EVE’S KITCHEN

 

My work tells stories; sometimes these stories explain the work; sometimes they are about my life; sometimes they are just….. well, stories.

This one is Occasional Blog #2: April, 2024

 

In the beginning, there was a tree; it was a most wonderful tree, filled with all the birds and animals, flowers, and luscious fruits that could be imagined. Little Eve hadn’t been born yet, so it grew quietly and undisturbed for a long time.

Little Eve never knew anything outside the garden; she learned to take all of its abundance – flowers, fruit, bugs, and all the animals - for granted. Birds, however puzzled her, but she found snakes particularly fascinating. She, of course, wondered about that special fruit on that special tree.

Little Eve reached out and plucked the fruit from the branch, and she held it in her hand. It was so beautiful!  Cool to the touch, heavy, solid, and waxy-smooth. It smelled heavenly…

This kitchen, found outside the Garden centuries later, by some archeologist, is evidence that Eve discovered fire and learned to cook her favorite foods: apple pie, apple cobbler, apple sauce, apple cider, which turned into something sparkley if left alone for a while, and of course straight off the tree. It took some convincing for Adam to try her cooking, but apparently, he eventually found her food was delicious.  (the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach)

The eviction notice: When Eve was a child – yes, she actually was a child – she observed the animals having babies, but she might not have been able to figure out how the babies came to be, or even if this applied to her, though she could see their bellies swell up, and even see the babies being born. She wondered if it would hurt, even though she didn’t think it would apply to her someday. But then? Babies just came out of their bodies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(This format may look as strange to you as it does to me: I am just learning/re-learning; please let me know what you see - or don't see.)

Eleventh grade composition class: I am showing my students an image of two cars crunched together, a bit of steam escaping from a radiator, some kind of oily fluid dripping onto the pavement.

“What do you see?”, I ask.

“Well, some drunk driver crashed into the other car,” someone offers.

“But what do you SEE?” I repeat; “How do you know?”

It gets quiet as the kids ponder the question.

“I think he ran the light and t-boned they guy in the red car.”

“How did you come to this conclusion?” I persist; “What do you SEE?” I ask again.

I confess that, even – or especially – as a teacher, I have had no difficulty jumping right in with “THE answer” – the right box to check on the next test.

How easy it just to say something like, “This piece depicts a wedding, and the items in this painting symbolize A, B, and C.”

So, here I am with this painting, or any artwork for that matter, tempted yet again to give it all away immediately.  Even if the topic of conversation is not a traffic accident, but a work of art, it’s pretty easy for me to make it easy on them by just telling them, instead of helping them discover it for themselves.

They THINK I have THE answer – when, actually, I don’t - especially when it comes to my own work.

 

I hope to help you, through this series of occasional blogs, to learn another way of discovering art for yourself – well, MY art, at least.

 

The title is “Fire of Roses” and the tag says it’s in oil, dated 2002. Just a title, I suppose; might as well be “Untitled”, as for all some people care, but sometimes it’s a hint about what’s inside.  So, I will ask the question again: “What do you SEE?” This isn’t an in-person (or even Zoom) classroom, so I will flesh this one out.

1. Always start with what’s right in front of you. This is a medium-sized rectangular painting; the background is dark, and everything is fairly realistic. It appears to be a night in a desert, and the central image, which takes up most of the space, is of something like a broken egg, but in the shape of a heart, with flowers and some kind of viscous, yellowish fluid leaking out. A good guess is that it’s egg yolk. The flowers glow red a little bit, and look something like smokey embers. Shards of broken eggshell are exploding in all directions, contrasting sharply with the dark sky. Above the shell is what looks like a human fetus, very pale pink, with tubes sticking out from its belly – the umbilical cord snapped violently from whatever it was attached to. (By the way, it is much more fun to figure this out with a group of people, and making a list on the board. But oh well)

 

1. By now, you can pay attention to how this makes you feel: you might be a bit uneasy, because it seems a bit strange, unworldly, or even surreal, but now and only now, are you ready to delve into the narrative of the piece. It seems to be that a baby is being born into an empty, harsh world – if it survives - and that the baby originated in a place of heat and flowers. Roses. (Burning roses signify sacrifice and devotion, in an act of purification)

 

1. Okay, here are some questions you must answer for yourself:

 

1. Who is the baby?  Is it alive? If so, what is its future? If not, then what?
2. Is the baby a symbol of something else?
3. What does the egg symbolize?
4. What do the flowers symbolize? (roses? How do you know they are roses?)  The embers?
5. Now you can make up the story that you think is being told here; you actually cannot be wrong, as long as you can justify your answer – or answers.

