Thoughts

The Cups

July 5, 2013July 5, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

So I am finally getting around to telling you – YOU – everyone, anyone that will listen/read about the day of the cups.

This is a big deal, so pay attention.

I only have one sibling. My brother Mike. Many of you that know me, and that know him, know that we have a very complicated relationship. We have gone years without speaking to each other. We’ve gone through that fiasco many a time, for a couple of different reasons. And we have come back together many a time too, and so on. Sometimes by force. Sometimes because we wanted to try again, and try to heal, and let bygones be bygones. What the fuck is a bygone? Oh. I just looked it up. Yeah, that’s a difficult thing for me to do, or it has been for me.

It means disagreements. Let disagreements be disagreements? That’s funny. I mean, if you know me on a super intimate level. I have had a real hard time with that one. It’s only made life harder for me. Not anyone else. I think about that now and I see that I am much better at that than I used to be. MUCH better. But I’ve always been one to nag at the other person in my relationships to “fix” these disagreements, when “fixing” them meant making them agreeable. LOL!

Anyway, I digress. A little. Mike and I have had our ups and downs. A lot of downs. Or should I say, a lot of rocky road in trying to reconcile enough of our current relationship so that we can just manage to love each other without it getting too complicated so that we’re not fighting all the time. That’s why playing music together is such a great idea for us. There’s just no bullshit there. It’s easy, and we connect and get along great. Nothing to it.

Well, recently, as you might know, I was part of this wonderful exhibition, Intersecting Paths: Art & Healing at Hebrew Union College at USC, curated by Georgia Freedman-Harvey. What’s great about that show is that, even though it’s over, there is still an online archive of the exhibition here.

And one of the artists in the show was Ehren Tool. He makes these ceramic cups for the children of soldiers that have seen action, or have fallen in battle. At first, I thought he made these cups for Jewish soldiers, so I didn’t bother to give out my name when Georgia the curator was asking the artists in the show if they had fathers or grandfathers that served in war. But then, at the end of the exhibition, just a couple of weeks ago, there was going to be a ceremony where Ehren’s cups were going to be presented to the artists and their families, among others, and it was going to coincide with a partial exhibit across the street at USC Hillel, where there would be small portraits of fallen soldiers.

Anyway, at this point, Georgia asked me again if my father was a vet and I told her he was in fact a WWII vet, but he wasn’t a Jew. She told me that it did not matter. He married a Jew, he had Jewish children, and he helped in the war effort to free the Jewish people in Europe. It was like a giant light bulb in my head was short circuiting or something. Duh!

Then I had an idea to bring Mike into the ceremony, as he was my family, in fact, my only family and we were addressing our father. Why wouldn’t we both get cups?

I sent Ehren a picture of my father at 19 years old, sitting on top of an Army tank in northern Italy (Treviso) in the winter. He was a radio operator sent in the very last (88th) tank brigade. I also sent him a picture of my father with my brother when he was a baby. His first and only son. He looked happy, and proud. And my favorite pic of me and my dad when I was little sitting on my brother’s bike, wearing practically identically the same material (my dress and his pants).

I did not tell Mike that his cup would have a special picture of himself with Dad on it, so he was quite surprised at the end of the event when we went up to the front to get our cups.

Very early into the event, when the speakers began reading off the names of the vets that were being honored on the cups, one of the women’s voice began to shake as she read the name of a man whose family she knew very well. She was not expecting to read the name and she began to cry. Sitting in the audience and watching her trying to hold herself together, I suddenly lost control of my emotions. Not just for her, but for the fact that they shortly thereafter read my dad’s name, Private First Class Calvin J. Snyder, United States Army. And for the fact that I was sitting there beside Mike and we were there together as sister and brother, willingly there, together, happily – and this would have made our parents happy too. And more importantly, it made ME happy. And I just could not stop crying my eyes out.

Then, Mike started crying too. He got up to get us some tissues, or napkins rather. That was nice of him, but it did no good. I went through those pretty fast. I was a snotty mess the entire time until we got our cups and finally got the hell out of there.

We sat in his fancy car (he has a Porsche that I’ve often made fun of) and stared at our cups for a real long while, playfully fighting about whose was better. Mine was better, of course. But you can see Mike’s on his Facebook page.

