Painting Make-over: Sharpie and More Paint!

Radishes, © 2011 oil (and Sharpie) on canvas

One of the great outcomes of teaching a class called "Expression in Paint" at Artascope Studios in South Portland is discovering what matters most to me in my own painting. What elements are (at least currently, since things do change) so essential to my own way of expressing myself in paint that I neglect them to my peril.

I can't say exactly how this has come about. It's a combination of slowing way, way down in order to watch what I do when I'm "not looking," by which I mean not over-thinking or over-editing myself. When I am trusting myself and whatever mysterious creative force it is that moves us all when we are open to it. That, and actually painting there in the class under different circumstances than at home; I paint a little differently there, and I'm still figuring out just how.

Some of my best (I think) paintings happen when I: 

• paint over old paintings (what's underneath provides plenty of opportunities for happy accidents of texture and color combinations and things peeking through from beneath)
• draw quickly over an old painting, either with paint or with black Sharpie marker to get my bearings and leave interesting marks showing through in places
• use more paint (it's easy to get "stingy" with paint) and push it around, either with a palette knife or with a pretty stiff brush.

The Sharpie first entered my repertoire as an ally when I once drew a quick freehand sketch on a yellow-painted wall in my garage, and I found it exhilarating! 

I've been a bit timid about admitting my Sharpie use in painting, as if some sort of Painting Orthodoxy Police might get wind of it and, and . . . what? Ban me from the world of "real art?" 

It's as if I think my Sharpie usage might disqualify me from some unnamed, desired realm, or immediately confirm my illegitimacy as a painter. (I comfort myself with the thought that if Sharpies had been around in earlier decades, somebody who is now a famous painter--Picasso is usually my go-to guy--would probably have used one. Right? And if not, who cares?)

So here are some radishes painted over an unsuccessful semi-impressionistic attempt at fall foliage from a few years ago. 

One other observation: I held myself back from "correcting" myself as I went along. I resisted fixing things up to be more right and proper and "better" (realistic?) according to some left-brain critic. I think that's why it works as well as it does. 

These Radishes have already gotten lots of "buzz" from my Facebook supporters (thank you, all!). "Free and beautiful" is one of the comments that's easiest for me to remember and that I will carry with me for the rest of today.

Here's to Spring

It must feel like spring today in Egypt--the exhilarating, inspiring, take a deep breath and sing, shout, and dance kind of spring. At the edge of the unknown, the future opening to just what new reality no one knows.

I had already planned to blog today about spring--the hopes and longings for spring that lots of us northerners find welling up in us on these cold but sunny days, the driveway crusted over with ice, the mailbox, broken off by the plow's forceful heave of too much snow, now askew but tied onto its post with some old clothesline and my best knot know-how. The snow piles so high it's easy to imagine they will be here into May. How will the crocuses and daffodils find their way through to bloom?

But I didn't want to blog only about hopes and longings but also about the small but real, tangible signs that spring is working its way already. Last week we marked that odd day knows as Groundhog Day (and the famed mammal did NOT see his shadow), an adaptation of the day elsewhere and otherwise known as Candlemas (also the Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple), St. Bridget's Day, and Imbolc--the latter being most likely the first of them all in time, and the other names later adaptations and reinterpretations.

Imbolc was a traditional feast day in pagan, pre-Christian Ireland (and perhaps is still in pagan and now- Christian/post-Christian Ireland?)--the day that falls midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In pre-Christian days it came to be associated with the goddess Brigid, goddess of poetry and healing, who in time became the Christian St. Bridget. (I know, it's complicated. And it doesn't really matter if you follow me or not! I actually just read that Brigid was said to have had two sisters, also named Brigid, so that she was a "triple goddess"--imagine that! A holy trinity of Brigid, Brigid, and Brigid!)

Imbolc, on Feb. 1-2, is considered the first day of spring in Ireland. Imbolc means something like "in the womb"--because at this time of year the lambs are growing fat in the wombs of ewes, nearing birth. I like that way of counting spring's beginnings even when the fuller expression of the season still lies weeks away, buried and hidden under snow.

And so it is, even in chilly Maine!

Just a few days ago a local Maine sheep and fiber farm posted a photo of a newborn lamb on Facebook! (Open this link to Romney Ridge Farm only if you want a dose of serious lamb cuteness to brighten your winter spirits!)

Over the past ten days, we've actually passed numerous significant milestones on the way toward spring. First, on January 31 the sunrise broke 7 a.m. and is now rising at 6:46 and getting earlier every day. Next  came the day when our total gain of daylight since the winter solstice passed the one hour mark. And soon after, the sunset has passed 5 p.m. and counting.

I assume it's this growth in daylight that has set the birds to singing! I've been hearing titmice and chickadees not just making noises but singing their trademark songs. Could it be they are warming up for wooing and courtship?

