Will we really be able to take down the insane tyrant with all his enablers?
The 2021 invasion of the capital by right wing Trumpians.
When I was enrolled in the SMFA diploma program we were asked to go to the museum and find a painting and write a story.
I decided to write a one page story about Joan Mitchell’s Chamonix https://collections.mfa.org/objects/149756
Neither my classmates or the professor running the diploma seminar responded well to the story. I think it made everyone uncomfortable as it was so dark. Which is strange as I saw it as hopeful and speaking to the power of art making to heal and comfort us during difficult times. Sally’s comments about her “Guston-esque” piece inspired me to dig up this very short short story.
What We Do by Jill Levien
I didn’t think the instability would come this far north. The rebellion seemed isolated to Washington and Wall Street. Many believed the American military would quickly get things under control. Those responsible for disrupting the American way of life would then be put in jail and life would go on. Nobody predicted the extent to which the armed men and women had been radicalized. Ideologues had infiltrated the military and po- lice. Silently, without anyone outside being aware, individuals took sides becoming ei- ther a Corporatists or a Krugman. And so on March 2020 America stopped working and started fighting.
Initially this was cause for celebration among the many Americans who had grown fed up with suffering while fat-cats ran the country. Extreme weather had caused food shortages and an excessive number of homeless families. The health care system which was strained due to epidemics, turned health care into a luxury item. America had become a third world country. There were so many people who had little to loose they took to fighting believing it would save the country.
I tried to continue with my life. Living in upstate New York we were at least able to grow and hunt our own food. I wanted to believe everything would return to the way it was and the babies I delivered would go to school, learn to drive, cause their parents grief, go to college and get a job. After the entire east coast was destroyed by a series of mega-storms I realized this was a fantasy. The UN was letting the US self destruct. The cities that formed the back bone of our country laid in ruins looking exactly like their imagined digital post-apocalyptic selves.
Time marched on and the life we knew fell apart. I gave up being a midwife. To bring life into this world one needed to believe there was a future for mankind on this planet and my optimism had been knocked out of me the day I watched a new mother’s joy turn on a dime as an infant in it’s last moments on this earth flew past me.
With the town destroyed, I had no desire to migrate with the remaining souls to Shuino a pop-up city up north. Instead I found comfort in an abandoned victorian near Hu Huazi, previously known as Lake Cayuga, with a small community of similar minded survivors who collectively scavenged for food and left each other alone to heal. We were a community of zombies; alive but dead emotionally and intellectually. One day while looking for supplies we found some old canvases and cans of house paint tucked away in the back of a barn. Joanie went outside and found some sticks and made some brushes from the hay and string we found lying around. Painting she figured would help distract us from rumbling stomachs and frozen fingers. I started to paint the hospital perched on a cliff above the lake. Joanie saw it and was reminded of the the child she had given birth to in happier times. She dipped a broom in the paint and made a sweeping gesture as she voiced her baby’s final cry. Once that happened I realized what I had to do. I grabbed one of the brushes she had made and dipped it in the black, mushing it with the wet white paint to create smoke. We both started to work at pushing the paint around and building it up recreating the feelings and emotions we had on that snowy spring day. Soft washes of green and blue among the smoke and snow mixed with explosive marks and the remnants of the hospital where we together had spent our last happy seconds. The two of us worked together one responding to the other. We were making visual Jazz. Eventually, the two of us fell back onto some hay and looked at our creation and started laughing. It was the first time either one of us had laughed in a long time and it felt wonderful. I knew after that, life and humanity could go on.
But I revisited it as I suppose parts of it were prescient. It wasn’t that I was clever enough to see the future, but more I was reading and listening to historians like Tim Snyder who were telling us this was where we were headed. Anyways it is a quick read and I hope you enjoy the story and don’t find it too dark.
Sometimes we just need to have Fun!!!
