and have a wonderful evening!

PS. My Oprah tickets came today! That’s the other thing I meant to mention! On the back of them it says you can’t bring STICKS! GLAD I READ THE BACK! BOY WOULD MY FACE HAVE BEEN RED IF I’D HAVE BROUGHT MY STICK!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support! 

Ugh. My head hurts and I feel sick. All weekend I was sick as a dog with massive diarrhea and just general weakness and ickiness and all the rest that comes with stomach flus (flues?). That’s not why I feel like crap right now though. I feel like crap now because I just ate an assorted sub from Mr. Sub and sometimes when I eat those I feel sick afterward. I get them because for a small one, it’s only 290 calories which ain’t too shabby for a lunch. They *are* high in salt though so I try not to get them very often because that’s not good for my kidneys. I did get a root beer to go with it but that was like, almost 300 calories so I opted not to drink it and I’ll give it to the kids as a treat after school.

Sunday was Wild Rumpus Day. I felt like crap so I didn’t do any rumpussing but I did wear my fluffy horns all day and Blake and the kids dressed up and went a-rumpussing in the field across the road from our house. They took Hoover Dog with them and Lucky whined and cried the whole time they were gone.

Here are some pics of Blake and the kids with their ears on:

Madison is wearing a kitty cat hat that Chali made, Blake is wearing his uncle John’s hat with ears he cut off of a stuffed horse and Wes is wearing the wolf hat I got him for Xmas.

He’s so handsome. I just want to fuck the stuffing right out of his guts.

While they were rumpussing, I made a painting. Actually, I started the painting Friday night but didn’t finish it until Sunday. It’s a self-portrait and if you know me at all, it should be pretty self-explanatory.

It is 12 x 16 inches, acrylic and cardboard on watercolour paper.
You can have it for $300, just e-mail me if interested.
More pictures can be found HERE.

I made a video of the making of this painting but I’ve got to admit, it’s pretty terrible. Blake says it’s fine but I think it goes too fast and since it took me 4 hours to save the damn thing, I didn’t want to go back and slow it down further. Movie Maker is an awful program, I’ve decided. Is there anything out there that’s better? (Don’t say iMovie, I use a PC.) When I was working on editing the video, I thought I was missing huge chunks of video because I guess in preview mode, like while you’re working on something, it only shows you SOME of the video. All day I was pissed off because I thought the Flips I was using to make it had failed to record huge chunks of time when in fact it was this awful program not showing me everything. I didn’t realize this was happening until I reviewed the saved video a few minutes ago.

I wish I had an actual video camera or at least an SLR that recorded video. It was really hard to record myself painting because the Flips only have 1 hour and 45 minute – 2 hour batteries (one has an hour & 45 min, the other is 2 hours) and they take that long to charge so I would have to take pretty long breaks while the Flips recharged (I wonder A) if you can use regular rechargeable batteries in them and B) how big their hard drives are) and that really cramped my style. My digital camera only takes 10 minute clips so that was out of the question and if I had the Digital Rebel that takes video (which is on my wishlist *cough*), I could just leave it set up on my desk and turn it off if I needed a break or needed to wait for paint to dry or whatever and recharging batteries wouldn’t be such a hassle. I have a feeling that the hard drives on the Flips are pretty small since they’re only designed to take an hour and a half’s worth of video. If I had the new Rebel that wouldn’t be a problem because I’d have a 32 gig memory card which could fit the entire video.

Anyway, here’s my shitty attempt at a process video:

In other news, this Mexican drug lord thanked all the presidents of my lifetime for his billions of dollars due to the “war on drugs”. He’s responsible for about 30,000 deaths in Mexico since 2006 (I believe was the statistic), but he is the 701st richest man on Earth, according to Forbes magazine. Thanks to Zombie Bunny for the link. If this isn’t proof that the whole “war on drugs” thing is a fucking sham, nothing is. I don’t know if I think *everything* should be legal, because where do you draw the line and who’s to say Xanax isn’t recreational for some people? Big pharma, like them or not, need prescription money to make medical breakthroughs.

Anyway…I have nothing else to say and it’s pretty much my bedtime, so hopefully you like the video and if you do, maybe I’ll do more. (But I think if I do more, I’ll have to use licence-free music. Anyone have any leads on what I could use?)

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support! 

This is so embarrassing and I cannot even believe I did it.

