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!
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 MyFitnessPaland 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.
I’m listening to Adele’s album 21 which I’ve had for a long time but never really listened to in its entirety until today. I’ve gotta say, it’s leaving me less than inspired. This is old fogey music. American Idol crap. I like “Rolling in the Deep” of course and I like whatever the second song on the album is, but the rest is like…Whitney Houston-esque garbage. This is adult contemporary, middle age “safe” music, the likes of which you find on easy listening stations and is TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY 100% NOT MY THING AT ALL. I love her voice and I really really wanted to like her but this is just…blah. Rainy day wallpaper. Blah.
So anyway yesterday I finished another self-portrait:
Self Portrait #2
12 x 16 inch mixed media on watercolour paper
The jewel-as-trache-scar was Charlie’s idea. It was a good idea so I used it.
Right now I’m working on my second 30 x 30 inch panel and a 12 x 12 inch wood panel. The 30 x 30 is the one with crackle paste on it and if I’d have known via Golden’s site how crackle paste really worked instead of relying on the instructions on the jar, I would have done a much thicker layer so I would have achieved bigger cracks. As it is, I can’t really afford any more crackle paste and the cracks are very small. I guess I’m going to try working with the cracks that I have now by applying a wash of colour with the idea of the watery colour gathering in the cracks but if that doesn’t look right I guess I have no other choice but to buy more crackle paste because it’s really important for the piece to be super duper cracky. Deep, fissure-like cracks is what I need, like a dry desert floor. I’m going to need to get one of those things that I don’t know the name of…one of those things that artists use that looks like a little flat trowel. Maybe it is called a trowel, I don’t know, but I need one whatever they’re called, if I’m to apply a second, thicker coat of crackle paste.
The really shitty part of this situation is that I’m probably going to have to either sand or scrape off the layer of crackle paste that’s there already, which also means that I can kiss my flawless basecoat goodbye. Not good when I’m using a discontinued colour and I only have one bottle left. WOE IS ME. #firstworldartistproblems
The 12 x 12 inch wood panel I’m working on is actually something called “gessoboard” which is *like* a wood panel but it uses that compressed, cardboardy fake wood that they make office furniture and cheap shelves out of and it’s primed professionally with gesso for a super smooth surface. Paint just glides on these fuckers. This is my first time using one and I’ve gotta say I’m a fan. The problem is that they’re pretty pricey, $18 + tax for a 12 x 12 when I can get 3 canvases of the same size for about the same price. But they are soooo nice and I can use my triple thick gloss glaze varnish on them without the fear of it cracking if mishandled. It probably wouldn’t work as well to glue heavy stuff on like the watercolour paper I use for my girls, but it’s PERFECT for flaming, glittering uteri. ;o)
So the absolute worst thing for me is a lack of ideas. It is not my natural state AT ALL and these days, while productive, I feel like I’m in a big of a creative rut. I realize that probably doesn’t make any sense since I’ve been posting lots of artwork but for the most part, these are all old ideas that I’m pulling out of my sketchbook and making real, I’m not really coming up with anything new.
So, I’ve been reading this book that I’ve actually had for years, since I was in college, called “How To Get Ideas” by Jack Foster and it’s a really simple book with a lot of good ideas like, how to look at things and really see them, doing morning pages (essentially), giving yourself deadlines and the space to come up with terrible ideas because sometimes terrible ideas are actually really good ones and this part really struck me:
“”And idea is delicate,” said Charles Brower, the head of an advertising agency. “It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man’s brow.”
I think this is why many people seem bereft of ideas.
They’ve run into too many sneers and yawns, they’re heard to many quips. And so they’ve said the heck with it and don’t even try to come up with ideas any more.
The fear of rejection shuts down their idea factories.”
When I was in night school for copywriting, my first copywriting class, my teacher said the same thing, that you can’t be negative in any way during a brainstorming session because if you are, people will clam up and not want to stick their necks out with terrible yet potentially genius ideas.
I can’t really say that this has ever been my experience though. This part of the book is 100% me:
“I used to teach a three-day seminar on advertising in Chicago. One of the assignments I gave each student was to create, overnight, an outdoor board for a Swiss Army knife. Most of the students would come in the next morning with the required billboard, but several of them would say that they worked for hours and couldn’t come up with anything. This happened three years in a row.
