Kvetches

Old Photos

May 25, 2013May 25, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

I’ve been scanning old photos today, not for any particular reason, but I thought it might be fun to share them for anyone who might be interested in that sort of thing.

I’m in love with this picture. I can explain who and what these people mean to me/who they are after I tell you their names first.

From left to right it goes: Lloyd, Grandma, Uncle Lenny, Nana, Jack, Feezie, Mike.

Lloyd was not my real Great grandfather, but my Great grandma’s third husband and the only one I ever knew and so I usually called him Grandpa. Rose, my Great grandma was widowed three times. Lloyd would pass away just about a month or two before her. Sol, my true Great grandfather, I never met, but he was a gifted jeweler. He died young because of a bad heart. Rose was pretty devastated over that because she loved Sol very much, but after many, many years, she married some guy whose name I forget, but his last name began with a Z. I don’t think they were together too long before he had a heart attack and died!

So Rose called it quits on men, but years later, when she was already very elderly, she belonged to a senior citizens club where she played cards and Mahjong, Bingo, etc., and Llyod followed her around and did not give up, and she fell in love with him and they made the cutest couple you have ever seen in your life.

Uncle Lenny: he was a funny, funny fucker. But he drank like a fish and we all thought he was going to die of liver failure. As a kid, I would sit on his lap and he would make me laugh until I’d cry. He stank of Bourbon every time I went near him. He was the life of the party and my mother loved him like he was her knight. He was her favorite family member, and they were very, very close. Maybe too close.

Lenny died while getting an MRI. He was allergic to the contrast dye. He was in his 50s. My mom took it so hard, she tried to kill herself, but she tried to do that pretty often.

Nana and Jack: a very cute couple (even though Nana was pretty much a bitch). Jack would call my Nana his “little chicken.” I thought that was so sweet and funny as shit. They worked so well together. Jack was Nana’s 107th husband! Not really. I don’t know how many husbands she had but it was a lot. She wasn’t widowed ever. She just had bad luck. And for the record, she was not easy to get along with.

But the best best best thing about Nana was… she always had bananas at her house, and Mallomars! Who remembers Mallomars? Let me know if you need reminding.

Then, holding my brother in place so he doesn’t run away and create havoc, is my Aunt Feezie. That was her nickname. Silvia is/was he real name. She was Lenny’s Wife. I lost contact with her. I don’t know if she is still alive, but I highly doubt she is alive in her 90s.

Feezie had a sister that lived across the way from she and Lenny. Edie. Edie was an artist. Edie also helped take care of me. I had a LOT of wonderful women around me when I was very young that took very good care of me, and this went on maybe half the time until I was about six. And then it all stopped.

Oh, so much juice I could tell, but I just can’t. (I say while wringing my hands! – Well not exactly because I’m actually typing so I can’t really wring my hands now, can I? Let’s get real here people.)

Anyway, lastly is Mike, my older brother. Older by three years. He is my only brother and my only sibling…wait, no, that’s not true.

I also have three sisters! That story is for another blog. I just want to show more photos.

Here is Susie, Nana, and Mom. Susie is my mom’s younger sister. Younger by 13 years. Or was it eight? No, I’m pretty sure it’s 13. But never mind that, Look at how much I resemble my mom in this photo! It’s just plain eerie! I mean, especially when I was really skinny. Those of you that knew me when I was skinny like this can look at this picture and think this is for sure a picture of me, but I swear to you it is NOT.

So far all the people in the photos are dead except for Mike and Susie. Wow.

This is my dad, Cal. I guess he always has that sevenhead. It’s not a forehead, a fivehead, or even a sixhead. How he got my fashion-plate, model mother to even go on a date with him, I will never know. Why did women marry him? Look at him. He looks like a doofus. I mean, he’s my dad and I think he looks so cute and sweet and innocent. Well, maybe not innocent, but he looks like who he was. You would get out of him exactly what he looks like here. A good person who is not too bright, but he’s going to be there and show up for you. That was my dad.

And here he is before the women, the complications of marriages and children. Here he is at 18 trying to face the reality of World War II. He is really not yet a man, but he can not be a child anymore. Not here. But this was what it was like for all the kids at this time. It’s not that my dad was such a dum dum. He just saw too many dumb and senseless acts.

Talk about dumb and senseless acts…

Please don’t ask me about how my dress is matching his pants.

Here my mother was in Miami dancing in the clubs for money. She had not yet met my dad, who of course stopped her from this nonsense. Look at her! Her bangs are too short. She looks like she’s 15. (She’s not. She’s about 19 here.) But she certainly doesn’t belong in a night club shaking her hips to wins trips and prizes, money or dollar bills. Like, what-ever Mom!

