It feels like I should be studying

Spent the weekend unable to log on to the internet. Since we had the party on Saturday night and the benefit on Sunday there was not a block of time that I could sit down and debug it.

I think I am missing having studying to do, or something. I went straight from 10 years of part-time study (while working full-time) to get my BA, to 5 semesters of full-time study (while working full-time) on my MFA to getting ready for a big art show in the gallery to dealing with my father's failing health and death.

Now I feel like I am in some sort of limbo. I need something to study and write on. Something challenging. Some ideas I have been tossing around are:

sustainability - which might go along with Abelisto's beekeeping project
identity & garment - this would be an extension of my thesis/portfolio
using art to promote peace & justice
art & activism
ancient textile techniques - art or handicraft
symbolic language - from textiles to rock art (could involve some primary research eventually, there are petroglyphs just outside of vegas)
authenticity - who has the right to express what

I think I need to stay in practice for doing research and academic writing. Maybe I will submit an article to a journal on something. It is either that or find a way to do a Ph.D.

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Too many files

I have spent a couple days now, on and off, looking for a file. The problem is I have three computers (maybe four - I cannot remember when I made the file, so I have no idea which computer it might be on...) as well as three network folders and three portable hard drives to search...

Time for some serious file management work. I need to start with the 500gig portable hard drive and get it organized. Then I could work through the others, looking to see where the newer versions of documents are and which should be saved/deleted. Then I could move the files to the portable hard drive and wipe and restore one or two of the computers, and reload only the files that need to go back on them. Then I could burn DVDs of the remaining data for archival purposes, and return to using the 500gig drive as a standard backup of all four computers (just the documents and software settings - not the software itself) and the other portable hard drives.

Sounds like too much work though - I bet it would take a month to look at each & every file - so I guess I will just muddle through the mess.

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A Reading

Last Thursday I had a reading of some of my stories at the local arts center. I was asked to read for 30 - 45 minutes, but brought enough materials for just over an hour and a half - not know what the mix of people in the audience would be. That turned out to be a good decision because the small group of people present encouraged me to read more of my work. I ended up reading for just over 80 minutes.

Much of what I read was material/stories from my MFA thesis/portfolio. I have not written much lately - just mostly about my father. It seems that other than the meanderings in this blog, when I write it is about him.

I think I will see if I can string together my previous stories and the new stories about my father and put together a couple hours of readings to perform. Maybe the Blue Heron would have an evening that I could take.

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Yesterday & Today's Efforts

This weekend has been fairly productive. Not with art, but with all the other crap that one has to do to keep things going.

Made it to the farmer's market to get some soup veggies for the party next weekend (we are having home-made soups and breads from Panera). Talked to the bee guy, finally remembered to take some encaustic paintings to show him. We gave him an encaustic artist trading card.

We did every scrap of laundry. Except now there is more to do...

We cleaned the downstairs bathroom. And our bedroom.

Abelisto did some grading and prep for Monday's classes. I did not have any grading to do. My students are working on papers right now. Next weekend I will have grading to do.

We bought mice for the snake to eat - frozen ones, not live ones. Mice-On-Ice, they are called.

We bought groceries. We only do that every other week. Well, we only go to La Crosse and do the big grocery shopping every other week. We get perishables locally from a couple stores in town and the farmer's market.

We picked up the built-in cabinet doors from the glass replacement company and put them back on the built-in cabinets. They had been sitting in the hall for about a year before we took them to have the broken glass replaced last week.

We took a short ride on the bicycles, stopped by the bike shop to ask about trainers (the device you set a regular bike on to make it into a stationary bike for exercising in the winter.

We cleaned up my studio - it was not too bad, so that was easy.

We cleaned up the front room. And the dining room. And the foyer. And the back porch. We paid the bills.

We replaced the front door. The replacement door had been sitting in the foyer for about three weeks. We bought it and one for the back door on sale at Menards at the beginning of the month and managed to get the back door replaced the next day. Not so the front door.

