Category Archives: art

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Ink

I for Ink in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I have three bottles of ink, by Windsor and Newton. Violet, Emerald and Silver. I have hardly used them, but I keep them. They are from my mother.

My mother was an artist and she also did crafts. She bought art supplies. When I was first married, my husband and I each bought a used gold chain. I started medical school and used the chain to put my rings on when I changed into scrubs for the operating room. Many people tied their rings to the scrub pants. At 2 am after a difficult surgery or delivery or cesarean section or premature baby or a trauma patient that did not survive: it’s easy to forget the rings. Lose them in the laundry. I hung my rings on the chain.

My sister told me that my mother complained about the chains. “Why would they spend money on something like that?” My sister replied, “What did you buy last weekend?” “Um,” said my mother, “Paper.” “Were you out of paper?” asked my sister, silkily. “No,” said my mother. She had enough paper for art for years, but she loved paper and art supplies and would buy good paper on sale. “De gustibus non est disputandumm.” said my sister. To each his or her own taste.

I have little caches of art supplies that my mother sent me. Beautiful ink. Beautiful paper. When I paint a watercolor postcard, it is in her style. She sculpted with clay, became a potter, did silk screens, etchings, watercolors, oils, pastels. She did crafts: glass beads. My sister did a glass bead class with her. They reported giggling that they had both made glass beads, quite hideously ugly. My mother bought the glass bead equipment. Woodcuts. Paper mache. She sewed costumes when we younger, though she didn’t like sewing very much. We both had japanese kimonos when we were little for Halloween. This stood out as too weird among our social group.

I have nibs somewhere, to dip in the inks. I have a fountain pen with an italics point. I have paper.

I look at the beautiful inks and remember my mother and my sister.

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Fly dream

F in the A to Z Challenge: Fly.

I returned to work yesterday after ten months off very sick and then convalescing. In the afternoon I came home. I ate a late lunch and fell into a deep sleep. Relief that I am back at work.

I dream: I am in a metallic boxy house. It is very modern, glass and metal. It is very spare, elegant and uncluttered. My daughter and cat are there but are one being. She keeps shape shifting from cat to daughter and back. There is a man and a teen, his son. He owns the house and built it. It is up high perched on a tower. It feels very precarious and the tower moves with the wind. The views are stunning, wilderness and mountains. The house falls and the man shows me that it is a spaceship. It hovers over the earth. He and his son are aliens. I am a bit annoyed that he deliberately scared me, but I also know that he is showing off. He is showing me his strength and power and maleness. I do find it very sexy. I want him.

I tell him that he can set the ship down in a safe place. I am suitably impressed and admiring. He does not need a spaceship or to scare me or to fly to be loved. He intimates that we can fly to explore other planets. I say “I am happy to explore this one for a while. It is ok to be grounded.” He sets the house spaceship down in the mountains.

I wake up.

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Love and self

When you love someone, do you lose your self?

I think that is the tricky bit about love. When you fall for someone else, do you fall or do you hold on to yourself? Where is that boundary?

I am in a flirtation. I am very interested in a person. I am interested in what he says and what he is interested in. I am learning quite a bit about some topics that really, have not been on my radar. I also often disagree quite strongly in the realm of politics. And I don’t really care that our politics are just about opposite ends of the spectrum.

I am interested in where we meet and where we don’t meet. Where we agree and where we very strongly disagree and privately think that the other person needs their head examined. I am not falling too far into the “really this person thinks like I do, they just won’t admit it” trap. Well, perhaps I am. Perhaps that is what love is: when we project part of our self and the ideal part of ourself on to the other person. They reflect and occupy some part of our ideal. That does not mean that they ARE our ideal or that they ARE the projection.

In this particular flirtation, he does not seem interested in much of what I am interested in. Well, particularly poetry. Occasionally this bothers me but mostly I shake it off. I am hoping that I have reached the age and level of cynicism where I do not expect the other person to like everything I like, to agree with what I say, to have the same ideals or ideas. I am watching myself and wondering how much of what I like in him is him and how much is my projection. Don’t know yet. The mind is a peculiar place. So is the heart.

But …. I am feeling much happier about holding on to myself at the same time as I fall and crush. I look at what he likes and wants but I also hold what I like and want. I am trying to give them equal weight, the needs and wants and desires of the two people present.

Hold and fall, at the same time.

The picture is of an etching by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.

Shake it off.

Also published on everything2.com

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unbearable

each time
I think
I can’t bear it

it hurts too much

you are hitting me when I am down

but then I know
that I have come too close

icarus to the sun

you melt the wax from my wings
impassive
as I fall
from the sky

you forget
I forget
that the sea is my true element

not the air

I fall into the sea

I am safe
no wings
no air
no burning sun
just the depths
my tail is back
and the painful split is healed

I swim
down to the depths

I remember
that you torch me
because it is unbearable
to be loved

you stand on shore
apollo
bright and beautiful

I wonder if you will call me forth
from the froth

I wonder if I will come
forth

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The Tiny Soldier Part 4 (Flash Fiction Chain #5)

Here is my addition to trablog’s flash fiction chain 5, thanks!