My middle child turns 30 tomorrow!! He will become a dad in 2 months!! Despite all my dark drawings there are reasons to be joyful and sometimes we just have to have fun. I made this paper so I could make a box/bag for our collective gift of cards to give to Joel. I had so much fun making it. Roen was drawing a “Blue Painting” while I was drawing this. We were two artists deeply involved in our work.
2020 comes to an end
I was thinking about the early days of the pandemic and how there was this unusual optimism and hope among those of us who have been educating ourselves about the climate emergency. The whole world had shut down. Fighting had even stopped in Syria. It was spring and nature responded with glorious bird song in response to the quiet in the air and on the ground. Skies were clear of planes and roads were not filled with traffic. There was hope that people would notice this new reality and we would emerge from this pandemic into a better cleaner more sustainable world.
Instead people kicked and screamed about haircuts, about being stuck with their offspring at home, about this vague thing called “the economy”, the ridiculous stock market, about the inconvenience of wearing a mask, about not being able to have parties and gatherings. People were impatient.
Even as ICUs fill again I see pictures on social media of people hanging out without masks with those not in their household. I see people outside without masks. I hear of unnecessary gatherings. The phrase “Flatten the Curve” is history and instead everyone seems resigned to the death and chaos this virus causes.
Meanwhile two new more transmissible CoVid19 viruses have emerged. Fires are still burning. People still talk about a return to “Normal” even though the future will be far from normal regardless of what we do. If we do nothing the climate will upend life as we know it. So we must decide which new future we want. I know what future I want for me and for my offspring. But I am not convinced the rest of the world is willing to do what they need to do so we can have that future.
Are we coming or going and does it matter?
The last day of critique group
It is hard to believe that another semester has come and gone on Zoom. I adore my fellow artists and looking closely at their work each week has been a highlight of this whole Pandemic. The critique group format has been wonderful for me. Hearing Joel and my fellow artists talk about work has helped me evaluate my own work as I am creating it and has made me a better artist. The weekly online gatherings have motivated me to produce work consistently and helped me find my voice. Looking at my art over the years I see themes and it is interesting to see how things like Tangles are being wrangled and controlled so I can use them to express my ideas and emotions. It can feel like a super power.
When we started critique group I had just rescued the Kodak Stereoscopic viewer and the slides of my parents wedding from their basement. I used it to make images I was happy with. Although I moved away from using the slides for my drawings, I knew that I wanted to end this critique session by returning to them. The batteries and bulb needed to be replaced and so I had to take it apart. When it was apart I wondered what would happen if I managed to squeeze two slides in so they overlapped.
The result was something totally unexpected. Relatives appeared who were not even born yet in the images. Most notably our daughter showed up! There was no doubt it was her. I showed it to my husband and he agreed. I suppose it is just genetics. Features of various relatives combining. But it is eerie. In another combination I see my brother and my cousin’s daughter.
One year on: How the west messed up.
Exactly a year ago a Taiwanese scientist warned the west of a potentially dangerous novel respiratory virus in Wuhan. The Taiwanese knew that China could not be trusted to tell the truth. They experienced this with the Sars and Mers viruses in the past. And so they took this novel virus that was starting to fill up the hospitals in Wuhan seriously and pleaded with the west do to the same. But with America Leadership golfing and perpetually on vacation there was no leadership and so the virus was able to spread like wildfire around the globe. Imagine how this would have played out if we had taken a much needed pause in January and treated this like the serious threat it was. Maybe we would be like Taiwan and instead of deaths in the millions we would just have a few hundred deaths.
And everyone is so confused. The physics of the virus is simple and understood, and yet everyone wants to make up their own rules. I am tired of doing my part only to have others not make an effort. The post-Thanksgiving Bump in the virus is an embarrassment on so many levels and it does not bode well for the future of our culture or society. Family’s edited and all unnecessarily. Imagine D-Day or 9-11 happening every day in the US.