Y’know how yesterday I wrote a few paragraphs about what “Me, too.” was all about? And y’know how I’ve been writing about “Me, too.” for the last couple of weeks?

Well, my friend Raya commented on that painting in Live Journal, here, and when I saw her write “Me too” (no comma), I thought, “that’s not right, it’s supposed to be me-comma-TWO-period,” and that’s when I realized I’d been writing it as “too” as well when it’s supposed to be “TWO”!

It’s supposed to be conversational, like, “how many miscarriages have you had?” and the answer is, “Me, two.” But it has a double meaning to also mean “me too”.

And I cannot even believe I did that. I just spaced hardcore for like, two damn weeks. On my own damn painting. Even my notes have it the right way:

So there ya go. I’m apparently a bimbo. I’ve corrected the mistake on the page for “Me, two.” on my site but I’m not going to go back and change all the posts where I reference it because I’m not sure I’d be able to find them all. Like I said, I am so embarrassed. That’s so stupid.

THE END.

I’m waiting for paint to dry. Story of my fricken life. Seriously.

My first 30 x 30 inch piece is pretty much finished, it just needs to dry. I also have to paint the sides and then varnish it, but after that, it’s completely finished. This afternoon I left the came running while I painted and uploaded all the pics to Camwhores. Here are a few of them:

(Me mixing glitter.)

You can tell in this pic where my old hair is and where my new hair is growing in.
My new hair is about to the middle of my ears.

So while I was painting this afternoon, I was thinking about what Silver said. I think she’s right that once the image I create leaves my space and goes out into the public, I lose control of it and I need to be okay with that. I’m not talking about copyright or anything like that, I’m talking about the meaning inferred. I can’t control what people read into what I create, which should be a “no duh” thing but it never occurred to me until recently that people may be inferring things into what I create that I never intended. I thought the incident with my friend and the 4 page long, intellectual bullshit e-mail was an isolated incident.

Don’t get me wrong here: I *accept* that this is what happens. That doesn’t mean I like it. I think intellectualizing pretty girls is stupid. Then again, I think intellectualizing most things is stupid and I do think, absolutely, that when you intellectualize a painting, you run the risk of being WRONG.

Example #1: The Scream by Edvard Munch. This whole section exists because there are right and wrong theories. I am not qualified to theorize on what Munch was thinking about or trying to convey in that painting. HOWEVER, as Charlie (woodoo24) said in this post, I *can* infer what it means TO ME. MsAnnaBanana in the same post actually illustrated that point better and made me understand the difference between the two.

Example #2: Dora Maar au Chat by Pablo Picasso. “The most embellished and symbolic element of the sitter’s wardrobe in this picture is her hat, Maar’s most famous accessory and signifier of her involvement in the Surrealist movement. Ceremoniously placed atop her head like a crown, it is festooned with colourful plumes and outlined with a band of vibrant red. Larger than life, an impression enhanced by her vibrant body that cannot be confined by the boundaries of the chair, Maar looms in this picture like a pagan goddess seated on her throne.” If someone said “I think her hat and the black cat represent that Picasso thought she was a witch,” THAT PERSON WOULD BE WRONG!!!! Therefore, it is absolutely possible to infer meaning to a painting that is WRONG and not what the artist intended at all. PEOPLE DO IT ALL THE TIME.  Maybe, like the article said, he had her wearing a hat because she wore hats all the time. Maybe things just are what they are. That’s all I’m saying. We don’t have to intellectualize everything an artist does. As they say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Think whatever you want, go to town, but my girls are just pretty girls made to enchant children. *shrug*

With “Me, too.” I think my intent is pretty obvious. The title implies that I, too, like a lot of women, have had miscarriages. And then the picture itself illustrates that. The glowy effect of the uterus is like…well the intent was to kind of give the impression that the twins would be bathed in white light and would go to Heaven. I realize there’s no such thing as Heaven and in case I’ve never made it entirely clear, I’m a pretty determined atheist, but I think most women, deep down, whether they’re an atheist or not, wants to believe that the soul (or souls) inside them either go to a better place or that they “recycle” or reincarnate. I don’t believe in an afterlife per se, but I do believe in human energy and I do believe that the energy that animates us leaves our bodies when we die and goes into the collective unconscious and recycles into new people. I don’t think there’s some great, intelligent creator pulling the strings and orchestrating this whole thing, I just think it’s a natural process. Death is a natural process. I came close to giving the twins angel wings but I didn’t want it to seem too biblical. I made the background a nice aqua blue to say that, even though crappy things happen sometimes and they’re really painful, the sun still shines and there are days where there’s not a cloud in the sky.