Eventually we want to give up this big house. We have talked about donating it to the local Catholic Worker house. They could use a bigger house for their women and children's homeless shelter. We have also talked about selling the house.

I just want something smaller and simpler and more energy efficient. I would think about building something, but past experience kind of makes me shudder.

Eventually I would like something about half the size of this place. I figure 1500 sq ft would be ideal. That would be big enough that people could visit, but not live with us. I would like to be on the edge of town - close enough to ride bicycles into town, but far enough out that Abelisto could have as many beehives as he would like. I want a big garage that I can convert into a studio.

Some days we talk about finding one or two like-minded adults who would like to live in community. If we could find them, we would consider keeping the house after the kids leave. But I go back and forth in my head on this. Having lived in community I know how hard it is to make it work. Still, with the right people... But that is the trick, finding the right people.

Anyway, the house, or at least the first floor, is clean (except for the kitchen which I am going to tackle right after I finish this posting) and ready for the soiree next weekend. We will need to give it a touch up, and mop the floors, on Friday or Saturday morning. But for the most part, none of us will be mortified about the house when people come Saturday night.

I was going to make some curtains, but I think I will just leave the slightly cat-damaged mini-blinds up for now. I will just pull them up high enough that the damage does not show. Instead of all that sewing work, I am going to start a weaving project. It will be nice to weave something. I have not done any weaving for a couple years. Between grad school and work and the divorce, weaving got shoved to the bottom of the list.

We did do one art related thing today. We went to the opening of the next show in the SMU gallery.

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A Father Story - Transcendence

My father and I sat in the van, in the pre-dawn twilight at the edge of the ocean, on Daytona Beach. We had driven all of the previous day and most of the night to get there. It was the last family vacation we took together – I was nineteen and had already moved out of the house (not on the best of terms), within a year I would be living in the commune, and all communication between us would cease until my first child was born.

I get motion sickness in a vehicle – car, bus, airplane – it doesn’t matter. If I am not the driver, I am ill. When my father is in the car he always drives. Always. On the trip from Indiana to Florida I decided to take medicine to keep from being carsick. I slept through three states and woke up somewhere in Georgia. Everyone else was asleep and my father was alone as he drove through the darkening evening. I crawled out of the pile of bodies and up into the passenger seat and watched as the roadside scenery flew past, briefly in and out of the illumination of the van’s headlights.

Along towards morning we arrived at our first destination – Daytona Beach. In 1977 you could drive out on the beach, right down to the ocean’s edge. We pulled up to the high-tide mark and turned off the engine. I closed my eyes and leaned back, deciding to try to sleep until daylight. Almost immediately my father nudged my shoulder, pointing out over the ocean. The band of sky just above the dark water line had turned from the black of night to a vivid, iridescent, dark turquoise. You could tell that the sun would soon be up.

Except for the gentle lapping of the waves, it was totally silent on the beach. As far as I could tell, there were no other people on the strip of sand stretching out into the darkness on either side of us. I watched as my father lit his pipe, tobacco glowing brightly as he inhaled, inhaled, inhaled – he always takes three deep puffs to light his pipe. When my night vision returned and I could see out into the darkness again, I saw a strange orange glow far out in the water, looking for all the world just like the glowing tobacco embers in my father’s pipe. I rubbed my eyes and blinked several times, unable to figure out what I was seeing. As we watched it became apparent that we were seeing the sun, seeing it shining through the water. We were seeing the sun before it rose, seeing it through the ocean, visible to us because of the curvature of the earth and the clarity of the water. For a few fleeting minutes it seemed like the ocean was aflame. Then the sun crested the horizon and the day was upon us.

At nineteen I was still far too self-absorbed to notice very many things beyond my immediate wants or needs, but sitting there on that beach it became evident to me that I was observing something outside of my normal daily experience. It felt like something that had been happening for millions of years, something that happened for the first time at that very moment, something that happens again each time I think of it.


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Transcendence

The opening sentence of my artist statement states: I am an interdisciplinary artist examining the transcendent in the light of the connection between the ancient and the contemporary.