Another week living with CoVid
It’s starting to feel like Groundhog day. Thanksgiving came and went. I made packages of chestnut stuffing mix and gingerbread men for the kids. We read and played games and ate left over soba noodles with homemade broth for dinner. The days are getting shorter and shorter and darker and darker. I struggle with the cold and the dark. Without a trip to a city or theater or a nice meal out to look forward to winter is going to be hard. Right now I am surviving by drawing. The critique group has been my weekly life-line and I am so grateful for it and for Joel, whose comments no matter how critical are always so intelligent and never fail to inspire me to want to make more work.
Do something abstract! I draw the cardboard from a tin of sardines.
Hunkered Down
Attempts to create empty space similar to the empty space Gay created in one of her drawings in critique group.
I have to work quickly. “What are you drawing G’Ma. I want to use your paints. I need your brush.”
Pandemic Life
I finally took a pair of scissors to my hair. It isn’t terrible and it feels so much cleaner without all those dead frizzy ends that would get tangled so easily. Tangles again!
In the 9 months since the pandemic began our granddaughter has gone from being a baby to being this small person with her own interests, opinions, ideas and QUESTIONS. So many questions. “What is Dat?” She loves music and was moved when we showed her children singing opera. She has jokes that she thinks are funny such as taking these wooden circular game pieces and putting them over her eyes. She likes to collect rocks, has a nest of imaginary baby blue jays that she sometimes has to tend to. She is a joy and she is also EXHAUSTING especially on a cold rainy day stuck inside. While she paints I paint using her new Crayola watercolors I had ordered. She sees me painting and as is common with young children sees the flowers and suddenly has to have MY brush. Because obviously the brush is why I am able to make the image I am making. She asks for what ever brush I am using multiple times. I keep working and ta-da….I end up with a not-terrible little watercolor. Definitely not archival, but sweet just the same.
Artistic Goals
So this week I revisited the subjects of last week’s drawings. I had this fear in my psyche that said if I could not create 2 new interesting drawings from the same subject than maybe last week’s drawings were “not real” and I was just lucky. Maybe it was just happenstance that resulted in my creating these two drawings that felt as though they did such a good job of expressing what I was feeling. I did not enter the self-assigned assignment with any specific idea about how I would compose them or even what they would be about. I tossed the knitting bag on the table and just started drawing. As I drew I moved things around. The same thing happened with the charm bracelet. There were lots of false starts and frustration. My husband and I have been playing this train game on weekends. In this game a single move can involve intense planning and time. So I will often draw while Roy is making his move. Both days I lost horribly because I was so distracted, frustrated and preoccupied with these two drawings. And there was pressure to complete them because on Monday morning the Tot would arrive and the still life on the dining room table would have to be cleaned up. The drawings were not emerging as easily on the page as the two drawings did last week. I did not expect to struggle as much when revisiting subjects I I had already drawn. It was only after a much erasing and rearranging and drawing and more drawing that suddenly I saw the theme of “escaping” emerge from the paper. Escaping from the bag and escaping from the bowl. Sigh the desire to escape our Covid-Confinement is ever present. The desire to escape our financial woes. I miss pre-pandemic life and want to be free of the mask when I step outside. I put together a document to show all four drawings together. It is interesting to compare the two. The second set feel a bit more tentative and yet I am happy with each one. I wish I had the resources to frame them as I feel as though this is a series I would frame.
How to keep a toddler occupied so I can draw
I have been very motivated to work lately. Feelings of success have pushed me to want to make more work. But I am also daycare for our granddaughter. An energetic, intelligent, typical 2 year old. 2 year olds are fascinating creatures. They are like aliens trying to learn about this new world they have woken up into. Their language is exploding at the same time they are developing better control over their bodies. They are far from being a “kid” but they are not a helpless “baby” either. In other words they are like a very smart puppy and they require one to always be attentive to them or else they will get into mischief. Yesterday morning our granddaughter was playing with a very small light jewelry hammer I have. I decided it might be fun to give her something to bang so I grabbed an empty egg carton from the recycle bin and poked some holes in it and stuck wax crayons in for her to bang. But that wasn’t enough for her. I ended up getting toothpicks for her to push in to the egg carton. In her words “A red one, a blue one, a yellow one, a red one…where is the yellow one.”