ANOTHER Change of Plans

April 14, 2013April 15, 2013Ayin Es4 Comments

Ha ha ha! What did I call the last blog post? Change of Plans: No More Seven or Eight? I find that funny. Because I have changed my plans yet again! Call me crazy. Actually, no don’t. Don’t call me crazy. That would seriously offend me.

Not only will there be a seven and eight, there will be a nine and a ten and a so forth. The numbers will keep going up if you know how to count.

Number 3:

Red Scarf, 2013. Oil and pencil on birch panel.

I don’t care about size. (Who said women care about size?) I don’t care about price. I don’t care about rules or regulations.

When I was a kid, my grandfather – well, he wasn’t really my grandfather – he was just Jack, my Nana’s 20th husband or something like that. He was a genuine Fuller Brush man, but that’s besides the point.

He used to come over to my house and grill me about how I should make a neat and tidy list of “RULES ANS REGULATIONS” and stick it on our refrigerator. I’ve probably mentioned this before. But it’s because it’s so ingrained into my head. Even the sound of his scratchy voice and Brooklyn accent, “Ya have to follow those rules and regulations so you know how to behave!” And all this because the fucking television was on in the living room when he came over for Thanksgiving one year.

It was probably on so we didn’t have to hear him bitch and moan.

So, as usual, I digress.

I have spent the last five days going over this whole idea of rules and regulations, about galleries, the economy, painting smaller, and pricing. Other people’s opinions, the “art world,” the supposed tos, and all that crap. Even the opinions of real people in your life that actually do matter, like the people I love – even they don’t even matter! Sounds harsh, but when it comes to your art work, YOU have to love it. If your mom hates it, too bad. And that goes for your boyfriend too.

I feel like I looked at all this shit from every angle until each element turned into a piece of fruit. Yes, I said fruit. Why? Because I have been eating a lot of fruit these past few months, and I have lost 25 pounds by the way. (Yaye. No one has noticed.)

So I chopped all this fruit up on a cutting board and slid it into a giant watermelon bowl (as seen below) and tossed it with some really nice, wooden salad tongs I got in a little, off-the-beaten path town in Italy that you will never find.

Then I served up this very interesting fruit-salad-of-art-quandary to both myself and my very opinionated boyfriend and… it tasted like shit!

It was so bad, we both could not eat it. I had to put the entire thing into the garbage disposal. Bye bye.

So I had to go fruit shopping, by myself, cut everything up, by myself, and eat it by myself.

The metaphor here means absolutely nothing – so stop trying to figure it out. I’m off the fruit thing.

Starting Saturday, I went through my entire database and repriced all my work, raising the prices for aaaallll the increments that were missed over the past six years — after I did the print residency at Self Help Graphics, which put me into almost a dozen international museum collections. Then, when won the Pollock-Krasner Award, landed a fourth, upscale gallery in Nashville and had two solo shows there. I had another important solo show at UCLA Hillel, and won two more grants from the California Arts Council, and most recently at the Artists’ Fellowship in New York. Not to mention had my hand painted book, All Done But None purchased for the National Museum of Women in the Arts collection in Washington, DC and UC Irvine. Plus, I had more of my Artists’ books purchased by The Brooklyn Museum, , Otis, UCLA, and a half a dozen private collections (both books and original paintings).

Never were my prices raised.

So at this point, to be shy about a crappy economy, taking financial and/or aesthetic advice from a gallery I no longer am represented by, or be scared to utilize my larger inventory of blank canvases – it’s all a waste of time time. I’m moving forward with my own gut.

mjp was actually a great motivator on helping me to raise my prices, I have to say. He’s been telling me for years to quadruple+ my prices, but I was too scared. I also wasn’t free to do that either. And as an artist, you can’t go backwards once you do raise your prices, so it is a big risk. However, I have nothing to loose now.

Learning to get Mad not Even

Some people may or may not agree that being mad, at times, is not only healthy, it’s a great motivator.

Well, this has been a lifelong problem for me. I fear “mad.” I fear anger. My own, other people’s, etc.

We all gravitate towards the familiar, so if you’re used to bad habits, of course it’s going to feel odd to make a change. It’s like learning to walk or something, but I’m working on it.

Because all it’s gotten me is depression (turning the anger inward on myself) and rage (stuffing it down and suppressing it).

Sometimes I even wonder if I could deal with these kinds of complex PTSD issues, how much brain chemistry would be left to medicate? The same amount? Very little? None? It makes me think.

So I’ve been working on these “rage letters.” I would never send them out of course. But they are starting to become healing and at the very least, getting me in touch with my anger.

The first ones I wrote, my therapist read them and laughed at them. She said, “This isn’t rage.”

