August 2021

The summer is always a slow for me as an artist. As one fellow farm worker said to me, our attention turns to the earth and growing things. I am doing less farm work than in the past due a shift in Lindentree’s operations and my decision to spend my workshare energy over at neighboring Drumlin farm. Tuesday I spent time at Drumlin planting beets with volunteers, crew and workshare members. Matt Celona is a very impressive farmer. I was amazed at how rich and fluffy the soil felt as we put the tiny fragile baby beet sprouts into the ground. When I got home the dirt easily washed off me. It is an interesting contrast to Lindentree where despite the focus on farming organically the soil has been allowed to compact and become hard. Meanwhile the planet is burning. Torrential rains are falling. It is crazy how much worse this is than what Al Gore showed in his movie “The Inconvenient Truth” and how foolish we were to ignore what scientists were telling us back then. And still nobody seems interested in doing the work to stop the train from careening over the cliff. It is capitalism. We are all addicted to shopping and buying and shopping and our cars and planes. Nobody wants to stop. Nobody is willing to stop.

All the grand babies are now no longer within walking distance. We are cycling regularly out to Bedford to see Roen and Maeve (and of course Shira and Nick as well) . I miss having them all nearby. Last week we had Isaac and his girlfriend here and that was so nice. I don’t miss the cooking or cleaning associated with feeding everyone but I definitely miss their constant presence.

Trying to force myself to work without falling into the habit of just drawing flowers. I have so many flowers this summer. I take a painting I am not happy with that features dried and dying flowers and I wipe an area away and put an image of myself in a “Lush Prison” (title courtesy of Sally). The painting feels right for the moment.

Summer 2021

CoVid rates are as low as they have been since the start of the pandemic. Hurray for Vaccination.

My babies are moving. I know I shouldn’t complain they are all still relatively close. Our daughter and husband bought a house in Bedford MA. Our middle son and his family are moving to Hanover New Hampshire where he will be an assistant professor at Dartmouth . Our youngest son is moving off the island of Manhattan (Harlem to be exact) to Brooklyn (Williamsburg). I am happy for all of them and what these moves mean for them, but I will miss our Pandemic gatherings at Leslie College with our oldest 2 and their families. Things change. Roen has morphed from a toddler into a full blown Three-anger. She is so funny. One of her favorite things is to do s’periments with food coloring and water. She can mix colors for hours. She is now part of a cohort of kids who regularly go to Larch Road park. They know each other’s names. Like a collection of little rascals they range in age from 2 to 5. The kids think my name is “Grandma” cause that is what Roen calls me.

So like an expanding spiral the kids are still close but moving farther away. We will still be connected.

Inequality, unfairness, cruelty, selfishness and human nature

We participated in an interesting theater experiment put on my a small theater in London we love, Almeida. i confess I missed the Almeida bar, which has good food, as well as the Ottolenghi cookies we would buy across the street. I miss the energy of Islington. But this particular Zoom theater experience was different than others because it involved you (the audience) interacting one on one with an actor or actress. I don’t want to give too much away in case they do the performance again and you can be a part of it.

Being a teacher at Grandparent Pandemic School has become a bit of a chore lately. Oh how I love that little girl and I do enjoy having her visit. But she is also exhausting now that she is older. She is so ready to participate in preschool and spend some of her days around other kids. If it were not for CoVid and I was babysitting her regularly we would be going to the library and music class and doing things where she was able to be around other children on a regular basis.

Quarantine Art

Vaccinated, Celebrations, Family and more (From last year)

vIt was a momentous week!!!   Our entire extended family is all vaccinated except for the babies and Roen.  My in laws and our youngest son came up from CT/NYC.  Roen got to meet her Uncle Isaac in person.  For half her life he has been the uncle who lives in my computer.  The two hit it off in person and immediately became best friends.

I spent the weekend hosting and for the first time our dining room table was clear of the piles of art work created by me and Roen.  It was free of brushes, paint and yogurt containers filled with water.   All the chairs were being used as chairs and not flat surfaces for storing things.  Saturday night as our large group sat around the table and babies cried while we laughed, we could hear laughter and chatter coming from neighbor’s houses all around us.  People whose vaccines had finally kicked in, combined with the CDCs new mask recommendations and the beautiful spring evening meant that people all over were gathering with friends and family.  That sound was so joyous.