Ehren Tool has made and given away over 14,100 cups. He is a modest, humble, amazing, beautiful person and artist to have this purpose. I really wonder if he knows the effect he has on the families he touches and how an item such as this can be a means to speak about war and feelings and memories and bring loved ones closer together than therapy. Maybe he has an idea, but maybe he’d be too overwhelmed if he could take in all the appreciation we all feel.

What the Heels Been Going On?

July 2, 2013July 2, 2013Ayin EsLeave a comment

Lots and lots. There’s never a dull moment around here. Just dull people.

Lists and lists. I’m trying to stay away from them, but they are still going on, but I’m glad to say they are tapering off a bit. I have Xed out so many out of the four pages I made for myself. So what’s left? Some things won’t make sense to you, but I can help you a little by telling you that I am back on the artist book I started what? Two years ago? Houses. I’m finishing up my back yard, tying up loose ends, I’m about to fix up Arctic Memory, and have a few new projects coming in from the back burners. That kind of means… Old chapbooks become new again. You’ll see.

McMannus & Morgan
Letterpress plates
Santa Barbara Sage
Bricks
Trims
Watercolor Pages
Pay Bills
Finish Edition Tags
Embellish etchings
Wire grid the climbers
Dentist
Letter to Elizabeth
Anne
Prep Panels
Jonathan
Arctic Memory
Rxs
Cut flower paper
4 digital red/blue pages
8 digital/embellished pages
Print Giclees
7 Gouache pages
8 pencil/ink/embroidery pages
Print colophon

And that’s my last page of shit-to-do.

Yesterday, I finished the Colophon for Houses. Wanna read it? Of course you do!

Houses is based on a poem written by Carol Es, copyright and published by Careless Press, © 2013. Special thanks to Bill Roberts, Stephanie Mercado, and Poli Marichal. This handmade book is limited to a signed edition of eight copies, all slightly varied.

Four of the inside pages, plus the front and back covers were letterpressed by Bill Roberts of Bottle of Smoke Press, Dover, DE. The two etchings were printed at Paper Doll Press in Highland Park, Los Angeles, CA (thanks Stephanie) with Master Printer Poli Marichal.

Papers used throughout are Artistico Fabriano, Rives BFK, Strathmore Artagain, Mohawk Superfine text, Moab Kayenta 205 gsm., various cereal boxes, and imported flower-pressed and gold, imported handmade papers from Nepal.

Each book contains an original drawing on black paper, a hand die-cut cover, two original watercolor paintings, four digital pages in Epson Ultrachrome K3 inks – although one of them (the one with the grass) is embellished by hand, two etchings, a block print and a Sumi ink painting on gold paper, and one original pencil and ink drawing with sparse embroidery with bits of linen fabric. Each book also includes a 5 x 5 inch, full color Giclée print of the painting, “Home is Near the Sea” on hot pressed Aqvarelle Arches watercolor paper. Originally 30 x 30 inches, this painting was created in 2001 in oil and paper collage on canvas. The print slips out from an acid-free, laid paper pocket adhered to the page.

Pages of this book are French folds, with the exception of the end papers. The binding was stab bound by Carol Es with waxed linen thread from Ireland.

Took a Week Off to Work Hard?

June 3, 2013June 3, 2013Ayin Es4 Comments

I haven’t been painting. Have I? I have not. I have been making pages, rather small pages, of lists. Lists of things to do. The kind that have little boxes in front of them so I can place an “X” in them once I have completed the tasks. The tasks run the gamut from taking care of a parking ticket to cleaning up my entire mailing list, which takes …I don’t know how long that takes. I’m still working on that, but I have to go through each name one at a time, edited their first and last name, and/or delete it.

As I’ve said before, I stopped doing this list-making for a few years, but I’m back on it now. I started to forget things and also, or maybe because, things weren’t getting done. Additionally, I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done in general even though I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs all day. I work, but at what? I guess it’s so I can remember in the past. It’s so I can feel some sense of accomplishment when I’m not painting. The paintings show me that I did something. But big woop.

It’s also so I can break the big things into littler things so I don’t procrastinate anymore (on the bigger things). Not that I’m a big procrastinator. I’m more of a worrier. I worry about procrastinating.

