Above: The painting that is a stretch for me. I hid it (facing away from public view in a dark corner) until I was ready to approach it again. I think I'll title it "al dante". I still don't like it, but that may only mean it's not done yet. Or it wasn't one I did for me. Who knows?



After a screen printing class one weekend, I dragged a print across canvas from the screen, and am now building a cliche Hawaii painting out of it.



This image is a bit faded from the actual colors: brilliant jewel tones. Title "Tales from the Alhambra" after whose-it's book. I'll get a better photo of it when I put on the finishing touches.


Titled "Sense and Dollars" in this one I'm exploring the idea of a recession, fears of scarcity, and the idea that life is full of much more than money... and how much easier money can make things.



"Sense and Dollars" again, with an untitled work that is in progress.



A freshly started canvas, to show how I begin. This is "Talk Story". I will next put down glazes of color/tone to cover the canvas and then go back into the original sketched idea and elaborate on it. The tiny green canvas is another one I'm playing with, having first glazed it and then starting to doodle afterwards.

It's one of those embarrassing 'aha's that hit me. You know, the thing everyone else sees as obvious, but you miss because you're breathing it? For me, the obvious thing is that I am rolling in creative clover.

We have an art supply store. We have a yarn shop here too. I am in a loving and supportive relationship with my husband who regularly encourages me to play. I have time and spaces available for my play. And I have no constraints (clients, designers, specs, whatever) on how I do the creating.

It doesn't get much better than this.

For me, listing what we have right now is a figure/ground shift. I have been warding off attacks from conventional viewers and creators, the mainstream of what is "art." We have been in economic uncertainty with the shop for a long time now. These external influences had colored my perceptions to the point of blacking out the general background that now makes me jealous of myself. The background has come to the fore.

In this new perception's light, my painting is taking on new light as well. I am free! I have materials with which to play. I will play.

Screen printing!

I took a two day workshop this past weekend to learn silk screen printing. It is the latest "thing" for our customers, and I knew so little about it that I wasn't even sure what to supply. Now I know enough about it to have a reasonable supply. I cannot, contrary to my hopes, instruct customers in all the methods of using the media during their visit to the shop... it's pretty involved.

In the class, I went nuts printing because... you can. You can whip out copy after copy of the image until you've had enough of it and tried it on every surface you can think of and your classmates start to give you room just in case you find them sitting still long enough to print them. At least, that's how it was for me.

In order to stockpile prints to collage, and repurpose later, I printed on cardstock with and without designs, a canvas, watercolor paper, tinted pastel and charcoal papers, and velvet. I didn't print on clothes only because my designs were faces, and that seemed unclothing-like.

Today at the shop I prepared a screen with photo emulsion. This is the one technique we didn't learn in class, and the method that most of our customers are using. So, I'm going to try it on my own in the coming days. Right now the screen is drying.

I learned that with silk screens you can:

• paint your design directly on the screen, do some mojo, and print it
• paint directly on the screen what you don't want to print (reverse process)
• use black markers, sumi-e ink, or whatever you want to draw and then reproduce that image
• use ready made stencils or cut your own out of anything, including just freezer paper
• print through a plain screen to print a colored background (and you can mess with that too)

Honestly, I was hoping that I'd learn the techniques and then be able to say, "This is nice, but it's not for me." Instead, I found I loved doing it, despite the messy, involved, cluttery thing that it is. So, you can expect some prints to be showing up in my images here in the future.

I'm still painting, but in an unusual phase. Mostly, I'm working small, quietly, like water trickling from a stream. Eventually I expect the bits that I've done to end up as lakes, rivers, and oceans. Time will tell. I'm doing the little stuff because I can't seem to bring myself to do the big stuff.

If there's anything I've learned about creating so far, it's to keep going, keep doing, regardless of my feelings. If I keep the momentum going, it's much easier when the flow grows to keep going than to get started again.

So, my recent mantras are:

Work quickly
Use what you have already
keep the momentum going

I'll show you the results of these thoughts as they form visually.

