Dog Toy

The toy I got Kermit for Christmas went right into the trash twenty minutes after he unwrapped it. The packaging said that it was made for aggressive-playing dogs, made from firehose material, made to hold up under rough play.

Plainly they had never tested the toy on Kermit's jaws. I threw it for him once, and then he systematically sawed it into pieces and gutted it.

So I don't buy him cute doggie toys like I used to with Howie, Babe, or Desi (a border collie/collie mix who took excellent care of all his toys) -- there's no point, I might as well throw a ten dollar bill at him and let him shred it.

However, after I filled the salt shakers in the kitchen, I had a sturdy salt box to put in the recycle bag. Had I been wearing shoes, I'd have stomped on it to flatten it and break it down a little, but I had sandals on.

...Oh, wait, I know who can help me with deconstruction. I showed it to Kermit, who was keeping me company as he always does, and then tossed it into the front room. He leaped after it, scooped it up.

The salt box fit in his jaws perfectly, and he began to gallop from the kitchen back door to the front door in eight-foot leaps, growling around his new toy. He tossed it in the air, chased it across the floor, chomped it, capered while shaking it, ran back and forth over and over again.

When he was done scampering and had settled down to eat the box, I traded him a big dog cookie for the container, and took a picture of it to remind me that there is one dog toy I can get for him on a regular basis.

Makes me feel a lot better about being able to give him a new thing to play with. Next time I'll take the label off before I give it to him -- he'll be able to play with it a few minutes longer.

The original plan was to spend part of Sunday afternoon doing the cover illustration for the Piker Press, but once I got out to the studio, I was too content with the idea of not working on a Sunday, and so opted to play with my watercolors again.

The online watercolor class had a bit in it about using wax paper to produce texture. It didn't do much for my cheapie kids' washes in blue and green, so I crumpled the wax paper, dripped some purple, blue and green onto it, and applied it to the paper, which was Bienfang cold press 140 lb, not that I know what that means. It looks much more interesting close up, so feel free to click on the image and examine it more closely.

While I was waiting for the two sloppy pieces of quasi-art to dry, I indulged my nastiest current habit: reading NFL articles and their attendant message boards. Today's treat was a story announcing that the Broncos had signed Caleb Hanie as Peyton Manning's backup. 28 pages of comments ranged from applauding Hanie's skills and the wisdom of Broncos' management to bitter predictions of a Broncos losing season after Manning gets wrecked again and Hanie can't figure out whether to throw with his hands or with his feet. From "Elway was a moron to get rid of Tim Tebow!" to "Tim Tebow was a hack who has no place in the NFL!" the commentary ran on and on like a vicious-tearful-accusatory-flirtatious soap opera, and as I was all alone in the studio, I was free to read it all without having any other member of the family cast a disgusted eye upon me.

Well, except Howie, but he didn't know what I was reading, he was just disgusted because I wasn't taking him for a walk.

Using tube paints (equally cheap, I might add) I put some swaths of color on a piece of dry Strathmore cold press 140 lb paper, and did the wax paper experiment again. Much more interesting result.

I can see images in the latter piece that make me want to try to draw a picture out of the mess. Is that valid art, or is that just a senior citizen kid in an unformed art exercise?



Yet why should I worry if it is? Haven't I been yapping for years about always feeling compelled to have my art be marketable or representational or "proper?"

How many years do I have left? Wow, probably not as many as I have toes and fingers. I think I have to take the opportunity to play with art a little before I run out of time, and stop listening to my mother's voice in the back of my head, the voice that abhors abstract or unpretty art.

Watercolors rock!

Today's Mess

Over the weekend, John's computer got hacked by some asshole in Germany, the passwords to every damned thing in the house with the exception of the toaster had to be changed, the router stopped talking to all the computers, and then my printer stopped talking to my computer.

All of that made my work with the Piker Press get backed up so bad I had a full day's work today. Which isn't bad, but I really wanted to play with this watercolor thing again. I just had to wait until after seven pm to begin.

I added the blue wash to the branches pic on the right; I played with some more washes and paint daubs on most of the other stuff; and tried a bit of representational art with the bell, just to see if I could do more than washes.

Bernie and Alex liked the bell.

Close-ups of the rest are on my Flickr account.

It was fun, and I think I may even have learned something today. Indeed, at one point I got so enthused I knocked that brown drawing board right off the work table, dented one corner, and slopped paint all over lots of things. Tomorrow I want to do the trunks of the trees in the blue wash pic.

Playing with Art

 One of the things I've wanted to do this year is to draw or paint more -- to stop my damned fear of performing less than perfectly.

Yesterday, I was thumbing through a magazine and found a picture of Fort Ross -- a place I had never heard of before, but with a little restored church that caught my eye. The idea of sketching it immediately induced a panicky paralysis ... so I opened my Paint program on the laptop and began slathering sloppy virtual paint on a blank screen.

What ensued was not great art, but it was fun. I have no great expectations of myself in Paint. And I kind of liked the surreal sky.

So today, after I'd dithered around the house doing almost nothing, I went out to the studio and grabbed one of the stack of canvases Alex got me for Christmas a couple years ago.

Shakily I put a timid sketch on the white canvas. Then something unexpected happened. Lillian came out to the studio and began to ask me questions. "Is that paint poisonous? Why is there oil under that blue paint?" She was plainly lusting for my oils, but I'm a witch about sharing art supplies, so I didn't care. Instead, I got her a heavy sheet of watercolor paper, found her family's oil pastels, and invited her to art along with me.

