Nursing Dreams

I had a dream about nursing a baby last night. I often have dreams about nursing babies; my own babies, others' babies, even animal babies. I adored nursing my five children, so I suppose it's natural that this scenario keeps appearing in my dreams. When it shows up now I usually know that I need to "feed" some part of myself. All the characters in our dreams can represent an aspect of ourselves. I found this photo in a book I'm reading called From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, by Marina Warner. In 1921 huntsman William Lyman Underwood killed a bear then discovered she had a cub. He brought the foundling bear cub back to his wife who nursed the cub along with their baby daughter who was born at the same time. They named their daughter Ursula (little bear) and named the bear cub Bruno. Underwood and his wife raised Bruno to adulthood then released him to the wild!

I love this photograph.

William Lyman Underwood

Wild Brother, 1921

Martha Miller

Catalpa, 1990

charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"

Collection of Pat Hardy

More About Roll Models

The high school students I worked with in the Roll Models project in 2006 walked over to MECA from Portland High School on Wednesday afternoons from October to May. Typically one would sit for a portrait, while the others would head into the printshop to work on their etchings under the supervision and guidance of a few of the other print majors. One afternoon, though, they decided that they wanted me to do a group portrait of them with my left hand! Agh! I had never worked this large before, never mind with my left hand, but I agreed. I ran down to the Art Mart and bought a big sheet of paper off the roll and tacked it to the wall in the print majors' hallway. The kids arranged themselves with pillows and chairs (Emily was not there that day) and stared at me - except Alice - she read the whole time. They said that it was very entertaining "better than TV" watching the drawing evolve before their eyes. For me it was physically demanding! My arm hurt, but I was determined to keep using my left hand. At one point, I picked up a mop that was sitting in a dirty pail of water nearby and used that to put a big wash in the background!! If you look up close on this drawing you can see the dirt traces. (Hey, it worked!) The whole drawing is kind of wonky looking but I'm very fond of it.

In the last image posted here I played around in photoshop with levels and color balance to try to make it look like I'm part of the drawing...

All these students are in college now. They were a fun group to work with!

Roll Models, 2006

pastel, oil, charcoal, watercolor and dirty sudsy water on Stonehenge paper, 5' x 7' (approx.)

For Sale.

Young Artists

Some of the younger students I worked with at Oak Street Studios last year.

I had lunch with two artist friends today and one of the women said that she had no art in school as a child. How tragic! I was very fortunate that my parents sent me to Saturday morning classes at RISD from second grade to seventh grade. I consider this as important as my college art education - maybe more important.

A Good Sign

Some scenes from a Maine winter. The first day of spring is 19 days away - on the calendar, anyway. The sun is getting noticably stronger! Here's a good sign...

Dogfish Bar and Grille

With the help of Susan Baker and Jo Goiran (THANKYOU!!!) I hung my show this morning at the Dogfish Bar and Grille on Free Street in Portland. There are 27 portraits, drawings and prints, and the exhibit will be up for two months including two First Fridays, March 7th and April 4th. I'll be there for dinner both those nights, so if you're in town, drop in!

Alec

Several portraits of my fifth and youngest child, my son Alec. The first was done in 1989, our first winter in Woolwich, when Alec was five. Alec posed sitting in a small chair that was perched atop on old dresser in my studio in the barn. The second drawing was done when Alec was 13, and the third portrait was done when he was 21. (This last portrait is a sugarlift etching - these are three prints from the same plate - I will be posting more about this technique...)

The last pic is a photo of Alec with his cousin George, my sister Susan's youngest, in CA last Thanksgiving at a place known by the local surfers as Bird Shit Rock. Check out the three profiles!!

Alec lives in Long Beach, CA, where he works as a carpenter, building houses. I miss him.


Alec, Five, 1989

pastel, pencil and charcoal on Rives BFK, 22" x 30"

Lost in Studio Fire

Alec

pastel on Rives BFK, 15" x 22"
Not For Sale

Alec in My Studio, 2005

sugarlift intaglio prints, 22" x 30"

For Sale.

Primary Dream

At the end of my first semester at MECA I had a final review with instructors from three different departments. One of those teachers was Ling-Wen Tsai (see Links) from the Sculpture Department. Ling-Wen told me that after hearing me speak about my work, a portfolio of prints and drawings, that it seemed like I wanted to perform my work. She encouraged me to enroll in her performance class for the next semester. The thought of performing terrified me, but after some deliberation, I signed up to take Beginning Performance in Fall '03, and I'm glad I did. It was a terrific experience! I was surprised that I wasn't nervous - this was not like performing on a stage. Participating in a performance was like being an element of a drawing, a painting, or a sculpture.

Here are some video stills from my second performance, titled Primary Dream. At the time I was also taking a sculpture class and spending many hours mixing up batches of plaster in what I call "the three bathtub" room. I knew I had to do something with those three tubs! They were old clawfoot tubs like the one we had in our first apartment in Sanford, Maine, when our kids were babies. I had several colored slides of our children in that tub and decided to project them onto white paper taped to the wall above the tubs. (I used three projectors with three different slides). I wanted my performance to be about being a mother and an artist. So, I filled the three tubs with the primary colors using water and tempera paint, and put cloth diapers in each tub, then strung a clothesline above them. Bathing babies, changing diapers, doing the wash and hanging it on the line - as a young mother these were activities that were ritual with five small children. Trying to find space and time to make art was an on-going challenge - sometimes these activities were my only art. Primary Dream spoke of all these things.

I made a row of candles in front of the tubs and turned on the three projectors. The candlelight and the light from the projectors really transformed the space. (I have to add here that those tubs, which were normally full of dirt, plaster and crap, had never been so clean! I worked like a dog to get them ready for this performance!) Wearing an all white leotard, at the start of the performance I lit the candles, then climbed into the first tub which was filled with the red paint. I stood and hung several dripping red diapers on the line, then inched my way across the back wall, leaving a trail of red on the paper behind me, and lowered myself into the yellow tub, repeating the process, then finally moved into the third tub, the blue one. After hanging the blue diapers, I climbed out of the last tub and left the room. The remainder of the performance was acted out by the colorful diapers that hung glistening and dripping in the candlelight.

The people who watched my performance did not know that anything was in the tubs, so when I stood up from the first bath dripping with red paint, they all gasped. They told me later that it was a shocking sight. I hadn't consciously thought through all the implications of getting into the red bath first, but of course it looked like like blood. The red paint implies menstruation, initiation, sexual maturity, and birth. It also symbolizes pain and experience, and baptism by fire.

Video stills from Primary Dream, performed at MECA, 2003