Saturday, December 21, 2013
Missing you.
Holidays have become a sad time for me. They make me miss people and feelings and experiences, and rather than being able to remember with joy, I am only filled with longing and hurt. I miss my mom and dad, who spent Christmas eve and Christmas with us every year since my children were born. Their absence has left a void so big, I can only want to crawl into it and suffocate. My children are grown, and have no nostalgia, although I know they miss their grandparents too. The night before Christmas was always filled with family, shrimp cocktail, blue cheese dip, Beaujolais, and a special meal, then wrapping presents and filling stockings late into the night. Today I will finish wrapping all my gifts, and then will have too much time to miss those things. I'm torn apart by my expectations and must free myself of them, or be overwhelmed by a longing for something more meaningful yet unattainable.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Daily Practice
My project of daily postcards began in July 2011. When a friend was diagnosed with cancer and began chemotherapy and radiation treatments, I decided the best support I could give would be to send a postcard every day, to give him something to look forward to and take his mind off the treatment. I started the practice anonymously, but it only took a few days before he knew who was responsible. It turned out to be a great spirit booster, something he and his family looked forward to getting every day. They displayed them in a rack on the counter, and re-read them and shared them with friends.
I started the cards by subscribing to a word of the day email, and would pick out words that were unusual or funny, and brought up an image in my mind. For materials, I used hosiery cardboard inserts recycled from samples I received at work, acrylic paints, magazine pages, and assorted papers. Sometimes the image would just manifest itself; other times, I made a sentence using the word before I could illustrate it. I most often used matte medium to glue and seal the images, however occasionally I used glue stick if I was in a rush. On the postcard side, I wrote the dictionary entry along with the sentence. I think the writing of the entry took almost as long each day as the image. I had become interested in hand lettering and so tried to vary my letters as an exercise.
At the end of his treatment, I sent the last card with the word ‘vaticination’, meaning ‘prediction’ or ‘the act of prophesying’. Here is the image:
After the project ended, I made a book to hold the postcards. I used clear sheet protectors, cut them to size and sewed around the edges, leaving the opening at the top. The single pages were bound together using Keith Smith’s single sheet binding instructions. After I put the book together and inserted the cards, I had to go back and fix a few. One card had lost a few cut out letters, so it read ‘ood day suns ine’. The card for ‘netsuke’ had completely lost its image of an ivory cat, so the card was an empty frame.
The second project began in March 2012, when my brother in law was diagnosed with cancer and began his chemotherapy. In between the projects I had kept up with making collages and postcards for other friends and family, and so still had plenty of backgrounds made and materials at hand. I continued with the word of the day practice for the length of his treatment, which ended in the beginning of June 2012.
One of the heartbreaks of my life was the day my dear friend M told me she had triple-negative breast cancer. Although we were close friends, we had not been in constant contact since she had moved to New York City 7 years prior to this time. It seemed so right to start the postcard a day project for her, but this time I needed it to be more personal. I wanted to be there with her every day, and to connect with her in a different way. We had worked together for many years, and were confidantes, co-conspiritors, and professional partners. As I got into the project, I realized how much we had shared, and just how much I missed having her to talk with and fight with.
My project for Margaret was a shoe a day. We both loved shoes, although only she could wear the 4 inch heels that we both admired. The added commitment, and an important component of this project, was the short note or thought on the written side.
The shoe collages began with a windfall of pages from the Metropolitan Museum daily calendar of 2011. I used only those images for a very long while, finding the right curves or textures in the photographs of the art, and mixing them up with each other. I found humor as well as inspiration in the shapes of the images. Later in the project, as the amount of calendar art dwindled, I started using magazine pages. Furniture and art magazines were preferable to food magazines, which didn’t seem to work at all for me. On weekends I would gesso a bunch of cards and then paint backgrounds. Sometimes I would make 4 or 5 collages at once, while some days I had to drive to the post office at 4:45 to make the mail pickup. Like all things creative, sometimes they came quickly and easily, and sometimes the shoes were ugly, misshapen, or just bad. But I still sent one a day.