This is a finished painting "Listening" which is hung over a sculpture my dad just finished for me title "Limu" (Hawaiian seaweed.) It's fitting that my father/harshest critic/fan/medici has stretched to a work of semi-abstraction and given it to me.


This is a new favorite I just started (mentioned in the previous post as delicious greys). I've titled it "Tales from the Alhambra" since I just finished reading the book and this underpainting and initial sketch seemed very Moorish.

Two of four paintings re-created out of a larger work that I vivisected and am now finishing with a breath of a sine wave in the overall design. This will be able to be hung in a long arrangement with some longer/narrower elements, or a square format with the same assymetries. I'll show you the possibilities when the foursome is complete.

Some more delicious greys from the previous week. I have since put in a haze of warm red. I don't know what this one is about yet or where it's going. It is rooted in fear: the barrage of outside voices opposing abstraction got focused onto this canvas. I did that same transmutation of feelings of aggravation at "life's little irritations" and ended up with my highest-paying painting yet. We'll see what this fear will turn into...

Jack and me napping: with some new layers of color washed onto it. I don't know what to do next with this one.

Mona Lisa Smile

We borrowed the DVD and watched it for the second time. I didn't know we'd seen it until part way through and I said, "This is the one with the paint-by-numbers."

I had to wonder why that detail, of all things, stuck in the brain that couldn't remember seeing the movie in the first place. The PBN (paint by number) scenes turned out to reveal the thesis of the movie, to wit, that an artist is popularized by the masses and never by the critics. (I wanted to add that popularity rarely comes in time to put supper on the table, a table in the house, or the house around the artist. But that isn't true, nor is it the premise of the movie.)

So, the idea is that if we are going to remain true to ourselves, that will make sense later in life. I'm thinking that what I'm doing might not make sense until later in someone else's life... if ever.

Today is my painting day. I'm writing this blog between canvases. I could hardly get started again after the poison of judgments that have flown about my head lately. So, I set aside my head and let my heart paint. I was afraid to paint. I got some greys on the canvas. Some delicious sweet and savory greys. I made some marks. I was about to freeze on marking the next canvas when I saw drips from the first splotching the surface. That freed me to make whatever mistakes I will proceed to make. So, I'm on with it then.

My dad decided to buy the abstract painting that he has been baby-sitting for me. It is titled "The Space Between" and is full of computer components and painted entirely in 0's and 1's. I was thinking of our techno-busy lives and how it is such a breath of fresh air when the computer goes down, the electricity off, and all our conveniences let go of us. Then there's just space.



When dad first saw it, not knowing the title, he said, "I see that you painted my brain." I laughed, told him the title, and said maybe I was thinking of the space between his ears. He has since re-named it "My Brain Headache" as a play on words for migraine headache.

Dad's purchase of the painting is very strange because of my receiving from him two emails saying that Picasso was an abomination. The last one said that Picasso should have been stoned to death. Then I got dad's opinion that I was smart to sign my abstracts with a nom de plume (Kala Kale: Sarah Charles in Hawaiian) in order to hide my real identity on that sort of work. The painting that dad purchased was one of my first abstracts, and I was embarrassed to think at the time of creation that he might ever see it and know I did it.

I have some things figured out about all of this. First, the purchase is a mercy mission. Dad knows that the shop is slow, and it's his way of giving us some money. Second, a part of dad actually likes the painting, although he hasn't said that and probably never will. Just by sitting with it for these weeks, it started to have a conversation with him and asked him some questions he hadn't previously entertained. Third, I did a good job protecting my developing abstract-artist self from a mean man. I am now more immune to his scathing opinions, but not entirely. If he had hit me with "this is trash but I'll buy it from you" when I was starting out, I wouldn't have painted again.

I don't know how to help my dad to creative freedom. But I can see now that his criticisms are much more painful for his life than they could ever be for me. My job, if I choose to accept it, is to keep from holding my opinions and beliefs so solidly that they become my prison.

It's my blessing to dad that the painting will continue to converse with him, and give him permission to open the non-existent barriers.