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So, how does one examine the space between the ancient and the contemporary in the light of the transcendent?

Transcendent, fancy word, complicated idea... The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as going beyond the limits of “normal or physical human experience.” I’m still working on my definition – some days I think I’m almost there, other days, well…

Why is it that people try to isolate the transcendent from the ordinary? It seems to me that they are two parts of a whole. Doesn’t separating them destroy both of them? Render them weak and unremarkable?

I think that life is, by its very nature, transcendent. I think it happens aljavascript:void(0)
Publish Postl around us but we often don’t realize it in our fragmented existences. To be present in your own life is to connect with the self – the I AM. From that place, from that self-awareness, comes the ability to recognize the transcendent. I don’t mean self-centeredness; I am referring to self-knowledge. When we do not know ourselves we become ineffective, insecure and fearful, easily swayed, easily manipulated. Because we do not know what we are truly capable of, all tasks seem impossible, all obstacles, insurmountable and our awareness is trapped in the normal, everyday physical life. I think most of us get glimpses of transcendence now and then, usually when we least expect it, during moments of peaceful acceptance or hard-found resignation.


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Identity

The process of self-discovery is fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose ourselves, moment-to-moment, like the fleeting recognizable shapes seen in the clouds. The process of discovering our godhood is likewise fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose our divinity constantly. This is our mystery.

It seems to me that identity is a made thing, like art, like music, like a spinach soufflé. It’s part performance, done for an audience, often involving improvisation – even plagiarism – and part self-discovery, a continual self-recreation.

I cannot speak to how everyone does it, but I pick and choose between all the possible choices I can imagine and sculpt an identity for myself. Actually I have several identities – the work identity, the home identity, the mom identity, the lover/partner identity, the artist identity. These days all my identities are more similar to each other than they have ever been in my life. I think I am achieving balance.

Finally.

Postmodern society allows for each of us to keep a closet full of identities which we pull out and try on, wearing when and as we see fit. It seems to me that this is both a personal choice and a tendency based on cultural norms. Sociologist Victoria Alexander, in Sociology of the Arts, seems to agree, stating “…because people are more geographically mobile and can choose among a wide variety of consumer items, their identities have become fragmented and based on their consuming choices and lifestyles” (13). Did my grandmother have more than one identity? Perhaps she did, living with an unstable man, balancing a work life and home life, walking carefully on whatever eggshells the moment laid before her. Perhaps the need for multiple identities – or multifaceted identities – comes from having large numbers of people to interact with. Could it be that we need to be one person with that group, another person in this situation, and still another when we’re all alone?

In The Power of Feminist Art, editors Norma Broud and Mary Garrard, discussed identity with Judy Chicago. Chicago stated that, "Identity is multiple… when I started looking at Jewish experience people would say ‘Oh, you’ve stopped being a feminist?’ It’s because they had a very narrow concept of identity… one can be both a woman and a person of color, an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class. One’s identity is larger than singular (72)."

My identity is indeed multiple. I self-identify as a member of a number of overlapping groups. In regards to ethnicity I see myself as predominantly western European (Irish, Scottish); class – this one is a bit fluid – I consider myself upper-middle class because I feel I am very fortunate in life, but I’m not sure if that’s how I’d be placed based on income. I place myself as an artist, a mother, a partnered individual, and a reluctant and somewhat anarchistic American. I have a work identity that oozes capability and responsibility, but I’d really like to chuck it all and be more bohemian, taking up an eclectic gypsy persona as my primary identity.

The clothes would be so much more fun.


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Interstices - Part 5

Took the show down on Saturday. Now all the art is back in our house. I found wall space for all the paintings and photographs, and I filled the corners of the front room with sculptures. Some items (like Glimpses in Time) will have to be rolled or folded up and put away. Even if I had room to hang a 5' x 8' x 8' sculpture in the house, the cats would destroy it... not on purpose, they just love fabrics and hanging fabric is their favorite.

