And now the blues begin.....

Art Supply Sale!

May 2 & 3

Studio Clearout

Unison & Sennelier pastels, handmade & Japanese papers, art papers, watercolours, tempera, oil pastels, oil mediums, giant tubes of oil paint, inks, brushes, pens, table easels, paint boxes, empty boxes, pochade boxes, art magazines, pencils, charcoal, journals, canvas, frames, videos, books, cameras and other items too numerous & various to list, etc.

Good deals.

When: Saturday May 2 & Sunday May 3

Where: 155 Passmore Street

Time: 11-3PM

Other: 250-508-2644 omorinski@gmail.com

Last weekend the sun was so welcome and warm; the yellow buds and blossoms sang like a barbershop quartet.

11 Lemons

Everyone is invited to the 2009 Fairfield Artist Studio Tour Gala Opening to view the artists’ work on April 24, with poet Linda Rogers.

Friday, April 24 7:00 - 9:00pm Garry Oak Room 1335 Thurlow Road

Gala Guest Speaker Linda Rogers

Studio Tour on April 25 and 26, 11:00-4:00. Details on artists in the link below.

http://www.galendavison.com/fast_2009.htm

A Possible Portrait of G'Lunk

How to Know What Crows are Saying

At first, three years ago, it was just G'Lunk. He’s a fine sociable crow who apparently likes to sit on high wires and engage in friendly gossip. He mutters and cackles and makes jolly guttural chirrups, trills and caws. Most memorably, he goes “Guh-Lunk“ and looks me in the eye when he does this, which gives me a thrill every time.

I began to fancy that he greeted me personally when I got home from town chores. Somewhere between the car and the front door, I’d hear a pleasant caw or two and even sometimes be rewarded with the treasured Guh-Lunk. And I’d always look up and reply pleasantly as I would to any neighbour, Nice to see you too!

It’s good to open the front door with a gladdened heart.

And I don’t care who’s watching.

One day, as I came home and got out of the car, I heard G'Lunk’s friendly caw. Hello!

I’m sure he said that. She’s home! He said that too. Who to?

The groceries were heavy and needed to be put into the fridge and I didn’t stop to chat.
Later, I went outside into the back yard and found PNL hard at work on the new studio.

Hi Honey, I’m Home! I like to say that for the music and the little tv show that plays in my head every time. Probably this is tedious for PNL to experience every day, but he’s never said.

He did say, I know. G'Lunk already told me.


Crow language is sort of like a Field of Dreams. If you think that what you are hearing is what you are hearing, you probably are.

What To Leave Out

Some people hate the colour red.
On the other hand, paintings with red in them tend to sell the most often.
Someone said.
Some people hate black lines.
On the other hand, some paintings with black lines sell very well.
Picasso said.
Some people hate paintings of flowers.
Not Van Gogh.
Some people hate any kind of drawing, considering it inferior to painting
and won’t look at Leonardo’s notebooks.
Some people hate decorative painting
and won’t have anything to do with the Sistine Chapel.
Some people hate surrealism and can’t take a joke.
Some people hate graffiti and won’t read the news.
Some people.

Direction

Not every day in the studio is full of inspiration. Some days I get by just flying on instruments. When the weather is foggy & grey, it’s hard see where a safe landing might be. Whatever I do seems technical and full of dangerous switches. Sometimes when I take a chance and drop through the clouds to see what the situation really looks like, I find I’m headed for a big mistake. The only thing to do is tilt my wings and fly out again. Somedays I have to cancel everything and go back to where I came from.

Show Opening Monday March 16 7PM

My friend Jane Baigent has a show opening tomorrow (Monday) night at the MacPherson Playhouse. I hope everyone who can will come to it. She's a world class artist and Victoria is absolutely lucky to have a chance to see her amazing work. IMO. Seize the moment!

janebaigent.com

The Trick to Getting to the Studio in the Morning is...

Promise yourself the second cup of coffee IN the studio.

Don’t think ahead.

Have food for the hungry crows. Be prepared.

