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I promise you, patient friends…

I will return to my blogging responsibilities this summer. But for today, I wanted to celebrate the great news in the verdict that struck down Proposition 8 (same-sex marriage ban) in Federal Court in California today. Yes, there will be more battles to come on the front for marriage equality. But today is a victory to be celebrated.

(Yeah, I realize that Love sculpture is in Philadelphia, but it’s one of my favorites.)

XOXO
-Sonya

I thought I’d check in and leave a note telling you what has been going on here over at our studio. It’s all exciting, but time consuming. We’ve been working on renovating, starting with ripping the carpet out (good grief, that was weeks ago already) and laying down IKEA wood veneer flooring. Already an improvement, right? Anyway, since the labor for this studio is being done by us, and since I have a tough time recovering physically from things like aching backs and angry little abused shoulders and crimped necks, some of it has been a SLOG. Also, this is a working studio, so we have been sitting in here basically up to our eyeballs in junk and chaos and renovation detritus doing nothing but paid work. No wonder I have a headache this evening as I write this. (Or it’s the fumes of machined engineered wood and glue getting to me.)

We got most of the storage system installed in the closet today and I need to sew a curtain to put up over the closet where we use to have bifold doors. Right now, the focus is on getting the supplies out of the other parts of the house (I swear, there isn’t a horizontal surface in this house that isn’t completely covered with stuff) and storing it in its newly designated storage place. And I am really looking forward to tossing and recycling alot of stuff. It looks like a lot of empty storage now, but I know we will fill it somehow. We gotta purge (she types as she looks over her shoulder at her husband)!

Also, the weather has been fabulous here in Portland and, well, the sun is my Boss. And when the Boss says get out there and re-charge, I do what the Boss says. So there you have it: delays, and more delays, but alot of fun and hopefully pictures soon to come.

And I really want to find a way to work one of these snazzy giant Martha Stewart pom poms in the design somehow:

Thanks for putting up with me tweeting on Twitter in lieu of posting formally here. It has helped me feel like I am staying linked. I look forward to returning and posting more regularly. And getting back to some of my languishing projects!!!

While I am getting the studio reno done (and it’s taking foreva!), I thought I would touch base, break in (whateva!) and tell you about a great cause that I know you can easily commit to and tell others about.

The 3/50 Project asks that you to pick 3 of your favorite independently owned, local bricks and mortar stores and if you can swing it, give them $50 of your business a month. Let’s face it, when this recession is over we don’t want to be left with only the Walmarts, Targets, and Kmarts of the world.

I’m thinking of my three…

I have imposed a moratorium on art and crafting supplies for all of 2009.

I have enough.

I don’t need any more stuff. I have ideas and supplies enough to make everything. I don’t need paper. I don’t need ink. I don’t need pens or pencils. Nothing. Done with the shopping and collecting.

But next Christmas, I want this:
My husband wanted to buy it for me this afternoon, but I stopped him. I feel overwhelmed by what I need to be working on in 2009. It’s on my Amazon wishlist for that momentous occasion when I am ready and have time to work with it.

Besides, there is always my birthday!

What art and craft projects are you planning on working on next year?

In the summer of 2007, I drew something for the first time in 20 years. It was on my desk surface. Well, it wasn’t really a desk. And it wasn’t even my desk at the time. It was a slab of particle board that my husband hauled up from the garage in order to give one of our subcontractors a place to sit and work. I can say little about what possessed me to start doodling all over it one night when my the husband was out of town. But it started with a simple expression of my feelings toward the current blithering idiot who lives in the White House. That phrase remained on its own for a few days, in stark black marker pen. And then the doodling…

In any case, Daniel’s Desk turned into a silly mini obsession that took a few hours of my time. My style here is exactly as it was when I was 16. Seriously, the graffiti, the angst, the flower-power. All is as I knew it.

So why did I ever stop drawing? And why does it seem like it is happening again? This time it feels like a blockage. But when I was 17, it was crisis of confidence and endlessly playing mental tapes in my head by people who liked to caution me about artists who “starve”, and questioning what I was “really” going to do with my life. And since you can’t stifle creativity, it next bubbled up and took the form of building doll houses. After that, I made all the little doodads that go inside the doll houses, which took me to polymer clay. Polymer clay morphed into making little figures. Little figures took me to beading and jewelry making which in turn made me think of making money. When that didn’t happen, it was the end of the road. The sad thing about it all is through yard sales, gifting, and losing stuff during many moves throughout my life, I have nothing to really show for it. No body of work. And I stopped drawing. Until one night when I decorated a desk and expressed how much I hated Bush. It was cathartic and is proving itself to be very hard to recapture.