Also while I was painting it, I was thinking that in books, bad things usually happen on “dark and stormy nights” when in reality, bad things happen on nice, sunny days too. Probably more often than not.

Anyway, I think all of that is really really obvious. And if it wasn’t then I did a really shitty job. Since we’re all sharing our feelings, I wonder what YOU thought of “Me, too.”? What did YOU get from it? Was I successful? Fucking critique me then, I’d love to hear it.

I know Jeck didn’t like the blue background because he thought there was too much negative space happening. What else ya got?

I’m also curious about this painting. It’s called “Beside Herself” and I painted it in…hmmm, I want to say 2003? What do you see here?

This is the next painting I’m going to put up for sale, I think. Another one I think I’m planning to put up is the one in my Live Journal avatar in this post. It seems pretty basic, a flower right? But it’s in a sunbeam and in person, if you look very carefully, the sunbeam has very fine glitter, like finer than actual glitter because it’s literally like, particles of metallic paint meant to convey that light itself is made up of particles. I suppose that one’s not as obvious as the rest of them because you have to look at it very carefully to see the particles but it’s cool once you see them.

I’m not putting any of my new paintings up on Etsy anymore because I don’t think they really fit in there. I might try putting “Camp Tampon” up on eBay just to see what happens. I have no illusions of actually selling it there but it’ll be interesting to see if anyone follows the listing to my site. Free-ish advertising, right? But the thing is though, that I’ve never really used eBay and I don’t know how to make a listing look nice. I’ve had an account since the dawn of time and I’ve bought and sold like, maybe 15 things there in the last 10 or 11 years but I still don’t really know how to use the site. When I buy things, I use the “Buy It Now” button every single time and I haven’t sold anything in like, a decade, so I’m not even sure how it works anymore. I guess I’ll figure it out.

So I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned her before but I keep getting sucked into the wormhole that is Gwenn Seemel’s blog. She blogs about art and she like, links to herself a lot all the time so you get caught clicking and clicking and clicking and it never seems to end. Right now I have this vlog, about how there are three kinds of artists and this article about how a masters of fine arts doesn’t necessarily make an artist queued up to read once I’m finished this post. You guys should check her out. Sometimes she kinda talks out her ass and is kind of snobby and elitist, but other times I think she’s absolutely brilliant and dead on. She also has endometriosis like I do so she blogs about that from time to time too and despite not seeing eye to eye with her on a lot of things, I really am a big fan of her portraits. I especially like “You Ain’t Nothing But An American Citizen” from her Apple Pie series.

Holy shit! Breaking news! Canada’s not going to be making pennies anymore! That’s just crazy!

And with that, I think I’m off to go draw another giant uterus and play with crackle paste. Smile! Tomorrow’s Friday!

~*PLEASE DONATE SO I CAN GO TO ART CAMP!*~
I’m 72% toward my goal and could really use your support! 

PS. This is a great comment by Charlie.

Blake is on the phone right now; a meeting for work. I have to be super quiet but all I want to do is blare A Tribe Called Red and glitter my uterus. You heard me. GLITTER MY UTERUS. Then I have to glitter some BLOOD for my EXTRA SPECIAL, ONE-OF-A-KIND PAINTING. WHY AM I TYPING IN CAPS?

But seriously, I really want you guys to listen to Electric Pow Wow by A Tribe Called Red. Here’s the link again. Listen. They combine pow wow music with fucking dubstep or whatever and the result is nothing short of brilliant. Plus they’re Canadian so they’re extra super awesome.