It cheers my soul. So here's to Egypt, to the spring of freedom (though the road ahead may be bumpy), and to the spring of spring.

Upside-down and Inside-out: part 2

As you can imagine, this decision to renounce my ordination had been brewing for a long time. Make that a long, long time.

It had been considered, suppressed, ignored, and muddied; reconsidered, re-suppressed, re-ignored, re-muddied so many times by so many "shoulds" and "oughts" and my high sense of responsibility and obligation to God, the Church, and my ordination vows--And did I sometimes manage to confuse the Church with God and God with the Church? In a word, yes.--until finally the yearning break free enough to ask the questions and find answers became a fierce compulsion. A command.

An order, if you will, from my own soul. Perhaps even a holy order.

Looking back I can see clearly that my psyche and soul had really been working over time for years, waving red flags, ringing alarm bells of various kinds, trying to get my attention.

If my soul had chosen to address me directly in words, it might have said: "Look, I've given you all kinds of signs and signals--dreams, posters, hand-lettered signs, coincidences, disasters, even messages from Facebook, for Pete's sake! How long are you going to sit around confused and paralyzed, waiting for more signs and signals?

"THIS IS URGENT! A matter of life and death. This can't wait any longer. It's time for you to act. NOW."

Finally I got the message and acted, wrote to the Bishop, handed in my priesthood and started over.

****************

How had I come to this?

I suppose the answer reaches far far back into my childhood and my family history, and although I've been excavating and discovering and writing about my finds, there's nowhere near enough time to go into all of that today. (That's what books are for, right?) But a little back story seems in order.

I'll save for another day the full exploration of such oddly intriguing (at least to me) tidbits like the fact that in my recurring early childhood dream of being left behind by my family, it always happened on our way home from church (way back when my family actually attended church together)! And the dreams usually began in the somewhat creepy basement-level nursery of the dream-church, in which my dream-self was dwarfed by oversized stuffed animals. I remember a lion most of all, like a guardian just inside the door.

But as I said, that's for another day.

Some time in late 2001 or early 2002, I was reading along in a book when I came upon a line that opened up a good sized fissure in me. It was a book of photographs and essays by Jim Daniels; the book is called Lives of Service: Stories from Maryknoll, about missionaries of the Maryknoll Order. Many, if not most, Maryknolls work in parts of the world where Christianity is not the dominant religion, and service, modeled on Jesus' compassionate self-giving, is the primary expression of their work. In other words, they are not trying to convert anyone from some other religion to Christianity, not even secretly!

One essay follows a Maryknoll sister who works with Cambodian women with HIV/AIDS, a predominantly Buddhist population. She spoke of how her cross-cultural, cross-religious work has taught her so much about the meaning of compassion and service. And then the line that struck me like lightning: "Before you are a Christian," she said, "you must be human."

Oh my God! Suddenly I knew: I got it backwards, inside-out, way back at the beginning. Starting all those years ago, I put being a Christian before being human, perhaps even took on being Christian as an escape from being human.

Could it be that I had undertaken much of my religious journey, perhaps even including my ordination, as a flight from life and a shortcut to having a recognizable identity?

Once again, maybe a little background would be helpful here. I was raised a Unitarian (though the church with the creepy basement nursery in my childhood dreams was an Episcopal church that my family attended for a while). Intellectual freedom and a kind of wandering, uncommitted religious inquiry were givens in my family.

I was proudly Unitarian in my early adolescence, chuckling smugly at the joke my father used to repeat about how at the Unitarian Church the only time the name of Jesus is invoked is when the janitor falls down the stairs! (I heard that recently on Garrison Keillor's joke show, but I know it has been around at least forty years.) I remember looking down my nose at my Episcopal and Catholic friends who actually recited creeds!

"How could they possibly believe that stuff?" I scoffed and wondered well into my teens.

My decision eventually to "try Christianity" in my late teens was partly motivated by a spiritual/religious curiosity, and in that area the Unitarian Universalist Church of the early 1970s failed me. At least that's how it felt at the time. I wanted someone to tell me something about God that related to my life, and all I heard were sermons about Vietnam and one notable one if which the minister said he was "no longer comfortable using the word 'God'"--a sentiment I can understand now with sophistication and nuance.

Back then I simply thought: "Well, you're no help; I guess I'll look elsewhere."

But my religious journey was also fueled by a badly broken heart. The first really big love relationship of my life had ended--I was dumped rather abruptly and ineptly--and I, being a very, very serious, sensitive, introverted, introspective teenager, thought maybe that God and I could work out some kind of a deal to protect me from this kind of heartbreak ever happening again. This wasn't an entirely conscious undertaking, mind you, but I can trace its contours now with confidence. I also was kind of a nerd--not into parties, beer, or pot--and tended to hang out on the edges of various social groupings, not very sure where I belonged, or if I belonged anywhere at all.