More quarantine art.

Will Humanity Prevail?

I spend a lot of time thinking about this lately. It is hard not to with what is happening in India with CoVid. Over a year since CoVid was declared a global pandemic and science has accomplished so much. We understand how it is transmitted from person to another. We have better treatments for those who are ill. We even have what so far looks like effective vaccines. AND YET…..India, Brazil, Michigan are allowed to happen and people are dying. What is wrong with us that we can not stop ourselves from traveling, from shopping, from spreading a lethal virus?

Hurray Saturday I get my second vaccine.

I think of the babies. So many babies lately are being diagnosed with being tongue tied. Is it being overdiagnosed? Is it due to something in the environment?

Life Death and everything in between

A fellow artist friend also had two grand babies born this month. In one case mom had a difficult birth resulting in her being in the ICU. My friend’s daughter is home now recovering. Meanwhile this friend learns her eldest daughter is seriously ill. Another friend and fellow breastfeeding home birth advocate I know lost her mom. Covid protocols probably were responsible for some of her mom’s deterioration in the past 6 months. A mom in the support group I moderate who I have known for years lives in Boulder CO. The Shooting being a little too close to home. The supermarket is one she used to go to all the time when her girls were in Elementary school. I hate guns!!! I hate the constant pain and death that gun violence is inflicting on our country. Bodies. I think of bodies as I draw. Fallen bodies from gun violence. Bodies of the elderly. Bodies of those who are ill.

And then I think of Maeve. Mystery Maeve. Why has she never been able to suck properly. Is it something minor? Is it more significant? Why does her voice sound raspy and hoarse to me? I say I won’t google but then every day I find myself reading web pages looking for answers. There are none. She needs professionals to tease this out. I hate seeing our daughter in pain and so sad. Meanwhile her other daughter is just BURSTING with life; A bird, a flower, the joy of throwing a ball, the amazement of finding yet a new and different rock, using her body in new ways, expressing herself, asking questions. Everything is new and exciting and has potential to bring laughter, tears and amazement.

And baby number 2

Two weeks after baby Nikko our daughter had her second child, Maeve. It was a home birth with some drama when the placenta took a long time to come out. That day, Monday March 1rst, Roen came over as usual but her dad left “the bag they had packed” for when mom was in labor. She stayed all day, had bath and dinner and went to sleep. For the most part she slept well, but I did not. I had my phone in my hand until I got the text sharing SUCCESS, which only came at 11:30 at night. My sweet daughter did tell me to go to sleep and promised all the details in the morning, but I had too much adrenaline to really sleep well. Baby Maeve was a big 8lb 15oz baby, which by my family’s standards is a giant. I have smallish babies. And definitely the opposite of her cousin Nikko born 2 weeks before. But what a cutie!

Meanwhile I am being postpartum doula to our son and his wife, going over while our son leaves to teach his course. In addition to all the usual challenges of adjusting to new parenthood their baby also has a posterior tongue tie which has made nursing challenging for baby and mom. It means more frequent feeds and painful positions for mom, which is exhausting.

Every day it seems I am holding a baby. They are both wonderful and I can’t wait to see how their personalities develop. So far both Nikko and Maeve seem to have this slightly skeptical look on their faces as though they know they were born during a global pandemic that we have not gotten under control.

Art has been not happening, although I did do one drawing I like today. I guess I am just overwhelmed with the new babies and what lies ahead. Our son and his wife got a lease for a house owned by Dartmouth and it starts in May. That seems so soon. I am going to miss having them around the corner so much.

One thing I love is putting photos of the two babies side by side. After both my kids sent me pictures of them in bed with their babies I had to combine them. They are great pictures which is no surprise as they both have spouses who are talented visually. But I also love the “battle of the baby chins”. Who doesn’t love a baby with a double or triple chin?