So this painting I’m working on is coming along fucking fabulously. All I have left to do is glitter the blood (I’m using fine glitter for the blood and flaky glitter for the clots haha), sign my name, paint the sides, slap on some varnish and she’s done. BUUUUUUUUUUUT – and this is going to take an awful lot of effort on my part – since it’s part of a pair, I don’t want to show you guys until both of the paintings are finished and all I have done on the other one is a basecoat so far. If I had more room to work, I could do them both at the same time, but I don’t have the space for two 30 x 30 inch wood panels. Right now my work surface is my coffee table and as it is, when I’m done glittering the blood, I’m going to be moving the one painting onto the treadmill (which is messed up, more on that in a bit) and then using the coffee table for the other. ALTHOUGH, now that I think about it, I may be able to use my easel for the one I haven’t started yet. I’m not sure how this crackle paste stuff works, if it’s really good and pasty I could use it with the painting being upright but if it’s liquidy in any way, it’ll run and I can’t have a runny, cracky uterus. Realistically though, I’m not sure I can draw a uterus upright. I work with stuff vertically and I don’t know if I’ll be able to change perspective. I kinda don’t think so. (I have no idea how people paint upright. It feels so unnatural to me.)

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before or not but when I was reading about Jackson Pollock, Wikipedia said that he was unique in that he used his whole body to paint because his canvas was on the floor and he could get at from multiple angles. I do that too. My leg muscles ache when I’m finished painting for the day because I’m squatting and my back hurts because I’m bent over the canvas/panel. I’ve dislocated two toes from squatting to do the tops of these big pieces. It’s hard to explain. Maybe when I start the other painting, I’ll do a process video. I’m not sure how to edit a video, though, which is why I’ve never tried doing a process video before. That’s at least a day away though, the lighting in here sucks during the evening, which is when I would be starting the second one. I’ll at least think about doing it, I guess. Like I said, my main worry is editing. I have no idea how to do it. I would need to add multiple segments together and cut the ends off them, speed the video up, mute it and I guess add music.

Another thing I was thinking of maybe doing was doing streaming video of me painting but I’m nervous about that for a couple of reasons: 1) trolls, 2) I don’t know where to do it. Also I don’t think I’d be a very good hostess. My friend Belinda used to do streaming while she painted and I liked to watch her but she’s a chatty person and would talk to us while she painted. I don’t think I could do that, plus my computer’s on the other side of the room so I wouldn’t be able to see the chat.  SO I’m thinking maybe streaming would be a bad idea. What do you guys think? And if I did it, where should I do it? (Don’t stay Stickam. I hate Stickam. MFC?)

~*GROCERY STORE & DINNER BREAK*~

We just got finished with having dinner. I hate about 1/4 of my steak and about  cups of green beans with butter. Now I’m eating 2o0 calories worth of sour cream & onion Crispers, which are only 10% of your daily intake of sodium. I’m 500mg below what a person’s daily average should be (2500). YAY ME. I’ve noticed that sour cream & onion flavoured things are lower in sodium than other flavours of things. Like mini rice cakes. Cheddar cheese ones are like 8% of your sodium per day and sour cream & onion is only like, 4% or something like that. I wonder why that is? Also, who knew I liked rice cakes?

While we were putting away the groceries, I took pictures of the dogs who knew there was food around:

Hoover Dog.

Lucky Dog.

Blake also bought me pink daisies, behold!

And now I’ve completely forgotten what else I was going to say in this post…oh yeah, the treadmill. Or as I like to call it, the dreadmill. The track is fucked up, like when Blake uses it, the track goes off to one side like as if one side’s stretched longer than then other or something. We got the extended warranty so they can come and fix it, it’s just a matter of actually getting it done.

Blake and Wes have started geocaching. There are a surprising amount of caches in our town and so far they’ve found two of them. I have no interest in finsing caches, but Blake said I could be involved in the making of them which I’m a little bit excited about.

I think this Sunday, which is one of my two days off, we’re going to go to Stouffville to get some fucking amazing homemade Ukrainian pierogies from the Sales Barns and then possibly Stouffville Pizza too because I just want them dammit and if I’m gonna blow my diet one day, I might as well DO IT. I just wanna go. Get food. Come home. Eat. And eat some more. And then do some more eating. And while I’m at it, I might as well eat.

And then guess what else is on Sunday? GUESS GUESS GUESS!!! I bet you guessed it!!! GAME OF FUCKING THRONES, PEOPLE!!! I’m only like, 1/4 of the way through A Clash of Kings though and there’s not a chance in hell I’ll be done before the season premiere. That said, however, Larissa on Facebook posted this and I thought it was awesome so I’m sharing it with you now.

And I think that’s all I have to say for now. I think I’m going to go read my book for a bit while my glitter dries, eat my Crispers, glitter my blood and go to bed. I wish you a happy tomorrow and sweet dreams whenever you get there. Truly.

