Grandma

Today, the wind and the windows hummed the deepest baseist chord

A guttural tone that mimicked my grandmother’s fret. 

“Lydia took a turn,” she’d say, never saying in what direction. 

“You’ll catch your death,” she’d scold, never explaining how. 

She baked the tiniest of muffins from the tiniest box and tell me not to eat them. 

I’d swat her hand when she’d help me with my dress for church.

“No man will ever have you,” she’d warn, without a trace of doubt. 

“Your independence will be the death,” she’d say, without any clarification. 

A gust, the rain, more leaves on the ground than on the trees. 

How to Carry Wet Paintings: A $5.49 DIY panel carrier

Here is a quick and cheap idea for a panel carrier. 

Plein air painting requires a lot of equipment for just the basics, easel, tripod, an umbrella depending on sun and weather, a medium like pastels, oil or watercolor, and their surfaces to paint on, paper or canvas and linen panels (and all the other options), and brushes. If you are a plein air artist, you know there's more too... rags or paper towels, view finder, mall stick, tools, water, and so on. This post is focused narrowly - for oil painters to suggest a cheap, simple way to transport in a dry panel and to transport out a wet one. 

The premise is simple: Create a light, cheap device that holds two panels of the same size 9x12", 12x16", whatever, to protect them from being dirtied or scratched, and to protect the artist or the artist's belongings from getting more paint on them. (Who among us hasn't found unplanned paint on a light switch, car door handle, and a favorite shirt?) I've described a simple solution below. 

You will need 2 frames, glue and a rubber band. I had the glue and rubber band on hand. 

Yesterday, I decided to paint plein air on a 5X7" canvas panel but didn't have a carrier for it. Typically, I use an 8x10" 9x12" or 11x14" for painting outdoors. For those I have beautiful panel carriers made by a carpenter-friend. To buy them online, the cost is around $20 plus shipping, but mine are works of art themselves, made from scraps of specialty wood. 

To get by yesterday, I took a C-clamp and wax paper, and counted on the idea that once in the car, it would get minimal jostling. The wax paper would keep debris and dust from landing on it and the clamp provides a handle. Anyway, I figured I could fix any smudging.  But then, in Chicago, there are wide and fast corners...

On the way home from the paint out, the wet painting slid around in the trunk of my car. It really didn't hurt anything, but I can't depend on my luck holding. Turns out, I liked the idea of painting small. I painted looser, faster and worked out the values. If I had a bit more time, I could have completed a second painting.  So, I stopped at Michaels and found a package of two wood frames for $10. Immediately, I saw the potential and found a 50% discount coupon on line that to use at the cashier. This project cost $5.49, with sales tax, sans the glue and rubber band. 

At home I removed the cellophane from the frames and removed the glass and paper.  

Using my trusty glue gun, I smeared glue on the front sides of both frames and placed them together. Later, I laid another bead of glue around the edges as an even seal. Someone asked, why do you need glue, not simply the rubber band to hold them together. Because, you don't want them to slide. If you don't have a glue gun, use Elmers, chunks of double sided tape or Velcro, though none of those sound as easy to me.

I was able to place my wet panel from earlier in the day facing the center. I could add a second one on the other side, also facing the center, because the depth of the frames will keep them separated. 

While I used the clips that were included in the frame, I am sure with use they will break off. I added a rubber band for extra security.  Next time I go out, I will insert a blank canvas surface on each side and complete one or two as time and energy allow. Or, if you only have on canvas of the size, you could keep and use, the backing that has the hangers on it.... come to think of it, you end up with a nice frame for showing it at a critique or until you use your carrier again. 

                                      

This idea is not my own. I copied it from the very talented, clever and thrifty Wisconsin artist, Dana M. Johnson, who painted plein air with the Plein Air Painters Chicago a couple summers back. As I remember the story, she and her dad created from frames found at a thrift store. I've looked there and garage sales, but never found two identical frames that would work. With the coupon, the price is about as good as it gets and a quarter of what you'd pay for a manufactured panel carrier. Michaels has many sizes of these packages of frames. There's no reason you couldn't make one for each size you use.  

For more on traveling and transporting plein air equipment, check out this post: How to Pack for Plein Air Painting Travel.

Grandpa Still Snowboards - How Staying Still Doesn't Allow Us to Grow

What’s the name of that restaurant? You know, the one on Irving, no, on Cicero, no, on Milwaukee? You know… the one with Baked Alaska*, it’s on the tip of my tongue…

That searching for a word, it’s called anomia. I’ve had run ins with it for a long time. I admit, a catalyst for retiring at the first chance came after sitting in meetings and feeling stupid. The times I couldn’t find the memory of the results of a previous day’s meeting, or I’d look at someone and couldn’t come up with their name, let alone their kid’s names. When anomia strikes, it erodes my self-confidence and immediately makes me think I will be in “the home” before the bananas turn yellow. 

