December 30, 2009

This was the day Jackson and I got started on the reef series, colors that are found in the wedge just off the shore across the street from the house.  The music was playing: the Canadian station that comes in pretty well, albeit a bit lacking in sound due to the smallness of the Casio speakers.  Der Rosenkavalier was the last music played before I came back.  Up to that point there was Liszt eulogizing Schubert and a series of chamber pieces that kept me dribbling the paint and thinking about my missed breakfast.  I do feel a creative flow happening and I'm going with it.

Sue from next door came by and wanted to know the latest, thanking me for the hand-drawn Christmas card of a view of the gallery window.  She's been gone visiting family in Oregon and said she couldn't stay because she needed to clean house and have her coffee.  I couldn't offer coffee because I hadn't brought any down with me.  I did have a Christmas spice tea to offer, and hot water for it, but she wanted her coffee.  She looked chilly from being on the beach cleaning up the park where she does duty as the park officer.  She stood by the fire and warmed herself and we talked a little about the co-op moving to the cannery building.  The cannery building has been vacant for some years and sits just down the road from the Reef.  Back in the day when people were catching more fish, the cannery did a pretty good business.  When I was in high school, we could depend on a summer job there.  I haven't been inside it in a good long while but one of my fellow Lions' members told about the conveyor system and how treacherous it looked.  That would all have to be removed for use as a cooperative grocery store, which is all we have here. 

When I had finished the series with Jackson Pollack as my muse, the last piece done on a small square of drywall, I rinsed up some more articles of the 'disappeared one' and hung them to dry on the rack in the bathtub.  While doing so, I looked at the bathroom wall and thought of Robert Motherwell and his painting style.  The main wall looked Motherwellish..in that it had streaked paint.  I looked around for a paintbrush and there was one on the sink in a styrofoam cup so I got some of the lighter paint I'd been using on the Jackson series and proceeded to fill in the wall to my satisfaction.  While I was at it, I got out the pickling stain and coated the vanity doors and towel rack.  Then I washed down the cabinet doors above the toilet, removing the last of the former tenant's decoupage wild animals and pickle-stained those as well.  I had been tiling in the shower surround but ran out of suitable tiles (a veritable melange of ornamental tile that has come to represent my need to applique in any form).

While the wet laundry steamed, I painted the bathroom wall.  I was tempted to continue on to the bathroom door but held back on that because it was noon and I still hadn't eaten anything.  Reluctantly I picked up the car keys (I don't really have to drive to the Reef, it's well within walking distance and there's even a bike there to get to and from but usually I drive and this morning it was raining) and headed home.  There I took a shower, stoked the fire and dressed to go collect the mail.  Once back from that little exercise, I made some fried potatoes and looked at the mail.  It was the usual dreary credit card bills and the car insurance notice, which went up a tiny bit because of a repair made this year. 

On the table sits a package from my diet pal from TOPS.  I'm curious to see what it is but I got so few presents this year I'm not going to open it up directly, but let it simmer on the back burner while I contemplate making burritos and waiting for my neighbor to call and say the spaghetti is on.  She mentioned yesterday she would probably be making spaghetti tonight and did I want to join her and her grandson for dinner.  I always enjoy hanging out with them, the grandson spends a fair amount of time with me when his grandmother is called out to an ambulance run and his grandfather is off at work.  He's like a quasi-grandchild of my own, as he's been with me since he was a little babe.  He's going to be three in March.  This week we made two cookies together with a number two cookie cutter.  He actually sat down and ate a few of them with a juice box.  I sent some home in a ziploc bag when his grandmother returned from the double ambulance call that had deposited him with me.

Now about the Pollack interface:  I've been educated in the arts almost by default.  I had a studio with my former husband, Tom Ashton, in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington DC.  Tommy was a student of the Corcorcan School.  He interned with Bob Stackhouse and Mary Beth Edelsen.  He and his former girlfriend, Laura Gregory, started an arts cooperative they named Madams Organ after the Adams Morgan neighborhood.  I happened on Madams Organ when I separated from my first husband.  I found an apartment in Mt Pleasant, right up from the National Zoo.  Madams Organ was in the next neighborhood down.  It seemed like a logical thing to do at the time: join an arts cooperative, let one of its members house sit while I came home to Sekiu for a visit.  Lo and behold it came to pass that I married the house sitter and we had three children.  All the time we were married, we talked about the meaning of art.  We didn't discuss Jackson Pollack per se but were in on the new exhibits almost before they were open to the public.  Some of the better known art dealers, like Leo Castelli, were always hovering in the background, keeping an eye on the doings of the radical bunch in Adams Morgan, the Madams Organ crew...who started the first punk rock venue and gave formal exhibits when not bouncing on the floor boards to groups like the Teen Idles.  One morning I was scrubbing up after a Saturday gig at the gallery featuring no doubt the Bad Brains, our house band, and one of the members of the Cramps was sitting out on the front step looking like a Kabuki goth sadomasochist, leather to the ankles, black spike heels, teased up black hair and a motorcycle jacket.  At the time I was eight months pregnant with my second son.  It was a fresh, sunny morning...the Cramps lady, for she was in fact female, didn't say a word, maybe she was smoking a cigarette, I don't remember, only that the stark contrast of her appearance with the well-worn neighborhood of Adams Morgan as it was then relayed to me the notion that art is like that, it's why you hang it on the wall, because of the contrast of it and the reality of standing there looking at it.  It's like the hand ticking off the minutes on the clock and records forever after what it means to say.