I am truly like the proverbial cow’s tail (always behind). I have been so busy with a very heavily scheduled routine, filled with appointments to my various practitioners (weekly chiropractor, acupuncture. Hell, I am even on a 3 month teeth cleaning recall these days). Then there is my toiling as the mediocre bookkeeper that I am for my husband’s business. I am doing a little bit of scribbling in my sketchbook, but nothing I’ve latched on to emotionally (yet). I have no drawing of cows to display here.

I have this fish though. I drew it for a friend (whom I’ve known since childhood) when she was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. The caption for it is “Swim!”. When I drew it, I remember feeling like illness must feel like a giant net ready to scoop you up and pull you out. And at the moment when you realize the net is there to grab you, someone screams at the top of their lungs: “Run! Get the hell out of there! “

I want just the opposite. I want to rest in the net and pretend that the house won’t go to hell overnight if I don’t clean it every day. Wanting time to do your art has to be one of the most torturous yearnings one can endure. Like having a crush on someone who doesn’t return the feeling, you feel almost spoiled and selfish for wanting it at all costs with such little return. And sometimes I can’t figure out if my responsibilities are the “net” or if my lack of exercising my talent is the “net”.

To be clear: I am, in no way, saying that I wish major illness upon myself or that illness has any role energetically in the creative process, although it may for some people. It’s more of a metaphor for priorities, and the sudden slap of awakening that one needs in order to get busy, whether it is toward the process of healing, or creating, or anything that is otherwise taken for granted in favor of the less urgent things in life like housecleaning, or unpacking a suitcase, or shopping for t-shirts and the myriad other things that absorb small chunks of my day until it is eaten away along with the sunlight I need to draw. And if creating actually did have some role in healing, wouldn’t we do it first? It’s about priorities, and if you are woman, it’s often about stealing time to do something that is good for YOU, not the others in the household, which gets into a whoooole other set of nonsense tapes that play in our heads and kill the energy needed to get started. It’s about suddenly getting the RIGHT to be selfish. Is illness the the only excuse we are allowed?

Also, full disclosure, I copied the fish in large part from a photo of a textile. Sometimes, when you are TRULY stuck and inert, copying something helps break up the logjam. As for my personal logjam, that was the first thing I drew OF ANY SORT in 20 years. And now here I am trying to keep it all going and discussing it on a blog. But that fishnet? That’s aaaaall me, baby.

I can certainly live with this:

Actually, I am really happy with this little sketch. It looks even better in “real life”. The sheen of the oil-based colored pencils competes with the hard lines to the naked eye and it makes the veins of the leaves less obvious (more subtle). It’s interesting, seeing the difference in a photograph versus seeing the real thing up close.

And comparing drawings, the bougainvillea now REALLY looks like “amateur hour”.

I’ve had this blasted pre-migraine headache for most of the week. Add to that, the Olympics and the pre-emption of my evenings (amazing how a sports event can encourage inactivity – I think I’ve gained 5 pounds), and I haven’t had much energy or focus to do more than this.

I was having a bit of a scale issue, but managed to sketch in leaves that seemed to fit the scale of the berries. I think the leaves are a bit close together so don’t be surprised to see some change there.

Anyway, a massage, more ibuprofen and the end of the Olympics should have a positive effect.

I’ve had these week-long near migraines before. There have been several bodies of work on artist expression and migraine. Most notably, Oliver Sacks’ book Migraine and his discussion of Hildegard von Bingen’s artistic and spiritual inspiration as a migraine sufferer. And there are some interesting examples of artwork created while “under the influence” of migraine. That’s all well and good, but I don’t know how I could even lift a paintbrush while having a migraine unless it’s to stab it into my eyeball to make the pain stop.

The whole thing is interesting, but migraine neither diminishes or improves my artistic abilities, which is fine by me. I find drawing to be much more difficult than even having a migraine.