Between picking up the too-pics I tried to draw her as I did last week but this time (per Joel’s suggestion) with charcoal. She was moving a lot more so I think that is why the legs are so off.
Comfort
Trump not conceding the election and the many who believe in him has left many I know with this low level unsettled anxiety. We know something is wrong, we know there will be consequences. Whether we will pay the price in the coming months or in four years has yet to be determined. Again we are waiting in the trenches for the battle to begin.
As a child I found great comfort in the tangles of Jewelry in my mother’s Jewelry box. I would sit on her bed and untangle the chains and bracelets. I particularly loved these two charm bracelets my mother had. For me they were magical with the tiny charms that were like little toys. There was a box with two tiny ivory dice, a small typewriter, a calendar page with rubies on my mom’s birthday, a whistle, a hammer and a miniature thimble to name a few of my favorites. Over the years I have tried to incorporate them into some art with little success. But yesterday while sleep deprived and angry and while I was also playing and LOOSING HORRIBLY to my husband in a train game we are obsessed with I found comfort in the bracelets and something emerged on the paper that I liked.
SCIENCE!!!
OK I know I have mentioned that we are in an unprecedented hurricane season with us already halfway through the Greek alphabet in naming storms. Remember when I mentioned that somebody I had been friends with was skeptical about recent storms being related to climate change. Well for as long as we have been recording and naming hurricanes we have not had to go beyond Z!!! That should give you the chills because it makes it clear how dire the climate situation is. And then there is this pandemic. There is no doubt there will be more viruses and pandemics. As Jane Goodall said when all this CoVid-19 started, we are out of balance with nature. Thankgoodness Joe Biden has made it clear he intends to put listening to scientists as a high priority. I really hope the Trump Loyalists do not try to sabotage him.
The first summer after our son arrived in Cambridge to do his post-doc, he presented a poster at a scientific conference. Harvard prints scientific posters on foldable fabric. As soon as I saw the poster I knew I wanted to recycle it into a cloth bag. At first our son refused. I think he was worried I would walk around Cambridge with it and people he knows would notice it and we all know how embarrassing mother’s can be. I assured him I would not use it at Frommaggio or Whole Foods (where his advisor might be shopping). Instead I would make it into a knitting bag which would hardly leave the house. Thankfully his partner/girlfriend rescued the poster and gave it to me and I turned it into a knitting bag. And that is what I drew while wondering if Science will win or if the turtle man and the others (I have nasty names for them which I will not put here) will swallow it
The marvel of human cognitive development
I feel like we need to take a pause to focus on how wonderful Human Cognition and Intellect can be. I have always been of the school that all babies are born with powerful brains and the potential for brilliance. But there are so many things stacked against them, such as lead poisoning, stress in womb and out, poor nutrition and environmental degradation resulting in poor air for them to breath. I love watching our granddaughter develop. With my own children I was so immersed in the parenting I could not quite take in how amazing this phase is. Her language has exploded and she now speaks in paragraphs of full sentences. She is starting to understand what 2 means and definitely understands the concepts of more and less.
I bought a cheap pair of plastic safety scissors for my granddaughter. She is still trying to figure them out but the first day she had them she just wanted to sit with some junk mail and practice “cutting”. I did think to remind her parents to keep any scissors they own out of her reach because I had unlocked “The cutting monster”. She tried to get me to go away to another room so she could try them on other things. I was not fooled. There is no doubt in my mind that she will give herself a haircut at some point and any doll that has hair is likely to have a visit to the hair salon for a new cut as well.
She was sitting relatively still so I drew her. Then I drew her playing.
First a sigh and then a return to the realization the war is far from over
I continue to draw tangles but the warm fuzzies of Saturday have made me switch from drawing thread to drawing my knitting. I am knitting a baby blanket for my son and his girlfriend who are expecting in March. We all need a hug right now before we go on to deal with the big issues.
Somebody I know wrote this today, "Most of the people that I know would directly benefit in tangible ways from easing up on the passion they invest in their relationship with politics. You can say that it's not true, or you could take a big, deep breath."