They are pretty tough on window blinds too. They have made cat-sized holes in the blinds on a couple windows. They simply walk through the ends of the blinds (bending the individual plastic strips out of their way) to get to the window sill, and after enough bending and folding even the toughest plastic will crack and break off. I have some 14 ounce canvas that I plan to use to make some roman shades. I figure that it is tough enough to stand up to five cats - it is the same fabric that is used to make commercial tents and awnings (minus the plastic coating that makes it weatherproof).

Anyway, the art show was fun and frustrating. The fun part was that I got to speak to so so many people about art in general, about my art, and about art education. The frustrating part was (and is) that I do not have the wherewithal to just do art, or even do the kind of art I would really love to do. I would love to do really large sculpture work and/or public art. I want to cast Communion Circle in ductile iron or soft steel and set it outside to rust. I want to do some work with oxyacetylene welding. And I would love to create some large clay sculptures.

I sure get tired of saying to myself, "Well, someday..."

However, I really should not complain. After all, I did not even step onto this road until just a couple years ago. You would think that by this time I would have learned patience. Perhaps I am just feeling mortal these days.

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I miss my dad

It is very hard to remember that my father is gone. I keep thinking about things I need to tell him or show him. It is sort of funny, well not really, but I think about telling him things more often now than when he was alive. Used to be, I would go days, if not weeks, without actively thinking about him. Now I think about him all the time.

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Making Paint

Tonight I made my own encaustic paints. I melted some beeswax, ground up some damar resin, and mixed it and the various pigmenting agents in the beeswax.

I ended up with six or seven very interesting colors and a couple not-so-interesting ones. I will use the ones that are not so interesting as base/background colors.

I used commercially prepared ground pigments. I am looking to move away from the paints that have heavy metals in them - even though those colors are the most intense. I do not like working with them because they are so toxic. I may end up working with a totally different color range in order to be more health and ecology focused with my practice.

I eventually want to grind my own pigments. But that will have to wait for a while. I need to figure out if I can grind the pigments without using a binding agent. I think most binding agents would not mix well with the beeswax.

Maybe I will make some more handmade paper and see how these handmade paints work on it...

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4 Weeks

Last night marks four weeks since my father died. I tried not to think about it too much. I am not into avoiding thinking about it, but I do not want to dwell upon it either.

I wonder if Friday nights are always going to make me sad.

I see photographs of my father and I cannot imagine him gone. He is always so damn strong and vibrant and alive in the photographs. How could someone so present in the world be gone?

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Interstices - Part 4

This is a bit closer photograph of Communion Circle: 1-10.

Communion Circle: 1-1
Plaster sculptures, each piece measures
approximately 24" x 24" at the base,
heights vary from 64" to 76"

I like tension in my artwork. I like to find ways to express two or more opposing ideas in a single work.

This piece is about community. As I planned the piece I had two ideas about community. Community is always the same. Community is always changing.

Community is always the same represents the idea that community essentially exists anytime there is one being involved with another. Thinking in terms of human community, it seems to me that community is our foundation; it is the bedrock of our existence. That is the part that never changes. We are always in community.

Community is always changing refers to the fact that individuals change community, and community changes individuals. By this I do not mean simply the transitory nature of human interaction, not just that we are nomadic in nature (nomadic in regards to community - even if we do not move our persons, we move our loyalties, our interests, our passions and that brings us into community with new groups) but also that each individual changes the dynamics of a community, and the experience of community changes the individual.

Each piece in Communion Circle: 1-10 represents a being, an entity, in some stage of its life. Each being has root-like tendrils at the bottom of wide/thick bases. Each being then tapers up to a narrow point which twists, bends or droops in a variety of shapes.

The root/tendrils base is meant to suggest a tree in the minds of the viewer - what is more stable than a tree. It lives its life in one place and, barring human intervention, lives a long time, feeding the community upon its demise, as it slowly decays. This represents the unchanging essence of community.