Go To the Studio even if you have to go back to the house right away for the crow food you forgot anyway. Just be sure to leave something very valuable behind, like the computer for instance. Then go ahead and just try to finish the house chores knowing that your entire life is at risk if you don’t get back in fifteen seconds flat.

Drink the coffee and stare at the latest painting for a while.

Funny, how the clamor inside my head silences when I really start looking at paint. When I really start looking at anything.

Actually Everything is More Complicated Than It Appears At First

I looked up the article regarding the expanding universe obliterating all traces of its own beginning, because if there is one thing I trust, it’s that my memory is a creative process and has its own very definite set of rules about reliability.

But there WAS an article. Hooray! Here it is.

But wait. The situation is worse than I said. Apparently the total disconnect that we’re all destined to cosmically share is the fault of Dark Energy. Well. How could I have forgotten that crucial point? Especially after the last eight years?

Of course, Dark Energy is always with us. It’s part of the Force. You can’t separate light from shadow and have either exist independently.

Still, it’s easy for me to say that vase over there is blue. But the shadow? At lunchtime I’d swear it was almost pure blue but now I’m hard pressed to say if it’s more violet than brown. Once you look into darkness, matters of color and form become very shifty and depend entirely on your point of view.

Impossible to tell where anything stops, or even begins.

I'd Do More If I Knew How

I’d write more if only I knew what to write about what it is that I don’t know.

What I don’t know is vast and multiplying at a frightening rate.

Je suis desolée.

The universe is expanding.
The universe is hiding all traces of its beginning.
Pretty soon it won’t look like it’s expanding anymore.
How will anyone know anything?

I come into the studio in the morning and go to work. Well, that’s one way to describe my slow process. What I suspect I actually do is leave the planet for a lengthy period of time; it seems from the slow progress of the present painting that I must spend a great deal of time traveling in hyperspace. I’ve certainly spent the last two weeks not getting right the same set of ellipses that define a rusted tin can. When I come back from my travels, everything is almost the same as before, although not exactly.

Outside the studio is a small garden mobbed with mostly silent crows. They’ve been watching all this time and could tell you more than me.

Work Doesn't Always Happen in the Studio

The business of being an artist seems to require a lot of business. I’m under no illusions about the importance of my art to other people- but it’s wildly important to me. Or so I thought until I started taking a look at my process of documentation.

I know Twyla Tharp works with boxes. Whenever she starts a new project, she opens a new cardboard box. It’s sort of a reverse Pandora system. Every note, every idea, color sample, picture, comment, cd, dvd, lists, telephone numbers- ANYTHING she feels might be or could be relevant to her project goes into that new box as she works on her project. At the end of the project, the box is closed up tight and put on a shelf. Ta dum. Instant cataloguing with complete documentation.

They must be pretty big boxes. Her work is great.

My system is a little different. It’s an ex post facto system. I must have at least 20 Ikea magazine boxes labeled Sort, More Sort, and Sort Now. I also have piles of half finished projects and collage materials in process stacked in piles which are stacked on shelves and in cubbies and also baskets. Like Twyla, I also use boxes, but they are of every size and description, from large white Ikea boxes to photo and shoe boxes. I also enthusiastically use the floor.

Once I had some very expensive photographs taken of my work by an incredibly fine photographer. He was in a hurry when I went to pick up the slides and so he gave the delicate film squares to me unmounted. “Here, he said, ”All you have to do is slide them into mounts, it’s easy. You know how to do that, right? I’ve got to go, I’m late.“

The transparencies were in an envelope. And no, I didn’t know how to do it and was too shy to ask. Instead, I think I first put them onto a shelf in our home office, a shelf of (guess what!) unsorted papers. Then I’m pretty sure, almost, they went into a box, possibly named ”Studio.“ That’s my last clear memory of those pictures. This was in 2001, I believe, and at least three studio moves ago.

Funny how a person never stops looking for the lost.....

But I’ve been thinking about the documentation process all this time (seven years) and last week finally Began To Work. So, instead of going to the studio, I worked at getting what photographs I had into order. I began on Monday with just the digital photographs which were scattered on several computers and three extra hard drives. Five days later, I THINK all the digital photographs are corralled into one computer, one program, one (backed up twice) file. There are over 11,000 photos and nearly all of them are bad. Or duplicates. Somewhere in that huge tangle are maybe thirty photographs of some of my work.