Character List :

Rick – a not so ordinary ten year old

Jenna – a social service employee

Mrs. Montgomery (ma) – the foster mom

Jake – Mrs. Montgomery’s only son

Sun – The monkey

Recommendation:

Read the first three parts before venturing this part.

Part 1 : Written by Abirami

Part 2 : Written by Sona

Part 3 : Written by hiddenstarsfiction

Part 4

Rick settled on the ground and Sun stood on the wires above him.

“I think better in motion, O Best Beloved.” said Sun. “You desire to know how I became the monkey? The first monkey?”

“Oh, yes,” said Rick. Books were his hiding place and passion and escape as a foster child, but to have someone TELL him a story….  He tried not to think about it or hope. They would probably be interrupted.

Sun looked up at her namesake, starting to warm the dry courtyard. “A’Tuin, the giant turtle who swims, you know of him?”

Rick nodded. “Discworld.” he said.

Sun frowned. “Oh. This isn’t Discworld, is it.” Rick shook his head. “You know that there are many universes? And many stories. Which is your origin story?”

“This is earth,” said Rick reluctantly. He often wished it were Discworld.

“Many stories.” said Sun, “You know many origin stories. In the Garden, Eve was made from the rib. That is what the book says. That is part of the story.

After Lucifer left heaven and became the Snake, Lucifer wanted power. Adam and Eve were to be thrown from the Garden, all for eating the Apple from the tree in the center. Adam and Eve had covered themselves and were hiding. They had named the animals and plants that were present but there was no Monkey.

Lucifer Snake wept out of frustration and rage. “Eve is too weak. She is only a rib. She can’t bear the children and bear the blame for the apple as well.” One of Lucifer Snake’s tears fell into the dirt. It held some of Lucifer’s remaining power from Heaven. The tear and the dirt shuddered and…”

“What are you doing?”  Jake was standing in the sun, his shadow falling over Rick.

Rick scrambled back. “Nothing!”

“Yeah?” said Jake. “Nothing? Stupid.”

“Isn’t your show on?” Actually Jake had shows all day. He did nothing before school but watch tv and after school he alternated. TV. Movie. TV. Movie. Ever since the game platform had broken. They couldn’t afford a computer or internet right now anyhow.

“Power’s off.” Jake muttered, head down. He was kicking at a pile of dirt.

Rick knew that Ma would not get the check for another two days. Then there would be a fine to turn the power back on. It had happened twice in the last five months. Eleven foster kids and Jake, but there was never enough to go around. Ma might be able to get help from the church, but she’s said she couldn’t use it too often or they’d cut her off.

“Army,” said Jake. “I told Alf and Wheeze that they are playing too. Now.”

Rick got up. He didn’t dare look at Sun and he didn’t want to get pounded. He wanted the story. He hoped Sun would understand.

In bed in the dark, tired, he worried that Sun would not come back. They were out of bananas and really out of most things other than oatmeal. At least they had that.

And the deep voice woke him. “The tear and the dirt shuddered. I rose out of it. I didn’t know who I was or what I was for. Lucifer looked at me and started laughing. “Go to them. Go to Adam and Eve and get your name.”

Adam had done the naming, but he had fallen asleep in the terror of the Apple. I went and there was Eve. She looked at me and said, “Hello. You are Monkey.” I threw my arms around her neck and cried. My tears carried Lucifer’s power and dripped onto her shoulder. The tears entered each cell and added power, and Eve passed them down to each child.  Through the mother, only. You too have Eve‘s mitochondria.

And that is one story of how I became the Monkey.”

Rick was crying a little. He hoped Sun couldn’t tell. He didn’t remember his mother. He wished he did. And he was tired, he didn’t like playing Army with Jake and Wheeze had skinned his knee and bled and Ma had been upset. “We are out of band-aids!” She used soap on the scrape and Wheeze had cried. Rick had tried to do what Jake said without getting hurt, but he didn’t like Wheeze getting hurt either.  He was also so glad that Sun had come back that he could hardly bear it.

“Will you tell me more stories? Please?” he whispered.

“Yes,” said Sun, “Now sleep….”

Part 5  by : Austin

Part 6 by : Phaena

Part 7 : Written by Tobias

Part 8 : Written by  Priceless Joy

Part 9: Written by Raskmik

Part 10 : Written by Manvi

Part 11 : Written by Sweety

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Painting Angels II

Painting Angels II

After my mother died, I wrote a poem called Painting Angels. It was about my kids’ comments about her death, but also about her being an artist. I wondered whether she was painting the sky or sunsets or clouds. She loved watercolors.

I was driving to the Boiler Room yesterday and came to the hill going down to Water Street and the sunrise was glorious. The leading edge of the front caught fire and there were yellow and orange and pink streaks up into the clouds.

I think my mother and my sister helped paint that sky. I stopped and took photos with my phone until I got too cold and the sun was up.

Thank you, mom. It was a beautiful show in the sky. I lost my mother in 2000, my only sister in 2012 and my father in 2013. I feel that the show has been blessed, and that getting my mother’s artwork out of storage fourteen years after her death and showing it is the right thing to do.

