sisters three

I started these portraits, my cousin's three daughters, back in June... and finally finished them a few weeks ago.

They were the most difficult portraits I've done so far. They're a little bigger than the others, at 8 x 10 inches, so I think much of my initial fumbling was solved by investing in some bigger brushes. But all the fumbling that came after that... I don't know.

It took me a good amount of time to settle in to my palette -- and to mix my 37 different hues each and every time. And while there were some exciting moments, like that electric orange on the eyelid, there was also a lot of fighting with exactly how dark that shadow should be on the cheek, the chin, or the neck.. and is it more purple or more brown?

I'm really good at reading all the nuances in one tiny spot, but I struggle with the bigger shapes, the relationships within the whole. What good is the perfect highlight on the lip if the whole mouth is too wide? And then the more I work into it, the more blended the paint becomes, and the initial vitality & expression of the brushwork is lost.

I think they turned out beautifully, don't get me wrong; I'm too much of a perfectionist to allow the piece to go unresolved. That's my problem, though -- the perfectionism is steering me toward ever-more-detailed realism, and what I really want to see is a looseness and economy of brushwork. This is always my challenge: doing less.

So now I'm trying to scale back: fewer colors, fewer hours, fewer moments of despair. I'm experimenting with collage too, and doing quick studies. Confidence, restraint, balance... these things just take all kinds of blasted PRACTICE.

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dear you, dear me

Dear Auden,

You know what I just realized about blogging, after all these years? It's that I've been trying to hew to a formula and the formula is bullshit. The markers and milestones and cheesy "letters" are bullshit. The trying to record my relationship to you in a way that is lyrical, genuine, and also amusing... it's bullshit.

I realized that tonight as I went in to your bedroom to check on you, and you had fallen fast asleep, and I put my hand on your bare chest and felt your heart thumping, and I marveled at your slim shoulders and the curves of your nose, your cheeks, your perfect sleeping mouth.

I felt fiercely in love you with right then, and I realized I had been unknowingly assuming that that kind of fierce love was reserved for infants, or maybe just specifically YOU as an infant. It was as if I had been subconsciously telling myself that I could never have your infancy back, and with it, the raw and enormous and lucent love that sharpened those months.

Isn't that silly?

I still love you that way.

It's just easier now to get distracted by every-day logistics, new challenges, your healthy and infuriating defiance. And it's not your birthday or any other milestone, but right this very minute I am watching you grow, I am watching you sleep, I am watching you kick and tumble, I am watching you become yourself with the same amazement and pride that I felt four years ago.

This thing of being your mother is so huge. I am humbled and exhausted and pried open.

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But all of this writing is really for me, so maybe the formula should be more like:

Dear Robin,

You know what you did today? You fed and dressed your children; you scrubbed poop out of a jute rug; you went to your two classes and bent your mind around the art of Dynastic Egypt and then around the mathematical rules of angles that compose a two-point perspective drawing.

You squabbled with Jason about discipline and consistency in dealing with tantrums and tearful snot-smearing bids for attention at the breakfast table, then you apologized, and Jason took the kids to school and you had a nice breakfast alone. You felt guilty about this transition to full-time day-care for Isla; you vowed to be more present and more patient.

You lost your patience about that whole poop-in-the-jute-rug thing.

You took the kids to a PawSox game, their first-ever baseball game in a real stadium, and watched as wide-eyed amazement gave way to sheer glee which then devolved into sugar-and-popcorn fueled shenanigans, but all of which was purely awesome to experience vicariously.

You got frustrated about painting; then you finally resolved the piece and rejoiced and called your dad.

You took a call from a friend who was struggling, and you gave her the very thoughtful and loving support that you yourself needed to hear.

You had a hard morning, and then a good afternoon; or maybe a good morning and a hard afternoon, where you couldn't quite put your finger on what made it hard, but you were distracted and let the kids tear up the house and draw on themselves with marker while you tried to talk yourself out of quietly falling apart.

Still, you managed to put together a healthful and delicious dinner, with all of the places set and silverware and drinks out and everything, and after dinner you took the kids to the park, where at first you felt like a lump of pity-clay because of that Hard Afternoon, but eventually you warmed up and played monster, chasing and tickling. You delighted in the crazy goofy dances Auden was doing to evade your grabbing monster hands; you threw your head back and laughed because he was laughing so hard -- and there is nothing at all in the world like the laughter of your son... that one particular laugh, the one when you tickle him just right, the fullest and realest and laughingest laugh, the one that rises like a wave, going up and up and up, until it crests and tumbles out over everything -- which of course was the perfect balm on your over-worked and worked-up thinker.

You will do anything for that laugh, even when it's no good getting Auden all riled up like that, and the fall-out is that you are done playing sooner than he is... But you realized today that you won't always be able to make him laugh that way, or to laugh at him doing his monkey dances in his little lithe four-year-old body, and how gorgeous is this one night, with its air so soft and your heart so tender.

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101

I'm going back to school.

I'm turning 35 in two days.

I'm not sure yet how quickly I'll be able to do it, but I'm going to complete a BFA in painting... and I get to do it for free!

I saw my husband's name in the course catalog when I picked out my classes. (I'm not taking his class, though I secretly kind of want to: he's teaching one on MONSTERS.)

