Mid Covid Check-In, and Delayed Art Show

 Hello!

I update this blog when I have art news, OR when I think of it AND am at a desktop computer AND am not currently on the clock. We're in luck today!

It's been so long since that last post about the art show for which I designed business cards and a logo. Since then I got a solo art show at the community center in my neighborhood...scheduled for April 2020. I also have had plenty of face painting gigs, the most recent of which was scheduled to be...in April 2020.

The art show was delayed due to Covid-19 lockdown. I got the news days before I was supposed to install it. Then this summer when things seemed to be opening up, the show was rescheduled for September and October 2021. Yay! But now, with the "fourth wave" of Covid moving through, it has been delayed until an unspecified time in 2022. Argh.

Obviously (I hope), I haven't done any face painting since that time. I miss that one! So intimate and personal.

By the way, check out how my glasses filtered the black light in this picture from 2019's Arts a Glow festivities! I'm almost sorry I noticed... ;-)

Regarding the art show, I had had a great plan. I was going to do a show that had a bunch of pet portraits I'd been doing lately, and a couple pieces of or by my Gramma, who passed away in November 2019 at age 100. I wanted to use my art pieces to help explain one aspect of my relationship to my Gramma. She loved that I am an artist, and always felt a bit like she contributed to it. She would send me stationery or cards with a note like "you could be doing this!" She would send me those giant cheap art booklets they used to sell in the 80s, like "how to draw the human figure for fashion" or "how to draw animals for cartoons." I have all of her old oil paints, and when I helped her and Grampa move closer to Mom and Dad in 2008, she had me sort through her portfolio and take whatever I wanted. There was so much there. 

Boy, some of her art was so creepy! Lol. It wasn't supposed to be. She did a charcoal drawing of a baby monkey being given a bath, and wow. I think that's one of the drawings I took--hopefully I remembered to take the source photograph too. I think she just tended to fall victim to that artists' conundrum where they draw too many lines instead of shading. I have grown to enjoy creepy art, but as a kid sometimes her art didn't work for me. However, I just wanna say, I love her landscapes now. I don't know how I didn't recognize how well they capture the dry grassy hills of northwestern California (I included one of those paintings further along in this post).

I'm willing to bet she was copying this photo. 

Anyway, here's the specific seed of my art show idea. I visited Gramma in August 2019, when I was in town for a high school reunion. She wasn't a feeble 100-year-old, and got around quite well in her wheelchair. I wanted to give her some long visits but I didn't think I would have enough to talk about for a long visit. I decided that a fun way to extend the visits could be to do some one-hour paintings. 

I bought a sample kit of acrylics (red, blue, green, yellow, black and white), a set of small canvases, some cheap brushes and a tabletop easel. Each day before or after reunion activities, I'd drive to her assisted living place (Mountainview, a fine facility) and do paintings while she watched. Under her supervision I created three one-hour paintings over three visits. 

When I do a one-hour painting, I prefer to not allow myself to touch them up later, because they're like sketches: practice. I tell you that as an excuse to cover their flaws. I felt a bit medium about them. 

Gramma tried laying claim to each painting, but I told her she had to pick ONE, and I was taking the others. She picked the first one, and guarded her ownership of it aggressively. It wasn't even one I liked much; I didn't like the color of green paint I had available to me, the kitten was cutesy, I couldn't see the colors well in her dim room so there's yellow around its eyes that I'd rather wasn't there, etc. But man, she loved it. Sometimes other residents or staff would stop by and watch for a minute or so. I would take a break with her and eat lunch in the lunchroom at her table, and she would bring her green kitten with her so that I wouldn't "accidentally" put it in my bag when I left.

The Winning Kitten

In the end I borrowed the painting from her--with her watching like a hawk and making me swear I would bring it back--and made prints of all three paintings so she could enjoy the others too. I gave a print to one of her tablemates who had admired it. He was a kindly soul. It had apparently reminded him of past cats of his.

So back to the art show. I thought I would put the paintings in semi-chronological order. First, there would be a drawing I did when I was nine and Gramma was pissing me off. Surely all people who like to doodle and aren't good at expressing their feelings try doing so in sketch form. Well, I tried it, and even got Gramma to sit for me. She was driving me crazy and I felt like I really expressed it. Then Gramma went and loved the drawing, even framing and saving it for decades. Me drawing it, her saving it, her writing ON it: these feel very symbolic of our relationship.