I will never take another bad photograph again.

I will never KEEP another bad photograph again.

I WILL label and keyword all photos with the zeal of a nuclear mechanic.

That said, at the end of the week, after more than twenty hours of diligent sorting, I still felt like I hadn’t been doing any REAL work because I hadn’t been painting and I hadn’t been in the studio. Painting, says my inner overseer, is the only Real Work. But no. Something has changed: I tackled a huge job and I didn’t give up. The whole project of getting my work in order may not be completed, but I did undertake and complete an important stage using every bit of tenacity and determination I could muster. This is a real accomplishment for me; once again I’ve learned the same thing I always learn. The lesson is: take care. Take more care. Pay attention. Love the process. I guess I’m here to tell me that any action done with attention, care, and a compassionate heart is the Right Work.

And that’s good studio practice, even if it isn’t happening in the studio.

“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time.” Annie Dillard begins her book Holy The Firm (and every morning) with a weather eye cocked on the forces that Already Are.

It’s a good policy.

I usually discover the god (or goddess) of the day after the third or fourth coincidence and nearly always after my second cup of coffee. Often the god of the day is Dropit!, a jokester who sees to it that anything I hold in my hand falls to the floor the instant my attention wavers. There’s another god who loves to hide things. His name seems to be **!!#%$! - he stopped by just last week to collect my favorite turquoise sunglasses.

Today’s god was in charge of studio conversations. I’d been feeling progressively more isolated after a week of solitary daily studio practice. As well, my slowly recovering health has meant keeping social interactions to a minimum. So today’s guy, TalkShop, saw to it that I had two long. lovely phone calls from dear friends in the morning, an actual visit from another dear friend at lunchtime, and two visits from postmen, one in the morning and one in the afternoon to make sure that the one in the morning had gotten his numbers right.

I did get my palette out and managed to paint half a leaf before the energy meter ran out and I had to shut up shop. A day of small work. Cleaning up, I regretted that I have too many colours on the palette lately. Prep time takes nearly forty minutes which adds considerably to the energy deficit. I began this painting so simply with just five colours and am now up to ... fourteen! I haven’t a clue what to about it, given the complexity of the greens of the salal leaves and seductive excellence of the paint (Vasari Oil Colors). I remember reading about Morandi’s amazement at the complexity of the colours of the Italian landscape near Grizzana. “Can you believe it-I actually saw seventy shades of green...!” *

Too many colours are like having too many conversations going on all at once in a small room. The clamor can be dizzying and it’s hard to pay close attention to what really matters. I was lucky to have my conversations today one at a time.

It was a good day. Once I understood to whom the day belonged.


*(Bornfeld, Ab. Giorgio Morandi: Seventy Shades of Green. Morandi Editions, 1997. p74.)

Real Life

Here’s what I like about being in the studio for a long time: after about three or four hours of quiet work, work that is full of hesitancy and indecision but also commitment and perseverance, suddenly, without warning, Real Work becomes a possibility. What does it take to get Real, I wonder?  It's as if someone has made an announcement: Everything that has gone before is NOT the Real Thing.  As in exercise, I might think I am exercising, but after twenty minutes or so of industrious muscle flexing, endorphins can suddenly be let loose and my opinions about exercise will entirely change. Usually for the better.  So too, after hours of continuous studio time, sometimes a beautiful door unexpectedly opens and I can see inside. The room is lit with summer sunshine with large windows open to the garden just beyond. There’s my real life, I murmur, as I clean brushes, unplug tubes of oil paint, hunt for palette knives fallen to the floor. There, where fountains make their dreamy music and dogs lie sleeping after a heavy lunch,  is a place where I could live forever.

While I Still Can Remember

Somewhere in the past few weeks I decided I would like to try blogging. Why was that? I can’t remember. Which is a compelling reason for any kind of diary, blogform or not. Another notion I had, and still have, was that blogging might be helpful simply in terms of writing practice. And I also thought if I wrote about my studio work, I’d have plenty of documentation for the paintings I’m working on for our upcoming September show, Stone & Iron with my fellow artist and friend Jane Baigent at the Martin Batchelor Gallery here in Victoria. (That’s a working title at the moment, ahem.) In the process, I hoped, naively, I might even learn enough to make my own website, or at least, be able to make some informed decisions about the design.