I went to the orientation for transfer students, and the Fashions of the Youth -- my god. The '80's are back.

I had to submit a portfolio for review, in order to waive the basics like Drawing 101, and to qualify for the BFA program. I had lots of work left over from figure-drawing classes of years past, and of course lots of my own personal work, and of course all of my portraits too. I enrolled in a design class, because I've never taken design, and I want to dork out on font styles and learn how to do, you know, hi-tek stuff on the computer. And I was absolutely certain I would not have to take Drawing 101.

But the professors who reviewed my work gave me credit for the design class. And credit for the figure-drawing class. And not for Drawing 101.

At first I felt righteously indignant, like, Do you know who I am? I am an Accomplished Artiste, and I shall not stoop down to your two-point perspectives and still lifes with plastic bottles painted gray! I voiced my indignation on Facebook, and got some responses from friends that really surprised me. One said, Don't Take It Personally, and the other said, I Think Everyone Should Take Drawing 101 Again and Again Forever.

And then I remembered something my high school physics teacher wrote in my senior yearbook: "Can you calculate the altitude of that attitude?"

So I promptly got over myself. I realized that school is only going to enrich me if I allow it to, and also that I have a lot to bring to a Drawing 101 class. And I also googled the professor, who is himself an accomplished artist and whose work is amazing, and suddenly it didn't seem so bad to be hunkered in a basement studio with a motley bunch of 18-year-old Art Education majors.

Stay tuned for some value studies of apples, people!

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Michigan

Back in the spring I hatched this harebrained idea that my dad & step-mom would drive to Providence in early July, and the kids and I would ride back to Michigan with them and spend a few glorious weeks there. I knew Jason would not want to be gone that long, and I knew I would not be satisfied with anything less... so he joined us mid-way into our vacation, and we all rode back to the east coast together.

I have a lot of harebrained ideas, but most of them never come to fruition. This one, I'm happy to say, worked perfectly. And it also featured lots of glittery water and naked children:

Long hot days at the beach, discovering Uncle Matt's REAL bow and arrow at the cabin, lazy naps on nana, real live sink baths, outdoor concerts, hanging out with both my siblings, fireflies, sleeping in late, seeing my kids and their grandparents so in love with each other...  I want to go back and do it again because I'm not sure I enjoyed it enough while we were actually doing it.

I'm not mentioning the sporadic crabbiness or how hard it was to operate without Jason for 10 days, or Isla's total pre-nap-meltdown-pee-on-the-floor incident at the store, because despite all those things this vacation was Perfect.

I also surprised myself by truly missing Providence. It was good to realize that I've made friends here, settled in to a nice rhythm. I guess the only thing to do is find out who to petition to remove all those pesky states between here and there that make these visits few and far between.

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blue skies

I painted this one, my friend's daughter, back in March.

My palette is so confusing right now with 37 different hues including 14 varieties of purple that I wanted to look back on simpler times. Simpler brushwork.

I feel like I'm tripping over my own efforts to "get better," when really, the first portraits I did are the ones I like the most. The ones where I wasn't trying so hard.

How do you try not to try so hard?  Riddle me that.

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how I complicate

The more I do this, the stranger it becomes.

I mix colors, then I push them around on a surface in the shape of a human face. The exact shape of which means something impossibly important to someone. I have my own fastidiousness about getting the curve of the lip just right, or the space between the eyelid and the brow, and loosely, and painterly, and without muddying, but also because I know that if I don't get it right, it'll feel like just an imitation of a face -- that face, that one you adore with your whole heart.

It's gotten kind of heavy.

I started out with maybe four or five colors on my palette, and it took me an afternoon to create a portrait from start to finish. Now there are approximately 18 colors, arranged in minutely varying gradations, and it takes more than three full days to finish. I've complicated things, and I can't uncomplicate them. I've always been better at trees than forests.

But just look at these gorgeous trees! Saplings, really:

What a peculiar trick it is to translate light touching on shapes into daubs of color, arranged just so. So that you recognize her, her mood, her weight, her next gesture.

I would like to think I am getting better with each new portrait... but right now it's hard to tell. I do this to myself a lot: I charge into a project, I fantasize about its proportions, I drive myself toward these challenges, and then I stop abruptly short of going over the cliff with wild abandon. YIKES, I think. Don't want to go down there, with all of that unknown stuff.

I'm terrified of making mistakes.

Therefore, painting portraits of people's lovely children is the most convolutedly perfect thing I could be doing.

I will learn to make mistakes and not see them as mistakes. I will learn to make mistakes and keep going. I will learn FROM my mistakes.

I will learn to simplify.

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sibs

Here are the older siblings of the darling baby boy I painted a few weeks ago...

 Big sister:

And big brother:

I thought doing two siblings was hard.... three was a whole new challenge. I went back and forth choosing the images to use, because I wanted them to look good together without being too similar. Composition, coloring, expression... I feel like I'm just guessing and learning as I go. That kind of sums up my whole career as an artist, actually.

This is how it goes: fumble fumble fumble fumble... A HA! Fumble fumble... fumble. Fumble, fumble FUMBLE. Fumble fumble, fummmmble fuuuhh-huhhhhmble fumble fumble...
A HAAAHHHH!

But lucky for me I get to fumble with super cute kids as subjects.

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