The upper sections of the beings are meant to suggest surreal bird heads (some of them strongly resemble birds). What is more temporal than a bird, more transitory? This embodies the ever-changing aspect of community.

The sculptures themselves were constructed in phases. I started with a block of wood, 1" x 7" x 7", drilled a 5/8" hole in the center of it, and inserted a 60" fiberglass rod. I then twisted newspaper into the root-like shapes and taped it to the board. Once I had enough roots taped down, I began filling out the shape with crunched up balls and folded up slabs of newspaper, taping them to each other as they wound around the fiberglass rod in the center, tapering to a narrow column at the top of the rods. I then twisted more newspaper into the various bird-head shapes and affixed them to the tops of the sculptures with more masking tape.

Once I had the general shape I wanted I covered the sculpture with a couple layers of plaster cloth (the same stuff they used to cast broken bones with). With this plaster cloth I refined the shape, adding details to make the suggestion of tree trunks and bird heads stronger.

After the plaster cloth dried and set up I mixed up a slurry of plaster and water which I then brushed on the sculpture in a thin layer. After the layer dried fully I added another layer, and another. Each sculpture has around twenty layers. After the plaster work was done, each piece was given two layers of a neutral white paint.

I decided on white because I did not want color to interfere with either "seeing" the shapes, or seeing the pieces as a cohesive whole.

That said, I am working with a local foundry on getting these cast in soft steel or iron. I think they would make a great outdoor sculpture - it would rust to a lovely brown color.

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Interstices - Part 3

There are two more fiber sculptures in my show. This one is called Glimpses in Time, and it tells the story of my father's life. It is hanging in the north room of the gallery.

Glimpses In Time: We All Tell Stories
Italian burlap, wooden dowel rods
approximately 60 inches x 96 inches x 72 inches
The two small works visible (on pedestals) are also my artwork
and will be featured in a later post. The work on the walls
is by the other artist in the show, Carol Faber.

Working with commercial fabric allows me to take work with me (sometimes, anyway). Abelisto and I went to a fabric wholesale outlet in the Twin Cities and bought 20 yards of this off-white Italian burlap. I experimented with using all sorts of substances to stiffen it enough that it would stand on its own - without luck. After wasting several yards (a pricey experiment - Italian burlap retails for $20/yard and wholesales for $8), I decided that none of that was going to work and I would have to use some really nasty, toxic chemicals to stiffen the fabric sufficiently. I am trying not to use those types of chemicals in my work anymore...

So I took another path, and created a work that would hang from the ceiling.

I started this piece on the trips to Indiana to be with my family during the last summer of my father's life. It has sections where I have pulled out the vertical threads, leaving only the horizontal ones. This creates visibly distinct sections - narrow and wide bands of open, semi-transparent areas.

So how, you ask, does this piece represent my father's life (and recent death)?

I took this piece with me when we first went to Indiana after learning that my father had terminal lung cancer, and each of the subsequent times we visited this past summer. During the days we spent there I worked on the piece on my mother's huge dining room table in the great room of my parents' house, the room where my father's hospital bed was set up. People would come and go - my brothers and sister, my aunt, the neighbors, friends of my father and mother, the hospice nurses. We we all told stories, lots of stories. The stories soaked into the artwork, the lines of thread being drawn out were the words of the stories, the gaps left behind were the feelings left when the stories were finished. The columns of drawn threads, narrow and wide, sometimes close together, sometimes farther apart, represent all of the lives that touched my father's.

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Interstices - Part 2

I suppose I should have mentioned that Interstices is the name of my show.

Interstices
[in-tur-stuh-seez]
1. the spaces between things.
2. intervals of time.

The space in-between is a potent place.
It is the space where transcendence – change and transition – occurs.
It is the quiet before the storm, the fallow time when ideas conceived gestate, the moment between the glance and the quickening.

Fiber Sculptures

Ascension.
Fiber sculpture, hand-woven and hand-knotted recycling twine,
approximately 14 inches by 12 inches by 40 inches.
Two gourd sculptures are also visible in the lower image.

