About Disorder

Writer Anais Nin said: "When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings…As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects."

As I create chaos in the process of moving home and studio, I fantasize about the moment when I will look at the piles of boxes and the general disorder we have created at the new home — and at the contents of my studio which are now housed in a storage unit. I look forward to making order from that awful jumble.

I believe that is what art is about. One takes control and makes something to one’s own notion of order or beauty or whatever it is that satisfies and rewards the mind and/or the senses.

I expect to be in that mode again soon. In the meantime I will spend as much time in my fantasies of the future as the reality of today will allow.

The images above are of my studio in the past when everything was in place. 

About Missing the Muse

I miss my muse. Oh, how I miss my muse. I miss the comfort of doing something I really want to do. I miss the peace of being focused and working. I miss the satisfaction of seeing something get done. I miss being able to plan a day and living it.

I am submerged in chaos. I am without the safety of my routine within the refuge of the home I built around me. I want my studio back and my blesséd routine.

Ordinarily I start my day by reviewing the world within my walls and putting everything in order. I had a dear friend who once said that she and I needed to have everything at right angles to everything else. Well, sure ‘nuff. When the dishes are washed, the bed is made, and the bills are paid, my world is in place and I go to work. I can walk away from it all and into that place in myself that paints. I can forget everything for a while knowing that my reading chair and refrigerator will be waiting when I need them again. The phone is there too; I can temper the loneliness by dialing one of my kids. I can rest so that I can do the same next day. Is that a lot to ask?

Yes, of course it is. It is the never promised rose garden. Experiencing a minor bump in the road like moving one’s domicile, demonstrates yet again just how good a life this is. No tornados here. No major earthquake, no disaster nor tragedy of any kind. I’m moving from one very comfortable space to another that will be even better. Who would ever even think of complaining? Just a mega-kvetch, that’s who. Well, okay, a very, very tired mega-kvetch.

The half-price moving sale of paintings dated prior to 2007 and that I am not currently marketing will continue until the studio is packed, sometime in the the week of the twenty-third. The final move is scheduled for the last weekend of this month. Email me at joangold@humboldt1.com for images and prices or for information or a studio appointment. The image above is Allegro ©2000, 10" x 26.5” . It is hanging in my studio and included in the sale.

About Possessions

I have tried not to get attached to things. It just doesn’t work for me. When I left the home I had put together in Caracas, I had to leave everything behind except for my children and what we brought in our suitcases. Actually, I did pack a few things and have them shipped: albums of photos and a few other items that would be irreplaceable. And then, because there was a minimum to be paid which entitled us to a certain amount of weight, I threw in a small teak table and an artisan-made chair. Not a bit more as this was 1979 and five dollars a pound to move to the US was daunting.

Now, many years later, I still miss the cookbook collection, and dream sometimes that I am back in that house running my hands over the surface of the dining room table. I would not change the life I have now for a return to that time. But I was attached to the home that was the site of our history as a family.

Now my home is in a state of total chaos as I am sorting through it all and with the help of my girls and my son, packing and beginning to get a home assembled yet again. I don’t have the lovely furniture I had before but it’s still hard to do the getting-rid-of part. I have a lot of stuff that I have kept just-in-case. I am a child of the great depression, have trouble throwing away food and tend to keep too much of anything that could possibly serve some useful purpose. But now it’s push come to shove. Trash or pack. The choice is easy to make.

According to my not very trustworthy memory, I have moved from dwelling to dwelling twelve times, the first few parent-powered, then on my own, later married with children and now with the assistance of these. This time it’s forever. Never again. Absolutely, never again. I plan to croak in my new digs and will be very careful to keep only what is unarguably useful. Says I.

The half-price moving sale of paintings dated prior to 2007 and that I am not currently marketing will continue until the studio is packed, sometime in the the week of the twenty-third. The final move is scheduled for the last weekend of this month. Email me at joangold@humboldt1.com for images and prices or for information or a studio appointment. The image above is Flourish ©2001, 23” x 60” (framed). It is hanging in my studio and included in the sale.

About Home

Elizabeth Bowen wrote in Death of the Heart:

"After inside upheavals, it is important to fix on imperturbable things. Their imperturbableness, their air that nothing has happened renews our guarantee. Pictures would not be hung plumb over the centers of fireplaces or wallpapers pasted on with such precision that their seams make no break in the pattern if life were really not possible to adjudicate for. These things are what we mean when we speak of civilization: they remind us how exceedingly seldom the unseemly or unforeseeable rears its head. In this sense, the destruction of buildings and furniture is more palpably dreadful to the spirit than the destruction of human life."