PS. I got my US postage stamps from Zazzle for The 4 x 6 Exchange and they look awesome! Unfortunately we need $1.50 US postage for each envelope and I only got 45 cent stamps (and not enough for all of us + my mom’s 2 entries) so we’re going to have to get an International Reply Coupon for each one anyway meaning that there was really no point in me wasting my money to get the cool stamps of my work from Zazzle. The good news about that though is that I got to see Zazzle’s quality and I can say without a moment’s hesitation that I’m pretty sure everything I made in my Zazzle shop will print beautifully so GO TO TOWN.

PPS. Silver over at Camwhores who is an artist and gallery owner had some interesting things to say about my art crisis post from the yesterday. You should check it out. Basically she thinks I should stop giving a shit what other people think of my art.

Last night we went to Staples to buy Madison a 3-fold science project folder thing and Blake thought it would be a good idea to buy me a new chair because I’ve needed one for quite a while. Years.

My old chair, pictured above, was found in the garbage in 1997 and my ex welded the broken parts back together at work. I remember it was 1997 because that’s when I got my first computer and thus, needed a computer chair.

It was worn out when I got it of course, but I loved it and over the course of a decade and a half it got pretty…gross. Stains everywhere – to match the ones it came with – a hole in the seat, the arms covered in so much paint that they became hard and cracked. Obviously it was time to retire the old thing.

I like my new chair, though. It allows me to sit cross-legged, which I couldn’t do in my old chair, but I feel like I have to be careful with this one. Not get paint on it. I’m not sure that’s even possible, to be perfectly honest, but I guess I’ll try.

Right now Blake and Wes are out at Curry’s spending the rest of my paycheque. Nice, hardcover sketchbooks are on sale, 2/$10 so Blake’s getting a pair for me and Madison’s getting a pair too, for Easter. Then I’m getting another 30 x 30 inch wood panel for another uterus and then some paint for it from Michael’s and then my paycheque is GONE. I can maybe afford a pack of Fizzy Skittles and that’s like, IT. :o(

I was about to write “sucks to be me” at the end of that paragraph, but it doesn’t suck to be me. more than 3/4 of the world would be over the moon to be me. I have shelter, food, a bathroom, clean water etc. I’m extremely fortunate to live where and how I do and I need to remember that more often.  We all probably do.

Last night I was blog-hopping and I started at the Squam blog and kinda went from there and I thought it was kind of funny how most of the blogs I visited were all trying to figure themselves out. I can’t even think of an example off the top of my head and I can’t go back to their blogs because I didn’t bookmark any of them, plus I don’t want to call anyone out specifically, but they were all trying to be deep and like, I dunno, just deep I guess. And here I am, blogging about paint. Or a chair. Or glitter paper. Or any number of absolutely trivial things.

But the thing is, I think I’ve got myself pretty figured out for the most part. I did all that soul searching and trying to figure out why I do the things I do and all that crap YEARS ago and I heard someone once one call that “mental masturbation” which I kind of agree with, but reading these blogs made me wonder if that’s what people want to read in blogs these days. I know they did back when I was doing it a long frickin’ time ago and maybe that’s why so few people read this anymore, because I don’t spill my guts out the way I used to. Honestly though? I just got bored of that. I mean, I still do it to some degree but nowhere near the way I used to.

Not that I care if people read this, not like I ever did, I just find it curious how my readership has changed over the years and how it continues to change. And how it’s changing again, right now. For a while there, I had the Suzi Blu/art journalers reading along but I think I scared them away when I got sick and now I know they’re not coming back when I’m painting miscarriages on canvas. I don’t see myself being in the pages of Somerset Studio any time soon, thank GOD. Not that I expect to be on the cover of Juxtapoz any time soon either…

I’m babbling. That’s okay.

As I said, right now Blake’s out getting me art supplies and I’m a little worried that I keep spending ALL my money on art supplies for art that I know will never end up anywhere but on my own living room walls. The utilitarian side of me is really concerned about this. I’m also worried that the art I’m doing now, not being as safe and as buyer friendly as my girls, is….I’m afraid that my mom won’t approve. I normally don’t give a flying fuck what people think of me, for the most part, but it felt good when I was doing my girls, doing art that my mom approved of and that her friends could appreciate. I think that’s a large part of why I did them for so long, that and mental safety.

