Sage Siblings
Posted on July 3, 2009 - Filed Under What I am up to
We are driving home from Ghost Ranch, and Sydney is showing off what she has taught herself about the animal kingdom. (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genera, Species, remember?)
“Sam, do you think you are in the same kingdom as a lion?”
Sam says “Sure!”.
“Right, it is called Mammalia” (she was wrong, it is animalia, and the class is mammalia, but I digress…).
Then she says “Sam, do you think you are in the same kingdom as fungi?”
Sam says loudly “for sure!”.
“Sam, you think you are in the same kingdom as a mushroom?”
“You didn’t say anything about mushrooms, you said Fun Guy!”
I love these little tidbits of conversation. It makes me really glad I journaled so much of it when they were little. As much as you think it is too funny to forget, if you have kids like mine, it happens all the time and no mother’s brain can file it all neatly for instant recall. Well, not this mother anyway.
Wyoming Welcome
Posted on July 1, 2009 - Filed Under 2009 Workshops
Two weeks ago I drove up to teach at Laramie County Community College (LCCC), in Cheyenne, Wyoming. One of my favorite places to teach. This time I stayed at the Howdy Pardner B&B, run by “Calamity Jan”. She had this welcome sign on the front door.
The place is stuffed full of everything cowboy, and I mean everything; the lamps, the art, the fabrics, even the butter.
Calamity Jan keeps a map of where her clients come from. Love those maps.
Wyoming is where my great-grandfather was born, on the way to where his parents finally landed in Cle Elum, Washington. Harry Charles Masterson was the number 1 birth certificate in the state, so I am part of Wyoming’s first white family. Maybe that is why the place resonates with me; it calls up the spirits of my ancestors. It is also true that I get to work with fabulous people there, and that is a real treat.
Matt West runs the art department at LCCC. He is married to Maureen, and has two daughters, Mariah (is that how you spell it?) and Chloe. Maureen and Mariah (sp?) were both in my class. I love having related folks in my classes, it is so interesting to see the bounce back and forth.
Here they are, the West family, cute as buttons and really nice too. They had me over for dinner twice, once for gourmet salad, once for BBQ. I think I might remember the salad for a long time. Matt picked it up from a well-known place downtown, and his girls were having none of it. It was pretty funny, but you had to have been there.
Wyoming is a casual and homey place. There is a diner there that I like, right off the road on the way to LCCC. When you walk in the door, you notice right away that it is filled with regulars. The jackalope is mounted the wall, along with every cowboy souvenir imaginable. The clientele is mostly mightily mature, and the waitresses all call you “Hon”. There is a very small aisle between the tables, and not an inch on the wall for anything new. The funniest thing is, right when you walk in the first thing you see is a huge sign that says “No skating of any kind in cafe”. I have never been in a place where skating was less likely. Who is going to skate here, and where? I sit down and imagine Chet over there riding high on rollerblades, making his way down between the five tables on either side of the aisle. Someone must have done this at some point, or they would not have used the big old sign to address it so loudly. I am very sorry to have missed that scene!
Ah, back to the class. My Personal Geographies class is always really satisfying. It is very personal and interesting to see what comes up for participants, and how they always manage to make stunning art of their memories. Check it out!
The Wisdom of Sam
Posted on June 17, 2009 - Filed Under Uncategorized
Sam is ten. I am very glad I have recorded his difference stages of sageness in my journal. The tidbits of wisdom that have tripped from his tongue are too numerous for one brain to remember. Here is one from second grade, when he was first learning about the body.
“Mama, do you know the strongest muscle in the body?
It’s the tongue.
It’s even stronger than your butt muscle.
If there was a battle, your butt muscle wouldn’t win.
Your tongue would.”
Sam Berry
11/06
A Face in the Flower
Posted on June 14, 2009 - Filed Under Uncategorized
Imagine wandering the world and finding this face in the jungle. It is the color, the way it holds its head, the attitude of this flower that amuses me. A green queen.
This one has its own butterfly, printed right on it. My girl and I gazed at all these beauties at an orchid grower near us. We took a class, with a group of orchid fanatics. I wanted to journal all day in there, but it was crowded with enthusiasts, and frogs. Big frogs leaping around the colorful faces steaming under the greenhouse roof.
This one kissed a pansy once.
I am going to play with the palette in this one. Reds, purples, yellow, orange, green, this one has it all. A real show-off. And wild, like an animal.