Although sometimes I made the cards in batches, I wrote the message on the day I sent the card. At first, I tried to make every card a positive, uplifting one, but that got hard after a week even with my Christian Science upbringing. After that, I got into a rhythm of just noticing a moment in my day, or taking note of a fleeting thought, and saving those up to write about. I didn’t hold back if it wasn’t exactly a positive note, writing sometimes about my anxiety about children or work. But I did try to add humor into them, sometimes just reminding each other about a very funny moment we had had together. Sometimes I laughed out loud, and I hoped that Margaret did too.
Apparently she did. She and everyone around her has told me how much the postcards meant to her. I sent her the first shoe card July 11, and the ‘last shoe’ December 29,2012, after she called to tell me she had a clear PET scan. Within a few weeks, she told me she was having radiation treatments for another 6 weeks, so I had another shoe bonanza from January 25 through March 3, 2013. After 2 years of using Aloha Hawaiian shirt stamps, the post office finally issued a new stamp with apples on it 2 weeks before I finished. On one of the final cards, I wrote that it was one of my favorite shoes that I had done. Margaret told me later that it had come to her with only the heel left of the image.
I miss sending the cards every day, but I try to keep those thoughts from going unnoticed by either writing in a book or sending a card to another friend or family member. It is amazing how much a written note can mean to someone, especially someone far away, or alone, or going through a tough time. It takes so little time, and is really a kind of journaling to send a card with a note. Also, the post office really needs the business.
After the project ended, I made a book to hold the postcards. I used clear sheet protectors, cut them to size and sewed around the edges, leaving the opening at the top. The single pages were bound together using Keith Smith’s single sheet binding instructions. After I put the book together and inserted the cards, I had to go back and fix a few. One card had lost a few cut out letters, so it read ‘ood day suns ine’. The card for ‘netsuke’ had completely lost its image of an ivory cat, so the card was an empty frame.
The second project began in March 2012, when my brother in law was diagnosed with cancer and began his chemotherapy. In between the projects I had kept up with making collages and postcards for other friends and family, and so still had plenty of backgrounds made and materials at hand. I continued with the word of the day practice for the length of his treatment, which ended in the beginning of June 2012.
One of the heartbreaks of my life was the day my dear friend M told me she had triple-negative breast cancer. Although we were close friends, we had not been in constant contact since she had moved to New York City 7 years prior to this time. It seemed so right to start the postcard a day project for her, but this time I needed it to be more personal. I wanted to be there with her every day, and to connect with her in a different way. We had worked together for many years, and were confidantes, co-conspiritors, and professional partners. As I got into the project, I realized how much we had shared, and just how much I missed having her to talk with and fight with.
My project for Margaret was a shoe a day. We both loved shoes, although only she could wear the 4 inch heels that we both admired. The added commitment, and an important component of this project, was the short note or thought on the written side.
The shoe collages began with a windfall of pages from the Metropolitan Museum daily calendar of 2011. I used only those images for a very long while, finding the right curves or textures in the photographs of the art, and mixing them up with each other. I found humor as well as inspiration in the shapes of the images. Later in the project, as the amount of calendar art dwindled, I started using magazine pages. Furniture and art magazines were preferable to food magazines, which didn’t seem to work at all for me. On weekends I would gesso a bunch of cards and then paint backgrounds. Sometimes I would make 4 or 5 collages at once, while some days I had to drive to the post office at 4:45 to make the mail pickup. Like all things creative, sometimes they came quickly and easily, and sometimes the shoes were ugly, misshapen, or just bad. But I still sent one a day.
Although sometimes I made the cards in batches, I wrote the message on the day I sent the card. At first, I tried to make every card a positive, uplifting one, but that got hard after a week even with my Christian Science upbringing. After that, I got into a rhythm of just noticing a moment in my day, or taking note of a fleeting thought, and saving those up to write about. I didn’t hold back if it wasn’t exactly a positive note, writing sometimes about my anxiety about children or work. But I did try to add humor into them, sometimes just reminding each other about a very funny moment we had had together. Sometimes I laughed out loud, and I hoped that Margaret did too.