My response "These past four years EVERY HUMAN ON EARTH has paid a price for the incompetance in American Politics. I am EXTREMELY thankful for all my passionate friends and the strangers who organized, made calls, sent texts, wrote postcards, let their voices be heard, marched and marched and marched again and again to stand up to the bully. And yes I will celebrate but I hope all those who have become so passionate continue because we have a lot of work ahead of us if we are going to save humanity from climate change, stand up to those who continue to harbor racists and xenophobic ideas and work to rebalance and reevaluate economics so it is not a winner take all hord it system but rather a system that respects the hard work of EVERYONE. You may want us to quiet our voices but we will NOT."
So to everyone who wrote postcards, made phone calls, took on leadership roles, raised money etc…..even if you only did one small thing I want to personally THANKYOU.
What Now????
How can Lyndsey Grahm get reelected? How can Louisiana vote against abortion? How can a crazy Quanon supporter get elected to congress? This is not OK and I do not see a path forward with Turtle Man running the senate. Four years of nothing happening because of him is only going to result in somebody much worse than Trump getting elected. HELP…the planet needs help. Humanity is hanging itself.
I drew this on the morning of election day. It was cold. I was using a small table mirror that was slightly angled on the floor. And I was drawing quickly because my granddaughter was about to arrive.
Waiting for the fate of Earth....
In this odd way I feel like the a man waiting in the trenches in France in WWI. Soon something is going to happen and my gut is telling me to be afraid. I do feel, especially after watching different CoVid documentaries about how the Trump administration handled this (NOW, Washington Post, and one on Hulu) that the fate of Earth and Humanities role on earth depends on what happens this week. If we fail to address climate then this CoVid-19 pandemic is going to look like the appetizer to the apocalypse we are about to face. But if we can get back on track and focus on the necessary changes then maybe just maybe we can survive. Hidden among all the noise of the Election and CoVid was the fact that ETA was a hurricane that hit Lousiana!!! Think about that!
Tangles. I draw tangles when I am anxious and upset. I supposed it is meditative as I let my hand and eye get drawn into the knots and holes and threads. What better metaphor for our current situation. A battlement of spools of thread, scissors stomping on safety pins and all of us connected and yet disconnected. Those safety pins.
Pre-Election anxiety
Everyone I know is anxious. We all are remembering the trauma of 2016. These past four years have been so damaging. We knew. Right away we said something needed to be done as the stakes were too high. Normal democratic processes were not going to succeed in removing a narcissistic tyrant. And with the world teetering on disaster due to our current climate emergency we simply did not have four years to wait it out. And sadly our worst fears have come true. I look to the future and I can not get past the ballot box. And so that is brings me to this week’s current work. I hope the visual says it all. I know not everyone can see or understand the imagery. It is interesting that the mirror with the eye glasses looks like the moon and we found water on the moon this week.
**An addition to this blog entry. As mentioned earlier this series was not a series of drawings my spouse enjoyed. And for the most part I was happy to be done with it. But last week (It is now December 6) I was reading the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fall Bulletin, which contained a collection of essays by those employed by the museum about Art and this moment in history. There was a piece in there by the curator in charge of European Miniatures. Many miniatures were created in Elizabethan England. Elizabethan’s had to contend with the plague and loss and separation from loved ones. These miniatures were all the rage and a bit like mini-instagrams used to stay connected. Elizabethans even believed they could talk. I thought about how putting my face in the mirror was reminiscent of a locket/miniature from that time.