Well, I’m not sure I would agree with the last two lines. I experienced a strong earthquake years ago in Venezuela and remember beseeching whatever powers might be listening: “Just leave me my children and my husband”. Looking back I’m inclined to think that was selfish. What about all the other precious children and husbands? But selfishness is not my topic today. Maybe another time. Now in the throes of moving from my dwelling of sixteen years, I am thinking about home. 

I have painted little houses since kindergarten. They are safe places. Drawing or painting them puts me in a safe place. This is not a conscious act. It’s like reaching for chocolate when chocolate is the right thing. Moving is like being unsafe until the new home is made. This home will be made when everything (or almost everything) is in place and the house loses its strangeness. Putting familiar things, those that have been with me for the longer haul, in their places will be good. Hanging my paintings, which is the last thing I will do, should bring home into the house. But the interim, which has started as I take this home apart, is life on quicksand. The feeling is one of un-ease.

I know people who take their houses with them wherever they go. They are like snails except that their homes are within themselves. They are good travelers, willing to be transported at the drop of a hat. I wonder if they grew up feeling safe and just assume that the force will be with them (to coin a phrase). I am not so trusting, and while I envy that serenity, I prefer to watch my back at all times when away from my own confines. But I have made homes before and will do it again now. I know how. Just wish I could get from here to there with no in-between.

From Robert Montgomery: Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.

The image above is one of the Little Houses series, actually a detail from Neighborhood, ©2008

Below we have an ode written by my friend Mike Yanke in response to About Napping. Behold, I’m a muse!

RECTANGLES ABOUND

Rectangles abound

This side of town.

They’re green and they’re blue

With varying hue.

Orange ones have dots

Reds have white spots.

Different as they may be

They’re all fun to go see.

Some with white borders

Others borderless in their orders.

Rectangles standing alone

Rectangles with an accompanying clone.

There’s multiples and more

There’s rectangles galore.

The creator of all these

Is so easy to please.

An afternoon bed

To rest her sweet head.

And what time of day

Does she want to go lay?

From one until three

It’s her life’s luxury.

She calls it her nap

To avoid the over-worked trap.

A nap ‘til she rises

She vehemently prizes.

There’s no need for it to be said

The shape of her bed.

It’s always rectangular

Not square, circular or triangular.

Rectangles abound

this side of town. 

About Napping

Moving hearth and workspace gives rise to a sea of stress that would drown me if I didn’t have a reliable life raft. Last week I griped about how I allowed my life to get crowded. This week I will pat myself on the back for taking naps.

I married into a family that played solitaire, spent long hours talking at the table over wine or coffee and got to work at ten o’clock in the morning at the earliest. My assessment of this behavior, oft voiced to my Spanish husband, was that my country’s work ethics got us to the moon. He seemed to prefer to live in the glory of Spain’s past and enjoy all the leisure he could get away with. I learned to nap from this family I married into, in addition to a number of other customs that have enriched my life, but napping is far and away the one I most value. Friends and family know that I don’t answer the phone between from about one to three (lunch and a bit of reading get factored in there) and I know that anyone who calls at that time is no friend of mine.

The effort I have been making to tie up the loose ends of my marketing projects and to walk away from those that have been my reason to live in my studio, and to dealing with the learning that goes into a house purchase and renovation — believe me, honoring my nap time, my splendid, blesséd indulgence, has enabled me to pick up and return to the fray every morning. Well, almost every. There has been a day here and there (this is the closest thing you will get to a confession from me), that I have gotten up at six (usual), sucked up a big cup of coffee, read the local paper, (all usual) and then, very quietly, I slip back into my bedroom and curl into my easy chair with my pillows and take a morning snooze. After coffee? Yup, napping is something I do exceedingly well. I can find that place in myself that connects me to sweet oblivion. The day I reach my one hundred and tenth birthday and am interviewed for my advice about how to keep going at such a pace for so long and so well, you will know the answer. Slumber. Often. More is better.

Bob Hope: I don't feel old. I don't feel anything till noon. That's when it's time for my nap.

Remember that to ease the transition, all work from 2007 and earlier that I am not currently marketing is on sale at a 50% reduction in price. The image above, Small Town, is included in this group. It is acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, ©1993, framed and hanging in my studio. Email me for images and prices or call for information or a studio appointment. 

About a Full Life

I like to have something to do. I don’t like to have a lot to do. It’s lovely to be focused on a task to the exclusion of everything else. Days like today, when there was so much that seemed important and urgent, everything vying with everything else for my attention, make me want to walk away from all of it. 