So it is with anything: art, politics, traffic accidents: What do you SEE? (with your own eyes). What do you think it means? What’s behind this story?

Ask me, and I can tell you what was going on with me then – and how that meaning has changed now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardening is messy. If you want anything to grow, you first need to be sure the soil is right:rich, soft, and able to support new life. And that requires digging. You have no idea idea what you might find, once you start excavating - and what you DO find is not always pretty. Dead things, buried things; rot and decay. Life is messy. When you want desperately to Love something into Life, you must probe the depths. Even when you have dug as far as you ever thought possible, and think you have found all that’s hidden, there seems there always more. Things get lost. And so it is with art. It, too, is messy. You try to breathe something into existence, so you dig, and work to build the soil/soul so it will Become. So you will Become. Like Life, Art is full of loose ends, incomplete sentences, and unfinished stories. So you excavate into the depths, and separate the garbage from the flowers: you enrich the earth, and you carry on. This is just the beginning.

Pointillism had been my thing for several years now, and I showed my “magnum opus”, “Innards”, in Prague early in 2018. Until now, it has remained unseen in the United States, but it will be making its debut here on January 11, 2020. This is but one small image from the exhibition, now entitled “Innards: Tending the Interior Garden”.
There are several new works taking root here, and I hope to share some snippets with you over the next few weeks. Expect a sneak preview at the start of January, too!

She doesn’t really get it, especially at first. She figures he is some sort of guide – a companion on the Way, but she doesn’t recognize him. Whoever he is, he’s not always young, not always beautiful on the outside: sometimes, he is tall, dark-eyed and movie-star handsome; but sometimes, he is short, and bald, with a sweet face and a wicked sense of humor. He is always intelligent, insightful, witty, and intuitive. Gentle, loving, courteous, playful, lusty, and pragmatic. He is also dealing with his own losses, is sad, angry, and vulnerable. Unlike Sojourner, who is sometimes tenacious to a fault, he is able to let the past stay in the past, and seems to easily let go of everything and move forward.

 

Sojourner sees him as strictly human, but, because his responses are always exactly as she wants or needs them to be, he seems Perfect to her. Of course, he is not perfect, and even when he manages to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, he is really only perfectly IMperfect. He feels pangs of sadness and even some confusion sometimes, just like the rest of us.

 

Perhaps he doesn’t understand that her silence at times only means she is avoiding the repeat of past hurts. Sojourner, for her part, does not know how to respond to this gentle companion, except to fall in love, in a fantasy kind of way that she believes has nothing to do with sexuality. Her self-protection doesn’t mean she is turning her back on him, or thinking he’s not enough for her, but that she has promised herself that she would never again say or do anything at all that would reveal herself. Rather than pushing past her fear of intimacy or rejection, she chooses certain Fear over possible Love. (never tell never tell never never never tell – or touch, or look him in the eyes)

 

At this point, it is unclear whether she is falling for the Traveler, the Beautiful Young Man, or the Grey Prince – or maybe someone else altogether.  Perhaps she only loves a figment of her own imagination?

His responses will determine and clarify his identity.

 

She doesn’t know how to love him.

 

She's a lot smarter than I am in some ways. She's more gentle, more creative, more loving, more forthright, more passionate. She knows her feelings and is willing to let them show. She is wise at times, almost as wise as Sage herself. She is growing and learning all the time.

 

She is strong, smart, assertive, and does not want to be ignored, but is not obnoxious. Some might say she is "made of adventure, dark chocolate, intelligence, cuss words, and courage".

 

She is also angry, ashamed, hungry, frustrated, confused, sad; she's sometimes afraid to trust other people, or her intuition, and yet she is sometimes a risk-taker.

 

She is a visionary, perhaps a mystic - but only a beginner. She's been through everything I have been through - but she sees her life through metaphorical glasses: she is, of course, a seeker, a wanderer. She is doubtless Traveler's feminine counterpart - his sister, perhaps.