Lillian is so bold in her art, and so uncaring of convention that I found myself liberated, and just flung real paint onto the canvas. When I opted not to use colors on the roof that were representational, Lillian piped up that she really liked the red in it. "My cannon looks more like an eel," she said, smiling, not minding that it did. When she began to color her foreground, I noted that she didn't use the color in the photograph, she used a brighter one -- because she liked it better.

I followed suit, using a red.

When Lil had covered her paper, I showed her a magic trick: my paint thinner could transform her oil pastels from sketchy lines to solid color. She was just able to finish her foreground before we went inside to cook dinner, where she was truly helpful, keeping an eye on and stirring the asparagus and mushrooms in their skillet while I focused on frying catfish.

After our dinner, I went back out to the studio to continue painting. Alex and Lil opened the garage door and brushed both shedding dogs, then the Queens all went for a walk. But then something else unexpected happened. One of the kids from next door, Philip, appeared in the driveway with his basketball.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Playing. I don't paint enough, so I'm out here playing with my paints."

"Cool. Did you do all those?" He nodded toward the unfinished stuff on the walls. "That's a lot. They're really good."

Obviously Philip is not an art critic, and he has no idea of what all art I've done, or of how much art I've avoided doing. But he was not the loud and obnoxious punk I've been irritated by in the past. He was absolutely rapt by my brushstrokes; quiet, polite -- indeed, nice. I found I didn't mind him at all, and even pulled out an empty underpainted canvas to show him how using a white canvas was going to make me work more to cover it up, whereas the underpainting of the other canvas (here I sketched some grasses in dark green) actually made things look more interesting.

He left reluctantly at sundown, which was good because I didn't want to send him away, but I did need to get indoors out of the mosquitoes. Bemused, I remembered wondering this morning how on earth I could rise to Pope Benedict's suggested theme for this Lent: "Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works." 

So I get an urge to paint, and God sends me someone I haven't liked much, and the two make a positive change in the world.

Amen.

Summer 2009

Lil and her pal Elena from across the street got in some desperate summer play today.

Tomorrow Elena won't be home, and the next day ... school starts.

They played in the garage and on the front lawn, then on the back patio, then in Lil's room, then out front again, then in back again, and then in Lil's room, and then out front. They had fun, they had drama; they had sun and then shade. They had a beautifully mild summer day with a sweet breeze, and Sebastian and Howie to play with them.

Born only a few weeks apart, sometimes I hear them play at being sisters.

I wonder often what they would have been like as friends if they had grown up in the kind of world I did. At seven, Lili's and Elena's parents and siblings worry about them crossing our wide street, because utter morons fly along at 45 mph on a regular basis, slurping canned drinks and talking on cell phones, oblivious (or far too self-important to take notice) of the 25 mph limit. When I was seven, Carol Jan and I ranged around our small town on our bikes in the summer (not down town, of course, but everywhere on the east side of town) and we kids spent mornings at the municipal playground, went home for some lunch, then went back to the playground until 5pm, at which point we played in the street or on the sidewalks -- or other kid's houses until dark.

The eyes of every resident in the community were upon us kids, all the time. But it was a town of 1000, and the biggest town in the whole county. People were poor, mostly, and we townies had it real soft compared to the kids on farms outside of town, who worked on their parents' dairies and chicken farms and fields.

Oh well. It was a different planet I lived on then, and it was blown away by "progress" as surely as Superman's home world Krypton fell to destruction. My Home Planet is gone, and Lillian must make her way in this world, however inimicable it may be. How she will grow up is anyone's guess.

That her summer "ends" on August 5th is another post, and it will be a venomous, bitter one.

Football Season

I don't know a lot about football.

For a while I watched the alley games at recess in grade school; there was a virtually unused alley behind the school, and steps all along it like a planned stadium. Watching the older kids play, I felt sure that I had a future in football; I could run faster than any other kid in the school, so if I could get someone to let me play, and get me the ball, I could score points and assure my team victory.

Fifth grade saw me get a chance to play, and sure enough, if I could get the ball, I could get it across the goal line without being tagged. But playing alley football is more than running -- you have to be able to throw the football back and forth if you can't muster enough kids to play a game.

I moaned to my dad that I was no good at tossing, so he and Mom went and bought me my own football. With his big hand wrapping the football, Dad taught me how to throw from the shoulder and put a tight spin on the ball. Before long, I went from being a running back and receiver to playing quarterback, and being a welcomed participant in the alley games, even though I was a pathetic girl.

The next two years I saw a lot of play, a bookish girl in thick glasses and dresses, skipping the jump-rope and giggle crowd for the ol' pigskin; then we were off to the junior high school and no opportunity to play. The boys were all sprouting whiskers, and the girls had discovered boobs on themselves, and football was not that important except as an extracurricular activity reserved for boys.

Later on, there was 4-H camp, and I was rediscovered as a talent during the pickup games at Junior Leadership Camps. During that time, perhaps my favorite memory of a game was when the counselors didn't make us go to sleep, but let us stay up and play football under the light of a full moon until we were exhausted. It was a game full of mistakes, but giddy fun in dark shadows and bluish highlights.

I remember the feeling of sending the ball down the field, the spin pouring out from my elbow down my arm to my hand, and seeing the football drill through the air to a receiver; I remember the capture of the power of a throw as I'd catch a football and let its inertia press it close into my arms and side so that it could not be swatted away, moving with it so that it wouldn't hurt to catch it. I remember numerous occasions of having my fingers taped together to heal after being stoved by scuffles over a pass.

Like I said, I don't know a lot about football, but I do know a stinko game when I see one, and that would be the San Francisco 49's against Arizona Cardinals. What a horrible time those teams must have had, leaving the field, SF players thinking, "Wow, I really suck" and Cardinals thinking, "Hey, we won ... but I really suck."

And they did, all of them. Sorry, guys. Made me wish I could still play.