My face goes off-screen because I didn't know how to do noses. I did hers all right because she sat for me--hadn't had anyone do that before.

Next there would be a painting of Gramma's, with an explanation of how she influenced me. Next a selection of pet portraits; they're almost all quite small, so I could have a 3x3 grid of them if I could hang them that way using the system at the community center. Among them would be the three I mention above, and three from a later visit I made to her, in early December 2019.

During that last visit, I was able to convince Gramma to try painting with me. 

She was really not doing well in general, and it had been a sort of emergency visit, cutting short Thanksgiving, because she was having mini strokes and being sent to the emergency room with some frequency. I didn't paint every day, and Gramma didn't watch me paint most of the time, but it was a way for me to be in the room with her. I would set up close to her bed and make sure that if she opened her eyes she could see I was there and painting. It was challenging, because it felt a little pretentious, and she had a hospice nurse sitting with her who would chat chat chat in a way that was friendly and well meaning but exhausting for introvert me. 

On the last day of my visit, Gramma was feeling better. During my visit I set up near her wheelchair and sometimes she would watch, sometimes nap. She seemed perky and interactive, compared to the previous days.

During her tenure at Mountainview, the staff had kept her very nicely occupied with crafts, exercises, gardening, and social events. Most of the time she'd refused to paint with me; I think over the years she'd just felt "done" with that part. I thought maybe the fact that she'd been missing out on her creative outlets might inspire her, so I invited her again. This time she joined in. 

My friend ended up buying the original and making a print for me so that I could put this into my show.

I had been doing a painting of my high school friend's pug. When I handed Gramma a canvas, she made it into her palette as well, and made a copy of my pug painting. Her hands were weak and unstable, and each movement required a lot of effort in terms of both concentration and stamina. All things considered, she did pretty damn well. 

See the palette dots upper right?

When she was done she was pretty exhausted. She'd been waking and napping a lot during my visit, so it was not surprising that she was pooped. I cleaned up, wished her good night, and told her I'd see her n the morning.

Within a few minutes of my leaving, she had another stroke, which was caught by her hospice nurse. Then it was back to the emergency room and the flurry of taking care of anything I could find that someone might need. She was bedbound and mostly incoherent most of the rest of my visit. Blessedly, she lived until my sister was also able to visit her a last time.

So the left side of my gallery was was going to be my and Gramma's early art, and the right side would be her last piece and maybe a photo of us together. The gallery folks warned me that people don't want to read a lot of text, so I wasn't sure how I was going to get my story across without words. I wrote a little five paragraph essay and hoped people would get intrigued. I was frankly a little relieved when the show was delayed.

She painted this in 1977 and titled it "Toomey Flats."

When it was rescheduled for this month, I panicked. So much had happened since then. Should I tell the same story? It felt old, like its moment was past. I would be the first post-lockdown show. Did I have anything to say about lockdown? Could I do some clever symbolic thing with mask designs and hand washing instructions? Could I figure out how to tell a story for my Afghan foster kid, as America withdrew from his country and civil war began? Should I find something to paint that showed how much the recent climate report had shaken me?

I have been uninspired this year. As you might imagine, even depressed. I don't know how to do art that tells my story without all my words also being necessary. All I know how to do is look at something in front of me and interpret it in a new location with new tools. 

Say, I have been enjoying Procreate (an app on my ipad that's similar to Adobe Photoshop). Maybe it can help me with conceptual stuff. 

You wanna know a little secret? An acquaintance has been getting pranked with a huge number of goat socks, goat art, goat jokes and postcards and surprise club memberships. Who knows how it happened. But I contributed a couple of images that I put together in Procreate, replacing his boyfriend with a goat or putting goats into his bathroom. So it's a lie that I've been uninspired. I've just had a hard time staying on my imagined target.

Considering I have no Photoshop experience I think I did pretty well!

I'm grateful for the creative outlet of this blog, even if I rarely remember it. This has been a fun project, doing this post.