I cannot tell you how fulfilling it feels to have gotten “Me, too.” out of my head and into reality. Finally! And to have it look almost exactly as I saw it in my head. It’s like having a toothache and the relief of finally having it pulled. Now, I can’t say I’m completely happy with “Me, too.” and I can’t exactly call it my greatest masterpiece, but I do feel a great deal of relief that I don’t have this pressure anymore, pressure that I put on myself, to get it done and out of my brain. Ideas plague me. They keep me awake at night, laying in bed working out the technical logistics of how to make an image work. Like how to use crackle paste to convey the idea of barrenness, which I’m doing in the painting I’m working on now. I don’t want to tell you the ideas for the two wood panels (not that any of you care anyway)  but I think that they are going to be amazing.

My big worry with them though is that they’re both pretty big, 30 x 30 inches and they’re meant to be a set. Not a diptych but definitely a pair, but the amount I want for each of them, when put as a set, make them pretty goddamn expensive. A little unobtainable. But I think they’re worth that and I wouldn’t sell them for anything less (as long as they come out as well as they look in my head).

Blake says I shouldn’t worry about stuff like that and I should just paint, but I’m spending my entire paycheque on this stuff, I have zero money left over after supplies, I have to worry about this stuff. But then Blake says, “so say you’re not going to sell any of these, don’t you have to get it out anyway?” and I guess the answer to that is a definite “yes”. I hate sounding cliche or like an “artiste” but I really don;t have much of a choice in the matter with these. With my girls, I would sit down and think “what can I create today?” and start pulling out materials and then I’d get inspired by the materials and that’s how I’d create them. With this series of paintings, which really needs a name now that I think about it, I wake up with the ideas or they just pop into my head when I’m trying to fall asleep. Then as I think about them some more and work them out in my head, they grow larger and clearer and then suddenly, like today, they’re totally in focus and it’s like I have to look around them to see anything else.

I would kill to not have to be working right now and painting instead. There is so much work to do on these wood panels and I feel a little overwhelmed. I know I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, I know I’m capable of doing this, it’s just daunting. I wish I had a bigger studio space (although I’m grateful for the space I have now) and I wish I had assistants like Damien Hirst, who could do my basecoating for me while I work. Maybe I can convince Blake to help me with that when he gets back. Wes could help too and they could bond or something (which is what they’re doing now).

I’ve gotta say, now that I’ve worked out the details of these next two paintings, I’m more excited about them than I was for “Me, too.“. I think these ones are going to be better realized, a more concrete idea and even though I have no idea what to do with them once I’m finished, at least they’re on wood panels so there’s not a lot of damage that can be done to them in this house. The worst thing that could happen to them is they get covered in dog hair.

Anyway, I think I’m going to go sketch for a while in between e-mails. Sorry for babbling your ear off. Have a great weekend. :o)

So, I’m finishing up the 30 x 36 inch canvas. I’m just doing watercolour work on it right now, then there’s one layer of paint left to do on the sides and then a coat or two of Krylon and then it’s finished.  But for the watercolour layers, of which there are many, I use a very specific set of tools that I thought you guys might get a kick out of. Here they are:

Do they look familiar? Anyone who’s ever had Sea-Monkeys should recognize these. They’re Aqua Leashes! You use these to remove dead Sea-Monkeys and to suck up individual live ones to, I dunno, put in a container and look at or whatever. I use them as eye droppers because that’s what I had and I’ve just never bothered to buy an actual eye dropper because why waste the money when these work so well and there’s nothing wrong with them?

So there ya go, those are my high tech tools of the trade.

In other news, I just Wii Fatted myself and I am now 132 lbs which is technically obese. I started using a calorie counting app on my phone yesterday after estimating (correctly) what my weight was and I’ve been using the treadmill every other day so I figure soon I’ll shed about 10 lbs and be where I want to be. No big deal. Plus, as Blake says, there’s at least 5 lbs of fluid in my abdomen from the pseudocysts so it’s not all me. BUT some of it’s me and I need to change that so I’m a-tryin’.

Okay, I’m tired as hell so I’m going to go to sleep and finish this post later…

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HERE I AM NOW! FRESH AS A DAISY! :o) :o) :o)

This part of painting is SO BORING because I have to sit here and wait for water to evaporate. Normally I’d blow dry the watercolour paint to speed up this process but the painting is in a place where my blow dryer won’t reach so I can’t do that and I’m left to the forces of nature. This is ANNOYING AS SHIT but there’s nothing I can do about it. In the meantime, I guess I’ll work on the next painting? Not that I have the room for it or anything. The next one is going to be 12 x 24, I think, and it’s going to be vertical.