For Different Ends
Fiber sculpture, hand-woven recycling twine, approximately
12 inches by 8 inches by 96 inches.

Both these fiber sculptures are made from recycling twine. I like making art from materials not normally used for art-making. I particularly like stiff, homely materials like recycling twine. I like the way it has a mind of its own - being tightly wound around the spool has given the fibers a memory of the curved, circular shape. When freed from the spool they tend to spread out in their own directions unless they are tightly woven or knotted (best seen by clicking on the images and viewing them in the full-sized versions).

These sculptures are hanging from the ceiling frames on monofilament. You can sort of see in one of yesterday's photos how they are suspended in space. These are 3-dimensional pieces and I like to encourage people to notice that by not hanging them on a wall. In fact, Ascension could not be hung on a wall at all.

More tomorrow... it's late. It always seems to be late when I find the time to write in this blog.

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Interstices - Part 1

I thought I would share images from my current gallery show - Interstices.

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View from outside the gallery

This is what you would see as you approach the gallery. I placed the sculpture Communion Circle: 1-10 carefully so that it would draw passersby into the gallery.

View from the doorway

As you step into the gallery you can see more of my work. I place a fairly diverse selection of work in this front room of the gallery. The gallery has two main rooms. This is the south room in the gallery. If you walk forward to the wall opposite the doors and turn to the right there is a smaller central area, formed inside the south room by two movable walls (which have never been moved because they made them way too heavy to move easily - they were afraid that the walls would not be stable enough to avoid tipping over if they were not really heavy, thus the 2 or 3 feet of concrete filler running the length of the walls at the bottoms of the 12 inch thick walls) and a permanent wall that divides the two main areas of the gallery.

In this photo you can see the doorway at the back of the room which goes to a very small room that is never used (except for storing platforms and pedestals and one of the movable walls) and the galley workshop/storage room.

So that you have an idea of the scale in the room, I think the gallery measures 30 feet by 50 feet, so it would be nearly thirty feet from where I was standing when I took the photograph to the back wall.

Here you can see some of my encaustic paintings - on the left and back walls, two fiber sculptures, two gourd pieces and the plaster sculpture i mentioned above, in the center.

I will post another set of photos tomorrow.

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Pavlo

Tonight Abelisto and I went to a wonderful concert. The musician was Pavlo(www.pavlo.net), who plays Mediterranean music.

We had third row seats, center stage, and there was no one in front of us.

Before the show there was a cd of Pavlo's music playing just loudly enough to be heard over the normal chatter of excited people finding their seats, greeting their seat-neighbors and paging through the program.

The cd faded out. The house lights dimmed. And Pavlo and the four musicians accompanying him came out onto a dark stage.

As they started the first number the lights came up and we could see five handsome men, dressed in varying combinations of black and white, lovingly playing their instruments. As their fingers flashed and hands stroked the fretboards, drums and keyboards, they set the mood for the evening - sultry, sexy and smooth.

Right away I noticed that the musicians playing the stringed instruments - Pavlo on guitar, George Vasilakos on bouzouki, and Randy Rodrigues on bass - were using wireless transmitters instead of the usual wired set up. It did not take too awfully long to see why - they never stopped moving and dancing to the music they played.

The keyboard player, Denzil Remedios, seemed at first to be a bit shy and distant until I took the time to focus on what he was doing. I think that part of my first impression came from the fact that from where we were sitting we could not see his hands and he did not move as much as the other musicians while he was playing. When I concentrated on his contribution to the music I realized that he was fully engaged with the others and his playing was an intense and compelling underscore to the stringed instrument parts.

The percussionist, Gino Mirizio, spent much of the concert playing not only the congas but all of the percussion instruments - including the cymbals - with his hands. The resulting sound was a perfect match; its soft, slurry beat complementing the sounds of the keyboard, bass, bouzouki and guitar. Not limiting his performance to the background, Gino used sticks in several pieces and created a complicated and compelling rhythm that wove in and out of the music in a manner that made it hard to stay in our seats.