Not so fast…. In the last few days, after truly launching my child across the country into his life after graduate work, after a year of retirement, after four years of learning to paint, and two and a half years of living on my retirement income, I’ve realized I put off focusing on my own growth and development in this next part of life. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been talking about it with whomever will listen… friends, neighbors, the Whole Foods cashier.  I typically spew the first part of my exploration like the gush from a fire hose, as the unsuspecting ask, how are you? Fine. I’m trying to figure out my life. I am done with health care, could use some money, I want a life of meaning, and painting and people, should I move? And on and on. 

It’s Wednesday and I have a wide open day, ripe for me to scratch off the items on my to-do list that extends to a second side of paper. I look forward to my still life painting class at the other end of my day that is part of my self directed curriculum on becoming an artist.  

Development as an artist is one of two successful elements I can claim on my plan to retire with intention. The other, which I may delve into more at another time, was living on my retirement income for more than a year prior to declaring a retirement date. Once I felt confident that I could exist, I set a date first in my own mind, and eventually with my employer. 

Which brings me back to today. I’m eyeing tchotchkes on a shelf I want to clear… for good, while packing my back pack for today’s attempt at a good submission for a plein air competition in Schaumburg.  I’m feeling pressure to get on with my life in the near term, and make sense of the rest of my days. Stat! Gratefully, I woke up to an email from one of my friends who’d sent a link to a TedTalk that she thought spoke to my woman’s “search for meaning.” It does. It’s by Bill Thomas, MD. a Harvard trained geriatrician who is reframing aging. I listened to the Ted Talk and intrigued, found another, more meaty presentation that got me to breathing a little easier. 

One of his messages is about anomia – the word finding issue I mentioned above.  When a young person stores a word in their brain, they don’t know a lot, and there is a lot of room to store words in their brain. Their filing system is simple, a single filing cabinet. If you live long, you have many filing cabinets, with many words, filed in different locations for different reasons. When you can’t think of a name of a restaurant or a person, it’s actually a consequence of how much you’ve stored.  

Research has shown that when people are asked to recall, young people remember the details, elders remember the gist. Elders have the store of knowledge to connect many aspects and pull on the architecture of the brain to activate and retrieve from different parts. Our brains have the power to provide a broader view of the issue. In other words, we elders have the gist of the story. In that sense, Bill Thomas jokes, “young people are neurologically disabled.”  

Yet, as a society, we don’t think in these terms. I smiled at Doctor Thomas’ concept of how we ineffectively cast “still” in our language. My Aunt Edith at 84 still drives. Grandpa still snowboards at 91… barefoot.  We are measured and somewhat revered by how we STAY the same. If we don’t stay still, we are disappeared.

Remember taking a child to the pediatrician and receiving a report in weight and height, or later talking with the child’s teachers about their maturity?   We have metrics to show change and growth from childhood, through adolescents and into adulthood. We recognize a fourteen year old who hasn’t dropped their blanky is acting inappropriately for their age. A twentysix year old still living at home…. (oops, scratch that example.)  Even with social trends like kids living longer at home, we recognize the end of the younger developmental phase, yet we don’t have a positive, recognizable phase for after adulthood. We are destined to stay still or disappear. It's a limbo, a time before death. It's not a recognized time for its own growth. For the most part, we measure peoples in terms of loss of adulthood. Dr. Thomas offers the name to this time as elderhood. And, he doesn't see it as staying still. 

I can relate… I am becoming an elder. I am done with certain things in adulthood. I am done being a slave to a work schedule. I am done with progress reviews that indicated my worth to an employer. I am done with conformity to fashion, cosmetics and other things that dictate how I must present myself. I really don’t understand cosmetic surgery, except for those days when I feel myself disappearing. I am done with raising a child… we now can have adult conversations. And, I am ready to grow. 

I am ready to reframe how I think about this time in my life. I want to create. I want to create meaning. I want to  be a successful painter- it burns me when someone asks, is this a hobby? Not really, I responded on Monday. The guys who asked followed up with, so you're making a living? Not a big one, I told him. But I am, not in money maybe, but this is big living for me.  

This morning, I am grateful to my friend who sent the link to Doctor Thomas’ talk (I encourage you to watch it) and I am grateful to him for helping me reframe my sense of self and my sense of meaning. 

Let the gist begin! 

*Community Tavern 

Doctor Marie Curie, Women of Substance and Poetry

Here is a video of amazing poems about science and the environment being read by poets and artists. It's from Maria Popova who curates the inspirational and thought provoking Brain Pickings and the Academy of American Poetswho bring us Poem a Day. Turn it on while you cook or spring clean. I found it uplifting and hopeful. "Not only does poetry matter, poetry is matter." 

One other thought... The poem about Marie Curie takes me back to grade school, to an assignment to write a report on a scientist. I landed on Madame Curie ---->. I'm sure I did the least to get it done as I often did in school, but it's stayed with me. It gave me a view of an accomplished woman in a world dominated by men. I remember my mother helping me with this particular assignment. She may have been the one who pointed me toward Madame Curie. She drove me to the library on the Hill to do the research and made editing suggestions sitting with me at the kitchen table. All of this was highly unusual behavior for her, as she was not the role model for the helicopter parent I became. Madame Curie must have been my mom's hero, this assignment engaged her. I think too, that it was her mild way of pointing me to becoming a woman of substance. My mother was a woman of substance who, though graduating from college at 20 years old, gave up her career at twenty-seven to marry and live a household life.