And Blake just handed me an extension cord because he’s SMRT so I’m gonna wrap up this pointless post and get t0 work.

ENJOY THE DAY!

PS. We ordered the invitations for our anniversary dinner and nailed down the guestlist for the afterparty! There are going to be over 20 people in my teeny tiny little house! Where everyone’s going to sit I have no idea!

I woke up to a very sad scene. :o( My dogs had killed a bunny in the backyard. I cried a little bit and then I went outside to take care of it. And of course take pictures. Here it is:

Poor thing. :o(

I’m told by the neighbours that it didn’t suffer but still, my dogs are dickheads. I can’t believe they even caught it though, my dogs are fat, lazy bastards and bunnies are pretty speedy little things. Maybe it was sick. (They say a cat can’t catch a healthy bird, so maybe the same goes for dogs and bunnies?) Oh well. Nothing can be done about it now. I grossed Madison out by picking it up with my bare hands and putting it in the garbage bag. I don’t see the difference between picking up a fresh carcass and picking up a live bunny, personally.

This morning Blake made me “the tomato thing” that I love so much because I’m trying to eat big breakfasts/lunches and have my meals and snacks get smaller as the day goes on because that’s what my doctor recommended. One of my Twitter friends asked about “the tomato thing” so here’s the recipe (it’s a Jamie Oliver recipe from “Jamie’s Food Revolution“, which I highly recommend because it’s awesome & we use it a lot):

Cherry Tomato Sauce With Fresh Pasta

1.5 pints of grape or cherry tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic
a small bunch of fresh basil (we buy the frozen cubes and use 2 of them)
1 lb of fresh lasagne
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
2 pats of butter
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
4 ounces of Parmesan cheese

Cut the tomatoes into halves or quarters. Peel and slice the garlic. Pick the basil leaves off the stalks and put them to the side. Finely chop the stalks. Cut the lasagne sheets into 3 or 4 long strips and put to one side. Grate the Parmesan.

 Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil. Put a large frying pan over medium heat and add a couple of lugs of olive oil and the garlic. Add the butter and let it melt. When the garlic starts to brown, add the tomatoes. Give everything a good stir, then add the basil stalks and half the leaves. Add the vinegar and season with salt and pepper. Drop your fresh pasta strips into the pan of boiling water and cook for 3 minutes. Drain in a colander over a large bowl, reserving some of the cooking water. Add the pasta to the frying pan with a splash of the cooking water and half the Parmesan. Give it a good stir. Taste and add a little more salt and pepper if you think it needs it.

Sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan and the basil leaves, tearing any large ones up.

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This stuff is sex on a plate, I could – and have – eat it every day if it wasn’t so carb-o-licious. Definitely one of my favourite  meals.

All I’ve been doing this week is working on my 30 x 36 inch painting. I don’t really want to talk about it though. Weird right? Normally I can’t keep a secret to save my life and this isn’t really a secret exactly, it’s just that I don’t want to talk about it quite yet. It’s really no big deal, honestly, it’s just jumping back into where I was in 2006 with both feet.

If you recall, it was in 2006 that I had my psychotic break and created “Camp Tampon“. But what I was doing right before that was, I think, a lot more interesting than cute girls on sparkly backgrounds. And I’ve kinda decided not to do cute girls on sparkly backgrounds anymore. I figure if you want those, the ones I did before are available on Etsy and Zazzle and those are good enough. Maybe every now and then I’ll add a new design for Zazzle but I’m not going to do girls exclusively from now on. They just don’t interest me as much as they used to.

I’m still going to do the colouring book, I’m just going to take my sweet ass time with it and just work on it in my spare time rather than making it a full-time job.

My friends The Perlorian Brothers linked an article about Damien Hirst on Twitter last weekend and I started reading about him. I’d heard his name before but didn’t really know who he was and the more I read, the more obsessed I became and the more links I clicked. I just don’t understand why the art world singled him out and said “yes, we are going to make you, Damien, the richest artist in the history of the world” when there are so many more deserving artists out there. (I don’t know of any because I don’t really follow the whole art world but I’m sure there are better out there because Hirst didn’t really impress me all that much.) I guess suspending a shark in a tank of formaldehyde is sort of interesting but wouldn’t it smell? Why would you want that in your house?