One thing that sucks ass is that every time I’m in the head space to write, it’s not when I have the time to sit here and write. Any readers I get here – that are still with me anyway – that haven’t left screaming from their machines, “Ahhhh, death by boredom!” They just aren’t getting the best of my brains. I think of the good stuff when I’m out in the yard gardening or something, which I did a lot of this past week and especially over the last couple weekends.

It all started when I found grape vines along my backyard fence. This is alarming since grapes can kill your dog and my doggie is about as big as a loaf of bread.

I got manic and tore them down and tried to find where they were growing out from, which was difficult. I found myself cursing at the cords coming out of the dirt and slicing them with my almighty sharp gardening cutters without cutting any of the other foliage. That fence is thick with a ton of other pretty things and it was hard not to hurt them, and not to cut all the wires that were set up for the grape vines which someone had obviously organized in a grid precisely carefully along the fence. I was going to need those for whatever else I was going to plant in its place. But, I managed to cut a few of the wires anyway. Better those than my fingers though.

You know how one thing turns into another thing, which turns into another bigger thing, and then your life gets eaten away? Well, that’s what my backyard did to me this last week or so.

Along this part of the fence I planted some white and burgundy Bougainvillea and a few Marigolds in front.

I H-A-T-E those Sunset magazines with all those pictures of perfect yards, expensive plants, beautiful patio furniture, genius landscaping with pristine river rocks between each pant (that happen to somehow be in bloom during the moment of the photograph), and not a single dead leaf to be found! Who are these people?

Once and a while, you visit a real home like this and you wonder, are they doing the work out there? Do they pay their gardeners double to help keep it up? Where do you find gardeners like that? Where do any rich people find their gardeners? Who is raking out the dead leaves stuck inside their rosemary bushes? Can that even be done? Or are they planting new ones every week? I’m serious! Drive through Beverly Hills once and a while and ask yourself this shit. In my case, I live by San Marino – far prettier than Beverly Hills. It’s on the way to Armstrong Garden Center, ironically, and I think about stupid crap like this.

Here’s a pretty good picture because you can’t get too close to it to see all the dead leaves in the bed of my cactus garden, but once upon a time there were a few more live ones in the back and I had even made a design in the rocks that’s now long gone because there is a tree way above it that sheds dead leaves like crazy. Every time I clean it out, a few rocks went with it, so there really aren’t many rocks left, but it used to have red rocks on one side, river rocks on the other and a white kind of eye shape in the middle that divided them. It was cool. I built it six years ago. It was a drained out fish pond when we moved in.

Right now, it’s 1:25 PM. My gardeners are supposed to be here by 2:00, but they won’t be here. They come twice a month and cut the lawn. That’s all. If I want more, I have to ask them, even though they’ve been told to “always” keep the ivy away from the doors and windows. Once the ivy grows on the doors and windows, I have to go out there and ask them to cut it back. And the Mondays they are supposed to come, sometimes they won’t. Or, they will come at 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 – making me stay home all day because I have to let them into the back.

Anyway, I have a few more things I want to plant in the back yard and I think I will be done with it for a while. If these things live, that is. I always have a few causalities. My thumb is not exactly green. It’s a kind of mood-thumb. One day it’s black, the next it’s a kind of blue-green algae that I make a smoothie out of: a horrible-tasting pseudo-ephedrine thing I try to sell to my friends at every opportunity I can find.

Other than gardening, getting my car to pass the smog test, paying some bills, catching up on laundry, I was able to get the rest of the art supplies I needed for the rest of the year, although I still need to make one last trip to McManus and Morgan for the Houses book. I’m getting some of the golden handmade paper from Nepal, like the flysheets that are inside my All Done But None books. Still in love with it. Here is the “mock-up” for that page, which will have a linoleum block print on it.

And speaking of books!…I just got word from Chance Press that the Neil Farber | Carol Es book will be out right at the beginning of next month and they are now taking discounted pre-orders at the crazy low price of $75 before the release. After that they will be priced at $100. There are only 18 for sale. It’s a very limited edition, so if you want this utmost fantastic work of art-as-book — what the hell are you waiting for????