My sister and mother were just here for a visit. They got tired of my orchid talk and asked me to stop. No one here can do that, it is my blog, so I am going to tell you a few things. There are 27 kinds of orchids in Colorado, and they are blooming now. One of them is vanilla. Betcha did not know that your favorite ice cream was flavored with the bean of an orchid.
This is a lady who can help you with the rest of your questions: Linda, the Orchid Lady.
Whispering Woodlands
Posted on June 3, 2009 - Filed Under 2009 Workshops
Monday night I flew all around the world, after teaching in Wisconsin at Whispering Woodlands, where we painted pages and made books all weekend. I stayed with Marcia and Anton, my dear friends in Madison, and ate wonderful food. Monday Mary Ann and I went to Chicago and took the architectural boat tour. It started to rain the minute we got off the boat and headed for lunch. Everything, to that point, was perfect.
What is not to love about spending the weekend among wonderful women in a pastoral heaven? Bucolic is how it can be described, and I do know what that means. Despite my knowing, the word does not match how it actually looks. Bucolic sounds like something that tastes bad, that might not stay down. So, I will use “pastoral” because I like the way it matches how the place feels.
At one point, in the middle of class, someone pointed out that down the long valley at the end of our view, cows were lined up single file, headed back to the barn. We stopped the class to watch them file down the dirt road, nudged on by a cowboy on horseback. How can you not appreciate the splendor of black and white cows in a bright green world? And these designer cows are friendly. They like to check you out, sticking their big noses out right at you. Curious cows.
I would have liked to visit a bit more with them, but we were so busy.
Here is most everyone. Some escaped before the picture was taken. Fabulous group!
I asked a lot of this class. We painted with all kinds of paints and sumi. They tried lots of techniques for texture and composition, and used symbolic languages to make marks under and over the paint. Then we made books, small story-telling structures that turned out so lovely I am very glad I had time to take these pictures so you can see them. I am proud and pleased and always so flattered that all of you showed up. Thank you, thank you!
Mary Ann dropped me off at Midway for my flight home. My bags did not weigh over 50 pounds, and I soared through the security line. In the cafe I met a young man just home from service in Afghanistan. He showed me pictures of the children there, that serve his troops as guards and mini spies. He said they were not allowed to speak to the women, and that everyone there is always hot, they wear so much clothing. I thanked him for his service, and went away grateful for his bravado.
On the plane I sat next to a young man who was an inexperience flyer. And, as he decided to share with me, inexperienced intimately with his bride-to-be. Good heavens, why would you share that with someone you just met? It amazed me what tumbles out of some people’s mouths, including mine. This guy can call himself experienced now, as a flyer anyway. We had to traverse the west to avoid a storm headed due east. Up and around Wyoming, back down to Colorado behind the storm. Lightening was flashing all around us, the plane was tossing. When we finally landed, we sat on the tarmac as there is a new rule that they can’t roll the ramp out when lightening is striking. So we sat. I ended up rolling up the drive about two hours after I had expected to, and into the house alive with children up far later than they should have been. They made forts of the couch cushions and were having a sleepover with a friend buried beneath them. I slept really, really well. No dreams that night. I left my dreams in Wisconsin.
The End of Elementary
Posted on May 28, 2009 - Filed Under About me
My girl (in blue) and her friend Sadie (yellow) graduated today from the fifth grade. The gym was filled with graduates and their parents, most of whom I have known since kindergarten. We are a small town. It was so moving, so profound, to think this journey at this school with all of these kids sped by like lightening. One minute Sydney is prone on the kindergarten playground, sobbing on her first day at school, the next, here we are. I need to remember all of it, I will try and keep it in my heart, the luscious nature of youth, of perfect skin and ideas, of freshness.
William Stafford is a poet I love for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that he nails the kid experience. This is my offering from Bill today.
First Grade
In the play Amy didn’t want to be
anybody; so she managed the curtain.
Sharon wanted to be Amy. But Sam
wouldn’t let anybody be anybody else—
he said it was wrong. “All right,” Steve
“I’ll be me, but I don’t like it.”
So Amy was Amy, and we didn’t have the play.
And Sharon cried.
This is dedicated to the Fifth Grade Graduates of Superior Elementary School. What a vision you all were today!