 

Although she has a past, some of it painful, she is not artificially ashamed of it; she loves life; she has a future, but she sees it only in flickering glimpses. As the girl casts the shadow of the woman, so does the girl that Sojourner once was cast a shadow, as well - not only of her present self, but of her yet-to-be-realized future.

 

This is the first of a series of "fables", which will debut in Prague, CZ, in May. 

"... she felt the wave of sadness as she walked away from him, wishing, wishing again and again that it didn’t have to be like this. In the midst of joy, there was always this grief - this disappointment – repeated repeated repeated – over a lifetime, it seemed.

Again, he had said exactly the right thing at exactly the right time: she had received exactly exactly what she needed the most – how did he know?

 

But now she was on her way back home; his presence – a shared joke, a smile, a glance, every moment that seemed like caring, even the teasing words - little treasures – something as precious and as worthless as seashells or shiny pebbles – lingered in her heart. Such little things, but they were all she had. ..."

 

She had always been so hungry. So hungry, in fact, that she took each little hug, each glance, or gentle word, and treasured it – as if each one were the last ever. She boxed them carefully, embedding each tiny Gem in soft fabric, setting the little boxes on a shelf, but removing them and opening them often.  She savored each little grain of warm sand, gazing at it, holding it to the light, smiling over it, and putting back into its tiny box.  It was not trash, nor was it pearl or diamond; it was sand. Common sand.

She felt like a fool. She could not tell anyone, least of all him, how tightly she had clung to the little bit of love he had given her. She knew she could never tell him, and spoil even this much. Making him uncomfortable, she knew, would cancel everything. But how could she prevent him from figuring it out? How well could she guard her heart?

never tell never tell never never never tell

 

She did not want to hate it. But she did.  She could feel the knot in the middle of her chest, as it tightened up. One moment, there was the urge to fling something across the room, and the next moment, the urge to give in to weeping.  Of course, she was never one to do either, so she knew she would not do these things now. She tried to swallow the sea urchin of pain she had inside. 

What an awful thing it is to hold on to something so little, and yet so beautiful, so tightly! After all these years of living and loving alone, she has barely enough to fill a salt shaker – but what can she hope to have at the end of her Road – enough to build a castle in the sand?

 

But, today, now that she knew he was truly gone forever, she opened the little boxes, and found - shining, lumenescent, beautiful, precious - Pearls.

 

 

 

Today, I am tentatively Reaching Out of myself and into the world with this entirely new collection of work.  Inspired at first by the political climate of mid-2016, this piece came into fruition in June of 2017, as red, white, and blue, but with visceral, organic shapes, wrapped in barbs and entangled in each other.  These cords, evocative of the internal workings of the body, extend into the darkest depths, but also are reaching hopefully toward the stars.

 

Pointillism, a technique perfected by Georges Seurat, is a very time-consuming, meditative form of work, created by the placing of individual dots of paint (less than 1/8" in diameter) in many layers on the canvas, yields a sense of mystery, calm, and depth to the forms being depicted. Colors are blended by the eye to create new colors, shadow, highlights, and effects.  Please spend some time gazing at the image, and letting it draw you into its depths.

 

I hope you will follow me on my interior journey, and find within and around it that will cause you to think, and feel, and connect.

 

 

 

 

THIS, my dears, is the Blue Nicey, cousin of the famous Blue Meanies from the Yellow Submarine.  (Re-posting this because the image disappeared into the ether somehow and somewhere.)

He is only about 5" X 7" without a frame, but of course he is bigger with one.  Pay $100 plus shipping for the framed version, or $75 unframed.  He is made with colored ultra-fine Sharpies on Bristol paper, and is one-of-a kind. I have PayPal, so you can respond here so I can send the details to you.

This is the second of the three pieces I am posting here for my Flash Sale.  Deadline is Monday, December 11, because it is currently on display at the West (Sonoma) County Health Center.  Guerneville is a pretty charming town, and, to me, this is the best store there is!  It is jam-packed with tchotchkes, including rubber duckies, old-fashioned candy, toys, and gimmicks of all sorts.  Useful items, too! 

People have fallen in love with this piece more than once, so this is a high resolution, unique reproduction on canvas (a giclee). If you look carefully, you will see an angel, a map, and more hidden behind the paint. I have embellished this with a new layer of acrylic paint, so it is almost like the (size: 12" X 20") original (even I have trouble telling them apart).  $325 (PayPal is my preferred plan) will get you this piece for your favorite wall.