Good Times in the Graveyard

Pardon my recent obsession with graves... but here's another update.
Yesterday was my grandmother's birthday. And although I love Harry Potter as much as the next 40 year old with the reading level of a 12 year-old, I did not celebrate Gram's "Death Day" with a party this past spring. In my mind, she is still the funny, silly, brave, ALIVE woman whom I admire and miss so much. Not the freaky-screaming-shell who vaguely resembled my Grandma on a really bad day. So which one would I rather celebrate?

Since she has a new stone, and it was her birthday, I coaxed my kids, my mom, and my mother-in-law out to the graveyard for a little picnic. My son and I had made a chocolate cake (Gramma loved chocolate) and we all ate until we were sugar crazed. Lilah took off running around the cemetery like a banshee and Ellie trailed after her. I had been disappointed that Gramma was buried in this new cemetery - no old interesting stones, no trees, just lots and lots of empty grass and an occasional altar with beer bottles or flowers... but now I realized this was the perfect spot. I didn't have to say"be careful, don't step on...." because it was mostly empty. So go ahead and run, burn that sugar rush! Meanwhile, Alex and I built a marshmallow "cake" into the shape of a heart and I wrote on it with frosting. The ants thought they had died and gone to heaven! Maybe Waterloo Cemetery is actually the Valhalla for ants? Well, it was yesterday. And after a week of steady, dreary rain, Gramma had somehow managed to conjure up an absolutely perfect sunny, cool day.

It really was one of the nicest parties I have been to in a long time! And I was imagining that, after the sun set, a small brown bear would wander out of the trees and gobble down the remaining marshmallows. Then she'd sit herself down against the bench, with her picture on it, and have a little snooze. She'd dream about a lady with lovely smooth, pink skin, mischievous blue eyes surrounded by laugh lines, and the heart of a bear. And for that minute, the bear would wonder 'Am I a woman dreaming of being a bear, or a bear dreaming that I am a woman?' And my Grandmother would look down from where she is watching and have a good laugh.

A Grave Situation

 It's been over a year since my grandmother died (read the post about her here). Her grave finally has a gravestone! It seemed a bit... well, I'm not sure what the word would be. I mean, she was buried in a tote bag for goodness sakes. I kept bugging my mother about getting a nice stone, but it wasn't until this spring that inspiration struck.

We stopped over in Paris on the way to our Holy Lands Adventure. The plan had been to visit the Catacombs, but when we arrived, there was a line all the way around the block. And visitors only enter in groups of 11 or so. I figured we would be standing in line all day before we even made it to the gate. Ugh. So we wandered over to the nearest, free, macabre attraction - the Montparnasse Cemetery. We roamed for hours. I have never been in a more fascinating graveyard. This was more like a little city and filled with famous scientists', authors' and artists' "homes". There was so much variety - from the Egyptian themed grave in the Jewish sector to an ultra-modern stack of granite sticks.

As we were leaving, we realized we had to make use of our inspiration to finally get a stone for Gramma Magda! And certainly not a boring gray slab.

I would have loved to have a bear shaped sculpture as her marker, but that was a bit... expensive. My mother ordered this unusual black granite bench with an engraved bear. A good compromise. The stone looks rather lonely and bare  (and a bit dirty!) without foliage and flowers. I thought it might be nice to make some cement stepping stones with the kids' handprints too. In our graveyards we often put vases of flowers. But in Paris, they have whole shrines erected. There was a grave for a 12 year-old Chinese boy  :-(  that had food in Tupperware containers, soda cans, little toys, photos, and letters. It was so sad. For the famous graves, visitors left their subway ticket stubs held down by pebbles. And on others, there were small piles of rocks. I suppose it is a way of saying, "I was here and I miss you."

A prince and a princess who died on the same day. So many stories buried here!

Guy de Maupassant (and Alex)

A very original grave!

My favorite shot. this was such a beautiful cemetery.

A stack of books!

I have always thought that you rest beneath your stone forever in peace. RIP and all that. But real estate is real estate. And if you don't keep paying the rent, well, someone else will take your spot. how creepy is that?