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The Mother Daughter Show II

Over the last two days, I hung the Mother Daughter Show II, at the Boiler Room in Port Townsend, Washington. It will be up for the month of December.

This time it is the joint work my mother and I did in the 1980s. She did etchings to go with nine of my poems. The tenth poem was written for an etching she had already done. I asked my mother if she would do this project with me and she replied, “Only if the poems rhyme. None of that free verse stuff.”

I worked on the poems, I think with my mother’s etching style in mind. She used a zinc plate, with a tar solution on it. She would do a drawing in the tar, usually with a dental tool. The plate was placed in acid, which would etch where the tar had been scraped away. She would etch the plate multiple times, which gave different depths to the etched lines.

When the plate was finished, she would remove the tar and run an artist’s proof. She would heat the plate on a metal hot plate. She would ink it and then gently wipe the ink off until there was a very thin layer on the unetched parts of the plate. This had to be done delicately, so that the ink was not wiped out of the etching lines. She would place the plate on the press, place a piece of wet paper gently over the plate, lower the thick pile of wool pads over the paper and run the press. After the plate had gone through, the paper was peeled up and there was an etching, with the edges of the plate pressed into the paper.

Sometimes she was not satisfied and would return to the tar and change the etching. Sometimes she ran multiple proofs until she had the color right. Then she would run an edition. The print and poems are editions of fifty. Each etching is signed and numbered: 1/50, 2/50, 3/50, and so forth. We had the poems printed first, on a lead type press, and then my mother ran the etchings. We had a show in the late 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia.

My mother died in 2000. My father died in 2013. My mother was a prolific artist, so trying to deal with the estate felt insane. I put the art in a storage unit. When I had The Mother Daughter Show in July, it felt like a remembrance of my mother. And anyhow, I have to do something with the art in that storage unit, don’t I?

I find the etchings easier to show and sell then the watercolors. I want to clutch each watercolor, but eventually I will start to let go of them. I have the etching plates, too, because my mother said she was terrible at finishing editions. I have the box of poems printed on the lead press and the guides for running the edition. I do not have the press. My sister took it to California and it disappeared. That is ok, because there are presses in Port Townsend. There is a big art community, which is part of why my parents moved to this area in 1996. Art, music, gardens and boats.

My mother did many small fantasy etchings, flying elephants, fairies, a mermaid, a merman. The poems I sent her were almost all about animals. I wrote Eating Water Hyacinths and my mother did a charming etching of two manatees. She looked in various books to see what manatees looked like and then drew them. I wrote a blue crab poem and we bought a live crab. I photographed her drawing the crab, which was skittering around unhappily on the dining room floor. I enjoyed the constraint of rhymes. It made it easier to write the poems, though I am not sure why.

I have six of the series hanging in the show. I don’t currently have the other four framed. The Gallery Walk is this Saturday. I hope that people will come and perhaps we will sell one. We are also going to show the Panda Minimum, outside. The Panda Minimum is a mountain bike camping trailer, a bit like a teardrop trailer, designed and built by a local friend. We will have it outside the Boiler Room. I’ve already told the friend that I think the Panda will steal all the thunder and the art on the wall will be ignored, but ah, well. I have a third show scheduled, for June and July, at another venue. It is easier to do shows of my mother’s artwork than my own, because I think she was so good.

Also published on everything2 today.

The Boiler Room: http://www.ptbr.org/

Donate to the Boiler Room! Or come to the auction, also tomorrow!

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Painting Angels

You were an artist
You are an artist
You said that you’d have to live to 120 to finish all your projects
And died at 61
I keep wondering
what the art supplies are like
and if you work on sunsets
or mountains
or lakes

Trey, 9
made a clay fish last summer that I admire.
He said grumpily “It’s too bad Grandma Helen died before I could do clay with her.”
He tells me he’s ready to make raku pots for fire in your ashes as you wished
I ask what he’d make
He considers and says, “What was Grandma Helen’s favorite food?”
I can’t think and say that she liked lots of foods
At the same time wondering squeamishly if maybe
he should make a vase and then being surprised
that I am squeamish and thinking of blood and wine,
too, I wonder if my dad would know. “Maybe guacamole.”
I need to find a potter to apprentice him to.

Camille, 4.
asks how old Grandma Helen was when she died.
I explain that she died at 61 but her mother died at 92.
Camille asks how old I am.
40.
When are you going to die?
I say I don’t know, none of us do, but I hope it’s more towards 90.

Camille studies me and is satisfied for now.
She goes off.
I think of you.

I perpetuate
the Christmas cards you did with us
upon my children
They each draw a card.
We photocopy them and hand paint with watercolors.
Camille wants to draw an angel
and says she can’t.
I draw a simple angel
and have her trace it.
She has your fierce concentration
bent over tracing through the thick paper
She wants it right.
The angel is transformed.

My kids resist the painting after a few cards as I did too.
Each time I paint the angel
to send to someone I love
I think of Camille
and you
and genes
and Heaven
I see you everywhere

published in Mama Stew: An Anthology: Reflections and Observations on Mothering, edited by Elisabeth Rotchford Haight and Sylvia Platt c. 2002

written January 19, 2002