Catching me totally by surprise, Randy Rodrigues skillfully slipped his electric bass right into the music. I would have never thought of an electric bass as part of a Mediterranean ensemble (being more accustomed to thinking of bass players playing rock 'n roll or reggae or some such). I love new discoveries, new realities.

For much of the evening, the focus was primarily on Pavlo and George Vasilakos. They were usually at the front of the stage, hammering away at their instruments, pouring out amazing music. Sliding, bending, hammering on, pulling off, all those special techniques that make music unforgettable. Fast, fast fingers. Perfect timing. Exemplary showmanship and expertise.

Even though many might see Pavlo and George as the stars of the evening, Pavlo went to great lengths to "show off" the skills of his partner musicians. Every musician was in the spotlight a number of times during the evening. It truly seemed that there was great respect and affection between the band members.

I ended up being given a free cd of their music. During the song Under the Heat, Pavlo invited someone from the audience to come up on stage and dance with him. Well, I certainly could not pass up the opportunity to dance with a handsome man, especially on stage... I climbed over Abelisto and our son (who pretended to be totally mortified), and danced my way up to the stage. Once there Pavlo and I dance for several minutes, whirling and twirling and enjoying the music. He asked me if I had ever done any belly dancing. I held up my hand with my thumb and index finger about an inch apart. He smiled and said follow me and we shimmied and shook back and forth, looking into each others' eyes (yes we did the booby-jiggle-walk). We laughed, he gave me a big hug and then we bowed to each other and I danced off the stage as he picked his guitar up again and finished the song with his partners.

It was great, great fun. During the intermission, Pavlo autographed my cd with"Thanks for the dance! Pavlo"

I could write much, much more. The show was absolutely a blast. If you ever get the chance to see Pavlo in concert you should definitely go. And buy tickets as close to the front as possible, so that you too can get up and shake it up on stage with Pavlo!

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My Father

This is the video that I made for the visitation before my father's memorial service. Hopefully it will load for everyone. I have not put video on the web using a blog before, and it has been a long time since I put any video on at all. The actual movie (DVD) has music, but it made a huge file for the web, so the sound is not included here (also I did not want to infringe on the musician's copyrights).

The first photograph is of my father when he was sixteen or so. He is pictured with his new limestone-hauling truck. He was so proud of it, before this (he started driving trucks at around age thirteen) he had been hauling logs for his stepfather's logging crew. He had some wonderful and interesting stories about those days.

The second photograph is of my parents on their wedding day, June 22, 1956. My father is 27 in the photo, and my mother is 19. They had been married just over 51 years when my father died.
Read more...

The third photo is when we lived on Handy Ridge Road. My father is cutting a board for some project. I am holding the board - helping him - even though I am only three years old or so. My brother is watching - he would be around two. This would be sometime around 1960, I think...

The fourth photo was taken during one of the motorcycle trips my parents went on. They usually traveled with my aunts and uncle. I think the person in the background is my father's sister, but the original photograph is so faded that it is hard to tell.

The fifth photo is one of my father with a MGA sportscar. He loved cars. This one was a deep burgundy with a cream-colored top. This was in 1967 - I know this because there is another photograph, taken the same day, wherein my mother is pregnant with my sister.

The next photograph is a portrait of my father - I am not sure when it was taken. I think it was before the photo of him with the car, these may be slightly out of chronological order.

The next photograph is my father receiving one of the many awards he received for excellence when he worked for Fiat Motors as a regional service representative. It is sometime in the 1970s - if you could not tell from the plaid pants. My father has his pipe and tobacco pouch tucked into the waistband of his pants - he always did that, I almost said that he still does that...

The next fourteen photographs span a time from the 1970s through this past spring. Mostly we took photos at holidays or other special occasions.

This movie makes me both happy and sad...

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Last night's art soirée

The event went fairly well. I would have like to have more people there, but the people who came were very interested in the work and what I had to say about it.