My grandmother shares her headstone with her mother-in-law, Jenni, her husband, Johannes, and her baby daughter, Merike. Jenni and John are actually buried somewhere on Long Island and Merike had been in a mass grave in Germany. But she was... "removed" when a large highway was built. It's nice to have them all together again in Warner, even if it is only in name.

"My life is a dark, darkroom" with Clowns!

I have been cleaning up and re-organizing my studio these past few weeks. It's the only way to get at all those dust bunnies, but it also gives me the opportunity to rediscover forgotten (lost?) projects, and to remove the stuff that is no longer useful. While shuffling junk around, I unearthed a painting I did in art school (20 years ago!) It is actually my most-favorit-est oil painting I have ever done. I have been painting since I was a little kid. My grandmother was an artist and she'd make us paint still lifes of flowers. I loved my grandmother, and I love making art, but I hate oil painting and I hate still lifes! The irony of this painting that I "found" is that it is actually done on the BACK of a stretched canvas with, guess what? - a still life on the front. It's a still life of shapes with part of a still life/model on top of that. We tended to re-use canvases a lot. Not just because they were expensive, but because we had to stretch them ourselves and we were lazy! So, this clown face is on the back of a recycled canvas. I must not have expected to like it or want to keep it. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't for an assignment - those were done on the fronts.

What I am posting here is a photograph of a painting I did of a black and white photo that I took of a girl whose face I painted! Got it?

Click the image to see it larger

 In what seems like another life... I had a business, as a teenager, painting faces at local arts and crafts festivals. I also was studying Black and White photography and the Zone System with David Marr. We'd spend days making test strips to get the perfect whites and blacks and grays. I have some very "pretty" photos from those days. Needless to say, I rebelled. I set up my own darkroom at home and stopped timing anything! I would just "wing it". And that's the stuff that got into gallery shows, stolen from gallery shows(!) and even sold. I even did a series of photos exposed from microscope slides of gallbladders. They looked like faces. I know, can you believe it? And I sold one to Kodak! That's another story...

This was before Photoshop. I loved the magic of watching the images appear from a blank piece of paper. I felt like a wizard... powerful. But, I hated sitting in the dark for days on end. And complete darkness (to develop the film) did yucky things with my depression-troll. When I dropped out of SVA, I gave up photography.

Meanwhile, back in my half-clean studio...
I decided to put the clown picture up near my computer, but the raw, ragged canvas edges looked really bad. Distracting. So I trimmed them the best I could and painted them black! What a difference, eh?

Now I stare at her face while I am thinking and I look into her eyes. I am amazed at how much depth there is there. I love the details. What floors me is that I painted this way in my teens. I loved to take photos so I could paint and draw from them. And yet, I studied photography, then illustration in art school... and it took me another 15 years to UN-LEARN all the crap from school... so I could start painting this way again!

I finally did something with the original photograph - I made some postcards. So if you love this image as much as I do, you can get some cards for yourself at my Etsy shop. I hope to post some more in the near future too. I'd love to know what you think!

PS Title comes from the movie "Beetlejuice"

Three baby birds, Two freaked cats, and a Partridge on my front stoop

Animal attraction? I came home one day to find this strange creature on my door stoop. My mother-in-law did some research and said it is a partridge. I think it is one strange bird. It just stood there. With my husband gardening nearby. With kids running past. Me taking photos. It's like it was posing. It showed up a few days later standing right behind my car. It didn't want to move. If I wasn't pretty sure they were extinct, I would have guessed it was a mutant form of DoDo Bird.

 In the carport, we have a new family of birds. The mom chose the motion-sensor light to build her house on. Right next to the door. For the past few months, every time I drove into the carport, the bird would fly off in fright... and trigger the light. Very convenient for me, but the flap of wings near my head would make my heart race! Now, with the babies, she sits on the junk at the back of the carport and sings, or maybe she's tweeting to her homies about her new brood and updating her Birdies'R'Us wishlists! The babies look pretty snug for now - reminding me how moms are so good at getting their families to fit whatever space they are provided. And everyday, when I step outside, I pray that I won't find the nest (or any babies) on the ground under the light. Urck.

And lastly, there's my cat Lilo. After Rum Tum passed away last fall, we had been trying out new kittens. That failed miserably when my favorite of the cats pooped all over my bed. Urck!