I was in college--a college with a beautiful English Gothic-style chapel, staffed by an Episcopal priest, with a big pipe organ cranking out those lovely Episcopal hymns I knew and loved from a summer camp, school assemblies, and other nostalgic occasions. I loved that chapel and it organ and was drawn to it, sometimes sitting outside in its sunny courtyard where I could even hear the organ being played, and other times sitting inside on its carved wooden pews in light muted through stained glass.

So when most of my peers were busy expanding their horizons, exploring all sorts of wild ideas and experimenting with various substances, I contracted, retreated, ran for cover. And religion seemed to offer just the right kind of solace and safety that I sought.

Because I'd been raised Unitarian and decided to "become a Christian," even to be baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I told myself that my Christianizing was actually doing something rather exotic, bold, and even rebellious in a quirky way.

But with the clarity and honesty of hindsight, I can see untrue that was. I really kind of did my best to rope "God" into a terrible bargain. (I put "God" in quotation marks because I believe this was basically a good of my fabrication and imagination, although a version of God all to readily accessible in much Christian interpretation.) The bargain was this: I'd give this God of my imagination--a super-parent of shoulds and oughts, rules and regulations and rewards--my fullest possible devotion and obedience, continue being the basically "good", tame, and risk-avoidant young woman I already was, avoide future love and sex (at least for a while--and it's not like I had enjoyed a whole lot of it before then!), and find a tenuous sense of belonging in the chapel liturgies and among the odd assortment of college kids in the Christian fellowship. God's part of the bargain, as I saw it, was to protect me, to keep me safe from further heartache. That's all I asked. That, and I suppose forgiveness for my many (to me obvious) sins and good old guilt and shame.

Perhaps I should have been suspicious early on that "God" wasn't really in on this bargain with me, when the student organist at the college, a leader in the Christian fellowship who also happened to be dating my roommate at the time, made a pass at me while showing me the inner workings of the organ!

As a sign of just how uptight and naive I was, I didn't see the humor in this at the time. Nor did I allow myself to contemplate the total sleaze-hood of the guy! Can you believe it? This guy put moves on my while showing me his very big, impressive organ!

As I said, I didn't catch the humor at the time. In fact, I was really a rather humorless creature in those days: very serious, very religious, and very unhappy. (And you might imagine, also very boring.)

Still, I bravely soldiered on and stuffed my native spiritual and intellectual curiosity and playfulness in a closet for at least the next few years while I doggedly pursued my new identity as a Christian and as a religious devotee, a scared escapee from life.

Salvation by Facebook

I don't do a lot on Facebook--a little Scrabble, a little wall-to-wall stuff. And I don't have many friends on Facebook, at least not yet. But sometimes Facebook really comes through and delivers. Last year about this time Facebook got me over my fear of meeting with the bishop to discuss renouncing my ordination vows. Facebook did that by making me laugh. It made me laugh when I got an email inviting me to be friends with the bishop on Facebook about six days before my appointment to meet with her. Being new on Facebook myself, I was a bit surprised that she was on it, too. But that's not the whole story.

You know how, when you get an email inviting you to be someone's friend on Facebook, there's a link to open, and then the text says: "Please confirm that you are in fact So-and-so's friend"? So imagine that the name mentioned is someone you're not sure you really are friends with, someone with whom communication has been slim to non-existent for over a year. And beyond that, that you remember very vividly in your gut that the last time you had a two-way conversation, you ended up curled in a fetal position afterwards shaking and weeping. And so Facebook's insistence that you confirm you are in fact friends with this person presents what feels like an ethical dilemma: you kind of feel as if you should be friends with this person, but you honestly don't know if you want to be friends with this person, or even if you can be friends with this person. 

So you hedge, and decide to wait a while, take some deep breaths while you think about it. And in the meantime, because you're curious, you open the next link offered. And that link declares in no uncertain terms: "You and So-and-so have no friends in common." 

"Duh...I could have told you that" seems an appropriate response. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Tears, too. You start to think that maybe you could call yourself this person's friend on Facebook just for the heck of it, just because this seems like quite a funny joke the universe has offered up just when you needed to lighten up. But not wanting to be too hasty about such an important decision, you close up the email until later, when you can share it with one or two trusted friends. And they too are at first incredulous, next totally skeptical that this person is on Facebook and that such a friendship might be possible or desirable, and then they too dissolve in restorative laughter. One of them is talking to you on her cell phone as she walks, and after letting out her trademark whooping laugh that turns heads in restaurants and libraries, she has to stop and lean against a tree because she's laughing so hard. 

So in the end, it just seems like no big deal to be friends with the person on Facebook and to meet with her six days later. And you chalk one up to Facebook, and you are also very happy when your daughter shows you how to give this person only limited access to your profile.