Madame Curie, who should be known as Doctor Curie, (another subtle way to suppress her magnitude?) was not only the first woman to win a Nobel prize; she won two Nobel Prizes. In school we learned about martyrs, who died for their faith. Curie died a martyr too, for her science from radiation poisoning... equally as inspiring. This assignment was one of my defining moments. It allowed me to see women in a different way, and, with my mother stepping beyond her usual, allowed me to see the possibilities for me. 

I'm hugely grateful for Brain Pickings and poetry for doing what poetry does. 

Fundamentals of Drawing and Painting: A Course in Courage to Become an Artist

I’m struggling with a painting of a beekeeper in a field calming bees by smoking a hive. An 18”x24” panel sits on a wood easel I bought last year to bring my painting practice inside. Until then, I’d painted only outside, en plein air, except for classes, since 2014. This morning, I sit on the futon in the room I call, with a bit of self-suspicion, “my studio”, and look hard at it.

Twice I’ve scraped it and started over. I may do so again. Two days ago, I stood in the Milwaukee Art Museum looking at Winslow Homer’s paintings in awe of the people he painted in the English fishing village of Cullercoats. Setting aside my surprise that Homer is actually American, and that I wonder if he picked that particular village because of its perfect-for-an-artist name, today, I wonder if my beekeeper isn’t the same story as the woman standing on rocks, above a tumultuous sea, a sail in the background, knitting. We viewers look up at her. She stands in the very middle of the picture… a frequently mentioned no no done well. Horizontally, she takes up the painting, her arm outstretched pulling on yarn from a skein in her apron. The painting foreground is no larger than the bottom of her shoe to her calf; the space from the top of her head into the sky, is that length plus up to her knee.

I know now, that’s “the story.” It’s the placement, the emphasis Homer gave her in space. The fishermen on the boat are not the story, her knitting is what she does while they are away. Her skirt billows like the boat’s sail. She’s as much a cog in the fishing village life as they are.  Like Ginger Rogers dancing all the same steps backwards without Fred Astair’s acclaim from the masses, she knits standing. My beekeeper needs a story. How do I know that? How do I do that?

I confess, I probably wouldn’t have known that was the issue with my painting, nor would have looked at Homer’s as critically, till discussions recently in the Palette and Chisel’s Fundamentals in Drawing andPainting class. Unfortunately for me, yesterday was the last day of that class. It’s a series, like college classes where you take 101 and learn basics about shapes, color, drawing, and 102 and 103 where they build on those knowledge and skills, and offer an understanding of what it really takes to create a successful piece of art. Yesterday was graduation.

I’m certainly not saying that now that I have completed the class I know exactly how to create the story. At best, I know I need to tell one. I am also saying that the difference from when I began 101 in March of last year through completing 102 and 103 is as if Fred had found Ginger a year before suffering from vertigo and never having danced. 

Until last March, I’d been struggling to move from hobbist to artist. Bob Krajecki and Dale Popovich the instructors who’ve taught this class together for years, gave me steps, not the choreography. I’d taken many classes and workshops, had dozens of critiques, but still couldn’t create a painting that I could envision as successfully completed. Fundamentals gave me language about art and about my art. It’s given me check lists, both in notes and in my head of how to start a piece, how to develop it, what to look for to complete it, and how to self critique it.

This post is as much a thank you to Dale and Bob. Though I’ve learned tons from previous instructors, it wasn’t until I had this core structure, did the previous teachings make sense.

I am grateful I came to the class with experience in painting, critiques and hours outside painting landscapes and cityscapes in wind, sun, rain, snow and fog. Those experiences teed up many aha! moments in class.  I’d heartily recommend this program at the Palette and Chisel for anyone who comes to painting, without formal training, no matter if they prefer, oils, watercolors or pastels. I don’t recommend it for those who aren’t willing to do the exercises or have a tendency to defend their finished pieces, it’s a place to learn from every nuance, not turn out masterpieces.

I received an email on Saturday, that a painting of mine sold from a plein air competition in Northbrook, IL. Currently, I have two paintings hanging for a year as “public works of art” in my home village of Deerfield, IL. These are signs of acknowledgement of my development as an artist since I began the class. My palette knife is ready to begin the third scrape, and I with the help of Krajecki, Popovich and Homer, the beekeeper’s story is about to be retold.

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The following posts are in chronological order from most recent to the beginning of my journey since 2014 when I began to view myself as artist. 

• How to Pack for Plein Air Painting
• 2017 - Progress on Becoming an Artist
• The Trail to the Cedarburg Plein Air Event
• Your Creativity - Early or Late in Life? Quick or Never Done? Malcolm Gladwell makes sense of it
• Unpacking The Evolution of Learning and Mastery of the Creative Acts
• Self Confidence and the Up Hill Climb of Learning a New Craft
• Dabbling Is My Creative Process 2015
• You Calling My Art a Hobby? 2014