The fourth year I tried something different. Instead of asking for just one billboard, I asked each student to create at least ten billboards for a Swiss Army knife. And instead of giving them all night, I told them they had to do it during their lunch hour.
After lunch everybody had at least ten ideas. Many had more. One student had 25.
I came to realize that when faced with a problem most people look for the one right solution because that’s the way they were brought up. All through school they had to answer multiple-choice and true-or-false questions, questions that only had one right answer. And so they assume that all questions and problems are like that. And when they can’t find a solution that looks perfect they give up.
But most problems aren’t like exam questions in school. Most problems have many solutions. And as soon as I forced my students to realize that, they found those solutions.”
That is me to a tee. (T?) I am afraid of bad ideas. I think that everything that tumbles out of my brain should be genius and I tend to think things are “precious”, even ideas. I’ve written before about how I’ve been trying to overcome my art supplies and projects as being “precious” but I think I need to do the same thing with ideas too or else I’m going to make myself insane. I have to allow myself to come up with 100 terrible ideas because within those 100 terrible ideas, there could be 1 or 2 really good ones.
Or maybe even none.
But I won’t know unless I try and it’s actually a HELL of a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be. I’m known for being really creative, creativity is what I’ve got, but for someone who supposedly has a creative mind, ideas sure are hard to come by when I get in ruts like this. They’re rare, but they happen.
And the book addresses ruts. The reason they happen is because of repetition and I think that’s definitely true in my case. I don’t leave the house. I watch the same movies over and over again. I listen to the same music over and over again. I go to the same stores over and over again (Michael’s and Curry’s). There is little to no surprises in my life unless you want to count catastrophe and you would think that I’d have some residual “stuff” to work out because of everything that happened this summer but I honestly don’t think I do. Besides, I’m not sure what a pancreas even looks like or necessarily where it’s located. And I’m not good at drawing bodies so my wound is kind of out of the question. Maybe I’ll go there some day but right now, I don’t think, is the time. Plus, since I don’t really remember anything that happened, I don’t have a whole lot to work with.
Anyway, that’s where my head is today. I only have 2 & a half more hours left of work and then I plan on coming up with terrible ideas for the next 2 days that I have off.
Tomorrow I’m going to be making a honey spiral ham with potatoes, corn on the cob and asparagus but it’s just going to be us so there will be lots and lots of leftovers.
OH! GET THIS! So on Facebook I’m friends with one of my father’s sisters and Lisa tagged a picture of her daughter on her photography business’ fan page. So I went to the picture because I didn’t even know this kid existed (I barely know this aunt) and in the album is pics of Phil’s brother’s daughter too. This leads me to believe that there was some sort of family get together recently which is interesting because Phil never gets together with his family because they don’t really talk. But this is the exact type of thing, like my own grandfather’s FUNERAL, that I wouldn’t have been invited to. Lisa’s pissed off that I didn’t want to invite them to our anniversary party, for legitimate reasons, yet it’s PERFECTLY FINE to not include me in my own grandfather’s FUNERAL or ANY family reunions. How the fuck does that work?
Just something that occurred to me yesterday while I was clicking around on Facebook.
Oh and for those who were concerned, Ana Voog is home from the hospital and is okay. She’d been withdrawing from an antidepressant which caused suicidal tendencies and she ground up Xanax in a coffee grinder and tried to OD. Then she ran away from the house at some point and the cops had dogs out looking for her. She also had a gun and she shot a gazebo. That’s all she’s really said about it other than the fact that her shrink was going to be retiring but changed her mind so Ana can still see her and I guess she had to go in front of the courts and prove that she wasn’t a drug addict and didn’t need rehab or something. I dunno, the series of events wasn’t crystal clear. All I know is that I’m extremely happy that she’s okay and that she now has a new lease on life.
“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!
My desk is overrun with itty bitty, cocksucking little ANTS no bigger than this font! There are like, 30 of them on my desk right now drinking poison. LOOK:
There are easily double that sucking back poison as I type this. I even tried to make a video of them but they were too small so it didn’t turn out so great. Here it is anyway:
All fall we had big, fat black ants all over the house EXCEPT my office and now we have these itty bitty, brown ants ONLY in my office. And they only seem to be on my desk! I removed any and all food from my desk last week when they first appeared but that didn’t seem to make a difference, as it got warmer, the more ants there were.
The poison I’m using is made by Raid and I’ve used it successfully before so here’s to hoping that it works this time.
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?)