So we decided to convert to a one cat family and Lilo (LiloBean JellyBean) found new confidence and a sense of serenity she had never experienced while under the dominion of RumTum Teazer. She relaxed and blossomed. Until Sunday, when her nightmares returned... supa'sized!

I posted a while back, the memorials I made to RumTum after she died. One was a little shrine type thing, the other was a larger-than-life cathead-shaped wooden cut-out of her face. On Sunday, I finally got around to mounting it on the mudroom wall above a little pass-thru window. I went back to organizing my new sewing room. My husband came in and asked if I'd seen Lilo's response to it. The poor thing was crouched on the floor hissing with a tail that was almost as puffy as her body! RumTum was BACK! And she was HUGE! I kept patting the painting and saying "It's not real" until her tail finally depuffed. As you can see from the photo (depuffed) - she still does not trust the painting! I have other big paintings of cat faces all over the house, but this is the only one that bothers her!

Art & Soul Recharge

I got home from Art and Soul (Virginia) on Wednesday and crashed into bed. What an exhausting, amazing... exhausting...  experience it was! We drove down with a car packed full of supplies for my classes - I taught two on Thursday, and for Vendor Night on Saturday. Teaching was an incredible experience - the classroom had such a variety of students: artists, crafters, cancer survivors, art therapists, a mom and her teenage daughter... I'd like to make my "show" more portable so I can do more of these retreats. Note to self: not more than one class a day!! I was on from 8:30 that morning til ten that night. I got to talk to so many people and heard the most wonderful comments. I always wish I could bottle them up for when I feel like crap. :-) I also got to take some classes. I always vow that I will make time to do more of whatever I've learned, but... years go by. That's why these retreats are so important to me. They give me enforced time to just concentrate on one thng for a day and immerse myself in the making of things. Here's what I made!

In Carla Sonheim's "Creatures on Wood" class we found creatures lurking in swirls and blobs of watercolor and gesso. I enjoyed swirling and blobbing so much -  I made a whole bunch of panels, but only the cat and the bird are finished.

On Sunday, I took Leighanna Light's "Birds Gone Wild". During lunch, my husband came in and started "suggesting" what I should do with the various pieces of metal. I threw him out and said "Next year, YOU sign up and make your own!" It really was a lot of fun to snip and punch and hammer and then eyelet it all together. My metal junk formed itself into a Witch Owl (I still intend to hang little mousies from its wing), a Love Bird, and, my favorite, the Bird-Bird.


The last class, which my husband DID sign up for, was "Moldmaking 101" with Marcia and Ty Schulz. They were Hollywood prop makers and certainly knew their stuff. We made a ton of press molds which I have done gajillions of already (for polymer clay projects), but we also learned how to make two part molds - like a doll's body. That was really exciting because it's the kind of thing you can see in a book and never try because it looks confusing. But Ty walked us through it with great tips and we all gasped as we pulled our castings out of the rubbery stuff. And we got to use a casting resin too. The possibilities are endless (sigh - something else I NEED to play with!).

This first photo shows the two-parter on the left and the push mold on the right. The castings, in the middle, had the feel (but not the weight) of porcelain. While pouring the liquid rubber (for the 2-part mold), scenes of Star Wars and Han Solo flashed through my mind as the black stuff flowed over the dolls face. Creepy!

This second photo shows the originals on the far left and far right and the castings in the center. The originals had been cast with plaster and were very delicate and had many flaws and air pockets. I was able to fill the flaws with clay, so the castings were lovely and smooth. When they come out of the mold, they are still a bit flexible and you can cut parts off or make holes, etc. Then they harden up.

Oh such fun!!

Home!

As the plane touched down on the runway, I had a disorienting moment of pure panic: I had no idea where I was!? The airport looked the same as the others I'd seen recently and my mind actually had to run through the itinerary to figure out I was home. This was Logan Airport. Home. Paris - Amman (Jordan) - Petra - Aqaba - Sharm el Sheikh (Egypt) - The Red Sea - Hurghada - Luxor - Cairo - Suez - Suez Canal - Ashdod (Israel) - Jerusalem - Haifa - Nazareth - Limassol (Cyprus) - Larnaca - Amsterdam - Boston - HOME.

