My daughter is due with her third girl any day now so we are full of anticipation. It is crazy because next week both her brothers will be passing through and staying with us and there are also snow storms coming so there is this eagerness to get this baby out when the weather is good and so we don’t have the girl’s staying with us when my son and his family arrive or when my other son and his girlfriend and band arrive. Our apartment is not that big and at times like this I definitely miss my big old house in Lexington, although I know in the windy cold we have been having, I would be cursing up a storm if we were still in that house. The stone walls made it a very chilly castle in the winter despite a state of the art heating system.
Onward. My husband and I have become obsessed with an animated series on Netflix called “Arcane”. The animation is brilliant and probably will be thought of as animation history for it’s use of hand painting with computer rigging. The studio in Paris, “Fortiche” has a really unique approach to animation. Before they started working with the writers and creators of this show they primarily used their quirky animation style for music videos and advertising. I could write paragraphs about how they mix painting and drawing styles …going from French Landscape painting to graphic Basquiet style montages to charcoal drawings to detailed renderings. But there is more than enough on the web about it if one is interested.
But there is another thing about Arcane that resonates with me. One of the main characters is a younger sister who just can’t quite live up to her older sister’s status but who is very creative and imaginative. I totally related to her especially when she was teased by her peers for not being able to keep up and for her tendency to make impulsive mistakes. Her character has a dark story arc. Trauma and abuse turn her into a dark creative who makes inventive toys that are also weapons. And there is a scene where she is welding and listening to music and totally in her creative zone after doing an impulsive revengeful act. I LOVE THAT SCENE. It so captures how it feels to be in the “Zone” when creating. Especially when one is creating in response to an intense emotional experience.
So it made sense that after I had a horrible day on Wednesday because family members who I thought I could trust did something unconscionable and very hurtful, I thought of this character Jynxx and had this desire to channel my inner Jynxx. Don’t worry I didn’t go make any weapons. The one thing holding me together was talking with other family members and friends who all agreed that what the other family members did was by all accounts VERY VERY WRONG. Even somebody who has known my family for many years and has a role as a religious leader was gob-smacked when I relayed what happened. I am just relaying that to capture the magnitude and awfulness of what was done. Thursday using the marvelous gift from the wonderful incredible angel Sally Casper extradonaire I took the key and went to Turtle Studio in Watertown. I put my ear buds in and blasted the sound track to ARCANE and I got to work mixing colors and rolling ink and printing with the Gelli plate. The crazy thing is I was really unsure what I was going to do or make, but right before leaving the house I grabbed a plastic bag I had from some spinach I had used up and thought…”hmmm…maybe I can use this somehow to capture the emptiness I feel in my heart right now. But what initially emerged was not my anger or feelings of empty darkness, but prints that totally resonated with waiting to give birth (at least that is how I see them). How appropriate that shortly after creating the first two my daughter texted me. When my daughter texted me I sent a photo of them to her and joked that I promised I was not thinking at all about her pregnancy when I started to make these. She laughed.
As the day progressed I returned to my hands and started to paint and draw on the Gelli plates with the left over ink I had from the previous successful prints and BOY that is when the Anger came out. ANGER about AMERICA. ANGER about CLIMATE. ANGER towards my one sibling. ANGER toward my father. And listening to the same music Jynxx was listening to while crafting her bomb in ARCANE just filled me with well……do I dare say it…JOY…LOL.
Don’t worry if I make any bombs they will probably be confetti bombs…made with compostable material of course.
This is the character Jynxx from the TV show “Arcane” that I mentioned.