My Memorial
Posted on May 26, 2009 - Filed Under My Work
Yesterday was Memorial Day, and I have someone to remember. His name is Roger Cobb Hallberg, and his name was on the POW bracelet I wore as a teenager. While I was dating and going to Disneyland, he was fighting, and then disappearing, in the jungle maze of Vietnam. A brave young newlywed just vanished.
For years I waited and watched lists of returning vets to see his name. Twice I have visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. At the long black wall I find his name and see his status. MIA. He is one of 2266 soldiers still unaccounted for in that conflict. Imagine the families living with that.
I have kept the bracelet all these years, and have long wanted to do something to honor Roger. Then Kim Rae Nugent asked me to contribute to her book and one of the projects was working with a maze. The idea came to me right away. What was more a maze than Vietnam?
The book is a box, a sort of temple covered with papers I painted. It is intended to look geographic and cosmic, as he is somewhere, we just don’t know exactly where.
Inside are five panels. The US flag is overlaid with a map of Vietnam on the first. The second is Roger’s name on the wall in D.C. The third is a map of approximately where he went missing. The fourth is my bracelet with his name on it, and two stories. The top story is the military account of Roger’s last known day. The bottom story is what I was likely doing that day, when Roger disappeared protecting his men.
In the center is Roger Cobb Hallberg and his military biographical information. The helicopter is like the one that came to rescue him, and did not find him.
I remembered Roger yesterday, and today, and I will tomorrow. My dream would be that somehow every single MIA is accounted for. Every single one.
Painting the Cosmos
Posted on May 22, 2009 - Filed Under 2009 Workshops, Creative Exercises
Life here has been hectic. Pipes bursting, loan officers disappearing with our mortgage papers, dental work gone way wrong, it goes on and on. Sometimes I think that elements in our lives get accidentally connected and make agreements, “Let’s all Leap!” Random Chaos, swirling around us. I decided to paint it.
I started with Sumi ink on Arches Cover, using an eye-dropper.
I let it tack up, then pushed some of the lines around with a feather.
Then I got my cosmos generator mojo going, and painted planetary shapes and swirls in layers, carving through some of them.
I only painted the colored layers on half of the sheet, so I could use the other half as a contrast. Then I made this book, influenced by Paul Johnson’s tongue and groove methods for non-adhesive book forms. His are elaborate and wild, this is my baby-step toward that.
Then I made a person inside the book, looking out at the swirling chaos. The person is woven into the window, just by cutting and folding the paper. No glue. Love the no glue.
I am going to try this out on the people in my class next weekend at Whispering Woodlands.
Today I feel lucky to be a visual explorer. It is impossible to imagine my life without being able to paint my own cosmos. I feel better now, a tiny bit of “me as God” and a whole lot happy about learning this hinging thing with Paul Johnson. Everything around me is still swirling, but it matters far less because I can make things that are new. I am a creator, my kids are healthy, and the swirling things around me can be fixed. Gotta be grateful for that.
Secret Gardens in Boxes
Posted on May 19, 2009 - Filed Under What I am up to
The first day of Paul Johnson workshops we did Secret Gardens in Boxes. We made these self contained pop up books that are only one piece of paper, cut, folded and decorated. We then made another that fits in a box, and we wrote haiku to go on the pages.
There were twenty people in one room, writing haiku. Windows overlooking the Rockies, Paul, the generous genius at the ready to help us, lots of friendships and huge creative energy. I don’t think it gets better than that.
Paul Johnson, day 1
Posted on May 14, 2009 - Filed Under Artist Friends
Paul Johnson, a book artist from Manchester, England, is staying with us this week. He is conducting four workshops for our guild that took me three years to get organized. It was almost like a wedding in the level of ordeal and then whoosh, the time is here and rapidly rushing by. Yesterday we went to the special collections of CU Boulder, and had all the librarians swooning over his books. We hope they will buy one like this:
Or this;
Paul then went to my kids school, and showed 60 little darlings how to make a pop-up book. He laughed at their questions, “Can I have it? Will you make me one?, How old are your kids?” In the UK he said the questions go directly to “How much does it cost?”. At dinner we discussed the cultural differences of Americans and Brits. It is Paul’s opinion that Americans are still exploring, themselves and what is around them, while the Brits are content to believe they have already found whatever this life has to offer. And they found it long ago, in the time of the Saxons. Maybe so, but that does not explain what you are about to see. Enjoy.
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