Neel and Pray

I'm on my knees: I LOVE Alice.

I finally found a copy of this documentary and watched it last night. A wonderful film. So moving.

The Morro Bay Line(wo)man...

...is still on the liiiine!

Some of my sister Sue's latest watercolors. So strong and beautiful!!!

Hey, Sue...this one's for you. From the "Songs I hate to admit that I kinda like..." category...

Happy Dejeuner Day!

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe
Jacques Roch


Dejeuner sur l'herbe
Edouard Manet

Dejeuner sur l'herbe

Sasha Q

Dejeuner sur L'herbe

Pepe Smit

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe

Sharon Hodgson

Dejeuner sur l'herbe

John Seward Johnson

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe

I am in Woolwich all this week, planting the vegetable garden, doing spring cleaning and yardwork, and will be taking a bit of a blog break, posting sporadically.

Picnic, BBQ, cookout - whatever you are doing to celebrate the holiday today, enjoy!

May Magic

Yesterday it was suddenly summer with temps hitting the mid-nineties here in Portland! My morning walk up to East Beach ended with feet in freezing but bearable salt water - quite the feat for a day in May! The Maine ocean is typically excrutiatingly cold at this time of year...

Off to buy a length of black velvet and then on to paint in the studio...

Christian Simmons

Some of the many faces of Brooklyn artist Christian Simmons (my nephew). A coincidence that he shares the same initials with Cindy Sherman??

Curtains and Clothespins

I've pieced together the 2 panels of my patchwork squares. Yesterday while in my studio I remembered that I had several of my grandmother's old clothespins - these are special - they have a metal clip that attaches to the clothesline. This would enable us to clip all the laundry indoors before heading out to the line, and then quickly hang the wash, snap, snap, snap. This was especially welcome on frigid winter days when the least time spent outdoors with frozen fingers, the better! The wash would freeze and flap halfway dry in the wind - then we'd bring it in and drape it over the chairs and radiators to finish drying...

I like the idea of hanging these panels on a clothesline rope for my installation, rather than a curtain rod. I've done several performances about clotheslines in the past (you can read about them here, here, and here).

Step by step, it's coming together...

Double Creativity and Confidence

Eckhart Tolle instructs us to live in The Now. Artists do this when they are in the act of creating - we enter a timeless dimension when we connect to that deep coursing river, that sublime source that binds us all. That's on a good day. At other times we are unable to shut out the judging voice, the harsh, harping critic that tell us our work is crap and what the hell are we doing wasting our time goofing around in the studio anyway??

I struggle with this all the while. There's a terrific book by Dan Millman titled The Life You Were Born to Live about a sort of numerology system, and in this system, I am a 29/11, which means Double Creativity and Confidence. According to Millman, the 29/11's life challenges center around low self-esteem regarding their huge creative energy. So here today is a bit of shameless horn tooting - more for me than for any of you wonderful and creative readers - to remind myself that I am "a very real artist," as one dear friend refers to me...because I do forget.

My self-portrait, Self with Lipstick, is in the book Drawing From Life, by Clint Brown and Cheryl McLean. I found out about this after the book was published when an acquaintance of mine who teaches drawing at USM alerted me to the fact that my drawing was in the text book he was using that semester. I'm still amazed at this. There's my name in the index in the very same column as Matisse and Michelangelo. Yo.

(Not that being in a book makes me a very real artist, but heck, as far as boosting confidence goes, it sure doesn't hurt!)

The Monday Report

A new chicken coop, built by my son, Andy, as a birthday gift to his wife, Oceanna.

My grandsons Brey and Wyeth survey the pen.

One rooster...

...and 6 laying hens! Very exciting!

A Saturday night birthday bonfire outside Andy and Ocea's studio.

I got to hold this sweet 3 week old baby girl for a little bit while her parents enjoyed the fire. Sigh...

Bleeding hearts in full bloom.

A pleasant weekend - back to the studio tomorrow!