Sometimes life gets too full. A good solution would be to get myself cloned — several times over. Then one part of me would be writing this blog, another would be in the kitchen baking the cake that I promised my daughter for her party and another would be paying the bills that are in danger of coming overdue. One of me would be working happily in the studio while another putters mindlessly about the house. One could be on the phone with a friend and an additional version could be reading quietly or (oh, joy!) taking a nap. None of me would be cleaning house. No sense in wasting any of this bounty.

And now all of me wishes all of you a joyful holiday with many happy returns.

The photo above is what the space that will become my studio looked like the day I saw it for the first time. If you stay tuned for updates you will see it become my ideal of a workspace: the well-illuminated inside of a white box. Hard to imagine, huh? Well, have faith.

Here’s an update on the moving story: I have the keys to the new quarters now. The plans for the renovation to what will be my studio are out for bids. The move is planned for the very end of January and it is my hope that the studio will be ready then. That is probably wishful thinking, but life has been so good to me lately, I’m going to assume this will just fall into place well. Or if not, I’ll adjust. Do not want to seem ungrateful to whatever angels have been seeing to my well-being.

Remember that to ease the transition, all work from 2007 and earlier that I am not currently marketing is on sale at a 50% reduction in price. Email me for images and prices or call for information or a studio appointment.

About the Loss of Selfhood

I just wrote a note that I ended with: “Imagine how many interesting people there are in the world, who have much to offer us, that we will never know”. Then I realized that is what books are for. And they are blessedly low maintenance. Joan Didion’s Blue Nights was a generous gift. I had read The Year of Magical Thinking which dealt with the death of her husband. Her daughter died not long afterwards and led to the writing of Blue Nights.

What surprised me about both books was that death caught her unawares. In spite of there having been several untimely and tragic departures amongst family and friends, she was totally unprepared for its assault on her. While the pain of loss would be whatever it was, death has always been visible in my picture of life’s probabilities at any moment. But what do I know? I hope to experience my own demise before that of any who are in the foreground of that picture.

Where Didion focused most meaningfully to me was on the loss of her self, of the person she was. As she experienced those disappearances she aged (or seemed to) more quickly than before. She had been fragile; now she saw herself failing and fading. Perhaps it is because she and I were born in the same year that her experience gripped me. I have not yet been drawn into the downward spiral she describes so affectingly but do not expect to be forever invulnerable. I think a lot about aging; it seems to happen far more quickly and causing more change than anticipated. Didion says: “Aging and its evidence remain one of life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored”. I would recommend that everyone, at whatever age, give some thought to it. Best not to let it catch you unprepared. Think about death too. No matter what you think or how smart you are, it will get you, too.

I quoted here once Isabel Allende (who also lost her daughter) who said in an interview: “Life is about loss”. Didion says it differently: “ 'You have your wonderful memories,' people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are (school) uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to weddings of people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.” She talks about “staying alive”. That is not the same as being alive. Big difference. I think in pictures: staying alive looks like someone who has fallen over the edge of the cliff and is hanging on to a tree branch by her fingernails. Being alive looks more like somebody dancing or busy at work.

I did a poor job recently of attempting to explain to my son-in-law why old photos make me feel sad. Recently taken photos don’t do that. Old photos are about the times that will never be again. I cannot ever again have the family whole and together as it was. Or be with my school friends feeling our futures in the palms of our hands, thinking we could do whatever we wanted with our lives. Didion’s take on this time: "Ask anyone who was a child during the supposedly idyllic decade advertised to us at the time as the reward for World War Two. New cars. New appliances. Women in high heels and aprons removing cookie sheets from ovens…  This was as safe as it got, except it wasn’t: ask any child who was exposed during this postwar… fantasy to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ask any child who saw the photographs from the death camps.” Two sides to this coin.

Life is good now. I am more and have more in many ways. But that does not change the fact that I can’t have my kids as little children again nor my friends young, healthy and alive. I can’t introduce my children to the grandmother they never met. A reviewer in The Guardian said something about the artist’s ability to create order out of chaos. Sometimes it can’t be done. What was is gone. Forever.

From a recent interview in Time of poet John Ashberry:

You're 84. Do you think about death?

I've never not thought about it. There are not that many things to write poetry about. There's love and there's death and time passing and the weather outside, which is horrible today.

The image above is RedYellowBlue, ©2011, 8.5” x 11”, acrylic collage.

Please check out the poem that my friend Mike Yanke was inspired to write after reading about my slovenly housekeeping. Just click on “Comments” below last week’s blog post.