Apparently she did. She and everyone around her has told me how much the postcards meant to her. I sent her the first shoe card July 11, and the ‘last shoe’ December 29,2012, after she called to tell me she had a clear PET scan. Within a few weeks, she told me she was having radiation treatments for another 6 weeks, so I had another shoe bonanza from January 25 through March 3, 2013. After 2 years of using Aloha Hawaiian shirt stamps, the post office finally issued a new stamp with apples on it 2 weeks before I finished. On one of the final cards, I wrote that it was one of my favorite shoes that I had done. Margaret told me later that it had come to her with only the heel left of the image.
I miss sending the cards every day, but I try to keep those thoughts from going unnoticed by either writing in a book or sending a card to another friend or family member. It is amazing how much a written note can mean to someone, especially someone far away, or alone, or going through a tough time. It takes so little time, and is really a kind of journaling to send a card with a note. Also, the post office really needs the business.
Saturday, March 09, 2013
Yesterday I sent my last shoe postcard to Margaret. Here is my message.
Today I started participating in a collage project called 4x4 x400 run by Jane Davies. The idea is to start with a piece of 8x8 paper, collage and paint or whatever to it, then cut it up into 4x4 pieces and finish your little pieces of artwork. Here are my first attempts.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Been away too long
Truly, I have forgotten about you, Blogger. And now I can't figure out this migration stuff. But I got to the page where i can post, so I will.
I've been working on a shoe a day project for the last 4 months, and i am ready to stop. The daily shoe postcards are for my dear friend who is undergoing chemo and radiation for breast cancer. It was supposed to be 14 weeks of treatment, and it's well past that, but I don't know whether she is still going through it or not. I haven't heard from her for a while. What should I do? I guess I will text her. I'm ready to stop at the beginning of the year.
Many of my friends have commented on the the concept of postcard a day, and a few have taken the challenge to do a postcard of their own for a friend. One friend sent a postcard each day to her ailing parents when she found she couldn't be there physically. Another thought of hiring me to make them for her. I would love to actually. I woke up the other day with the idea of 'one a day, vitamins for the heart' as a business name- I know it needs work but really it came to me in a dream, OK?
Here is a link to my shoe set on flickr.
One of my favorites recently-
Where will it lead me?
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Thin Places
This article in the New York Times struck me the other day, and made me think about the places in my life where I have felt an other worldly connection. For me these places are not necessarily far away or exotic, but rather close to home, places where I have felt an overwhelming serenity and gratefulness for life. Sometimes it is just a moment when all things come together in perfectness- walking through the fields to the pond at sunset, my mission to turn off the irrigation pump, my reward a song of peepers and a warm, fiery sky. Heaven, as they say, on earth.
This article in the New York Times struck me the other day, and made me think about the places in my life where I have felt an other worldly connection. For me these places are not necessarily far away or exotic, but rather close to home, places where I have felt an overwhelming serenity and gratefulness for life. Sometimes it is just a moment when all things come together in perfectness- walking through the fields to the pond at sunset, my mission to turn off the irrigation pump, my reward a song of peepers and a warm, fiery sky. Heaven, as they say, on earth.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
winter carrots
winter carrots
Originally uploaded by pizza on earth
It has been a crazy weather year, so warm even through Christmas. The ground isn't even frozen, so it was easy enough to dig out these crisp little carrots.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Family Memorial July 26, 2011
My family had a memorial for my parents, who both died last year. It was held at my grandma's house in Orange, MA. How strange to be there without them. They had both been cremated, so the day after the memorial, we went to the cemetary for the burial. Got there, no hole. How could the cemetary people forget something like that? Actually, I think my dad would have found it pretty funny. So while we are waiting for a time when my siblings and I can reschedule the burial, my parents are biding their time on the mantel. They look pretty swell in the boxes I made, with the male and female cardinals facing each other. I imagine them being happy together.