Blankets

Before Nikko was born I was drawing scissors. I have always enjoyed drawing tools and my scissor collection became a great tool for expressing everything from angst to hope. As I said in previous posts I used them as figurative objects. In the week before Nikko was born I was terrified about the baby being a footling breech and what might happen in the final weeks. I knew that setting up a very straight forward narrative still life would not lend itself to an interesting drawing, but I had hopes that I could use it as a background for something more complex. I placed the scissors pointing out of a bag. They were feet sticking out of a container. One could not get more explicit about my footling anxiety than that. I had just started on the drawing and after Nikko was born I found I could not continue working on it. Instead I found myself focused on blankets. I had visited my mom who is still recovering and she was in bed among blankets. My son , his wife and their baby were surrounded by blankets as they nursed their small newborn. And so I set up the silk scarves and started drawing hoping to capture that feeling we have when we curl up with our blankets to heal and recover and rest.

A boy, whales and dreams that come true

There once was a boy who loved learning. He had many challenges growing up but worked hard and became a PhD and is now going to be a Professor. I am so excited for him and his new family to start their life in NH/VT.

Ethan loved whales, especially Orca whales. I have a vivid memory of sitting with him as a toddler on the rocks in a park on Orcas Island and seeing a pod of whales go by.

He learned all about them and a whale video set to music was what calmed him down.

One of his favorite books was a book made by a local Pacific Northwest Author called “Davy’s Dream” The last line is “And Davy learned dreams really can come true.” How appropriate.

New Life-meet Baby Nikko Born February 12

Words

Words can not begin to express the pride I feel in my son and his wife. They are starting off their new life as parents with so much love for each other and for this new creature.

I miss having coffee or tea with friends. Baby Nikko’s birth made me wish I could celebrate and share photos and stories with my dear friends who I miss so much. i keep thinking about how sad it is that one of my close artist friends who is also about to have two grandchildren born (her son and her daughter are both having babies that are due on the same day in March). And what fun it would be to gather with all these babies together. It would be a baby party!!! But alas that is not going to happen….

Medical Mess

My mother just had a medical nightmare experience, despite the fact that her and my father were paying 10K a year for a concierge doctor. A large part of why this experience became such a tangled mess was the failure by the doctor to take into account my mother’s age and to listen to them and not make assumptions about what was going on. It was a scary experience for all involved and thankfully my mother will make a full recovery. What surprises me is how many of my friends respond to this story by telling me they had similar experiences with their aging parents. It is another example of how our fee-for-service medical system is not even serving those who can pay well.

Approaching a year...

A year ago Roy and I were feeling pretty good right now. We had overcome a sudden move and dealt with a storage locker we had had since we had moved out of our large house in Lexington. Roy was now consulting for a company in Harvard Square. I was babysitting Roen and making art at Maud Morgan. Our days were filled with long walks and wintry treats at cafes like Flour and Burdick. We were planning our trip in 2 weeks to NYC to see Isaac and Roy’s parents. And we were adjusting to our new apartment. We had found a new home for Bone. Overall although we still had financial stresses hanging over us, I was still hurt and upset by being abandoned by somebody I thought was a friend. Despite all the worries I would be pushing our Granddaughter in the stroller or mixing ink in the print studio or making a dinner for our kids and think “Life is good”. At the same time we were VERY aware of this emerging Pandemic in Wuhan. Foolishly we assumed career government employees were doing what they have always done and like other similar diseases this would be contained and mostly effect the far East. Little did we know, nobody was watching the ship. And so while we were being misled into believing it was no more dangerous than a bad flu it was quietly spreading all over the globe. Roy and I played the board game Pandemic, joking that if we fail to contain the abstract pandemic there might be a real global pandemic. We were also planning our trip to NYC to see Isaac and Roy’s parents and discussed whether we should cancel. But we had not heard of any cases being in the US and traveling in February is always risky with seasonal colds and flus circulating. We would follow our usual diligent protocols.

A sigh and then the hard work ahead

What joy to see Kamala sworn in! I was a fan of hers early on in the primary and felt awfully alone as I knew almost no one who felt the same way about her. What joy to see a beautiful diverse group of people who all believe in what can be done and the future of our planet and our country. But I am with Bernie and I fear that talk of unity and working together will be the undoing of this administration and when the bad guys come back they will not come back with a bumbling fool but rather with a clever snake whose venom will get into the blood of Americans and result in an even worse nightmare than what we had these past four years.

So now the hard work begins.

"A Horse A Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse"

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.