My Future Exhibit
I was working on a drawing my husband simply did not like. He even walked by and in a moment of frustration around the image I was creating said, “I think you should just stop working on this.” Which as every fellow artist knows is just the comment we need to hear to make us WANT to work on it even more. My response to him was to say long after we are dead there will an exhibition of this body of work I am creating and in one of the exhibit rooms there will be this drawing along with a display of the Stereoscopic viewer and case for those future humans to examine. This week for fun I created a mini imagined exhibit and wrote captions as though it was 30 years from now. I can’t help imagining videos accompanying the exhibit of the, empty streets in the early days of lockdown, the overflowing hospitals, BLM protests, and hopefully images of the incompetent and greedy politicians in orange jumpsuits being marched to their incarceration. I still need to work on it but I want to keep working on this fantasy future exhibit if only because it comforts me to think there might be a future with museums and exhibits. I miss museums. I miss the Metropolitan Museum in NYC so much that it hurts when I see their posts on Instagram. Oh to wander that vast museum and come across some new visual delight. I miss our son who lives in NYC who I have not seen in person since this whole pandemic began. I want to hug him so badly.
Last week my mentor/teacher Joel Janowitz had made some interesting comments about this complex still life I had set up with the viewer and case in it. He got me thinking about how I could use it to capture the angst and struggle of this moment in history. Although the drawing as a whole did not work, in my opinion Joel had pointed out drawing elements that had potential and so I was inspired to revisit the idea. I am still not in a place where I feel the idea is working or the drawings are where I want them to be. But the critique group has been inspiring and I am not going to let go of this idea. Everyone’s comments including Joel’s have made me even more eager to return and play with this idea. Stay tuned for more attempts to tackle this still life self portrait!!!
It was a beautiful day. I am not normally tempted to do landscapes but the weather was perfect and I simply could not resist. I headed out and before I had even gone to the spot I was thinking I would work I saw this trash can and how it captured how we are trashing the environment.
Me, Myself and I
The pandemic means spending a lot of time with yourself. I no longer have casual interactions when I go shopping, or work in a shared print space, or attend events with my granddaughter. Sure I talk to other caregivers at the park with my granddaughter, we see our kids for masked socially distant gatherings every week, and we even sometimes have a socially distant masked gathering with our neighbors . Thursdays this summer I have been out at Lindentree with my fellow Farm-Peeps. But unlike past years we do not hang out afterwards and share lunch together. We often work far apart and there is less socializing. None of these are the same as meeting a friend for coffee/tea or visiting another artist’s studio and working together for an afternoon.
This week was about the self portrait. Given that I care for our granddaughter it was only natural she should find her way into one of the drawings. She loves making marks with Charcoal. Especially because she can take her hand and wipe the marks away and then finger paint with the charcoal. She was so excited to draw a dark line while sitting on my lap. It let me actually complete the drawing. She did wipe out her face once she noticed the drawing was of herself. A new form of peek-a-boo, which she thought was very funny. I was able to add the eyes back in.
What a crazy time it is
It was a week filled but sadly not with art. Concern about our son’s partner’s pregnancy made me tired. Concern about the planet, our country and our own struggles left me anxious with the desire to do something mindless to turn off the brain. The Fires are still burning. The President of the United States and many around him have CoVid-19. We are on the verge of a civil war.I still find myself revisiting my parent’s wedding slides and had planned to do a drawing about my father looking at himself in the mirror hoping to incorporate some of the trees and line work from last week. But as I worked the drawing shifted and I added my mother do the drawing and drawing myself over and over looking burnt out. As I worked on these drawings I kept thinking how much has changed since the 50s when they were married. The world seemed so full of potential with a sleek shiny silver future. My husband and I are fortunate to still have all four of our parents. That is rare among our peers. Our parents are in their 80s and each is struggling in their own way with this new reality. My own parents want to pretend it will all go back to normal. I mention the climate emergency and they can not fully grasp the magnitude and how it will impact their great grandchildren. They imagine their great grandchildren not as future soldiers in the war to save humanity but growing up to the same world they lived in for most of their lives. A world where each generation had a future that was brighter than the one before. Most of the time my efforts to collaborate with our 2 year old granddaughter end up as a page covered in MUD colored watery paint. The drawing rarely stops when I want it to as toddlers and preschoolers are the masters at embracing process. Our granddaughter is obsessed with pumpkins and so together we draw and paint. I am not sure why I like this drawing so much