My family had a memorial for my parents, who both died last year. It was held at my grandma's house in Orange, MA. How strange to be there without them. They had both been cremated, so the day after the memorial, we went to the cemetary for the burial. Got there, no hole. How could the cemetary people forget something like that? Actually, I think my dad would have found it pretty funny. So while we are waiting for a time when my siblings and I can reschedule the burial, my parents are biding their time on the mantel. They look pretty swell in the boxes I made, with the male and female cardinals facing each other. I imagine them being happy together.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
I still need to put in a credit for the words by George Harrison. It has given me and my husband quite a chuckle during these trying dark days, when I announce that I need to read my book.
This might be the first installment of my "Songs for Spontaneous Singing" series.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
For Christmas I made Jay a small book about his collection of Marimekko shirts. He has 10 of them, all different color combinations. I painted the fabric covers to look like the hand screened shirt fabric.
The inside pages are a double accordian with reversed cutouts. The images are hand drawn and painted with gouache. I need to make a slipcase for it, and then I will enter it into a show on miniature books. It is slightly too large, being 5 1/4" high, a little above the 5" speicifications, but I hope it will slip by.
This was a fun project- a knitted chain link necklace. Now this has potential, and is super easy to make! Thanks to antelopebaby for the pattern.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Michael deMeng Workshop, the secret keeper.
A terrific workshop, just the right size. My surprise and pleasure to reconnect with a friend from the past, Lisa, and to connect with a new friend, Elizabeth.
Having taken so many workshops, I went without expectations of creating a masterpiece, but with the desire to try every technique. Amazing to see what everyone came up with. I learned techniques for attaching with adhesives, wire, and clay, texturizing with molding material (dap), and layering paint with acrylic washes to achieve color depth. I was awake in the night processing it all and transforming projects in my mind. I hope I will get to it in real life.
Monday, August 02, 2010
The black cloud on my mind has finally disolved, leaving me with sun and energy. How did it happen? I don't know, it's that time of life ( which for me could be any time). My life lately has been filled with long trips and long stays away from home, stressful working situations, stressful family situations, and no time to process any of it. I had signed up a while ago for a workshop called the Amazing Dremel, and although I was dying to know how to use it, I could not have been more challenged to make myself spend my only free weekend in 2 months at a 2 day workshop. But in fact, it was just what I needed.
One thing I loved about the workshop was the individuality of it. Although 12 of us were sitting around a large table, I felt totally absorbed and separate in what I was doing. Wearing safety glasses, a breathing mask, and ear plugs may have had a small part in that. But there was plenty of together time and sharing, during the informative demos, the sunny lunch on the steps, and Jill's sharing of her beautiful books.
Jill took the mystery out of the assorted strange looking bits in our box, giving us clear tips for their use, but also giving us permission to try all of them in any way we wanted. I definitely came away with a desire to use my dremel again. Right now I'm looking at those ugly plain switch plates on my walls, and wondering which bits will work best on them.
Top to bottom: mirror, wood, ceramic tile, metal, glass
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
barn and wood
barn and wood
Originally uploaded by pizza on earth
A sunny day in winter is a good day to load wood.
I enjoy stacking wood in the summer and fall, and I don't mind loading it into the carts and bringing it to the pizza hut and the house when it is a day like today, sunny and mild. Unfortunately, we also need to load wood when it is below zero and the wind is fierce. That is the hard reality of wood management.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Musque de Provence
We had some spectacular pumpkins last summer that grew along the edge of our stone wall terrace. At first, the plants just kind of trailed along the top of the wall, but by the end of the summer, the vines had completely taken over, spilling over the wall and trailing into the yard below. Some of them were 20 feet long by the time we ripped them out in the fall. The beautiful pumpkin, Musque de Provence, are deeply ribbed, with huge lobes of dark green skin. We've kept them in the hallway, and now they have turned a beautiful russet color. Time to open them up! For our first meal, J made pumpkin risotto and cubed up the rest for the freezer. Of course that was just a quarter of one of the 25 pound babies. The other quarters have been given away to other lucky foodie friends. And the largest one is still the conversation piece of the hallway.
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