I got clicking around on Hirst’s Wiki page and stumbled upon the piece “An Oak Tree“, which Blake thinks is stupid but I think it’s kinda genius.

I just don’t understand how artists can make a living from their art. The concept completely baffles me. Like, how do you make enough money to pay rent and eat and stuff? Let alone make enough to go on holidays or travel or make appearances at plavces and stuff like that. I know how Hirst did it but I mean like, more normal artists. It takes me like, 2 weeks to make one painting! I could never make a living from them!

I have so many paintings planned right now, it’s ridiculous. They’re just popping out of my brain and I can’t even get them on paper fast enough. For the next one I actually need a 24 x 30 inch or maybe a 24 x 36 inch wood panel, which is going to run me about $30 + shipping which I totally don’t even have. I already spent my entire paycheque last week  on the piece I’m working on now. This art shit is expensive! I mean, with my girls it’s easier because I already have a stockpile of stuff for them but these are different because they’re large pieces so I need large substrates and I just don’t have those “in stock” because I’ve never needed them before. Plus, I don’t have anywhere to store them to keep them “in stock” because my house is so friggin’ tiny.

Oh well, as per usual I just have to figure it out.

Right now I’m just focused on the work. Everything else is optional or a bonus or whatever. I just want to plow through all these ideas in my brain and create art that *I* want to see. To hell with everyone else. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it, y’know?

When I went nuts, I was terrified of using my imagination because psychosis was so much like being stuck in my own imagination, which is a scary place to be, believe me. SO that was in 2006 and it wouldn’t be until 2008 when I would use my imagination again and that was when I took Suzi Blu’s class and learned how to make my girls. But my girls were safe and not at all what I would normally do if I weren’t so scared of my own mind.

So when I “went there” last week and started working on this 30 x 36 inch piece, I got really scared that I was manic and about to lose my mind again. I was crying daily, afraid that if I went nuts that I’d lose my job again, but still working on the piece while Blake assured me that I was okay and that I needed to trust the medication.

I think I kissed mania right on the lips though. I’m almost sure of it. I’m okay now and it’s passed, but I wasn’t sleeping, which is a bad sign and I was just having strange thoughts that I can’t really explain. Like, one day I thought it would be a hilarious idea to sit the kids down and tell them we were getting a divorce but then tell them later that I was kidding. I didn’t DO it. I just thought, for a brief minute, that it would be extremely funny to do this. That’s not a good sign.

But like I said, it passed and now I’m 99% sure I’m okay.

Yesterday Blake and I made a decision on the gardens. We’re not going to do the front yard this year (for those new to the fold, my front “lawn” was replaced with a wildflower garden in 2006) and in fact, we’re going to plant grass seed instead. The reason for this is because if I have surgery in the spring, I won’t be able to take care of it and Blake & the kids don’t want to take care of it for me. Plus we don’t plan on living here much longer and the house will be easier to sell with a lawn. BUT we are going to do veggies in the back yard because they’re easier to take care of, they have the added benefit of being food and it’s a much smaller garden.

We don’t have any money right now but I hope to buy seeds sometime very soon so I can start them inside and have healthy plants to plant in the spring.

Last year Ruggedo got me these awesome upside-down hanging things that you plant cucumbers or tomatoes in and they were pretty neat. They didn’t produce very much but we’re going to try them again this year with tomatoes instead of cucumbers to see what happens. I think tomatoes will do better, personally.

And I think that’s all I’ve got in me today. I’m kinda feeling “blah”. I decided not to go to the Game of Thrones exhibition   today in order to stay home and paint on my day off. I just honestly do not even care. I like the show, but I’m not a fanatic and props and stuff don’t really excite me. I know it was my idea to go but really, I was just looking for something cheap/free for Blake and I to do together and he doesn’t care if I go or not so I’m just not going to go.

So that’s that.

Anyway, happy Sunday! I hope you aren’t too hung over this morning! *bashes cymbals together*

PS. Blake and I finalized our guestlist for our anniversary party last night and we’re going to order the invitations soon soon soon. I’m so excited!

PPS. “Indigo Ocean” is now on my site and ready for sale!

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