So as a first step, I bought a software program for writing, MacJournal, which, so far, I like a lot. I think. It was easy to buy and it’s easy to use, sort of. The problem was that I had to decide on a blogging host in order to just get going. Not so easy!

A blogging host is a website that publishes bloggers’ blogs. (What is the word for the process of describing something in terms of itself- recursive tautology?)

There’s a tremendous choice for blog hosts, blog software, and blog themes out there in Internetland. For beginners like me, though, so much choice is overwhelming. I’ve spent hours, days! surfing, researching, reading. It’s like trying to swallow a pig whole (although I don’t eat mammals, so I’m only guessing).

Eventually, through a rough form of content analysis (as in how many times the same names showed up in connection with the search words FREE and EASY), my choice narrowed down to the websites Blogger and Wordpress (the hosted form). I chose Blogger because I liked the themes (the pre-made formats for publishing blogs) a little better and mainly because it won the coin toss.

(I’m skipping over the parenthetical part about the two days it took me to come up with a name for the blog that wasn’t already taken, but suffice it to say that I didn’t emerge unscathed. I am now the proud owner of four different and totally ridiculous domain names.)

Blogger IS easy to sign up for. But oh my, what an awkward little world it is to navigate in, with its tiny little writing window that is very unfriendly to drag and droppers, and unclear tabs and weird positioning of commands. I won’t say how many times I kept hitting the Create button when I just wanted to Sign In; I’m just surprised there wasn’t a buzzer and a flashing red sign spelling out GOTCHA! to enhance this new user’s happy learning experience.

I’m using MacJournal in order to avoid Blogger’s uncomfortable little window. MacJournal does lots of amazing things that are helpful to bloggers, although the program can be a little erratic, like a sensitive racehorse afflicted with flies. For instance, the text size randomly changes size and orientation at times, which frankly, makes me woozy. As well, I can’t seem to position my photographs in the text just the way I’d like. But that doesn’t seem to matter much because Blogger refuses to accept images from MacJournal anyway, no matter where I put them. MacJournal offered complex workaround instructions on two different web pages for this problem, with each partial solution consisting of at least 12 or 17 or 58 steps. Perhaps I exaggerate. The workarounds included signing up for more (MORE!) software (Picasa) which meant more sign-in forms and more usernames and more passwords and more email congratulations from remote web servers who really don’t care even if they say they do. The learning curve for this little project has increased exponentially every day.

In trying to track down how to insert images into my post, Blogger style, I discovered that you can’t insert images into an already uploaded post and furthermore, you can’t even cut and paste text OR images from your writing software into the tiny little *&@#$!! Blogger writing window. It only took another two hours of random Google research, signing up for yet more user forums and waiting to be accepted etc. before I came across a useful comment in a user group forum about the cut and paste difficulty (as in not working); I’m so sorry, but I don’t remember where. Because in order to remember, you have to remember to remember and also keep notes. Which I seldom do. But thank you whoever you are in Googleland who supplied this solution. Because part of my problem with cut and paste seems to be the way Safari works, or doesn’t work with Blogger. If you use Mozilla’s Firefox (yet another new application to learn)as your Blogger browser, cut and paste seems to work just fine in the tiny little *&@#$!! Blogger writing window. But not pictures. There’s another five or six or seven step procedure (per picture) which inserts the pictures into your blog exactly where you don’t want them until you get hip to cursor placement. The only way I’ve found so far to reposition the images is to slide and scroll them a few lines at a time. It’s about as easy as pushing peanuts with your nose.

But signing up was really, really easy. I know, because I did it at least sixteen times.

Eventually I expect I’ll figure out how to do this process a little more gracefully, and in time I’ll probably forget just what it was that was so difficult because I’ll have learned the right moves (hopefully). Meanwhile this learning to blog process has been so cumbersome, I don’t even WANT to remember it even though right now I still can.