I had assumed I'd be able to get online during the trip and blog my adventures as they happened. But life never follows an itinerary. So I found myself on many, many (many!) long bus rides "blogging" in my head. The past two weeks or so are already becoming a blur. This was an insane trip filled with locations at which we could have easily spent the entire trip! We arrived home at 2am "our time" - 7pm local time and my brain is so filled with a jumble of images and emotions - I imagine it will take a while to sort it all out.

The awe of walking a mile through a dark narrow "wadi" (a rock canyon) and emerging into the sunlight to stare up at the "Treasury" of Petra. An entire city carved out of the rock walls - thousands of years old - lost in the desert until about 100 years ago. I stuck my feet in the Red Sea, the River Jordan, and the only lake on the planet invisible to satellites! I stood between the front paws of the Sphinx! No one gets beyond the fence surrounding the sphinx, but Dr. Ramadan, who is second in command of the Egyptian Antiquities Dept. - also happens to be a former student of the professor who was leading our group. He accompanied us around Cairo and took us down to the feet of the Sphinx! We were able to walk right up to the tablet under his chin. If you don't understand the sense of awe this creature instills - consider this: the sphinx was already ancient... 8,000 years ago! They believe he originally had the face of a lion and it was re-carved into the pharaoh's face "in more recent times" which is why the head appears so much smaller in proportion to the body. It's also thought that there was a matching Sphinx on the other side of the Nile.

I was also overwhelmed by the insane amount of construction going on in the Middle East. Miles and miles and miles of very expensive apartments and hotels all going up at once... in the desert. Where does the water come from?! And the trash and the smog. There are four-lane highways in Cairo and traffic worse than Boston. 20 years ago, there were some cars, but mostly donkey carts and pedestrians and scary buses. Our bus drove up the plateau, behind the pyramids to the scenic view where you can photograph all three pyramids together. We could barely see them through the smog. Egypt will manage to destroy in one generation - what has lasted for thousands of years. There is a new McDonald's right behind the Luxor Temple, and I saw a TGIFriday's and a Gold's Gym built onto the Nile in Cairo. A positive development is the improvement of the museums and Egypt's new cataloging system. They have recovered over 5,000 "stolen" artifacts. Many more are still in museums around the world. They are also working on programs to train and educate Egyptians to curate the new museums and do recovery work.

One thing that I did not think I would get used to was the security. Everywhere we went we had, what we called, our "men in black." I don't know how they manage to pack those huge guns into the back of their pants... and the suits! It was more than 110 degrees in Egypt and these guys were wearing full suits. But they came everywhere with us and often there was a police escort as well for the bus. Every public place we entered: hotels, museums, tomb sites... we had to go through security x-rays. It eventually wore me down. This combined with the huge (gigantic) changes at all our stops in Egypt... it felt like the kid in me who decided to become an archaeologist at age 8... was being stoned by Reality. I just cannot put into words the shock and horror at the change I saw. It's like that song "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The parking lots, tourist trams... no photos in the Valley of the Kings?! Even if you aren't as into archaeology as I am, you must have heard about the accidental discoveries in Egypt? The boats found buried next to the pyramids? Or KV5 - the tomb of Ramses' sons? Even King Tut was just a hole in the ground, right? So how...HOW... can they justify paving and building roads, museums and rest houses, parking lots right up to and through these sites?!!! And the trash from the locals and the tourists will cover the country faster than the sand. I saw islands of water bottles and other trash bumping up against the luxury boats on the Nile. There used to be hundreds of little sailboats in Luxor, felucas, now there are hundreds of hotel boats. Honestly, floating hotels.

I've never been to Israel before, so I thought it would be better - nothing to compare it against. But I had a feeling the "Atlantic City" on the shore of the Sea of Galilee was a fairly new addition. Our guide described the Roman ruins around us, but the shops completely obscured them.

All my ideas about politics, religion, materialism, security and even my own sense of confidence have all come under examination. I hope I can think of something to "DO" with all this "stuff" in my head! I did keep a journal and if I can keep my eyes open long enough tomorrow, I'll try to scan some of it and post it if there is any interest! I know this post comes across as very negative - that happens when one is extremely exhausted. But, honestly, I am really glad I got to take this trip - and really glad I got to bring my son along. I need to unpack my brain along with the dirty clothes and assess it all.

Shaun Tan, My Art Hero