stormy weather

so much summer rain! it's weirdly cooler today for all the rain storms.

i've been mulling over how to start these drawings. i realize i've never made the kind of drawings i want to try for our show. i don't know what kind of paper to buy. or if there is such a thing as sheen-collet (spelling?) drawings. maybe i should just call them collages. . .i might be less intimidated.

sunday evening

it's hot and stormy here. the weather it seems is fickle. 

it's tense and the air is heavy. it starts to rain and 

thunder and lightening

and i keep hoping this storm will lighten the air. 

but then there is another and then another.

today i can appreciate it's frustration. . .

it's so hot here, already. that sort of dense heat where you want to lay around, and at 10pm it finally seems like a good time to have dinner as long as it's a salad. it was.

on saturdays, i usually wake up grumpy and cloudy and still full of the debris of the week behind me. i go to the farmers market, which is like yoga or running for other people. i think i don't want to go, i think i just want to stay in bed but i know once i get there, i'll be happy i did.
this morning i woke up and didn't fight my natural tendency to wake up early; i got up and i see the week behind full of possibility just like the weeks ahead...
i'm still going to the farmers market.

full heart/full mind

i'm so full of so many things: memories, ideas, pathways, friendship... my mind is spinning, but still I look.

new beginnings

Congratulations on the first day you would have had to go to work if you were still employed, but you are free as a bird!
i like the new beginnings, the potential of starting fresh. and this life goal/plan you've been working towards is so inspiring. . . .
adventures are afoot!

morning

i'm still struggling to get up early and draw, the covers this morning felt like warm bubbles in a bath pulled up to my chin. it's one of those rare NY summer mornings that isn't hot and muggy yet. it still feels refreshed from the night time.

i woke up mulling over this goal for an artistic life. i am so inspired by you quitting this job and selling paintings. my vacation fantasies this summer are to draw and sew. . . draw and sew for our show, for my portfolio and to sew for something to wear.

somehow i always come back to the original desire for a new dress. . .

re-membering

i remember in color.

it's a web or a puzzle that forms the whole . . . the color of the time of year, the year of school i was in, which room that corresponded to . .

after high school, it was what apartment we all lived in, what state Tara lived in, what journal i was writing in and where i was working, was it between my years at PCC? or after?

little pieces of memory that are all strung together and make up some color of a memory. it's like a colorful equation, adding up all the pieces to get the whole.

it's harder now, living far away. we all move around less. and i see less and hear less of what goes on in everyones lives. . .

the day Tibi was born was the day i got my diploma from Parsons. . . . and Tila, i won't forget that it was thanksgiving, but my own thanksgivings all look the same the last 4 years, i don't remember where i was or what i did. . . . it will make remembering what year he was born so much harder. . .

pictureless

as i move towards the end of one path of my life, i've been so much less able to take pictures. except for some photos for work, it's been a few days without taking any pictures. i was going to let another day go by without posting, but realized i could post without a picture, with just words.
my memory works in images, though, so perhaps that's why pictures seem so important. i always thought that was why my version of history is so much more subjective. pictures can be intrepreted in so many ways.
you are the historian, the one that remembers things as they were (you are a mix of romantic and realist), how do you remember?

finding ones strength, finding ones center, finding ones purpose. i think about the luck we had in becoming family, in the ability we have to go to each other, the knowledge we have that some one is out there rooting for us, and willing and able to accept our darkest faults and most debilitating insecurities. and here, being able to talk and think creatively and have someone to explore those ideas with. we've always had that. i'm a better artist because of this built in creative support group we've had, more able to take risks and deal with the failures and successes that come from that risk-taking. and really, a better artist to me is just a working artist. discipline is easier out of the garret.

funny, i just thought about how our room growing up was actually a garret. that must have been what sealed the deal.

tuesday evening

i was walking home from yoga tonight, the sun was going down and the light was so lovely. i was taking pictures with my little camera, mulling over how much photography and works on paper are coming to the for front of my mind. . . i'm not sure yet how many sculptures i need to make for this conversation. 