The event was a fund-raising benefit for art students and art programs at the university. It was a wine and cheese soirée. The event kicked off a month-long silent auction of some of my work. The proceeds from the auction will go to the school of the arts, as will a percentage of the sales of any other work. Currently I have sold five pieces, not counting the three which are being auctioned.

Today my feet kind of hurt. I spent a lot of the day yesterday talking about art in the gallery. I spoke to two Artscore (arts appreciation) classes - one was the class I am teaching - and then three hours at the event.

The first piece to be bid on was Red Bowl Ritual. It is a gourd bowl that has been dyed red and has spirals burnt into the side of it. The spirals were branded into the gourd with a brass rod with one end that I shaped into a spiral and heated in a campfire. I think I want to make some more branding irons, but this time with iron or steel - the brass rod barely survived the heating I needed to decorate one gourd. Maybe I will ask Sr. Margaret for some time with the oxy-acetylene welding/cutting torches.

People also bid on the small piece, Bee Garden. It is a 6 x 12 inch encaustic painting. No one bid on the large encaustic piece, From the Beginning. Perhaps it was because it had a minimum bid price of $250.00. The others had minimum bids of less than $100.00. However, I would not let go of the larger piece for less than that if I were selling it, so I do not want it to go for a lesser amount at auction either.

It is always a dilemma - pricing the work I do...

Home Again

We are back home now. We made fairly good time coming back - left around 8:30 (our time) and got to Winona around 6:30.

I only got sad once during the drive back.

It is impossible to believe that my father is gone. It does not feel real yet... I am not sure it ever will.

I miss him. Now and forever.

A very hard day...

We had a visitation and memorial service for my father today.

I made a video for the visitation. We scrambled for photographs, searching my mother and sister's numerous photograph albums, bought a scanner (my mother's had quit working ages ago), and I scanned about 30 photographs, color corrected and optimized them in Photoshop. I did not overly repair them. I wanted people to see the age of the photos - I just made the colors and contrast a bit better if the photograph was too faded. The wear and tear of old photographs is a big part of the story that each of them tells, to make them too pretty would be akin to telling a false story and I wanted to tell my father's story right and true. We found two of my father's cds - a jazz one and a classical one. I took one track off of each of them and imported all of it into Premiere, added timings, transitions and a title slide and rendered the whole thing through Encore to make a DVD that was set up to loop the movie over and over.

At the visitation people seemed to really enjoy the movie. They sat there smiling through their tears, telling stories about my father.

I mentioned before that he did not want to be displayed at a funeral. He did not want people looking at his body and "carrying on." I think I agree with the idea of being cremated. It was a very peaceful ceremony, and I am not sure it would have been so restful if there had been a body to cry over. I do not know, hopefully no one will be stuck without a way to heal because they did not see a body. The body is not the person. And cremation is what my father wanted. My mother did not agree, but she said she would do it for him. She said she did not want to be haunted. I am not quite sure if she meant that literally or not... she is a Celt after all.

Two ministers spoke, even though my father was not a church goer. One minister was the one from my mother's church. He is new (and very young - not actually a full minister yet, I think), and did not know my father well. He came over once during the last few weeks of my father's life and spoke with him. Even though he did not know my father well, he did very well presiding over the memorial service. The other minister was a friend of my father. He was one of my father's McDonalds breakfast compadres. He had a personal relationship with my father, and was able to speak about him directly.

After they both spoke the presiding minister asked if anyone else wanted to speak. I did not have anything prepared, but I could not let go of the tightness in my chest without speaking about my father. I spoke about his kindness and generosity, about the stories he told us, the stories he created just by living a true life. Actually I am not sure exactly what I said. I did not break down, but I got a bit weepy at the very end. My sister and mother and one brother thanked me for speaking, the other brother looked me in the eye and nodded. I took that as his approval.

After the service we went to a luncheon that my mother's church had prepared for us. Everyone at the service was invited, but only family and the church people came to the luncheon. We thought it was going to be a chore, but it was not. It was a very relaxed and peaceful meal.