I wrote things like, I am very upset and sad and feel you should take some responsibility for this situation…

I guess that is pretty funny. That doesn’t even sound remotely mad really. It sounds like I was giving the person some sort of option. Ha!

Eventually, I’ve been able to write things more like, “you’re a nasty bitch that deserves life-long baldness and your toenails removed with a rusty pliers…”

So at least I’m getting there.

Okay. Want to see the preliminary sketch for Number 6?

I’m working on Number 4 today. It’s lots and lots of black outlines, so maybe I will take a pic when I’m done with this part of it. We’ll see.

Drums, Blah

March 25, 2013Ayin Es4 Comments

Yeah yeah yeah….. I set my drums up in my studio. It was a pain in the ass – had to rearrange a lot of stuff blah blah blah. Energy: Gone, really sore all over, oh my achin’ reah reah reah… Too depressed to write a blog post. An honest one anyway. Meds sucking. Here’s a pic, but I made a whole page about it on my site here.

Television!

March 24, 2013April 7, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

Yeah, so HBO cancelled Enlightened, a show that I was quite fond of for many reasons. Mike White, one of my favorite, multifaceted writer-directors, somehow got paired up with the specialized talents of Laura Dern to create the show about a middle-aged woman trying to reassemble herself among her co-workers after making a spectacle of herself during a nervous breakdown in her corporate office.

Only Laura Dern could have played this character, a woman so much the opposite of self-aware, who you feel both disdain and pity for, while tension builds and builds as you move through each episode – something that is clearly the work of White and Dern as a team. If you have ever seen Chuck and Buck, you’d know what I mean, or Dern’s character way back in Blue Velvet. I loved that tension, which is hard to portray in both acting and/or writing.

I was so looking forward to this series, and it did not let me down. It did exactly what I expected in very unexpected ways. “Amy,” Dern’s character is just not likable, but by the end of the first season, the viewer, no matter who you are, will see themselves in her character – all the ugly, self-centered parts, and the parts that mean well.

We all mean well, and we find something beautiful and childlike in what she tried to discover about herself among the sea turtles on the hippy-dippy retreat she was on after her breakdown, which she reflects on occasionally in the episodes in the first season. And in the second season she comes back to try to take the corporation that she works for down, for all the corruption and environmental havoc only she knows they are guilty of.

Anyway, I loved this show, and like many other AMAZING shows, like Deadwood, for instance, HBO has cancelled before they even had time to percolate. Fuckers! On the other end, I am grateful for the risks they have taken and support they have given to shows like Girls, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Big Love, OZ, etc.

I guess I will just have to cry my way to April 7th when Mad Men starts on AMC.

Maybe I’m Feeling Better?

March 20, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

It’s a no-go on Yaddo. I got the rejection letter yesterday. Oh, boohoo. Whatever. I expect another letter from Montalvo mid-April. And I haven’t applied for anything else besides the California Community Foundation grant, and that one is practically impossible to get. I mean, I said that about the Pollock-Krasner and I somehow won that, but that was because they had a couple of drunken panel members who were also blind and possibly on fire. I don’t know how I won that thing! They probably got sick of seeing my name – “Give it to her already! Or she’ll never leave us alone!”

Went to therapy today. Yeah, therapy. They still haven’t fixed me. And I have to say I really love my therapist. It is really hard to find someone to trust and feel comfortable with. I think about people I know and the stories I have heard, and even a few stories of my own! It’s not easy to find a sane therapist. Many get into the field because they are not stable themselves, so it’s no wonder that there are plenty out there that are creepy or hippie-dippy, or just bad.

Before I went to mine, I researched thoroughly. Those of you that know me know that that probably means I went to each of their houses and took blood tests and asked for their birth certificates. I knew what kind of therapist I wanted and I didn’t want to fuck around with someone who didn’t know what they were doing because I had my face in psychology books for the last 10 years, and they were about specific issues you might want to call rare.

I found a winner. She is highly intelligent and understands everything I have been bringing to the table. So now, especially since I’m going through major medication changes, I want to see her once a week, at least for a little while, and that nice lady made it doable for me. 🙂

Then I came home a stood in my studio, too tired to really paint, but I have been thinking a LOT lately about setting up my drums. I began taking measurements and figuring out what to do about this electrical outlet and that plastic bin, and my drawing table, and where to put my carts, and long story short, I think I have it all figured out. It’s going to take a couple of days and I have to visit Home Depot, but I just might have a little drummer area up and running by next week. I have to squeeze it in – between paintings and doctor visits, and all my other dicking around I do.

I was going to talk about how fucking disappointed I am about how HBO cancelled Enlightened, but I need to get back to the easel, so I’ll bitch about it later.