for sure the tree of inheritance. it was the talk about this dress that you responded to, that sparked this idea.  

maybe it's because i've been focusing on collages and drawings this week . . . but i'm intrigued, i feel like my mediums are romancing me, vying for my affections/attentions. . . 

tuesday

it seems like summer, or at least spring, has finally decided to emerge. our garden is going nuts, and there are even moments of blue sky. my summer self is emerging too, and i want to be outside, active, with friends and family gathered round.
you know the meyers-briggs thing, and the different personality traits? i've always sat right between introvert and extrovert and i've decided that those parts of myself are seasonal. i'm coming into the extrovert side...

back from the woods

i'm remembering what true quiet is, and how much i like it.
and now i'm headed back to my studio, to make golden apples and put birds in frames.

i repeat myself

lost again in the weeds. it's saturday morning. awake and asleep on and off all night, all morning. my mind is full and also without words, cloudy i guess is the word.

thursday

i think yoga broke me tonight. i had planned to come home and do more . . but instead i'm going to take a cool salty bath.

maybe tomorrow will be better

drawing

shoes on the brain.

i came home from work to draw tonight and instead napped.

there is a slight shade of shyness mixed with fear? that makes drawing really hard to start and so easy to walk away from.

but there is so much in my head that wants out! so many drawings. of everything. not only shoes. but all the feelings that don't have names, the dreams i can't say aloud.

this place is odd to me. i've fixed myself in the middle, between what i want and not wanting to find myself disappointed.

it might be called stuck. but i think i most knowingly placed myself here. 

i don't like to know it any more.

rain

after wishing for rain, we got a thunder storm. it came at the end of yoga, we were all laying on our mats, sweating like mad, listening to the thunder and lightening. it was over by the time we collected ourselves to leave. 

amazingly the rain brought some relief from the heat. today felt cool by comparison, nearly 15 degrees cooler.

often the rain makes me homesick like nothing else. i miss the smell of it and the amazing colors the clouds produce during a storm, when the ceiling rises but only reveals more purple clouds swirling around.

i hope you found sunshine, constant rain brings it's own oppression, much like the heat. i over look that part in my memory.

i've been thinking so much about romance since you mentioned it last week. 

i was always the romantic one. 

once when i was 18 i was talking to a friend of mine who was about 30 at the time. he struggled with depression and ghosts of his life. and i said, "maybe if you sleep on your side all the rocks will fall out of you head".

i miss that romantic optimism, that it could be so easy to let things go.

interestingly, no one here sees me lacking romanticism. it's my romanticism that makes me the wedding dress maker. and it's this romanticism that also makes me the wedding photographer. last night i was given Quinn, a Nikon D40x, in exchange for being my dear friends wedding photographer.

it amazes me too that you are being covered in rain there. we are still sweltering. and the summer rain here gives no relief, it leaves the air heavier then it finds it. have fun while you are way, i will miss you.

i bought epsom salt today, later i will try turning my bathtub into a mini cool salty ocean. . .

the sun is still elusive and we're going to the woods. i'll be without my normal electronic connection to the world and i couldn't be happier. i'm just hoping we won't spend the entire time damp. i never thought of myself as someone obsessed with the weather, but this lack of sun is doing something to me. and it's strange to think of you sweltering away, sweat pooling in crevices. the rain is pooling in mine.