Finally, tomorrow is mjp and my 14th anniversary, so we are going away for a couple of days to a 100-year-old resort later in the week. We found a trustworthy place to board our Gemma since every time we have left town in the past two years, we have taken her with us every time. The place is called Wagville and she has been going there for daycare every other day for more and more time to get acclimated to the place. We should have thought about this a long time ago because she is such a terrified little pup, this seems just the right kind of medicine for her. She’s been having a lot of fun and now, so shall we.

Anniversary advice that you didn’t ask for:

Fourteen years seems like nothing. Seriously. For all of you that haven’t made it very long yet or ever, it’s really no big thing. Love changes. It gets different. It gets BETTER. New love is for suckers. If you fight a lot, that’s not a good sign. Ha!

And for those of you that have made it much further as easily as we have, you know what I mean.

All those boring things that old people tell you are true: Trust, communication, and same sense of humor.

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!

This

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

I was working in my EyeBook yesterday, the one where I write in on one side and draw on the other side. I talked about this in a previous blog entry here. I haven’t been able to get a good/usable sketch out of it for a while now, but the writing has been very therapeutic.

So yesterday I was writing about how I felt that the series I have been working on is pretty complete – in terms of it being a basic body of satisfying imagery, palette, shapes and forms where I can now continue to communicate from – for a little while at least – even though I’m just at 12 in the series.

A lot of artists like to name their series. I suppose I have too; “Dan,” “Pattern Paintings,” etc. but those are kinda obvious. I think I will just call this new series, This.

The only one painting I may want to spring board from is the pink one. There are still complexities in that one that I still can’t manage to let go of. Whether it’s the narrative, the painterly-ness, or the autobiographical/narcissism, I’m not sure which, but I know that I would miss nixing that sort of painting all together, which is why it is going to stay in the series. It has to be there to mix and mold, and evolve with the rest of these fuckers.

I suppose I should feature the last two pieces that I finished in this series in this blog post, since I don’t remember if I did or not. Let me check first….

Okay, I already featured Survivor, but I never showed Rabbi Says. The one that happened to take the longest for whatever reason. It must have been painting around all those letters. So here it is:

Rabbi Says, 2013. 24 x 24 inches. Oil on birch panel.

Shit, did I talk about this before? The quote is taken from the late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (Reb Moshe). And it’s just part of a whole quote. The painting says:

The whole quote is actually a comment on a section of the Torah. It’s hard to explain, but it’s about a troubled rabbi not being able to enter a holy place because of a dark cloud, and this seems to keep happening to him, while his solutions had been: waiting for others to pull him through, waiting for the black cloud to go away, etc. And Reb Moshe’s comments were:

There are many times when a person feels that he cannot move forward because a dark cloud hangs over him. One should know, however, that nothing can stop him! Sometimes one can make a path through the cloud, i.e., he can navigate through his troubles without becoming embroiled in them. This is the preferable course, for who knows how he will emerge if he gets caught up in a struggle?

If one cannot go through the cloud, he should look for a path that has no obstacles (just as Moshe waited for the cloud to depart). However, if he can neither go through the cloud nor find another path, he should push forward anyway with a firm conviction that Hashem will take him by the hand and lead him through.

So, I wanted to honor at least part of this view of Reb Moshe’s comment. I thought it had many important elements that confirmed what it was (for me) in being Jewish – ambition, faith in self as equal as faith in God or the universe, yet it not mattering which, and tenacity to survive (not leaving your life to fate).

And okay, so I wasn’t going to go into this, but I figured if two people already asked me this, two more people might ask me, and so on. And maybe I will stir up shit, I don’t know. It’s only how I feel and I can’t help that!

I was asked why I made the rabbi so silly looking. We all know that I make silly cartoon characters anyway, but twice I received the comment that it looked as if I was making fun of him, and this is correct. But it is not I that is making fun of the Rabbi, or the strange Jews in the black hats, or the Jews in general. It is not me who sees the Jew with the big nose and a scary face, or the orthodox with shards of bad, archaic teeth, or Jews throughout time with their hands out for your money while entertaining you, while balancing on a stick, or making you laugh. Nope. Not me. Maybe it’s me who is tired of that though.

I see those “funny Jews” that study day in and day out coming back to the community that wants to listen to them, give the kind of insight you just can’t get anywhere else.

Anyway, back to the studio.

Oh, speaking of the studio, I added new pics in the studio section of my site. Take a look!