Still not too much towards the Pollack idea, other than the shock value of having one of the Cramps sitting on the front porch was not unlike looking at my first Pollack piece and I couldn't tell you the name of it, other than it was a lot of black enamel and red enamel on a canvas painted sometime in the 1950's.  There was no structure to the brush work, other than the paint was drooling off the brush onto the canvas and didn't need the interface of the painter to apply the medium.  It sprang into being just like the Cramps lady appeared on our doorstep when we were making a name for us in the world of punk.  We did all shave our heads and dye our hair odd colors for a bit there.  I think I had for a time the first 'mullet' because I'd finally grown my hair long enough to satisfy my urge to do that and then here comes this stylistic demand that we start using butch wax and wearing spikes.  I compromised and only let them take the top part of my hair.  My father-in-law said I looked like I'd been run over by a lawn mower.  It was odd but that's what we were, what I am now.  Self-expressive.  We had ridden the curl of the wave, exploited the idea that we didn't need the help of the commercial art forum and were about to take off wherever destiny led us, only Henry from the Teen Idles made through the dark tunnel.  The rest of us took our leave and went elsewhere.   We painted, we still paint and my husband still has a grudge against the Corcoran School.  He never got his diploma, though he was there five years.  It would seem that we'd done our duty by the standard of art and whenver there was need of our effort, the Potomac Alliance when 3 mile Island started to leak, we were in the forefront being ourselves.  There was some paranoia, but not much because we were wearing the shoes of those who went before us.  We made do with bin diving and cast-offs from Fields of Plenty, the neighborhood food coop right near our house.  We could have had respectable jobs being art teachers, clerical support or whathave you but because we didnt have diplomas, we made do.  We took tickets at the movie theater and made movies about things like the FBI guys beating up our cardboard g-man when the new FBI building opened and left Justice in its wake.  How this is like Jackson Pollack would have to be that he started it, him and others like him, drooling paint and not even trying for abstract like Picasso did.  What is it about abstract art anyway?  Notably, the scene painter, Thomas Kinkaid, who enjoys a popular following, would be far from the maddening crowd of us would-be limelighters but he too had a muse I discovered when I recently watched the Lifetime movie on his evolving as a painter.  That's what we were to one another in the Madams Organ cooperative and I just hear my exhusband criticizing me now for even talking about it.  Well, let him.  He and I had some rather violent arguments about art and he would tell me mean things like 'you just want to be rich and famous'.  I doubt that's what it's really about.  I think Pollack and Jasper Johns and people like them, note I leave out Andi Warhol because he had a hard enough time being himself let alone making art to count as one whose work has that purity of synthesis the painters of the 50's did.  Not that Warhol isn't up there and in it too, just a different time.  Pollack and Johns and I should say Rauschenberg too because that one is a favorite of mine were the creators of a venue we 3rd-generation Color School avante gardists chose to follow.  We did street theater, held impromtu fetes involving cheap beer and gusty poetry, rattled chains at the snow and watched one another face the challenge that was our art.  Being a Catholic I had the training to self-examine myself to my soul in order to prepare for a good confession.  With art it was staring at the canvas, hearing the music, doing the dance and trying to tell oneself you weren't playing at being extremely foolish but did have something important to say.

So how I got here to the Reef and my own studio and setting up a painting cycle that begins with an homage to Pollack and progresses to more formalized work like that I do with my painting circle, the Messy Palettes, is what I intend to explore here, a day before New Year's Eve, when I'm at the crossroads of my own life, my first granddaughter, no real life partner to speak of, a very aged mother, deceased dad and brother, two brothers married, only one with children, and three living children that are quite a blessing to me in so many ways although oddly they'll call from time to time and tell me I've committed an unforgiveable boo-boo and I just don't know how I ever did that, only to say that perhaps it's payback for sitting on the porch with the kabukized lady Cramps member.  Like trying to plug into a two-twenty line in real time some of the far out notions of art and what it means.  Pollack was very much on the vanguard of that notion and I find my painting tends to float that way as well.  It's my way of coping with my mother repeating herself within ten minutes of the initial statement she makes in a conversation.  It's my response to my batchelor brother's caring for her and observing that he exhibits the initial signs of Parkinson's disease.  It's not something you can change, these things that happen, but you can react to them and that is what painting does for me.  I don't paint tranquil little river scenes like the ladies of the Messy Palettes brigade, but I do my fair share of pine trees and daisies and odd little cartoony drawings that I've always done.  I do odes to nature for here more than anywhere I've been, nature is in the forefront, leading the way.  The tides and seasons are vigorous and abusive of human inhabitants but it can't be helped.  It's not Newfoundland but it's close.  It's rugged.  So is Pollack's take on art.  Just do it...was that Abbie Hoffman said that?  Probably.