...so no posts from me until friday.

walking with our brother and his family was like a continuation of my recent thoughts. i was looking at my neighborhood though his children's eyes, and their eyes became my own childhood eyes. or maybe it was the other way around.

and finally, we all saw some sun.
i've been spending a lot of time looking in extreme directions; straight up and striaght down. that feels like childhood when the sidewalk comes up to greet you so much more readily and the action in the world takes place far above your head.

quietness

I like the way the things I see look through your vision. Like your pictures of my little worlds. I like that all the things we have around us have their own story. We make up a lot of stories, the stories are endless, they keep coming. I see something being a stream of unending stories, slips of paper, notes. The bounty of words, almost an excess. I think our loved ones would definitely call it an excess.
Not that we don't know how to be quiet. Both of us are quiet, you and I. The things we like to look at are quiet. Sometimes quiet is very powerful. And sometimes power and beauty come in small ways, ways that go unseen by most. Ways that you must be still to see.

a big part of my memory of our childhood is our neighborhood. there's a way that we lived outside. we knew so much about everything in a 10 block or so radius. what grew where and when, the animals, the shops, the stories we made up or observed about our neighbors. the haunted house, especially creepy when we were nearing halloween and whose only real terror was that the house was a little decrepit and an old lady lived there. the barber next door. the orchard at... what was that school we caught the bus at? not laurelhurst but the small one by the brown house? it's on the tip of my memory.

i'd like to walk around and take pictures of those old pathways. i bet it'll seem much smaller now...

nesting

today i feel better, still slow and spacey but also mildly introspective. i'm not sure i feel like the historian anymore. i feel like i stepped away from being the historian about when i stopped taking pictures.

i'm starting to miss that phase of my life. i hope this make/believe will wake up that habit.

i've meant to put my camera in my bag since we started this. today, to take the picture at the right, i actually had to charge the camera battery. baby steps . . . .

i love your idea of bringing in the words and the colors . . .

correspondence

i do remember that; that we are biologically related because our cells have memory. i think memory is one of the things that moves us both as artists and as people. one of the things i've found interesting is the way memory works for both of us. i've always thought of you as the historian, the one that should accurately document our past. i don't think of myself as a romantic, but sometimes the way that i remember betrays that tendency and i'm forced to reconcile with my own nature. i feel like you are a more romantic person in the day to day acts of living and i am in memory, my romanticized memories.
but i was thinking about our correspondence yesterday, about the letters and drawings and collages and objects we sent back and forth... and email too. i was thinking about the history of how we communicate, and how words intrigue us and yet are not something we need to speak to each other. i was thinking about our secret language of colors and images and experiences. i was thinking about how to make that into something not secret, or at least something shareable.

biological memories

do you remember this?

a few years, maybe 4, after the divorce i learned that our bodies store our memories in our cells, throughout our bodies, in our muscles and stuff.

i reasoned that our shared history, growing up together and having so many shared memories stored in our cells made us a biological family.

i thought of this today because i've been doing so much hot yoga, with all the stretching and sweating, my body feels so different. happier and healthier. but my mind and my feelings are running all over my life. today my emotions are about 5.

i wanted to stay home sick today . . . just hang out at 5. . .

maybe tomorrow . . .

Here's an image of something in my space... in the small, immediate world that surrounds me.

timid

i'll admit my nervousness is directly proportional to my excitement.  

forgive me if this sounds to nostalgic, but it is the same as the day i met Briana. it was spring in portland and i was five. more then anything i wanted to make friends with this new sister in my new spontaneous family. timid and oddly shy, i had no idea how to begin. . .  much like now. . .

there have been thoughts of this running around before, our work with familial themes,  doing something collaborative. my first thought was wondering if this would work with the dresses that keep asking to be made, do they fit into this conversation? yes. yes, when a dress comes into mind, this is where she comes to fruition. 

for this show i am excited to explore this, from here and from there.

the first conversation about our november show

roadmaps to our past
roadmaps of childhood
roadmaps/pathways
roadmaps and keyholes
key
maps
what makes us family
making family
roadmaps to family
airways

make/believe
I think that's the one.
My sister and I met when I was seven years old. Though the Brady Bunch showed us an idealized version of what combined families looked like, it still felt very new and strange in the early eighties to try and explain our family. Throughout our lives, my sister and I continue to define and explain to each other what family is. Both artists, our work is about observing and documenting the world around and within us. Our world is made larger, more understandable and brilliant through our relationship. I talk to my sister every day. This show is about that conversation.