sweatpants and owls

Today is a good one for me, because it is the day I officially lost the last of the 20 pounds I gained after surgery last year. Years of competitive swimming messed up my knees, and they really didn’t like carrying an extra stone around.

I celebrated by buying myself a giant pair of baggy sweatpants. 

So that was nice.

Today I finished painting the birds. 

I posted a reel about it, and included my own face, even though I just finished reading The Circle, and I am still not okay. A couple weeks ago, Zenny and I read The Eyes and the Impossible, this year’s Newbery award winner, and we loved it. It’s a beautiful, funny book full of art and nature and pupusas, so afterwards I thought it would be fun to read everything else Dave Eggers has written. Folks, I was not prepared. He’s bringing these kids up to appreciate the beauty of life just to DESTROY them as adults. The Parade really bothered me in a way I couldn’t stop thinking about, and then The Circle did me in. It was great. I hated it. It’s like a really long and engrossing episode of Black Mirror. And by linking it just now, I have learned that there is a sequel called The Every. Oh no. I am absolutely reading it, but I think I’m going to take a week off from Dave and read Starter Villain (Alex award winner) until I stop wanting to smash all my devices with a hammer.

Go read The Eyes and the Impossible, though, even if you don’t have a kid to read it to.

No ugly thoughts

My kids said I needed to start showing my face in my weekly painting reels so people would recognize me as a real person if the piece makes it to the Artists of Hawaii show this year, so that added an element of discomfort to my week. It's already a jolt hearing your own stupid voice on a recording and realizing that's what other people hear all the time, and seeing yourself on a video without the mirror reversal is the same kind of feeling, especially as you get older and start avoiding cameras. But just like your voice, everyone already sees your stupid face every day and they like you anyway, so maybe it's for the best to just take the shock and accept what you look like to the world. Remember that whole Mom Stays in the Picture thing? While teenagers are 'mewing' (pressing tongue to top of mouth to fake a slim jawline), the rest of us should be 'Dahling' (think good thoughts and be lovely).

exerpt from the Twits, by Roald Dahl

 

So I'll try to stay in the videos.

Also as an effort to take up more space in the world, I have started collecting shirts to annoy the book-banning moms at my library. My fashion theme this year is “be a bigger problem for those three people specifically”.

Breaking news

Today is a big one: Leif is taking his driver's permit test. He should be road legal by the end of the day.

what we’re lacking

Valentine's Day is a minefield of old feelings that I have learned to navigate by impersonating a sack of potatoes. Throw me in the car, I’ll roll with whatever.

We took the day off while the kids were in school and played tourist in Haleiwa, eating an overpriced, over-salted lunch at the Beach House and then walking up and down the shops to look at sea shells and tacky souvenirs. When we passed the Wyland Gallery, I walked up and grabbed the giant dolphin-shaped door handles, “Let’s see why this guy is a billionaire and we’re not.” The gallery was full of poured resin art and sea turtle statues. On the wall of Wyland originals, I stopped in front of a black marker scribble of a dolphin, with a dot for an eye and four slashes in the corner for sunshine. It would have taken less than a minute to draw, and it was matted and framed for about a thousand dollars. The larger paintings ($50,000 - $100,000) were carelessly airbrushed seascapes with a whale tail whacked in and dabbed randomly with glitter. It looked as if he had assistants prep the airbrushed canvases so he could spend 5 minutes painting a tail and then go surfing.

“I see what we’re missing. The audacity.”

We walked across the street to another gallery, where the owner was smashing pastel-colored paint into the shape of an ocean wave on a little canvas with a palette knife. A group of blonde women politely admired it when she held it up, “You did that JUST NOW? Wow! And it took you, like, 5 minutes??” “Well,” the artist said with a little fake modest laugh, “years, actually. It comes with experience.”

These guys are like the kids who come up to strangers and brag, “I’m the best at ninja, watch this,” and then break into wild flailing and expect applause. It’s lazy and arrogant, and it’s the key to salesmanship. 

The audacity. 

If you don’t have it naturally, be grateful. We get to be the ones who can slow down and enjoy making or baking or building things, getting frustrated and seeing improvement, developing pride in craftsmanship, and having the freedom to try different subjects and styles and methods instead of banging out the same schlock every day for people we feel contempt for.

But when it’s time to show your work and you feel embarrassed or out of place, remember to square your shoulders and think, I’m the best at dolphins, watch this.

A month into the project

I’m still keeping up, but I forgot I was supposed to do two paintings on the figure page (there are fewer pages than weeks in a year, so I’m pacing a couple weeks on the same page), and to make up for it I’m spending the next 4 Mondays on the birds. I’m going to be living on this spread for a month, hopefully it won’t be covered in coffee, fingerprints, and cat feet by the end.

(Paper is warped because I gessoed it, it’ll dry flat)

 

missing wildlife

Someone has abducted Baby Jesus. Over the weekend, extra cat food cans started appearing next to his dish (a plastic tupperware lid), and I cleaned them up so I could keep track of how often someone else was feeding him. Yesterday he was gone, and no more cans have been put out. One of the secret nighttime cat ladies has nabbed him, I think. I hope. I know she exists, but I don't know who she is. A couple of times, I came by after dark and got out of my car to find myself surrounded by dozens of glowing eyes, with all the fat glossy strays gathering around the walkways, waiting for their dinners. I have read Millions of Cats enough to know how this kind of thing ends, so I ran for it.

(Nearly all of them have notches in their ears, because Night Feeder also takes them to the Neuter Scooter like a good citizen.)

Today was going to be rescue day. We worked with the university vet tech program to arrange free treatment, and I have the humane trap in the trunk of my car, but he has vanished as suddenly as he appeared. I'm worried about him, and hope he's getting the care he needs. I'll keep checking for him.

Meanwhile, I have been getting weird about birds. DLNR announced their annual wildlife stamp competition, and I started thinking about painting an entry, which got me reading about endangered forest birds, which led to researching how scientists measure populations, and then getting mad about disruptions to albatross nesting grounds. Watched a video of researchers photographing a bird that hadn't been seen in 140 years, and now I feel like grabbing my camera and charging off into the woods to find all the extinct little birds that may still actually be alive. It gives some hope.

 love this

My sketchbook is filling up with birds. I might not paint a contest entry because I'm just trying to keep up with my painting-a-week project (progress on instagram), but I'm enjoying the birds.

Maurice

My paternal grandfather died this week, and I’ve been having feelings about it. I met him twice that I can remember, and only had a conversation with him once as a teenager. He seemed like a dialed-down version of my father; a generally happy person who enjoys the idea of piecing together clues to unlock conspiracies. For my father, that means he’s loudly cheerful and loves theatrics and alien files (he even wrote a book), and for his dad that meant noodling away at Bible code theories, convinced there were messages hidden in the texts if you applied the right cipher. Dan Brown conspiracy theorists, not anti-science conspiracy theorists - the kind of people who are looking for clues to puzzles, hoping to get a look at some secret world that’s bigger than what we can see. Joy-seekers. 

I would have liked to know him, but I think my grandparents didn’t want to intrude on our lives, and I didn’t want to intrude on theirs. We all missed the boat on that one. Now I send Christmas cards, and sometimes my grandmother replies, and that has had to do.

If I’m invited to the funeral I’ll try to go, but I think they won’t want to bother me with it, and I don’t want to bother them by asking. At least that would be consistent with how things have been.